Day 1166: A Vaxx Like Any Other Vaxx

Aaron Siri, the man who sues the FDA so you don't have to, wrote an excellent essay against the anti-vaxx talking point that certain mRNA products that fail to prevent COVID infection or transmission "aren't vaccines." Apparently the essay was restricted to his paid Substack subscribers at one point, but in the intervening two months has gone fully public.

If you're not familiar with the other non-sterilizing vaccines on the market, this essay is both short and educational. One omission is why the pertussis vaccine is non-sterilizing, but it's much like the other inactivated virus vaccines: the virus (or bacteria in some cases) runs rampant in some more external part of the body (e.g., the mucus membranes or the digestive tract) but is prevented from getting into the bloodstream or spinal column where it could do the most harm.

If this sounds like a just-so story to obscure the poor performance of inactivated virus vaccines in first-world countries where the diseases aren't circulating anyway, well, further research on this topic is left to the reader. There's no particular evidence that the COVID vaccines are achieving even this half-arsed immunity, so (if the others are) the mRNA vaccines could still be not-a-vaxx by most people's standards.

Non-sterility is not his only argument, though the remaining points are less about the definition of a vaccine and more about standards of vaccine (or drug) safety that the mRNA products violate. That it's been a long, slippery slope with littered with other bad vaccines is a sort of argument for yes-a-vaxx, though not the one he makes.

It's all worth a read, but the most horrifying example is the hepatitis B vaccine, which appears under both the yes-vaxxes-use-new-technology point (recombinant DNA) and the yes-vaxxes-are-largely-untested point:

The clinical trials for Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines each enrolled at least 30,000 people, reviewed safety for at least six months, and had a placebo control group for at least two months on average.

In contrast, most childhood vaccines had only days or weeks of safety review; typically far, far less than 30,000 participants; and virtually never had a placebo control. As an example, let’s use the very first vaccine on the CDC’s childhood schedule – the hepatitis b vaccine given on the first day of life:

[vaccine schedule chart omitted]

The safety review in the clinical trial relied upon to license this vaccine is similar to that of many other vaccines on the childhood schedule. In a word: useless. Now let me earn the use of that adjective.

There are only two brands of hepatitis b vaccines that are given to babies on the first day of life, Recombivax HB and Engerix B. Here is a summary of the clinical trial relied upon to license Recombivax HB for babies and children directly from the official FDA documentation:

[screencap omitted]

So, 147 children were injected with 5 days of safety monitoring after injection. The clinical trial for Engerix B (see page 6), the other hepatitis b vaccine given to babies, only had 4 days of safety monitoring after vaccination.

This seems so unbelievable that, on behalf of Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), my firm sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA demanding copies of the clinical trial reports submitted to the FDA to license Recombivax HB, and you can see for yourself it was indeed five days of safety monitoring after each shot given to babies and children! For Engerix B we requested that the FDA only produce clinical trial reports that reviewed safety for more than a week and after 3 ½ years, the FDA has still never been able to produce a single such study!

[...]

And if you are thinking, as I did, that maybe, just maybe, a clinical trial or some other large, robust safety assessment occurred after licensure (even though it would be condemned by the medical community as unethical – to withhold an “effective” vaccine from children in the control group), you would be wrong.

Note that hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease; there is no reason to vaccinate an infant unless the mother carried it. Studies have shown that immunity does not persist well into puberty as was hoped when the whole boondoggle of vaccinating day-old infants began. (PlagueBlog recommends against this vaccine in infancy, even if it is a vaxx like any other vaxx.)

P.S.: Alex Berenson reports that the vaxx became like any other vaxx in yet another way today when the FDA nixed the storied two-shot series along with booster samsara (the eternal cycle of boosters) in favor of one bivalent shot for all but the most defenseless among us. This remains an emergency authorization, with no final, allegedly vetted product in sight (as the monovalent vaccines are now deauthorized).

Day 1090: Not the Vaxx, and Yet, Still the Vaxx

Although it's harsh on Scott Adams week in the Covidsphere, we'll leave that work to the bad cat (representing the "fear is the mind killer" camp) and Mathew Crawford (representing the "controlled opposition" camp).

Instead we'll flash back to last year's news about IgG4: "Class switch towards non-inflammatory, spike-specific IgG4 antibodies after repeated SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination" in Science Immunology, followed in January by a similar result in Frontiers in Immunology: "mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 induce comparably low long-term IgG Fc galactosylation and sialylation levels but increasing long-term IgG4 responses compared to an adenovirus-based vaccine". (The first paper was preprinted in July, and the second submitted in August of last year.)

The bad cat and Alex Berenson go into some detail about the papers, but the short horror story is that the antibody response you get with repeated mRNA shots is akin to the one you get for allergens, and is not particularly useful against COVID qua infectious disease. This means that boosters not only make it more likely you'll catch COVID, but also make it more likely you'll die of COVID. So the vaxx is not necessarily killing people with the weird side-effects of an insufficiently-tested technology that has never succeeded before; it may just be killing them with...COVID.

PlagueBlog recommends avoiding drugs that have only been tested in a handful of mice, especially if said mice have only passed a vague and possibly harmful endpoint like "antibody levels".

Day 782: Push Your Luck Games

Today's big news was that Moderna seems to have skipped right past the main myocarditis years to making a poor, leaky vaccine for the under-six set. PlagueBlog recommends against digging any deeper into the hole of government-guaranteed immunity from liability, especially where innocent children are involved. It didn't end well in Love Canal and it's unlikely to end well for the mRNA vaccines, either.

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

Day 760: The Poop Plummets Faster Than Vaccine Efficacy

The news of the day in Massachusetts is our plummeting COVID poop rates, kindly log graphed by redditor u/Delvin4519, of child mask mandate mapping fame.

Also of note is the exceptional ineffectiveness of Pfizer's vaccine in children. It's so bad even the New York Times reported it:

The numbers for protection from infection are more reliable [than claims about hospitalization]. Vaccine effectiveness against infection in the older children decreased to 51 percent from 66 percent. But in the younger children, it dropped sharply to just 12 percent from 68 percent.

We await the batch of FDA Pfizer documents that ought to have been released today. Perhaps they will appear in the customary spot momentarily. PlagueBlog recommmends not holding your breath, however.

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

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.

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.

Day 621: Spikevax Spiked Some More

There's been some snide "fact checking" in the mainstream media over hasty alt-press reports that Sweden had banned Moderna's vaccine outright rather than just for young adults [under 30]. On the other hand, Iceland has abandoned Spikevax altogether as of last Friday. The following is a slightly corrected Google translation of that link. Note the Epidemiologist's comments on neighboring countries' policies.

Use of the COVID-19 vaccine Moderna in Iceland

In recent days, there has been data from the Nordic countries on the increased incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination with Moderna vaccine in addition to [sic] vaccination with Pfizer/BioNTech (Comirnaty).

In Sweden, the use of Moderna has been restricted to individuals born before 1991. In Norway and Denmark, it has been emphasized that Pfizer vaccines are recommended rather than Moderna vaccines for 12–17 year olds.

In Iceland, only the Pfizer vaccine has been recommended for primary vaccination at 12–17 years of age since vaccination of this age group began.

For the past two months, Moderna vaccines have been used almost exclusively for booster vaccinations after the Janssen vaccine and after two-dose vaccinations for the elderly and immunocompromised. Very few individuals have received the second dose of primary vaccination, which started with Moderna.

As there is a sufficient supply of Pfizer vaccine in Iceland for both the pre-vaccine activation vaccines and the primary vaccinations of those who have not yet been vaccinated, the Epidemiologist has decided not to use the Moderna vaccine in Iceland, while providing further information on the safety of the Moderna vaccine vaccine.

—Epidemiologist

There's a bit more information about the history of Moderna in Iceland in this alt-press article.

Domestically, the FDA dissed Moderna this week, as the advisory panel punted on their boosters (as well as Johnson & Johnson's), due to concerns about insufficiently increased efficacy:

Moderna said the mean antibody level of participants in its study was 1.8 times higher after the booster than it was after the second shot. In another measurement, the booster raised neutralizing antibodies at least fourfold in 87.9 percent of people compared to after the second dose, thus narrowly failing to meet the agency’s requirement of 88.4 percent.

The EMA also has yet to rule on Moderna boosters. To some extent Moderna is suffering from its greater initial efficacy, which may be due to their higher dose (the booster is proposed to be only half-strength) or the longer delay between initial shots, or both.

It's not recommended to boost with a different vaccine than initially administered (e.g., Pfizer's approved Comirnaty booster) even though there have been some reports that varying the vaccine administered increases overall efficacy. So the Spikevaxxed are out of luck unless they fall under the exemption for the immunocompromised. Nevertheless, the New York Times estimates that 1.5 million of the Spikevaxxed have gotten boosted (with a full dose) by hook or by crook. (PlagueBlog does not recommend illicit boosting.)

While normally the FDA would be ruling in line with the advisory panel's decision come Thursday, the New York Times has some frightening things to report about the temptation "to reach 'a harmonized approach' for all three vaccines and to simplify booster recommendations for the general population." PlagueBlog does not recommend purely political boosters.

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

Day 372: But Sweden...

Last June, Nature published a much-cited paper modeling the efficacy of lockdowns vs. other non-medical interventions, "Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe" (where "intervention" means the government did it), and concluding that lockdowns, acting alone, saved three million lives. PlagueBlog will not be publishing the authors' names because the math is too embarassing, but Philippe Lemoine had no such compunctions when he tore the paper a new one back in a December blog post: "Lockdowns, science and voodoo magic".

Based on what I have seen by playing a bit more with simulations, it seems that the model tends to ascribe most of the reduction in R_t to whatever intervention took place after the peak of infections and was closest to that peak or, if no intervention took place after the peak, to the last intervention. This makes sense when you think about it. Indeed, if you assume that one intervention is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the reduction in R_t, the peak of the infections curve you infer is going to be located at the time this intervention took place. So both the infections curve and the deaths curve you infer are going to be shifted to the left or to the right depending on whether you assume that R_t collapsed sooner or later. Moreover, since both the infection curve and the distribution of the delay between infection and death are right-skewed, the death curve, on which the model is fit, is also going to be right-skewed. Now, when a curve is right-skewed, the fit is going to be worse if the peak of infections, hence also the peak of deaths, inferred by the model is to the left of the actual peak than if it’s to the right. So the model is better off ascribing most of the reduction in R_t to the intervention that happened closest to the peak of infections but after it, unless that intervention happened really too late after the peak.

It seems that it’s those purely mathematical considerations and the fact that lockdowns were implemented last and before or not too late after the peak of infections in every country, not the fact that lockdowns really are the only intervention that have a meaningful effect on transmission, which explain why the model reached that conclusion.

Well, not quite every country. Sweden never had a lockdown, so the model instead ascribes all non-medical efficacy to their last intervention, the cancellation of public events—a measure that had no effect elsewhere because it was followed by the supremely effective lockdowns, but was truly miraculous in Sweden. The paper doesn't show this explicitly because all European data has been pooled together, so Lemoine had to run his own unpooled calculations to see the Swedish miracle. Much of his post is devoted to the alleged malfeseance of the original authors in omitting this damning per-country calculation:

I actually think that not mentioning this fact about the country-specific effect in Sweden comes very close to scientific malpractice. It makes their main conclusion, which as [I] just noted can be seen to be implausible without any complicated modeling, very hard to maintain and I have a hard time believing they weren’t aware of that and that it’s not why they carefully avoided the topic in describing their results. In any case, what is clear is that, once you realize that the model was only able to find that no intervention except lockdowns had a meaningful effect on transmission by estimating a huge country-specific effect for Sweden, it becomes impossible to take that conclusion seriously.

The blog post was not the end of the story. A few weeks later, Nature finally published a Swedish response to the paper that it had been sitting on for six months and that largely agrees with Lemoine. (He discussed it and other responses in a second blog post.) It also inspired Lemoine to come up with his own theory about Swedish deaths, that the disease had progressed further there than elsewhere in Scandinavia. We at PlagueBlog still prefer the "dry tinder" theory of Sweden (that, rather than having an outsized number of deaths due to the lack of lockdowns, Sweden had more deaths because, after two mild flu seasons, they had an outsized population of fragile old people hanging on by the proverbial thread), but both may very well be true.

If you enjoyed that takedown, Lemoine also takes on the hydroxychlorquine question. In any event, PlagueBlog recommends that you check whether Sweden immediately disproves your theory before you publish it in a respectable scientific journal.

Day 220: Labor Day

It's a holiday here at PlagueBlog Headquarters. The biggest news is that, as usual, practically everyone is deficient in Vitamin D and would be doing better every day in every way if they just took a whole lot more of it. (PlagueBlog recommends 4,000 IU a day or more.) A couple of recent studies consider it in coronavirus in particular, but the answer is the same as for every other ailment: more is better.

Massachusetts' cases are up a fifth of a percentage point today.

Day 213: No Health Service

India is making the news in its press to reach #2 in case counts by breaking all daily records with almost 80,000 cases yesterday. They also recently beat Mexico to become #3 in total deaths. (To be fair, Mexico has less than 10% of the population of India.) Elsewhere over the weekend, Oman and Kuwait surpassed China, leaving #38 Belgium as the last straggler, currently only six cases behind China.

In Britain, the NHS (National Health Service, though an alternate interpretation of the acronym is included in the title of this post) is even further behind on providing health care than usual, with the Telegraph reporting a two-year wait for a phone call from a specialist. The Daily Mail appears confused by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries admission that the evidence for masks is weak.

In Australia, a Perth resident is on his way to jail for sneaking out of a quarantine hotel to infect visit his girlfriend using a ladder and an accomplice. His lawyer claims the quarantine rules were "confusing." PlagueBlog recommends rethinking the legality of any plan that requires a ladder and an accomplice, unless home repair is also involved.

Also in Australia, there appears to be a black market for the experimental feline infectious peritonitis drugs PlagueBlog covered last week. GS-441524 in particular is being produced in China for illegal sale to Australian cat owners, who spend up to $5000 (Australian) per cat to save their lives. Government warnings about the dangers of the unapproved drugs fall on deaf ears, since the alternative is a dead cat, and no drug companies seem interested in producing the drug for legal sale in any cat market, never mind the Australian one. There does appear to be some interest in using GS-441524 against COVID-19 in people, however, as it is closely related to remdesivir.

In local news, the Commonwealth has mandated flu vaccine for students, including college students, this fall, leading to a bit of a backlash from parents. Considering that 80% of minors in Massachusetts already get the flu vaccine (never mind mandatory vaccines), the reaction seems a bit misplaced. PlagueBlog is more concerned about the largely unvaccinated college population depleting needed vaccine supplies than anything else.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up a quarter of a percentage point today.

Day 195: Don't Drink the Hand Sanitizer

New Zealand is up to 17 cases (that's 3.4 cases per million residents), and people are already hoarding and protesting the lockdowns there. Elsewhere, the Ukraine has passed the China point. Next up appears to be the Dominican Republic.

Despite its being a relatively harmless alcohol that has only ever killed one person (a far cry from ethanol's body count), the FDA has freaked out about trace amounts of 1-propanol in some hand sanitizers from Mexico. They've been added to their list of unsafe hand sanitizers, which is 149 products long today. The FDA goes on at some length about how 1-propanol "can be toxic and life-threatening when ingested" instead of ethanol, particularly in children. (Presumably adults can hold this slightly-souped-up liquor.)

Until now, PlagueBlog was unaware that hand sanitizer was supposed to be potable, never mind fed to children as martinis. This hype can only reduce our estimate of the dangers of rubbing methanol on your hands; on re-examination of the FDA's five previous announcements about methanol in hand sanitizer, it turns out their main concern has always been children (and pets) drinking the hand sanitizer. Nevertheless, PlagueBlog recommends steering away from hand sanitizers that are composed entirely of methanol. As for the 1-propanol versions, we recommend drinking your hand sanitizer in moderation: no more than half as many Purell martinis as you would normally consume.

PlagueBlog is publishing this public service announcement immediately. Maps and/or complaints about the cities and towns data being as borked as yesterday's dashboard was will follow later today.

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

P.P.S. Unlike the daily dashboard, which has lost its county counts, the cities and towns report has only gained in intriguing new columns, some of them with color-coding. Sadly the county data that got included into the cities and towns report at some point (along with every other stray bit of data the MDPH felt like reporting on weekly) only covers the franken-county of "Dukes and Nantucket", so integrating it with the real counties of the census data would be a bit of a kludge.

Speaking of kludges, a third of every relevant page of the cities and towns PDF is devoted to the same footnote about the data. Fortunately, the MDPH provides an Excel file of the data these days so the punch card girls computers are grinding away at that instead. Results are expected sometime tomorrow.

Day 188: Hard Labor

The world jumped well past 19 million cases today, with the US hitting 5 million and #3 India reaching 2 million cases. Bolivia (now #29) has surpassed China in cases, and the Daily Mail reports that failed state Venezuela (#64) is forcing non-mask-wearers into hard labor.

In the US, Governor DeWine of Ohio has tested positive. ABC News reports that the student who took some viral video of students not wearing masks in a crowded Georgia high school hallway has been suspended. (PlagueBlog recommends saving your education budget for PPE, not blowing it on the inevitable lawsuit.)

On the high seas, a third plague ship has joined the new fleet: passengers and "most" crew of Germ Boat #32, the SeaDream I out of Bodø, Norway, have been quarantined after a passenger from their previous cruise tested positive.

Massachusetts' cases are up a fifth of a percentage point today. Yesterday was cities and towns day; the new maps are below. In addition to being late, the report from the MDPH came with no comment about the reporting issues from late last week or whether they affect these numbers at all. Caveat lector.

(Pop out.)

(Pop out.)

Day 170: In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine...

Deaths worldwide have topped 600,000. In the US, Florida is now well in the lead of Texas and is eyeing California's #2 spot. Massachusetts cases are up a quarter of a percentage point today.

The mainstream news of the day seems to be the New York Times' sketchy take on a study out of South Korea, in which the Korean scientists were careful to state that they did not determine the direction of transmission, or even that transmission was familial at all. Nevertheless, the Times jumps to the conclusion that children aged 10 and up can transmit the disease as well as adults. Just one of those coronavirus "facts" you'll probably need to conveniently forget later...

The interesting news of the day, however, is a commentary in Independent Science News on the lab origin theory of the current pandemic. PlagueBlog readers may recall previous made-in-a-lab theories involving the mysterious coronavirus sequence known as RaTG13, and Dr. Shi of the suspiciously-located Wuhan Institute of Virology. This theory differs on a few points. It accepts RaTG13 as a genuine, natural coronavirus, spends a good deal of time debunking the opposition (an oft-cited review in Nature from March), and tells a new story about COVID-"19" in which it is actually COVID-12:

The story begins in April 2012 when six workers in that same Mojiang mine fell ill from a mystery illness while removing bat faeces. Three of the six subsequently died.

In a March 2020 interview with Scientific American Zeng-li Shi dismissed the significance of these deaths, claiming the miners died of fungal infections. Indeed, no miners or deaths are mentioned in the paper published by the Shi lab documenting the collection of RaTG13 (Ge et al., 2016).

But Shi’s assessment does not tally with any other contemporaneous accounts of the miners and their illness (Rahalkar and Bahulikar, 2020). [...]

Fortunately, a detailed account of the miner’s diagnoses and treatments exists. It is found in a Master’s thesis written in Chinese in May 2013. Its suggestive English title is “The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown viruses“.

The authors had the thesis translated, from which it became clear the miners suffered from a disease very similar to COVID-19, and not from fungal infection. In fact their doctors consulted with China's expert on SARS and sent samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which (they hypothesize) the virus later escaped.

The flurry of virus-hunting behavior in the mine by Dr. Shi and others after the miners fell ill is thus deeply suspicious, as is their publication of RaTG13 and a prior subsequence without any comment on the miners or their disease, instead asserting that the distant Yunnan province mine where they collected their samples was "abandoned".

To account for the differences between RaTG13 and its closest coronaviral relative, SARS-CoV-2, the authors propose viral evolution within the six miners as their "Mojiang Miners Passage (MMP) hypothesis". Specifically, the virus evolved in their lungs, an unusual locus of coronavirus infection (at the time) that they believe was particularly conducive to the recombination of RaTG13 and other coronaviruses from the mine into SARS-CoV-2.

They also posit an explanation for the long delay between COVID-12 and COVID-19:

Our supposition as to why there was a time lag between sample collection (in 2012/2013) and the COVID-19 outbreak is that the researchers were awaiting BSL-4 lab construction and certification, which was underway in 2013 but delayed until 2018.

We propose that, when frozen samples derived from the miners were eventually opened in the Wuhan lab they were already highly adapted to humans to an extent possibly not anticipated by the researchers. One small mistake or mechanical breakdown could have led directly to the first human infection in late 2019.

In conclusion, they call for an independent investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as of the "conflicts of interest" they see as suppressing the escaped-from-a-lab hypothesis.

PlagueBlog notes there is something off about the notion that six miners breathing bat guano could substitute for the missing human evolution phase of SARS-CoV-2 that has made it so stable since. It is particularly mysterious how all six of them fell so ill at the same time, and yet the mine has failed to start the number of pandemics this rate of attack would seem to promise. Bats are not known for flying about in tiny masks, so perhaps the mine workers themselves did something unusually unsanitary. They were allegedly cleaning out bat guano at the time they fell ill, which doesn't seem like the most productive or typical miner employment.

PlagueBlog recommends that, when you see a bat, you run screaming in the other direction. (A mask should not be worn for this purpose, as it impedes proper screaming.) In particular, do not gather or eat its guano for any reason whatsoever.

Day 95: More Retroactive Cases and Vaccines

The news has picked up on the 42-year-old Algerian man in Paris who was in the ICU on December 27th for what turned out to be COVID-19, a month before France's first two official cases (ex Wuhan) on January 24th. The patient, a fishmonger with pre-existing conditions, had not travelled since an August trip to Algeria, but tested positive on retroactive testing of stored samples and so is considered an instance of early community spread. He also had a child who suffered from an influenza-like illness (ILI) before he himself fell ill. Some news outlets have since reported that the man's wife worked with Chinese people at a supermarket near the airport.

A pre-proof of the associated paper is available at ScienceDirect: SARS-COV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019, in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the paper is that the authors were not hunting very hard for cases; they were merely associated with a hospital in the north of Paris which routinely preserves respiratory samples. They restricted their testing to their own ICU patients between December 2nd and January 16th, for whom the medical record included both ILI and ground glass opacity on a lung scan, and a negative result for other infectious disease (flu, other coronaviruses, etc.). The paper was not clear on what the hospital routinely tests for.

This exclusion process left them with only 14 samples, of which only one tested positive (twice). They conclude that their restricted sample (especially the exclusion of all other infection, as co-infection with the flu and COVID-19 has been documented in China), and the possibility of false negatives (due to the test itself or damage to the samples in cold storage) may explain finding only one case when that case was clearly of community spread.

On the vaccine front, another group has made the MMR connection PlagueBlogged back on Day 71. Though it's a rather sketchy "report" from "World Organization", the anecdotes (PlagueBlog hesitates to call anything within "statistics") are interesting. They note that the US Navy routinely administers MRCV (an unspecified measles and rubella-containing vaccine chosen out of the options of MR, MMR, and MMRV, which contains chickenpox vaccine) to new sailors, possibly explaining the low death rate aboard navy plague ships. Besides their anecdotal evidence for several countries, they do provide some references for the MRCV coverage rates noted in their anecdotes, as well as citing the paper from last month [PDF]. An enterprising person might actually analyze the data and write an actual paper about it.

Without any statistics it's hard to make any falsifiable claims, yet they do get some things wrong. One of them is the likelihood of people over 60 having been vaccinated, a topic on which they are technically correct because of undue focus on MRCV (which includes a measles vaccine), but quite wrong when arguing the efficacy of rubella vaccine as they seem to be doing. Non-immune women of childbearing age have gotten vaccinated since the introduction of rubella vaccine in 1969; in fact the risk of birth defects from rubella (as vividly demonstrated by rubella epidemics in the 60's) was the main impetus behind the creation of the vaccine. Needless to say, many of those women are well over 60 now.

They're also doing a titer study of COVID-19 survivors; you can sign up online. Considering their general methodology it may never get published, but you can apparently get your titers back from them.

The case count in Massachusetts is up 1.7% today. In Middlesex County it is up only 1.4%. PlagueBlog advises Somerville residents not to listen to lies from the city about the governor's face mask requirement; as reported in all honest sources, Governor Baker has only required face masks outdoors and in other unspecified public places in cases where you cannot maintain social distancing. The specific requirements are also unchanged and involve only stores and shared or public transit. PlagueBlog also notes that this is the last day of the grace period on the $300 fines, and recommends you breathe free one last time.

Day 88: Even the Pug

In coronaveterinary news, WRAL reports that a North Carolina pug named Winston is the first American dog to test positive for COVID-19. The pug was tested as part of a study its owners volunteered for. Their other dog and their cat were negative. (Of the owners, two parents and a son were positive, but the daughter was negative.) Winston experienced mild symptoms for a few days and has since recovered.

PlagueBlog disapproves of a trial of female hormones on male COVID-19 patients reported in the New York Times, because female hormones (whether naturally elevated in pregnancy or administered, e.g., as birth control) pose a risk of thrombosis (clotting), which is already a problem for coronavirus patients. Though they've excluded patients with a history of clotting from the study, PlagueBlog does not consider this precaution sufficient, as the side-effect normally occurs in young people with no history of clotting, anyway. PlagueBlog recommends that, when grasping at straws, one try to avoid the extra-pointy ones.

The Guardian (AU) reports on an increase in toxic shock syndrome and Kawasaki disease in children in the UK. Kawasaki disease is an inflammation of the walls of blood vessels; the cause is unknown but it is suspected to be childhood infections, and genetic susceptibility may be involved. A firm connection to the coronavirus pandemic has yet to be established. The Independent (UK) and the NHS seem a bit more hesitant to peg the disease(s), instead calling the phenomenon "a multi-system inflammatory state requiring intensive care."

In other weird symptom news, ABC News reports on silent hypoxia in the wild, sometimes with crazy O₂ levels:

Dr. Jeffrey Moon, medical director for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania's emergency department, said his department has seen "people coming in with COVID who are less symptomatic than we would expect given their low oxygen levels." Moon said he saw one patient Monday who was talking to him "in full sentences" despite having a pulse oxygenation level of just 55%.

"It's hard to believe what's in front of you at times. There is this subset of COVID patients where I don't believe my eyes," Moon said.

PlagueBlog speculates that one of those complete sentences was "I'm not dead yet!"

Time reports that "COVID toes" are getting more recognition, along with other minor dermatological symptoms like hives and rashes. There is some concern, however, that these conditions may be caused by generalized clotting, which may in turn be doing more significant damage under the surface.

LiveScience reports on the original weird coronavirus symptom, a "ruptured heart", observed in the autopsy of America's (retroactive) first death. (What actually ruptured was the left ventricle.)

This type of heart rupture occurs more typically in people with high cholesterol levels or abnormalities in the heart muscle, Melinek said. But Dowd's case was very unusual because her heart was a normal size and weight, she said.

Although LiveScience repeats rumors of the victim's alleged good health, the autopsy actually said that she was "mildly obese" with a "mildly" enlarged heart. In this context "mildly" obese is class 1 obesity, at a BMI of 31.2.

The Independent reports that the methanol poisoning death count in Iran has risen to 728, out of (apparently) a total of 5,011 poisoning cases.

P.S. Massachusetts' numbers are out; we are up 3% today. The governor describes us as on an unusual "plateau" and has closed the state for another three weeks, until May 18th. Middlesex County is also up only 3% (someone asked) and in no special need of masks at a distance outdoors, where the virus has never been shown to be transmissible.

In other mask news, the UK government and their scientific advisory committee have reiterated their complete rejection of masks for the public, in response to a belated attempt by Scotland to mask the populace merely on public transit and in shops.

Day 83: Recounting China

China is once again a moving target in the coronavirus country counts, having locked down the northern city of Harbin (population 10 million). Accounts of why the city has been locked down vary, with some sources blaming an asymptomatic student "surnamed Han" ex New York City, while other sources only blame the 87-year-old super-spreader man "surnamed Chen" who actually spread the disease through two hospitals to 78 people, without any specific claims about where he got it. Sequencing the new cases would be quite helpful, but PlagueBlog does not expect to hear any such results, at least not anytime soon.

Some brave researchers at the University of Hong Kong have pulled an estimate of China's true case numbers by modeling results for the most accurate of their constantly fluctuating case definitions. Unfortunately the data they used for modeling dried up after February 20th, so their estimate is only of the case count as of that date. But it's still a doozy: 232,000 cases instead of the official count at that time of 55,508 cases. You can read more about it in their Lancet article.

On the cat watch, some suspect feline cases we've already mentioned have been confirmed. As part of the official confirmation of the two housecats from New York state, it came out that one of their owners was not actually sick. The cat appears to have caught COVID-19 through community spread. The CDC is now recommending social distancing for both dogs and cats, but (based on the research reviewed in previous posts) PlagueBlog recommends you not worry about the dogs unless you yourself are ill.

National Geographic reports that seven more large felines at the Bronx Zoo have tested positive; only one of the seven was asymptomatic and unsuspected back at the time their first tiger was tested. There's still no direct evidence that a zookeeper infected them; it's just "the only thing that makes sense."

The governor of California is planning to dig up more bodies more autopsies of possible early COVID-19 deaths like those revealed in Santa Clara county yesterday. Those patients have been identified, and had no obvious connection to Wuhan. A microbiologist involved in sequencing SARS-CoV-2 nevertheless believes that the two early deaths will prove to be from a strain imported from Wuhan to Santa Clara county early on.

Massachusetts' numbers are up 7% today, with about 3,000 new cases. The governor encourages people to seek treatment for other serious illnesses, because hospital visits are lower than expected (even taking the reduced accident rate into account) and the hospitals are safe to visit.

Day 62: Friends in High Places

The Wall Street Journal reports (sans paywall here) that 1.2 million N95 masks are on their way from Shenzhen to Massachusetts aboard the Patriots' 767.

Massachusetts’ quest to acquire these masks was a tense, weeks long saga that began with the state’s governor and winded through embassies, private partners and the U.S.’s most successful football franchise. After a layover in Alaska and an anxious process to win approval from Chinese officials, the plane was given permission to land in China to collect the masks.

“I’ve never seen so much red tape in so many ways and obstacles that we had to overcome,” said Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner.

The article notes that 300,000 of the masks will be sent on to New York, and half a million are still in China waiting for transport "on another shipment."

The Governor also spoke about it at his press conference this afternoon, referring to a previous shipment of 3 million masks that the state had bought from BJ's but that the feds confiscated in the Port of New York back on March 18th. The Boston Globe reported last week on that and several smaller incidents.

Bloomberg reports on our record unemployment, 6.65 million last week for a total of about 10 million in the past two weeks. They're hedgily predicting 15% unemployment in April and a possibly high of 20% if staying-at-home goes on longer than that.

P.S. The Governor also mentioned we will be giving an unspecified number of masks to Rhode Island as well. It's still open season down there, so PlagueBlog recommends not shooting the delivery folk if you want your masks.

P.P.S. The world has surpassed a million cases of coronavirus, with over 52,000 deaths. In Massachusetts, we went up 1,228 cases (16%) to nearly 9,000 cases. There were 32 deaths added, with one of a woman in her 30's in Suffolk County who had pre-existing conditions, but most over 60. Dukes (5 cases) and Nantucket (7) counties have finally been broken out. The state is also reporting some numbers regarding long-term healthcare facilities, where there are 197 individual cases and 85 different facilities reporting infections.

The Governor also mentioned at the presser that we're getting a Battelle N95 mask sterilizing setup at the empty K-Mart in Somerville, which should be sterilizing 80,000 masks a day by next week.

PlagueBlog neglected to mention that a 44-year old crazy man tried to ram a Navy hospital ship with a train in the Port of Los Angeles yesterday. PlagueBlog notes that psychosis is not a common symptom of COVID-19.

Day 61: April Fools

The civet saw its shadow, so we're expecting six more weeks of quarantine. Or something like that.

PlagueBlog is saddened to report the death of Star Wars actor Andrew Jack from coronavirus, and hopes he was able to leave a Do-Not-CGI order behind.

The world has exceeded 911,000 cases, and the US has surpassed the 200k mark and is already at 205,000 cases with 4,500 deaths. Italy is at 110,000 with 13,000 deaths, and Spain at 100,000 with 9,000 deaths. New York State is at 83,000 cases with 1,900 deaths, with New Jersey the runner-up at 22,000 cases but only 355 deaths.

There's an interesting preprint at medRxiv correlating the varying rates of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality across countries with their rates of tuberculosis vaccination:

BCG vaccination has been reported to offer broad protection to respiratory infections. We compared large number of countries BCG vaccination policies with the morbidity and mortality for COVID-19. We found that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination (Italy, Nederland, USA) have been more severely affected compared to countries with universal and long-standing BCG policies. Countries that have a late start of universal BCG policy (Iran, 1984) had high mortality, consistent with the idea that BCG protects the vaccinated elderly population. We also found that BCG vaccination also reduced the number of reported COVID-19 cases in a country.

You can check out your country's BCG vaccination policy at the BCG World Atlas. Most notably, Spain had a child vaccination program from 1965 to 1981 only, though it appears that Basque children may still be getting vaccinated.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports an undue touristic interest in Montana. The governor has expressed legal qualms about closing the border, trusting in the usual quarantine period instead. PlagueBlog recommends applying the National Guard to the issue instead.

The AP reports that Wisconsin is calling out the National Guard to staff polling sites for their primary next week, even though even Bernie recommends postponing the primary. PlagueBlog also recommends they save the Guard for a real election.

CNN Philippines reports that Duterte has declared open season on quarantine protestors. PlagueBlog is surprised it took him this long.

Time expresses the usual doubts about China's numbers, though in slightly different language than the usual urn-focussed story. Instead, Time opens with China's moving case counting standards:

After several days of trumpeting just a handful of new COVID-19 cases, on Wednesday China once again switched up exactly what that means, and included asymptomatic infections of the coronavirus in its official statistics for the first time.[...]

It was the eighth different definition of what constitutes a COVID-19 infection in China’s official statistics since the outbreak began in late December, with critics arguing that the lack of clarity has made it harder for other nations to adequately understand and prepare for the disease.

P.S. Our numbers are in: Massachusetts is up 1,118 cases (17%) to 7,738, with 33 additional deaths (122 overall). The state conducted a hundred-odd tests while Quest did 2,300 or so. Over 50,000 people have been tested; about 15% were positive.

The governor has also launched an independent investigation of the situation at Holyoke Soldiers' Home.

P.P.S. WFSB Hartford reports that a six-week-old baby has died of coronavirus there.

P.P.P.S. Something I didn't notice in our numbers at first was the death of 31-year-old Riley Rumrill of Suffolk County, an former Alabaman with pre-existing conditions (apparently asthma and obesity), and our youngest victim to date.

P.P.P.P.S. Also, there seems to be another Holyoke Soldiers' Home-level outbreak of stupid going on at the Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley in Littleton, MA. The town felt the need to publicize the facility's bad behavior in a press release.

Day 56: The Herd Strikes Back

Today's title is for Boris Johnson, currently self-quarantining at Number 10 Downing Street.

Do you recall when PlagueBlog did not recommend closing the border to New York State? Well, clearly the governor of Rhode Island is not listening to our recommendations, because she has instituted a house-to-house search for roving New Yorkers, using the National Guard. (This somehow reminds PlagueBlog of the popular theme in Portuguese COVID-19 memes of reconquering a disease-ravaged Spain, or at least Galicia.)

Science Alert suggests that the current coronavirus may be a chimera of a bat coronavirus and a pangolin one.

RaTG13, isolated from a bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis collected in China's Yunan Province, has recently been described as very similar to SARS-CoV-2, with genome sequences identical to 96 percent.

[...]

However, the coronavirus isolated from pangolin is similar at 99 percent in a specific region of the S protein, which corresponds to the 74 amino acids involved in the ACE (Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2) receptor binding domain, the one that allows the virus to enter human cells to infect them.

By contrast, the virus RaTG13 isolated from bat R. affinis is highly divergent in this specific region (only 77 percent of similarity). This means that the coronavirus isolated from pangolin is capable of entering human cells whereas the one isolated from bat R. affinis is not.

In addition, these genomic comparisons suggest that the SARS-Cov-2 virus is the result of a recombination between two different viruses, one close to RaTG13 and the other closer to the pangolin virus. In other words, it is a chimera between two pre-existing viruses.

P.S. Our numbers are in: Massachusetts is at 3240 cases, up 823 (34%) over yesterday. There were ten more deaths, mostly of patients over 80, for a total of 35. Sex is a growing mystery to the DPH, as is the source of the infection, with over 800 more in the "under investigation" category. Quest has tested 2,800 more patients, more than three times the next runner up (the state lab). A total of seventeen labs (plus "other") are now performing tests.

The commonwealth has officially extended the tax filing deadline to July 15th, and the Governor is on the case of cities who've banned construction.

Also the US has now topped 100,000 cases and 1,500 deaths. New York State is far in the lead with 44,800 cases and 519 deaths.

Day 54: Diana's Revenge

Basically everyone on the internet has informed PlagueBlog that Prince Charles has come down with coronavirus, so we're passing it on to you. Take it as you will.

Here in Massachusetts, things have gone from bad to worse, or at least from untested to tested. The total is now 1838 cases, up 679 from yesterday (59%). We also have 4 new deaths, all over 70 and most with pre-existing conditions. The jump is mostly due to testing by Quest, whose numbers have gone up from 379 positive out of over 5,000 tested yesterday to 805 positive out of over 9,000 tested today. The state comes in a distant second with 4,774 tested. LabCorp remains in third place, and the lab count is up to thirteen, plus "other".

P.S. If you're on hydroxychloroquine, PlagueBlog hopes you're also a prepper and stocked up ahead of the rush. Buzzfeed reports Kaiser Permanente is denying hydroxychloroquine prescriptions to lupus patients in California. Also, PlagueBlog recommends against drinking your fish tank cleaner because you don't understand chemistry (or for any other reason).