BioNIHTech

It's been so long I've stopped counting. I was planning to comment on #iamahorse, the FDA's tweet-deleting settlement of a lawsuit against them for practicing medicine without a license interfering with the distribution of ivermectin. But then this came up...

The bad cat reports on another lawsuit, in which the NIH is suing BioNIHTech BioNTech for royalties on their COVID vaccine.

the mRNA payload came from NIH to moderna and moderna paid them lavish royalties in the hundreds of millions, possibly billions whose recipients at NIH were never really disclosed (and astonishingly are not required to be). these often go to individuals, not the NIH as a whole. fauci and collins may well be very rich men from this. (and their alleged “nothing to see here disclosures” all oddly seem to predate the commencement of the licensing lucre.)

many searched high and low but bioNtech remained a mystery.

where did they get their mRNA payload for their incredibly profitable product and how did they do it as quickly as moderna who had clearly gotten the cheat codes from the selfsame “scientists” who funded the virus’s creation?

well, now we know: they got it from the same place that moderna did: the NIH.

then they seemingly skipped out on the check. and now they are getting hit with a notice of default.

doopsie.

If it were me, I might gamble that the NIH was raking enough in from Moderna and try to skip out on the check. But it seems they lost the bet that the NIH would pass up Pfizer-level funds to keep this quiet. How much of a secret can it have been that a largely unqualified company also came up with a never-yet-successful mRNA approach to vaccinate against the same disease?

Day 1246: The Erstwhile Preprint

You have to be quick in post-COVID clown world, not taking the week off for the holiday. We at PlagueBlog intended to blog the amazingly anti-vaxx preprint "A Systematic Review of Autopsy Findings in Deaths after COVID-19 Vaccination" on The Lancet's preprint server while it was still up. We expected it to last longer than 24 hours. It seems the world wasn't ready for an estimated 700,000 American vaxx deaths, while the excuses were near at hand. We'll quote them because who knows what they'll be tomorrow:

This preprint has been removed by Preprints with The Lancet because the study's conclusions are not supported by the study methodology. Preprints with The Lancet reserves the right to remove a paper that has been posted if we determine that it has violated our screening criteria.

They cite a FAQ that, of course, does not say they take papers down for methodological reasons (though they do for ethical and other reasons), just that they reject preprints for methodology—which they clearly did not (by posting it in the first place).

Note that this tissue of lies is inserted in place of the paper's abstract. The Wayback Machine is watching, so you can read that much there:

Abstract

Background: The rapid development and widespread deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, combined with a high number of adverse event reports, have led to concerns over possible mechanisms of injury including systemic lipid nanoparticle (LNP) and mRNA distribution, spike protein-associated tissue damage, thrombogenicity, immune system dysfunction, and carcinogenicity. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate possible causal links between COVID-19 vaccine administration and death using autopsies and post-mortem analysis.

Methods: We searched for all published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination up until May 18th, 2023. We initially identified 678 studies and, after screening for our inclusion criteria, included 44 papers that contained 325 autopsy cases and one necropsy case. Three physicians independently reviewed all deaths and determined whether COVID-19 vaccination was the direct cause or contributed significantly to death.

Findings: The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%), and multiple organ systems (7%). Three or more organ systems were affected in 21 cases. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days. Most deaths occurred within a week from last vaccine administration. A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.

Interpretation: The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms, and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.

Funding: None.

Declaration of Interest: Drs Alexander, Amerling, Hodkinson, Makis, McCullough, Risch, Trozzi are affiliated with and receive salary support and or hold equity positions in The Wellness Company, Boca Raton, FL which had no role in funding, analysis, or publication.

The Wayback Machine is not so good at capturing weirdly-linked PDFs, so if you're looking for the paper, the precient folks at The Daily Skeptic have it here, along with their own reporting.

Here is the preprint's extrapolation of 700,000 deaths, not from the autopsies and causes they listed, but from a rather mild VAERS underreporting factor:

Pantazatos estimated that VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20. If we apply this underreporting factor to the May 5th, 2023, VAERS death report count of 35,324, the number of deaths in the United States alone becomes 706,480. If this extrapolated number of deaths were to be confirmed, the COVID-19 vaccines would represent the largest medical failure in human history.

Day 1213: The New Anti-Vaxxers

The failure of the COVID vaccines has led to generalized grassroots anti-vaxxing. But lately the sorts of professionals who used to preface their doubts about the mRNA vaccines with apparently sincere statements that "I am not an anti-vaxxer but..." have been coming out as anti-vaxxers.

I don't know whether it's the recent revelations about massive production issues with AstraZeneca, the latest autism numbers, or previous enormities like the CDC adding an emergency use vaccine to the childhood schedule that's pushed these people out the Overton window into anti-vaxxing, but once they arrive they usually mention autism (rather than, say, SIDS).

Recently vocal anti-vaxxers include Steve Kirsch, Dr. Peter McCullough, and Aaron Siri.

Day 1193: Letters to Walensky

The bad cat has joined the epistolary madness, writing his own, properly capitalized missive to lame-duck CDC head Rochelle Walensky.

This series of unfounded claims and distortionary definitions seems both a poor and a deeply dangerous practice for Public Health.

If we are to have any hope of restoring faith in this field, we must ask and answer the pointed questions of “How did this happen?” and “At whose behest?”

Someone made these choices for some reason. Who and why would seem to be the bare minimum of post mortem here.

It is oft opined that a bad map is worse than no map at all and in this, I must wholeheartedly agree. The public health agencies in America have become the most calamitous of cartographers.

Jessica Rose also reports on Dr. Lapado's missive exchange with the dens of vipers writers of "word salad" at the FDA and CDC (which we linked in passing last time).

Day 1189: The State of Non-Emergency

About a year and a half after all semblance of an emergency ended (with the just the flu Omicron wave), the federal government has finally put a stake into the state of emergency that would not die. Federal largess for free COVID tests and vaccines has officially dried up. Like welfare bonuses, the Medicaid extension ended a bit earlier, but what happens when to those who no longer qualify for Medicaid varies by state.

Holdout states like Massachusetts are quickly dropping any remaining mask, testing, and vaccination mandates as well as ending local states of emergency. The major healthcare networks have been sending out emails about what they're dropping, as though they had a choice and could continue enforcing masking or other measures without the state to back them up. Regardless, none of them seem to have the appetite for it any longer.

It's difficult to say which intervention was the least effective, but the one people on the ground are still the most attached to seems to be masking. The government, on the other hand, continues to push dangerous and ineffective vaccines.

P.S. ...except in Florida.

Day 1188: The Vaccines Fail to Work, Bivalent Booster Edition

For the last day of the state of emergency, here's a preprint about the boosters failing to provide any protection against the most current incarnation of COVID they considered. They phrase this in terms of various Omicron variants, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to assume it's about the particular variant rather than the passage of time, as boosting is calculated with a week of immortal time.

Despite the immortal time fallacy, they found that more jabs led to more cases of COVID, and that natural immunity led to less COVID:

The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19 (Figure 2).

[...]

The multivariable analysis also found that, the more recent the last prior COVID-19 episode was the lower the risk of COVID-19, and that the greater the number of vaccine doses previously received the higher the risk of COVID-19.

They cite some prior speculation (immune imprinting and IgG4 issues with which PlagueBlog readers are familiar) about the causes of the increase in COVID with more jabs, and even dare to suggest that more jabbing may not actually be helping.

Day 1181: VAERS Still Full of Dead Bodies

As of two weeks ago, VAERS was up to over 35,000 deaths from various COVID vaccines (over 17,000 of them in the US) out of about 45,000 total deaths reported since 1990. Steve Kirsch hasn't given up on VAERS-watching or convincing people to acknowledge the body count, though he himself refrains from the VAERS underreporting math in that post. (It adds up to about 700,000 COVID vaccine deaths in the US to date.)

He has other interesting arguments for VAERS veracity that I don't recall from my first run-in with his numbers a year and a half ago, back when the body count was half what it is now. I think the most impressive argument is the imbalance of male to female deaths. Men are the weaker sex when it comes to vaccine side-effects, but people allegedly making politically-motivated VAERS reports don't know that. They certainly don't know to report only the male childhood deaths and no female ones. Pediatric deaths that aren't from skateboarding into traffic or genetic diseases are already an anomaly that needs explanation beyond because VAERS. A sex imbalance is just adding insult to the injury of the CDC ignoring them.

Day 1167: Casualties

I have long thought that if the excess mortality rate is out of control, then whatever is causing those deaths must be causing significant morbidity as well, not to mention affecting labor markets. Back in January, the Vigilant Fox reported some numbers from Ed Dowd:

The following table, provided by phinancetechnologies.com, provides a summary of different statistics regarding changes in disability that occurred from February 2021 through November 2022. We’re going to be focusing on the red section.

[table omitted]

The number it gives is an increase in disabilities of (1,460,000 + 1,677,000) 3,137,000 in people between the ages of 16-64.

“In Wall Street,” explained Edward Dowd, “we focus on signals and frequency and rate of change. That was a three-standard deviation year-over-year rate of growth change — shouldn’t have happened.”

He makes much of the new disabilities being concentrated among the employed (allegedly due to vaxx mandates), and, more obviously, causing our national staffing woes.

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 1162: An Anti-Vaxxer for President

RFK Jr. isn't just an anti-vaxxer, he is the anti-vaxxer. He'll be kicking off his presidential campaign in Boston next week. One wonders if he'll come out of the gate gunning for the CDC, and how many Republican and independent voters he can grab on COVID issues.

Dr. McCullough also reports on a research letter on bad batches of Pfizer's COVID vaccine in Denmark. While it looks pretty damning, due to their methodology the report actually fails to control for bad administration technique, which (as a systemic problem rather than an occasional random jab to a vein) could be highly correlated with batch number.

Day 1102: vxCJD Paper Published

The mysterious disappearing vaxx-variant CJD preprint from last summer has finally been published, in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research (h/t the bad cat). The final paper is restricted to mainly the French cases from the preprint, including one who was still alive in August:

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the formerly rare but universally fatal prion disease in humans, normally progresses over several decades before it leads to death. In the Appendix to this paper, we highlight the presence of a prion region in the spike protein of the original SARS-CoV-2, and in all the “vaccine” variants built from the Wuhan virus. The prion region in the spike of SARS-CoV-2 has a density of mutations eight times greater than that of the rest of the spike, and, yet, strangely that entire prion region disappears completely in the Omicron variant. In the main body of our text, we present 26 cases of Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease, all diagnosed in 2021 with the first symptoms appearing within an average of 11.38 days after a Pfizer, Moderna, or AstraZeneca COVID-19 injection. Because the causal progression, the etiopathogenesis, of these atypical and new cases of human prion disease — cases of what is apparently a totally new form of rapidly developing Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease — we focus on the chronology of the symptomatic development. We consider it from an anamnestic point of view — one in which we compare the typical development of pre-COVID cases of Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease to the extremely accelerated development of similar symptoms in the 26 cases under examination. By such an approach, we hope to work out the etiopathogenesis critical to understanding this new and much more rapidly developing human prion disease. By recalling the sequential pathway of that the formerly subacute and slowly developing disease followed in the past, and by comparing it with this new, extremely acute, rapidly developing prion disease — one following closely after one or more of the COVID-19 injections — we believe it is correct to infer that the injections caused the disease in these 26 cases. If so, they have probably also caused a many other cases that have gone undiagnosed because of their rapid progression to death. By late 2021, 20 had died within 4.76 months of the offending injection. Of those, 8 died suddenly within 2.5 months confirming the rapid progression of this accelerated form of Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease. By June 2022, 5 more patients had died, and at the time of this current writing, only 1 remains still alive.

One of the authors has also died. Note that the VAERS search mentioned in the paper (for CJD from COVID vaccines) originally produced 20 cases, 19 of whom were already deceased. In our previous vxCJD post the search produced 33 deaths, and as of last week is was up to 79 cases, 42 of whom are marked deceased, and two of which involved J&J rather than the mRNA vaccines.

If you're feeling brave, the bad cat goes into the prospective mechanisms behind vaxx-induced CJD. Keep in mind that vxCJD onset appears to be sudden, usually within 15 days of vaccination, rather than a delayed side-effect of the vaccines.

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 1067: The Other Football

While we at PlagueBlog Headquarters have been expecting the vaccine against soccer to eventually affect a major American sport live on camera, we watch little enough of it to have expected to witness the event ourselves. But we were watching today's Bills game when 24-year-old Damar Hamlin mysteriously collapsed on the field.

One would also have expected people to be a little more aware of the recent carnage on the soccer field and a little more prepared for SADS, but it's all shock and ad-libbing from the teams and reporters. As of press time the game is still suspended.

P.S. The Internet is grasping at a diagnosis of commotio cordis, but it's extremely rare, even rarer in adults, and also rarer in non-projectile sports like football.

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 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.

Day 1002: The Misinformers

On Monday, the Ethical Skeptic finally published Part 2 of his series on the CDC's death-reporting malfeasance. He elaborates on their missing and misclassified records---most notably, cancer deaths reclassified as COVID deaths to reduce the excess death rate from cancer below 9σ)---along with their callous disregard for the 20σ high in heart disease deaths since the inexplicable date of MMWR Week 14 2021.

To add insult to injury, he also find the CDC inventing fictional deaths among the unvaccinated to get the pro-vaccination results they wanted out of a sampling study, and their misuse of all-cause mortality figures. He concludes with a frightening number for excess non-COVID mortality:

In the end, it is this last chart depicted in Exhibit 6 which serves to confirm the claims made in Sections 1 through 4 of this article. The level of excess natural cause death which is not Covid itself, is around 13.3% to the excess of where it should be – even given a 1.1% baseline growth inside an aging demographic (see Exhibit 6, dark orange baseline ‘annual growth’).

Exhibit 6 – Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality as a metric, serves to filter out the distractions of Covid-19 as well as mortality from accidents, overdoses, and assault – all of which serve to cloud one’s ability to observe the entailed alarming signal. As of MMWR Week 40 2022, the US has experienced an additional 385,000 natural cause deaths above and beyond what we should have seen for this period of time. Couple this with 80,000 non-natural deaths during the same timeframe, and one finds an excess of 465,000 deaths which have occurred since MMWR Week 14 of 2021. A pandemic all unto itself.

---

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.