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…

[...]

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 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 738: Falling Apart

Eugyppius has a long reader report on "containment collapse" experiences around the globe, including Canada:

On Thursday night, Ottawa was still relatively quiet, although there were a lot of Canadian flags flying from pickups and SUVs. Regular folks who got in their cars, pickups, SUVs, and vans beat the convoy to Ottawa on Thursday night and early Friday morning.

Around 10 AM on Friday, January 28, the HONKING began. Day 1 of The HOONKENING. People in pickups, cars, SUVs, vans were starting to pile into town, and they began jamming up roads in the downtown core, most importantly Wellington St, the street the Parliament buildings sit on. As far as I can ascertain, the first big trucks arrived from the Southwestern Ontario leg a couple of hours later. They, too, piled up on Wellington St and other roads in the downtown core and held their horns down.

Seemingly, entire hotels in Downtown Ottawa were booked out by protestors. I walked the streets of downtown with a group of friends on Friday night. Despite the temperature hovering somewhere around -27℃, the city was one giant block party. Folks were screaming at the top of their lungs for "FREEEEEEEEDOM!!!!" firecrackers and fireworks popped off intermittently, HOONKING was incessant. One woman was running around with her shirt off, wearing body paint that said "My Body, My Choice," while a burly gent wielded dual Canadian flags wearing nothing but his underwear and some steel-toes.

People actually had fun in this country for the first time in two years.

Day 733: Groundhog Day Again Again

This is where I say, "the groundhog saw its shadow, which means we'll be having six more months of COVID." But the real quote of the day comes from eugyppius on Omicron:

Your immune system isn’t going to invest heavily in fighting minor threats, and in this it much wiser than our governments and public health establishments.

I heard this one on the news this morning and had the same reaction as Alex Berenson: Just another healthy 49-year-old having a stroke...

In totally unrelated news, the COVID vaccines continue to make progress towards eliminating the scourge of soccer in our lifetimes.

Day 729: Truckers

As the Canadian vaccine mandate trucker protest approaches both Ottowa and comical counterproductivity, the Aussies are also getting in on the action.

In local news, WBUR notes our falling sewage levels but says to remain worried, especially abuot Omicron, The Sequel.

Day 725: The Omicron Hypothesis

It sounds like an episode of Star Trek, but it's a substack post series by Mathew Crawford, currently at three parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. He actually covers seven hypotheses about the origins of the Omicron variant, as well as the reasons one might be spouting wild theories about such a mild and unassuming "variant". If you've missed any omicrankiness, from the patents to the lab leaks to the variant's variant, it's in there, along with the author's even wilder conspiracy theory.

Massachusetts cases were up five ninths of a percentage point for the Tuesday lull.

Day 724: Something is rotten in Denmark

The opening line of Alex Berenson's latest post makes a better title than his title (AN URGENT WARNING). Most of his rot is in Israel, where vaccination continue to counterproduce the most Omicron cases, including one percent of the population of the country on Saturday. He advises a precipitous halt to all vaccination because, to paraphrase, WTF?

His earlier post, Moderna stock is falling faster than Covid vaccine effectiveness, is the real title winner for the day, especially when you throw in the opening zings:

I’m joking, kids! Nothing is falling faster than Covid vaccine effectiveness.

And unlike vaccine effectiveness, Moderna stock has a zero lower bound.

Massachusetts cases were up only about two-thirds of a percentage point a day over the weekend and today.

Day 714: Prisoner’s Dilemma

The bad cat has some interesting speculation about bad vaccines as a prisoner's dilemma:

this [prisoner's dilemma thought experiment] is obviously a gross oversimplification and the reality of secondary attack rates etc, but it raises a potentially REALLY interesting question:

is omicron really this much more contagious or is it vaccines MAKING it this much more contagious?

i have not yet looked at this, but it seems a promising avenue to explore perhaps by comparing the testing adjusted rates of omi growth in some high vaxx vs low vaxx places of similar demographics.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up only one percent today.

Day 707: The Latest Numbers

The Omicron numbers are still through the roof, even without counting a zillion mild, untested cases. But the more interesting undercount is of vaccine side effects. The European passive surveillance system, EudraVigilance, hit the following total on New Year's Day:

• Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2, Comirnaty) from BioNTech/Pfizer: 16,471 deaths and 1,546,829 injuries
• Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273 (CX-024414) from Moderna: 10,170 deaths and 465,080 injuries
• Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 2,245 deaths and 114,229 injuries
• Total reactions for the vaccine AZD1222/VAXZEVRIA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) from Oxford/AstraZeneca: 7,371 deaths and 1,117,914 injuries

The numbers were compiled by Health Impact News, where they are broken down further by symptoms and also displayed in a handy table.

VAERS Analysis shows 21,000 deaths, a million injuries, and 110,000 hospitalizations through December 24th due to COVID vaccines. Eugyppius continues to track negative vaccine efficacy in Britain.

Real Science continues to track the soccer vaccines sudden athlete collapses (412) and deaths (242). In a similar vein, Australia appears to have lured Novak Djokovic and other tennis players into the country with promises of vaccine exemptions only to toss them into their concentration camps.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up two and a third percent today.

Day 702: Ontario Omicron Original Antigenic Sin

Negative efficacy data continues to drop out of those few places that are on top of data collection in this new Omicron Year. One of those places is Ontario:

it shows something incredibly interesting. it shows vaccines working to stop cases until mid december and then suddenly inverting. this is presumably due to omicron.

vaccination just fell to a -33% VE for cases and this looks to be worsening rapidly, likely because of a rise in omicron prevalence.

this is consistent with not just vaccine escape, but vaccine driven acceleration.

the vaccinated are getting covid at higher rates than the unvaxxed and that rate looks to be increasing rapidly as omi gains viral share.

many are denying this and calling it a simpson’s paradox (SP) where each subgroup is actually showing strong VE but where the way they aggregate causes the net figure to invert and imply an erroneous relationship that does not actually pertain. such things have been common in covid data.

i think this claim is incorrect.

firstly, if this is an SP, then why did that not manifest before? why did the relationship for case reduction invert so suddenly? it was certainly not a massive, sudden change in who was vaccinated.

Day 701: Omicron Severity

Omicron seems mild enough here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, but a preprint out of Manchester, England portends hospitalization numbers proportional to those from Delta:

Using data from the Virology laboratory at the Manchester Medical Microbiology Partnership (MMMP, a partnership between UKHSA and the Manchester Foundation Trust), we have extracted a real-time feed of Omicron samples from hospitals across Greater Manchester, an area of the United Kingdom with a population size of approximately three million individuals. Omicron hospital samples are growing exponentially across Greater Manchester (doubling time 2.7 days (95% CI: 2.1, 3.7)). The proportion of Omicron in hospital samples follows a similar trajectory to the SGTF [S-gene target failure, an Omicron trait] proportion in cases, but with a two-day offset. This is consistent with the delay from testing positive to hospital admission, implying a similar proportion of Omicron cases are converting to hospital admissions as for Delta cases. Comparing the Greater Manchester data to national hospitalisation data, similar tends are observed. Therefore, there is no signal of a substantial reduction in hospital admission risk with Omicron, and Omicron epidemics are likely to place a substantial burden on public health infrastructure.

While this wasn't the pattern from South Africa, vaccination rates were low there while they are high in Britain. Considering the negative efficacy of the vaccines and the media's inflated idea of the severity of "average" COVID cases, it seems entirely possible that Omicron could end up just as much of a problem as any previous variant of COVID ever was—which is to say, flu-like. Bad flu seasons have overwhelmed JIT healthcare systems in the past.

So it's not necessarily the mildness of Omicron that's led to the backpedalling of COVID craziness you may have observed lately; its pervasiveness alone is enough to blow all the bad statistics of the pandemic out of the water. Once anybody can do the math of vaccine and mask (in)efficacy on their fingers, the cat is outta the bag.

Day 700: Fact Checking

Fact checking these days is hard to distinguish from body checking; you slam into unwanted facts with all the force you can muster, hoping to bash them out of your way. An intrepid PlagueBlog reporter, working from home while infected with the dread disease, reports that Reuters has gotten into the fact checking game, trying to body slam the negative efficacy numbers buried in a Danish study of Omicron with a lot of dancing around the fact that there were negative efficacy numbers buried in a Danish study of Omicron:

Users online claimed that the table on page 6, particularly negative VE estimates against Omicron 91 to 150 days following second mRNA dose, was proof that vaccines were harming immune systems with other claims that unvaccinated people were less likely to get infected with the virus.

Negative efficacy literally means that unvaccinated people were less likely to get infected with the virus. While it's also literally true that the study did not conclude anyone's immune system was damaged by vaccination, the anti-vaxxers harping on the study never claimed it did. The fact check reads suspiciously like some sort of missive from a Communist press that toes the party line while leaking the truth out between the lines.

In any event, negative efficacy data is not limited to the backs of Danish preprints; el gato malo find some in Omicron data from Germany:

to calculate VE, we need to compare the vaccinated cohorts to the unvaccinated. that’s the control group. there are probably some pretty significant error bars here, but this outcome is STARK. the risk ratios for all vaccinated groups are far, far higher than control.

boosting does seem to lead to a 2/3 risk reduction vs just being double vaxxed but still leaves one at 4.7X the risk of the unvaccinated.

He goes into some detail about how the window of immortal time post-boosting makes these numbers look worse than they are (and the booster look better than it is). See the bad cat for details.

P.S. Brian Mowrey has a different take on what's going on with negative efficacy: the suppression of innate immunity.

P.P.S. Massachusetts cases were up 2% again today.

Day 696: Necronomicron

Good news out of South Africa, where case rates are falling and "the much more deadly Delta mutation has largely been replaced by Omicron, which – according to multiple studies – seems to be the mildest variant so far." South Africa wants compensation for the UK ruining its Christmas with baseless panicked travel bans in contravention of WHO recommendations, but seems unlikely to get it.

Also finally dead today is the pandemic of the unvaccinated, as the vaccines continue to be a far better cure for soccer than for COVID.

Day 693: Breaking Records Like a Man in Women’s Sports

Everybody who's still keeping track is announcing record-breaking COVID numbers. Besides our record highs in Massachusetts yesterday and the day before, Canada has exceeded 20,000 cases, with Ontario also breaking their record. The US hasn't maxed out yet, but New York and New Jersey are also on their second day of record breaking, and Ohio is on their third. Illinois broke records as well, and even Florida is thinking about it.

On the bright side, Israel may be backing off a second booster because Omicron is still looking mild. As long as it doesn't gremlin out at midnight tonight, we should be safe.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up one (and a twentieth) percent today, with almost 11,000 cases (some presumptive).

Day 691: The Omicron and the Omega

Things are looking apocalyptic with heavily-vaccinated Britain posting an all-time daily high of 106,122 cases, Israel moving on to a fourth shot (because it worked so well the first three times), and Omicron sweeping the land.

But on the bright side, the army thinks it has cured all SARS, and the mainstream media are now admitting that cloth masks do nothing and it's pointless and dangerous to boost teens:

The last vote by FDA advisers, in September, rejected the proposal 16-2. FDA leaders revisited the proposal in November and simply bypassed the experts. So did the CDC, whose advisers had rejected boosters for people not at high risk. Two top FDA scientists, including the head of the agency’s vaccine efforts, quit around the time of the September vote over White House pressure to authorize boosters for all. They wrote in detail about their concerns.

A study by Oxford researchers, published last week in Nature Medicine, validated those concerns. It found young people suffered myocarditis, pericarditis and arrhythmias more frequently from vaccines than from Covid itself. And the long-term cardiac effects of boosters in young people are unknown.

Not to mention the unknown long-term side effects of COVID vaccines at any age...

Lastly but not leastly, after a long hiatus covering antifa and foot-shooting Republicans, David Cole takes another whack at the pandemic:

The “politician/scientist alliance” (typified by the Democrats and Fauci) has done much to encourage both extremes, exhorting the left to lionize lab-coaters (Fauci literally declaring, “I am science”), and taunting the right with a stubborn refusal to admit errors and uncertainties.

Also, the personal behavior of the alliance members has engendered bad-faith skepticism to a huge degree. The people who tell us we’re gonna die if we (and our children) are maskless have no problem constantly violating their own mask rules. In their personal behavior, they don’t act like there’s an emergency. Ordinary folks pick up on that.

Worse still, some in the alliance seem to be enjoying the pandemic a bit too much. When I see the wide toothy smile on the bony-ass Skeletor face of the New Zealand prime minister every time she announces new lockdowns and mandates, I think, “Jesus, that psychopath’s getting a kick out of this shit.”

Massachusetts cases were up five sixths of a percentage point today.

Day 690: Winter Mask Advisory

Our governor warns that there's heavy mask weather ahead, or something like that. The locals are already complaining that the mask advisory is not a mandate, even though the most fascist maskist of us are already under city and town mask mandates.

In national news, the three-letter COVID agencies' witchhunt against the authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration has made the news, if Zerohedge counts as the news.

But the quote of the day comes from el gato malo of bad cattitude, in a long post about the harmless Omicron variant:

continuing to swerve around a chipmunk in the road as though it were some sort of phantasmagorical lovecraftian horror will accomplish nothing but needless damage.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up almost two thirds 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 687: The Little Variant That Couldn’t

The data on Omicron continues to be very reassuring, with negligible morbidity and mortality despite its communicability. For example, Alex Berenson reports on auspicious numbers from South Africa and Denmark.

Day 685: National Nullification Day

It's the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and in imitation of the spirit (if not the catchy sloganeering) of our ancestors, the Unity Project has declared it National Nullification Day. Though the call is for general COVID rebellion, the organization itself is particularly devoted to not jabbing schoolchildren.

Why rebel? Just for example, The Washington Post opines on the FDA and CDC progressing from ignoring their expert panels to failing to convene expert panels at all—most notably in extending boosters to 16- and 17-year-olds with no discussion of myocarditis, or anything else.

In local news, Omicron is speeding around Massachusetts faster than we can sequence it—which apparently isn't all that fast:

Researchers from Yale New Haven Hospital and the University of Washington this week posted data showing increasing numbers of samples with the genetic change.

But it takes seven to 10 days to complete the full genomic sequencing that would confirm the presence of Omicron. As a result, the official case counts probably represent a fraction of the current infections, Lemieux said.

“It is alarming to see how quickly this virus is spreading,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up two-thirds of a percentage point today.

Day 673: It's Coming From Inside the House

Omicron has entered Massachusetts.