Day 864: From Tragedy to Farce

The thirty-month-long Ays Rand novel that is the coronavirus pandemic leapt the shark recently, ascending from tragedy to farce via a thinly-veiled send-up of Pfizer on Dilbert. From the initial decision to become a big pharma company to Wally coming into his own to the most persuasive presentation pointy-haired boss has ever seen to eliminating the whistleblowers, it's two weeks of the most fun you can have combining epidemiology and cupidity in comic book form.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up an eighth of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 857: Buying Health

Mathew Crawford explains the illusion of vaccine efficacy caused by income disparities, a theory shared by the Ethical Skeptic (ES):

ES wins a grappling match by clean submission by showing that (still working at the U.S. county level) COVID deaths correlate to vaccination no more and no less after vaccination began as before. The pattern of results just…remains the same.

He does not touch on the possibility that the causal factor behind better health may not be the wealth itself but whatever caused the income and educational disparities in the first place.

Day 854: COVID Karate Kids

The bad cat deals the covidocracy a one-two punch with posts about the fakery that was martial arts before kickboxing—that is, the fakery that was epidemiology before bad cats on the Internet pooled their statistical chops, and the morass of confirmation bias that is public health even today.

From the former post (why public health "experts" never want to fight "the amateurs": what kung fu theater can teach us about public health):

from SAGE to the CDC, the UW to the NIH, it’s been complete and total woo-woo. their models did not just fail, they were so bad they were non-deterministic and could not even replicate their own results.

they rode in on big white woo-woo horses laden with credentials and made bold claims of their prowess and prescience. they legitimately had no idea they were not world champ top of the game stone cold epi-killahs. they had never been outside. it was 15 years of patty cake training to get ready for the gold medal round in olympic boxing.

total misses on swine flu and zika and dengue and “ebola comes to america” had been largely ignored.

they had no idea that they were, in reality, stunningly, embarrassingly bad at this.

and suddenly they were in the big leagues and got knocked out in the first round in front of everyone because they did not know any better than to jump in a ring for which they were unqualified. all their predictions were wrong, their recommendations false and ill advised. it was just jumping around and tossing out jargon and mathiness as though it implied knowing how to fight a disease.

and we watched this kung-fu theater die in real time.

And the latter post (we've reached the "we're not even going to pretend to prove this works, just do as you're told" stage of the pandemic: watch as the messaging shifts once more):

and that’s the stage of public health we are reaching, because they have lost the debate, been trounced on the data, and been caught lying and making up studies over and over but they are still sure they are experts (and there is no safe path down off the tiger onto which they have climbed in any event).

they are not going to change their minds nor in all likelihood can they without internal psychological crisis. imagine the psychic baggage of realizing that you just architected the most damaging and least effective public health response in human history while endlessly grandstanding about your knowledge and insight.

yowsa.

Yowsa, indeed.

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

Day 853: Vaxx For Thee But Not For Me

The latest celebrity charged in a Spanish counterfeit vaccine passport scheme is also the most ironic: José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, president of one of the largest pharmceutical companies in Spain. According to Steve Kirsch and the EuroWeekly News, it was a sliding fee scale, so he paid a lot not to take his medicine.

Not surprisingly, some famous athletes also paid the big bucks not to have to take the cure for soccer COVID. What was surprising is that the counterfeiting ring was broken not by a direct investigation, but as a side-effect of the campaign against the "dark web":

What is interesting is that the police did not uncover the scam through a local investigation, but rather through efforts to curb extremism on the dark web.

Enter policeman A, his name has not been made public. According to the Guardia Civil he made contact with an extremist Islamic group who he arranged to meet in France, but told them that he personally could not travel as he had not been vaccinated.

He said: “I don’t have a COVID-19 passport; I am not vaccinated. Allah does not allow me to put anything impure in my body.”

They replied that they could get him a passport and even get him registered on the National Registry of Vaccination, He was introduced to two Madrid residents, Álex, a former thief with a history of sexual assault and known to have contact with criminals in Madrid and Irene, an attractive woman who had been convicted and then pardoned for drug trafficking many years ago.

The police followed the two and noticed that Irene met a young man twice a week, after hours. That young man turned out to be Mario, a nursing assistant in the Hospital of La Paz.

An investigation online found that Mario was an active militant and a Covid-19 denier, which made them suspicious. But on checking they found he could not be the source of the false certificates as he would not have access to the database.

So they went about pretending to be potential customers to gather the evidence they needed. What they found was another nurse was being given a share to issue the certificates, with the money being put into cryptocurrency accounts to try and hide it.

But they also did spend it drawing further attention to themselves, with the network growing and the number of customers increasing.

In the end, the police arrested 15 people involved in the selling and issuing of false certificates.

What makes this case even more bizarre is that Mario contracted Covid-19 and need to be vaccinated to be able to return to work, but he couldn’t do that as a denier. So that’s when he approached his would be accomplice, who helped him out. It was at that point, Mario realised that they could make money offering the false certificates.

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

Day 849: The First Casualty of COVID is Duty

Vinay Prasad blogs at length about the pushback he got for taking the (actually) rational and scientific position on matters of COVID, rather than adopting pop-sci stupidity about masking children, closing schools, boosting the healthy, giving Moderna to anyone under 40, etc., etc.:

I'm trying not to use the word stupid to describe the people who hold the view that it helps. Instead, I will put it this way. I no longer respect any actual scientist who tells me that that it makes sense to make 2-year-olds wear a cloth mask in daycare except for the two hours they all nap together side by side. Anyone who believes that policy actually slows viral spread can be safely ignored.

But what can I do about bad policy? I thought about it, and slowly over the course of a year advanced a series of articles in places like Medpage today, and the Atlantic on this issue. I tweeted against the AAP when they said deranged things like there is no evidence that kids need to see faces.

This earned me great professional pushback, and headache. But you can't focus on that, you must focus on your duty. My duty, as a professor whose life is the arbitration of evidence, is to encourage people to use their rational, evidence-based medicine skills in pursuit of policy recommendations that benefit people. I can't be dissuaded if a bunch of people who aren’t thinking clearly decide to engage in mob Twitter.

Though the occasion of his post is obvious now, it goes unmentioned so we should note for posterity that armed guards hired to protect schoolchildren instead stood by at a school shooting in Texas this past week.

Massachusetts cases were up a fifth of a percentage point on Friday.

Interlude: The Orthopox That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Alex Berenson reports the impending sudden end to the monkeypox scare, as the news gets out that it's only affecting gay men, after gaining a foothold at a couple of gay raves in Europe:

The good news is that the public health authorities are now likely to pivot fast away from trying to scare people about monkeypox, for fear of stigmatizing gay men (by letting them know too much about what happens at these raves).

[...]

Added bonus: the same epidemiologists who wanted to lock you and your kids up for the last two years for Covid, a disease that poses approximately no risk to them, are now sure to let you know that MANDATES AND GOVERNMENT EFFORTS TO CHANGE BEHAVIOR NEVER WORK!

Day 843: Boosting Severity

The bad cat counts up adverse effects of boosters in VAERS and finds them even deadlier than the original shots:

the surge of boosters in the US began in September 2021.

this is precisely the same time the spike in deaths and hospitalizations per day per dose per day started.

so this is NOT an artifact of just dosing more, we’ve already controlled for that. the per dose incidence of death and hospitalization rose 4X immediately, seems to have plateaued for a minute, then found another step function spike in late january early feb and basically increased 5X from its already 5X elevated level. that is actual exponential growth in propensity for severe bad outcomes per dose.

such a thing is extremely unusual to see and would appear to be of such magnitude as to make a simple rise in reporting rates appear highly unlikely, especially as the overall reports figure does not mirror this pattern, retains linearity, and shows no major moves during this spike in more severe outcomes.

[...]

VAERS is supposed to function as a tripwire, a warning system. it’s the canary in the vaccine coal mine.

american public health officials appear to be literally treading on a carpet of dead songbirds so thick that feet have not touched floor in nearly two years.

In an afterthought he realizes what the second spike might be:

addendum (post publication) another possibility just occurred to me: this second surge in severe outcomes might be associated with 4th doses (second booster). i have no data on prevalence or timing there, but if this is the cause, then we’d have real cause for alarm as it would imply that each incremental boost looks 5X worse than before. purely speculative, but perhaps fertile ground for inquiry.

In other VAERS news, Children's Health Defense reports the illicit deletion of 10,000 severe adverse reactions to COVID vaccines from the database.

P.S. In other vaccine news, the FDA rubber-stamped another booster today, this time for five-year-olds, without any clinical trials for efficacy, and with minimal safety data. It did not reconvene the advisory panel because the advisory panel already said not to do that.

Here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, we follow the science, not political decisions made by the FDA against scientific advice.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent on Friday.

Day 832: Scrapieing the Bottom of the Barrel

If you've heard the wild stories about experimental mRNA vaccines causing cancer and prion disease but brushed them off because the mechanism by which they might have such outrageous effects is unclear, the bad cat has some bad news for you:

a nasty ringer is the emergence of the GGGG quadruplex (made easier by adding more G’s) which can cause neurological disease and bind to prions.

this may actually be quite a lot worse in that it appears that you do not even need a full quadruplex for this to happen. duplexes will do if the protein can fold in such a way as to generate what is effectively a quadruplex binding site and thus based on THIS study, all of these sites can play this role: (i) d(TGGGGT), (ii) r(GGAGGAGGAGGA) and (iii) d(GGAGGAGGAGGA) can serve as a quad.

this appears to facilitate the transition of PrPc into its pathologic isoform.

that’s bad.

If you don't recognize PrPSc in the above, just keep in mind that now is not the time to take up cannibalism. And in the future, avoid new technologies that have gone down in flaming failure with horrific side-effects in every previous trial, but are allegedly working perfectly this time.

Speaking of the trials, Steve Kirsch, not content with breaking the news of all-cause mortality being up for the vaccinated in Britain by their own numbers, has also publicized evidence of what the internet cats call pfraud in the latest data dump: Pfizer fraud? Or just great execution? He waffles on whether what happened in Argentina was actual fraud, but of course there were yet more side effects that never made it onto the label:

Neither Augusto’s pericardial effusion, nor another volunteer’s penile vein thrombosis, appear to have found their way into the reported side effects of this trial.

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

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 826: 1001 Collapses

On the cure for soccer front, the Good Sciencing count has hit 1001 unusual collapses in and around sportsball, with 649 deaths. If you haven't checked them out in a while, they've added some spontaneous soccer death statistics from before the vaxx plague; it turns out that an average year doesn't quite equal January of a vaxx plague year.

The Washington Post reports on efforts to vaccinate more people in Infected Shenzhen. They explain the low vaccine uptake among China's elderly: unlike the West, China focused on those likely to spread the virus and not on reclusive retirees.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent today.

Day 823: When Masks Kill

New in Medicine is the eponymous Foegen effect, a mechanism by which facemasks contribute to the COVID-19 case fatality rate, by Dr. Zacharias Fögen. (The things people put their own names on these days...)

A parallelization analysis based on county-level data showed that in Kansas, counties with mask mandate had significantly higher case fatality rates than counties without mask mandate, with a risk ratio of 1.85 (95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 1.51–2.10) for COVID-19-related deaths. Even after adjusting for the number of “protected persons,” that is, the number of persons who were not infected in the mask-mandated group compared to the no-mask group, the risk ratio remained significantly high at 1.52 (95% CI: 1.24–1.72). By analyzing the excess mortality in Kansas, this study determines that over 95% of this effect can solely be attributed to COVID-19.

These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.

The cause of this trend is explained herein using the “Foegen effect” theory; that is, deep re-inhalation of hypercondensed droplets or pure virions caught in facemasks as droplets can worsen prognosis and might be linked to long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. While the “Foegen effect” is proven in vivo in an animal model, further research is needed to fully understand it.

The latest batch of Pfizer data came out yesterday, but so far no smoking guns have been spotted.

Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 814: Negative Efficacy Numbers

PlagueBlog apologizes for taking a spring break during an exciting week that saw the end of federal transportation mask mandates as well as a damning preprint (hosted by The Lancet) RCT meta-study showing excess mortality caused by Pfizer's mRNA vaccine. (That is, it killed more people with side effects than it saved from COVID.) The bad cat has the details:

this rush to EUA not only allowed a seriously rigged drug trial methodology to be used (ignoring or misattributing the ill effects of immuno-suppression post dose 1 and for 7 days post dose 2, both know[n] and serious issues deliberately designed out of assessment despite the fact that all those getting the jabs would experience them) but also more or less ignored the overall mortality data despite the fact that it was not only available, but unfavorable.

certain felines were heard to describe it as “not so much as a vaccine study as an instagram selfie”

it appears these danish researchers are coming around to this viewpoint as well.

this was always available data. there were few deaths in the pfizer trial overall as the enrollees were generally young and healthy. 79% had zero comorbidities.

and they clearly played some games. they called a death in the vaxx arm “covid pneumonia” to avoid having a “covid death” and excluded it when calculating VE.

there was also a significant cardiovascular risk signal. this is why more people died overall in the active arm than in placebo. in the moderna trial, overall mortality was exactly equal in the 2 arms.

It is surprising that Moderna, which is known for having more side effects from its larger dose, actually broke even in the save-grandma/kill-grandson trade-off, but even more surprising is that Johnson & Johnson, the vaccine the regulators actually pinned a few deaths on and (occasionally) regulated, was the safest and most effective of the bunch.

This must be what the kids these days mean by "clown world".

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a seventh of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 802: Data Fraud, Simplified

Mathew Crawford posted a summary of the DMED/DoD vaccine data fraud situation early this morning:

The best way to understand the DMED saga is to forget what you've heard about it. Wipe your mind clean of the details and start over. The data results shared in January were likely incorrect, and the Department of Defense (DoD) comeback appears to be an ugly deception. This will be easier to understand after I explain what I believe did happen as clearly and as simply as possible.

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

Day 800: No News is Censored News

This week was notable for the end of British COVID data transparency. Alex Berenson reported the hiding of embarrassingly disproportionate cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the vaccinated.

But hiding the numbers won’t make the vaccines work better. It will just make people less likely to believe anything else public health authorities tell them about Covid and the vaccines - if that’s even possible at this point.

Their excuse for the sudden change was too silly to repeat here.

Speaking of silliness, Berenson also reports on the entertainingly failed criminal case of "US v. Bored-Rightwing-Potheads", otherwise known as the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

Even by the standards of FBI-enriched “terrorism,” this was thin gruel.

Nonetheless the bluechecks bluechecked hard for this one. Right-wing militias were now taking aim at elected officials!

This was the media party line for the last 18 months, despite mounting embarrassments as the case moved ahead. Those included fact that the FBI fired the lead agent on it after he was arrested FOR BEATING HIS WIFE AFTER FORCING HER TO ATTEND A SWINGERS PARTY.

True story. Can’t make it up. Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity, Gangbangery, that’s the slogan, right?

I think that aptly summarizes the last 800 days. ("Can't make it up", not "Gangbangery", just to be clear.)

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a tenth of a percentage point on Friday.

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 793: Australia Still in Fascin’

Australia seems determined to maintain their position at the top of the Most Fascist COVID Response crowd, now by forbidding doctors from publishing research that contradicts "public health messaging". Alex Berenson has the story:

Doctors are now being told they could face discipline for saying anything that contradicts “public health messaging,” even if what they are saying is “evidence-based.”

They may even face investigations for “authoring papers” that health authorities do not like.

Here in the US, we just ignore the evidence; we don't ban it outright:

Johns Hopkins University medical professor Marty Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, asked sarcastically whether "bypassing the typical voting process" of the VRBPAC was "following the science."

Instead, the agency plans to convene its outside experts to "discuss" the FDA's decision, which is like "a judge issuing a verdict and then having lawyers make their arguments," Makary wrote in a tweet thread.

"There is zero clinical data that a 4th dose reduces hospitalization risk," he said. "There isn't even any evidence that a 3rd dose reduces hospitalization risk in young people."

Here at PlagueBlog we follow the science by following the science, not by ignoring the science. And certainly not by stomping on the science in our jackboots...

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up nearly a tenth of a percentage point again on Friday.

Day 790: Two Shots are Better Than Four

Even the New York Times is pessimistic about a fourth shot (2nd booster) for anyone but the seriously ill or seriously old, but the Wall Street Journal one-ups them by dissing the first booster, too:

The FDA reportedly will authorize (but not recommend) the fourth shot for patients over 50. But if your immune system is healthy, three or even two doses of these mRNA vaccines should be sufficient.

Vaccine-induced protection against infection is short-lived and doesn’t get much of a boost from extra shots. Yet the initial two-dose regimen is enough to provide most patients excellent protection against severe disease—mediated by durable cellular responses, not the neutralizing antibodies that rise and wane quickly after vaccination.

Speaking of shots, the Chinese went gunning for Fido briefly, then allegedly backed off.

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

Day 789: Taylor Hawkins' Heart

While initial reports and later snide elisions attributed Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins' sudden death in Columbia to an overdose, the current word is that he was as toked as the average drummer, and instead died of "cardiovascular collapse", apparently caused by a massively swollen heart:

Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died Friday in Colombia, had a heart that weighed double the average for men his age [50], according to a new report.

Forensic experts during an examination found Hawkins’ heart weighed “at least 600 grams,” double the average of 300 to 350 grams (three-quarters of a pound), the Daily Mail reported Sunday.

While long-term drug use can cause swelling of the heart, the band is also rumored to have been fully vaxxed.

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

Day 786: DMED Fraud, Part 2

In a follow-up to his initial DMED fraud post, Mathew Crawford charts the allegedly "glitch[y]" data.

Day 785: No One Left to Resign at the FDA

Vinay Prasad is appropriately incensed at the White House for bypassing the pesky advisory committees and unilaterally declaring a 4th shot of ineffective mRNA COVID vaccines against an extinct COVID strain, plus a 5th shot if you're over 50. While he titled his blog post "The White House is now your doctor!" and he makes at least 8 great points, his most telling point was #7, that there's no one left to resign at the FDA. Another great quote:

They are skipping the ad-com [advisory committee] because they know many smart people will disagree with them, and consider their plan reckless, and lacking data. These people will give great quotes.

PlagueBlog eagerly awaits the great quotes to come.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a fourteenth of a percentage point again on Friday.

Day 783: The Daily Activities of a Two Year Old

The bad cat tears Moderna a new one over their "successful" COVID vaccine trial in ages 6 months to 6 years:

moderna has been far less forthcoming than even pfizer on adverse events (or if there have been more disclosures, i haven’t seen them) but we do have some. (per CDC)

grade 3 generally means “unable to undertake daily activities.”

grade 4 generally means “needs urgent medical care/hospitalization.”

[table of adverse effects by grade omitted]

this is a quite limited list, but it shows that we’re in the neighborhood of 20.5% of the vaxxed being unable to perform daily activities when we sum the 2 doses.

[table of "local" effects by grade omitted]

we pick up another ~11% grade 3 from local (though how that overlaps is unclear) so we can use a range of 20%-32% unable to undertake daily activities at some point in the vaccination regimen. about 0.1% were grade 4 and probably hospitalized/urgent care.

The cat also notes that no study participants were hospitalized for COVID itself, which poses vanishingly small risk to children at this age. The cure is literally worse than the disease.

The cure is also horrifyingly worse than the disease, when you consider what the daily activities of a two-year-old actually are. Here at PlagueBlog Headquarters we asked our underage intern about it, and she tossed some puzzle pieces onto the floor. In other words, it's not rocket science. It's not even submitting crappy statistics to the innumerates currently running the FDA about how it's a great outcome to injure children with a vaccine that does not even prevent the disease.

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

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 781: Covidese

We have a very young intern here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, in relation to whom arose the question of what were the most memorable words or phrases to come out of the COVID plague years. I prefer the bad cat's "Baysian datacrime," though what he's really talking about there is "immortal time," another vital concept to carry out of the pandemic (if there is ever an escape from the pandemic).

Today he outdoes himself with "they took the wheels off the trebuchet," the short summary of a long discussion of the apparent contradiction of so many employees burning out while working in their PJs:

your boss got more and more annoyed about calls being truncated to “go make lunch for the kids” or “because the rug cleaning guy is here” or “to see what the dog is freaking out about.” these are not things of the office. the office is, by design, meant to keep them out because they are distracting as hell and they break workflow and atomize it. they waste other people’s time. you probably did 100 of these things. perhaps you realized they were annoying to co-workers and employees, perhaps you didn’t. but, it started to create a new kind of license to demand accommodation and a sort of passive aggressive tit for tat of “well yes, i AM chopping onions because last week you were eat[ing] pizza!”

no one’s time is “their time” anymore. it’s all “our” time. this sets up a full blown tragedy of the commons. no one owns the resource of time, so no one takes care of it. everyone tries to overconsume and it gets grabby.

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

Day 780: MIT's Mask Anti-Mandate

Steve Kirsch blogs about MIT's new mask policy, which appears to prevent mini mask mandates from campus groups after the campus mandate and all relevant city mandates have been revoked. NBC has a bit more on the story. However, here at PlagueBlog Headquarters we heard about the policy changes from a campus group that is still trying to guilt attendees into wearing masks despite the anti-mandate.

One thing the news has missed is that, while the vaccination requirements remain draconian and myocarditis-inducing for MIT faculty, staff, and students, they have also been relaxed (to completely optional) for most visitors. This is easy to miss because different policy pages say different and opaque things about it, but the events policy page is clear that the TIM ticketing system is now optional and that vaccination is only recommended to attend events, while the general vaccination policy page restricts vaccine requirements to TIM ticket holders; vaccination of any sort is merely recommended for other visitors.

That you need prior experience with the Gemara to parse MIT's COVID policies is not particularly surprising, but it is surprising that a campus that was locked down for two years is now so open that visitors can not only breathe the air but walk about unvaccinated. None of the reports have really explained this change of heart, though if we were going to get a random outbreak of numeracy, MIT is certainly be the appropriate place for it.

Day 779: CDC Wrong Again

The Washington Examiner reports that the CDC has retracted 24% of all pediatric COVID deaths after it turned out they were reporting an unknown percentage of non-COVID deaths as COVID deaths this year. They also misreported an unknown, inflated percentage of adult deaths.

I checked out the usual suspects on this point, expecting to find far more horror than I did at the innumeracy at the CDC that didn't blink at reporting nearly 75 spurious pediatric deaths a week at the beginning of this year, when that number is 10% of all pediatric COVID deaths for the entire multi-year pandemic, and thus more than ten times what it should have been.

Day 773: Zero Shenzhen

The Guardian reports that China has locked down Shenzhen, a city of seventeen million near Hong Kong, in their latest attempt at Zero COVID:

No one can leave the city except in special circumstances and with a negative test result obtained within 24 hours prior to exit. Local communities and residences had established monitoring teams with a “warm-hearted service hotline”, it said.

The restrictions are due to stay in place until at least 20 March, adding Shenzhen to a number of other cities under various restrictions, including China’s most populous city Shanghai, and the northeastern city of Changchun in Jilin province. Of the 1,938 new cases confirmed on Sunday, more than 1,400 were in Jilin.

Day 770: Zero COVID, Anyone?

Somerville suddenly and unceremoniously dropped our mask mandate last Saturday, citing the mood at the CDC. This isn't as exciting as it sounds, because we're increasingly a city of condominiums largely served by shops in neighboring Cambridge. Their indoor mask mandate ends this coming Sunday.

The bats have come home to roost in China, where their Zero COVID policy is working about as well as it did for New Zealand:

On Friday, the authorities in Hong Kong said that the city’s hospital mortuaries had filled up so quickly amid a sharp Covid outbreak that body bags were being crammed into wards with patients who were still being treated for the virus.

“For some of the bodies, we have not been able to move them from the wards to the mortuary,” said Sara Ho, the chief manager of patient safety and risk management at Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority. “It may cause some concerns among patients.”

Massachusetts cases were up a twentieth of a percentage point yesterday. There were no body bag buildup concerns among our 290 hospitalized COVID patients.

Day 767: The Opposite of Working is Failing

The bad cat can caterwaul at times, but two of his recent posts have been calm explanations of the research showing variant-specific boosters are just as useless as the original boosters (with a side of original antigenic sin), and the looming apocalyptic dangers of original antigenic sin.

On the bright side, Massachusetts cases were up a mere thirtieth of a percentage point today. Mask mandates are falling across the commonwealth, and the poop level is so low that the MWRA had to redraw the graph to make it visible.

Day 761: Document Drop

The March batch of the FDA's Pfizer vaccine documentation has appeared at the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency website. Be sure to sort by Date Produced to see what's new.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixteenth 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 759: Disrespect

The bad cat is in rate form today on the topic of "respect" for other people's useless masks:

if others are vulnerable then we need to provide real protection, not the illusion of safety.

a false football helmet is worse than none at all. you’ll behave as if you are protected when you are not. you’re going to get your head split open.

what would be the moral duty on a football field if you saw another player walk out onto the gridiron with a helmet made of old cereal boxes? would it not be to warn them that this was not going to protect their head?

Day 758: Public Malaise

Vinay Prasad lights into the corrupt institutions of public health and their role in abusing people, especially children, with masks, school closures, and other pandemic theater that left them less healthy than before—on the occasion of the NYC school system ending their WTF-inspiring outdoor mask mandate:

Let’s reflect on this for a moment. NYC school district has been requiring children wear masks OUTSIDE all this time. Years after we knew the virus almost never spreads outside. During recess when kids play, forced to wear a mask while exerting themselves. Wow!

Whoever made the policy is an idiot. No way around it. They are not fit for policymaking. They abused the power of government to coerce children (at incredibly low risk of bad outcomes) to wear a mask in a setting where the virus simply does not spread. In other words, they participated in something done in the name of public health, which actually made human beings worse off. Worse, they used coercive force to do it.

Post-COVID we need to seriously talk about setting restrictions. But not on people. We need to place restrictions on public health and things done in the name of public health. We cannot allow individuals who are poor at weighing risk and benefit and uncertainty to coerce human beings, disproportionately the young and powerless (waiters/ servers) to participate in interventions that have no data supporting them, for years on end.

Unfortunately for us, he can go on at some length about what idiot government functionaries and their ignorant fellow-travellers in the private sector have been up to without exhausting the subject.

Day 757: Metro Minor Mask Map

Reddit user Delvin4519 has put together a map of Greater Boston child abusers public school system mask mandates. Not surprisingly, it's worse the closer you get to Boston proper.

Here's a MSM story that takes the long COVID cake: The trucks have left Ottawa, but 'phantom honking' lingers for many downtown.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a twelfth of a percentage point yesterday.

Day 755: Another Day, Another Bad Mask Paper

Vinay Prasad debunks yet more sketchy mask statistics:

All this means is they think they are matching trajectories [between masked and no-mask counties], but the actual pandemic is almost surely doing different things. If I were to bet, it is more steep and brisk in no-mask mandate places. Then the mask mandate is implemented, and of course, covid-19 spread, which is non linear, may grow substantively over time, but that is going to happen disproportionately more in no-mandate counties as they started time zero with much brisker epidemic spread.

This is a damning limitation that thwarts the entire paper in my opinion. It cannot be saved by back calculations. Trust me, I wasted an afternoon in excel trying. Finally, this likely explains why the effect size seen here is too good to be true. Free surgical masks and strong advocacy had an 11% relative risk reduction in Bangladesh and cloth failed entirely. How can a mask mandate— mostly cloth masks let’s be honest— achieve a 20-35% reduction in cases? I suspect mismatching is the root reason why the effect is too good to be true.

And he's only warming up. He also discusses the fear factor, where people ineffectively mask (mandate) up and effectively social distance out of fear, but the masks get all the credit. Apparently there are even more statistical sins below the fold, but the PlagueBlog budget does not cover Substack subscriptions so our reporting ends here. Alex Berenson reports on an event entirely unrelated to COVID: Greta Thunberg invades the Ukraine.

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

Day 754: The Billing Data

The bad cat reports on a treasure trove of vaccine side effect data: insurance billing in Germany.

this seems a sensible approach.

doctors [may] avoid filing vaccine adverse events reports with agencies. it’s extra work and they are under pressure not to. BUT they are going to bill for treatment. because doctors always bill for treatment.

The adverse event rate was many times that in the German version of VAERS, although the data is only for early 2021 so far. It may prove even worse later in the vaccine rollout. All-cause mortality also rose above average later in the rollout, despite the increasing immunity of the population to COVID.

P.S. Eugyppius also takes a look at the insurance data.

P.P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixteenth of a percentage point today, though on account of the holiday, this may be a displaced Tuesday lull and not fully representative of current case counts.

Day 748: Inconvenient Truths

Public Health Scotland has decided to stop publishing statistics by vaccination status because the mean anti-vaxxers keep pointing and laughing at them. Both eugyppius and Igor Chudov point and laugh even harder over it.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point.

Day 746: The Bat Lady Again

You're going to have to read between a lot of lines to get any useful information out of Jane Qiu's latest Bat Lady puff piece in MIT Technology Review. Or, you can let the Internet de-Lysenko it for you:

Paul Thacker opens with a history of the CCP's fascist interference in local and Western media, including locking up anyone who reports seriously about what was once fondly nicknamed Wuhan Flu:

The reason we never learn anything about Shi Zhengli’s military research seems obvious: Jane Qiu understands that her role as science writer is to make happy talk about science, not to offend the Chinese government. When Qiu was called out for this on Twitter, she protested to the contrary, forcing reporter Keoni Everington of Taiwan News to call Qiu a liar for an “insult to our intelligence.”

Thacker covers the hair style puffery as well as most of the already-discredited arguments in defense of Shi Zhengli that appear in the story—Laos, the wet market, the missing database, etc.

Eugyppius also lays into this execrable propaganda piece, but focuses on a discredited argument that didn't even make Thacker's list, about the Yunnan cave:

As you might expect, nobody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has any interest in disclosing new information, which leaves Qiu with little to report that we didn’t know already. Just a lot of the same old dissimulations, with the occasional update.

The most interesting of these surrounds the Mystery of the Mojiang Cave. The story goes that workers were cleaning up bat droppings in this abandoned copper mine in Yunnan province in the spring of 2012, when six of them fell ill with pneumonia. Shi’s lab tested blood samples to see if they’d contracted SARS or a SARS-related virus, and afterwards the Wuhan virologists developed a persistent interest in the Mojiang mine. Among the bat samples collected there, they claim to have found RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-2.

Note all of the bizarre coincidences you must live with, if you believe SARS-2 has natural origins: You have to imagine the virus just happened to enter humans via some zoonotic event in Wuhan, the only city on earth with a lab devoted to sampling and culturing SARS-related bat coronaviruses like SARS-2, where its closest known relative also just happened to be sitting in a freezer. And we haven’t even gotten to the furin cleavage site yet.

It is curious, then, that nobody can ever get the story straight, about what happened with those mine workers.

[Some lies omitted.]

In Qiu’s article we find the latest excuse: “Shi said her team did not find such antibodies, although she said some early tests did produce false positives that were corrected when the assays were fully validated.” So, the miners tested positive for SARS, before they tested negative for SARS. The only problem with this lie, is that it can’t explain why Shi and her team ever took an interest in the Mojiang mine in the first place:

It’s not unusual for respiratory illnesses to have an unknown cause, but even though Shi couldn’t figure out what had sickened the Mojiang miners, her instinct told her that something interesting might be going on. “What viruses were lurking in the cave?” she remembers wondering. Between 2012 and 2015, her team undertook more than half a dozen trips to the mine shaft, about 1,100 miles from Wuhan, and collected 1,322 bat samples.

Emphasis mine. Shi found nothing in the miners’ blood, but decided nevertheless that the distant cave where they got sick was the perfect place to spend three years sampling bats for SARS-related coronaviruses. Totally by coincidence, bats in the cave turned out to be full of SARS-related coronaviruses, including RaTG13.

While Eugyppius is more entertaining in general, Thacker does a better job at mocking the moral grandstanding of the Mother of Pandemics (nickname mine):

It’s Qiu’s collection of colorful facts—Shi Zhengli’s short wavy hair and beige sweater; her colleague’s neatly trimmed bangs and turquoise-colored T-shirt—and the studied lack of interest in critical evidence—Shi Zhengli’s military research for a fascist government—that should give readers pause for concern. Instead, we are treated to Shi Zhengli’s disapproval of us when her “girlish face suddenly dimmed” and she begins to berate those who question the Chinese government:

“I’ve now realized that the Western democracy is hypocritical, and that much of its media is driven by lies, prejudices, and politics.”

Shi paused and drew a sharp breath. Her body tensed, blood flushing her cheeks. The air swelled and seemed to grow hotter.

“They’ve lost the moral high ground as far as I’m concerned,” she said.

We Westerners really appreciate lectures about the moral high ground from someone whose personal body count is quickly approaching six million.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a tenth of a percentage point.

Day 745: Reading Between the Lines

The bad cat explains how to read between the Lysenkoist lines to the Darwinist truth of today's scientific papers. His example involves the possible negative efficacy of vaccines after six months, but it's the pattern that disturbs:

in the age of the internet, this sets up a bizarre and deeply frustrating conflict: those who can and do really read studies are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does.

and, of course, trying to convince someone that the authors deliberately misstated the facts in the summary is like trying to teach a new trick to the very oldest of dogs. they are just not having it.

Day 742: The FDA Backs Off

The FDA, after egging Pfizer on in their premature submission of an ineffective COVID vaccine for toddlers, has now punted the advisory board meeting until Pfizer has tested their third dose. It's unclear why they backtracked so suddenly; the least likely explanation is the one they gave about always following the science:

Since the early days of the pandemic, we have always followed the science in this ever-changing situation. Given the recent omicron surge and the notable increase in hospitalizations in the youngest children to their highest levels during the pandemic so far, we felt it was our responsibility as a public health agency to act with urgency and consider all available options, including requesting that the company provide us with initial data on two doses from its ongoing study. The goal was to understand if two doses would provide sufficient protection to move forward with authorizing the use of the vaccine in this age group. Our approach has always been to conduct a regulatory review that’s responsive to the urgent public health needs created by the pandemic, while adhering to our rigorous standards for safety and effectiveness. Being able to begin evaluating initial data has been useful in our review of these vaccines, but at this time, we believe additional information regarding the ongoing evaluation of a third dose should be considered.

Vinay Prasad is strangely disappointed in this good news:

Now, facing the prospect of a negative advisory vote, the FDA walks back the meeting itself.

What are they thinking? We have far more at stake than just this vaccine— we have the fate of all vaccines on the line. What will the American people think about this vaccine with these flip flops? If a vaccine is ultimately approved at these ages, a huge chunk of Americans may never trust it. Worse, many may stop trusting all the vaccines we have had to protect from childhood illnesses for many years. Already some states are floating regulations to remove all vaccine mandates. That would not be good. Finally, trust in the FDA may crater entirely as it appears the White House is controlling the day to day decisions of the agency.

If a kids vaccine is someday approved, what will the uptake be? We currently have ~20% uptake in 5 to 11, this vaccine is poised to do even poorer given all this drama.

We agree that flip-flopping is bad, but what's the alternative at this point? Surely not crapshots in arms?

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

Day 741: Tell the FDA Off

Steve Kirsch recommends telling the FDA off during the comment period for their insane consideration of Pfizer's ineffective and unsafe vaccine for children under 5, for whom the trials showed it was particularly ineffective. (Fortunately it's also completely unnecessary at that age.) Instructions for commenting are at the link.

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

Day 740: The Sudden Reversal

The New York Times stuck a nose in the air and felt an unmasked breeze. More specifically, they catalogued an encouraging number of retractions and expirations of pointless mask mandates. Even the crazies at The Atlantic want to end the madness already, even if they have to back down on every media lie of the pandemic to do so.

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

Day 739: Hot Lots

Mathew Crawford goes into detail about how baseless (yet still possible) the theory of bad lots of COVID vaccines is.

Certain lots can, mathematically, have more adverse events reported against them without being in any way different than others, because they were distributed in settings where reporting to VAERS is more likely. He mentions long term care facilities and red states; the political likeliness of adverse event reporting can be misinterpreted as a conspiracy where Big Pharma is trying to kill conservatives.

Hot lots are just the lots put into hot patients. He accumulates some evidence that earlier lots are associated with more side-effects, but they also went into the elderly, who suffer more side-effects, at higher rates.

Aspiration (the practice of injecting the vaccine properly) can also be associated with lot, when the same lot got into hands with similar training. While PlagueBlog is fond of aspiration theories, this is the first place we've seen it suggested that anyone aspirated anywhere in the US during the pandemic of the vaccination. If he or the hot lot sites have some European data, then this is a valid consideration.

Taking just these considerations (and perhaps those I haven't thought of) into account, I can easily imagine data that appears to suggest "hot lots", but ultimately represents other issues of varying concern. While this certainly does not fully dismiss the HLH, our simplest and primary reasons to be skeptical of the HLH could potentially explain all of the observed effects. However, we should thank all of the investigators looking into this problem, both because the HLH may yet turn out to be true, but perhaps more importantly because that investigation may help shed light on other serious issues.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his numeracy, Mathew Crawford is a conspiracy theorist, so he can't just leave it at that. He adds a fourth point that lot sizes vary, and says (boldface omitted):

At this point I'd like to offer a middleground hypothesis. It could very well be that a large part of the noisy AE batch distribution is due to points 1-4 that I made earlier. It could also be that there are a small number of toxic batches within all of that which resulted in additional harms.

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 737: The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database

We missed the DMED whistleblower news, but Daniel Horowitz covered it all in an op-ed at the Blaze earlier this week. He ripped into the military's lame excuses for the circa 300%–2000% increases in a bunch of apparently vaccine-related diagnoses appearing in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database in 2021:

This is in addition to the original data Renz revealed to Sen. Johnson showing a tenfold increase in diagnoses for neurological issues, a 300% increase in miscarriage diagnoses, and a total cancer diagnosis increase of about 300%.

One would think this data would be the biggest national news story for the ensuing week, but the revelation was met with radio silence. Then, late Monday night, PolitiFact finally drops its obligatory “fact-check” and posts the first and only response from a defense official. Shockingly, they validate the data, but suggest without cause that somehow the 2016-2020 data in the system was all a glitch and that they will get to the bottom of it.

[Quote omitted]

What’s next? Are they going to tell us the VAERS data from 1990 through 2020 was just a glitch, in order to accommodate the new 2021 sky-high baseline?

This statement, taken at face value, is the equivalent of a political and national security nuclear bomb that requires immediate follow-up questions just to make sense of it, yet PolitiFact takes this absurdity at face value and goes on to rule the articles on the DMED data “false.”

Putting aside the feasibility of such a statement for a moment, the implication of this assertion would be that the entire military health surveillance system was 100% broken on every diagnosis code for five straight years. This is the expensive database whose purpose is described by the military as “granting military health officials unprecedented access to epidemiologic data on active component service members and tailored queries that respond in a timely and efficient manner.” That in itself is a huge national security issue, and Thomas Renz and his military whistleblowers deserve a medal for “discovering” it.

It goes on like that for quite a while.

Day 736: The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Mask Study

While the public's patience for the endless flow of bad mask papers seems to be waning, Vinay Prasad remains alert and ready to tear into the recent nadir of mask studies:

Ultimately, the CDC & NIH failed us. The agencies should have run a half dozen masking cluster RCTs under different conditions, and for different ages. We were starving, and we needed this loaf of bread. Instead, the CDC published flawed study after flawed study. It didn’t even give us crumbs; it gave us a fistful of sand. Starving, we swallowed each grain, and begged for more. Medical leaders told us to fill our bowl before it runs out. Science lies on its deathbed.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up three tenths of a percentage point on Friday.

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 732: Year 3, Day 1

Year 3 of COVID in has produced the strange spectacle of the FDA begging Pfizer to apply for emergency vaccine use in children under 5 despite its being ineffective in that group. (They gave up on it actually being an emergency several age brackets ago.)

Massachusetts cases were up less than a fifth of a percentage point today.

Day 730: A Sudden Reversal

The Telegraph reports that, in a sudden reversal, the UK is about to end vaccine mandates for National Health Service and "social care" workers, citing possible shortages of 80,000 workers.

In local news, our two year COVIDversary is coming up. Details to follow...

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 728: Weathervane Says It’s Gonna Snow Tonight

Vinay Prasad takes a scathing look at the harms caused by COVID "weathervane" commentators:

What is a weathervane? You will recognize them— they are frequently on TV news giving updates on the pandemic. These are people in biomedicine, who may even have fancy titles and lofty ranks, and they are good at averaging what people think, and offering that point of view. Their method is simple: read the mainstream news outlets, closely follow academic twitter, and average the opinion of people they see. Of course, they are averaging the last few days, so they are always a lagging indicator of sentiment among the media and elites.

Weathervanes often have similar characteristics. First, they self identify as ‘science communicators’ and less often as ‘scientists.’ Some have published papers, but these are often un-original and plodding. Rarely, in their scientific work have they held a position or stance against others in their own field or discipline. Almost never has their work taken place on a controversial issue, in the midst of a scientific debate.

P.S. Massachusetts case numbers were up only half a percentage point today.

Day 727: The Misinformers

Some of our favorite substacks made it into The Guardian's hit piece on the alleged COVID misinformation industry. Rather than linking unreliable sources like the U.K. legacy media, we refer our readers to eugyppius' overview of the misinformation misinformation campaign.

P.S. Eugyppius launched a counter-strike against the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Massachusetts cases were slightly up, at three fifths of a percentage point.

Day 726: Above the Law

It's a big day for thinking oneself above the law. The FDA has decided that, because it hired reviewers who can't read, it won't be meeting the court-ordered FOIA deadline for the next 55,000 pages of Pfizer vaccine data.

A school system in Riverside, NY is refusing to abide by the state supreme court order overturning mask requirements in schools. For their part, angry post-COVID parents refused to take back their unmasked children yesterday.

A similar standoff took place in Virginia:

Fairfax County Public Schools made a show of defying Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s order that schools respect parental rights on masking on Tuesday, with an assistant principal standing in front of the school to suspend students without masks, and a public relations staffer who said the media was not allowed to watch the conflict between state and local governments play out.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up five ninths of a percentage point again today.

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 723: Are the Numbers Really Up?

It's a shame "casedemic" was coined in the medieval times of the COVID pandemic, because that bon mot would fit today's omicrommon cold statistics better than ever before.

Vinay Prasad's guest blogger, Dr. Sebastián González, goes into detail about the problems and cost of "overdiagnosis and overtesting", that is, medicalizing every old fragment of viral DNA in evidently healthy people. Some of the issues are quite meta:

Consider the UK, which is now planning for the absence of up to 25% of workers from their workplaces due to covid19 cases. Overtesting could per se, overwhelm the health care system (particularly during covid19 surges) if healthcare workers (HCW) are isolated without need, reducing the HCW force, leading to worsening outcomes and increasing mortality due to hospitals and ICUs constraints. People will die when the people who should be taking care of them are needlessly isolated at home and the quality of care lowers.

Overtesting has ballooned to an extent in which testing capacity becomes overwhelmed. Paradoxically, the healthcare system can be jeopardized by the increasing demand of testing by those seeking covid19 tests.

Given how little over-the-counter rapid COVID testing from various companies wuth friends at the FDA resembles the early days of highly-rationed, broken tests direct from the CDC, is it any wonder our current numbers look higher? Whether they really are higher is one of those questions we may never get a straight answer to.

Day 722: The Legacy of Tamiflu

In a scathing editorial, the BMJ lights into COVID vaccine manufacturers for their lack of transparency, recalling "the Tamiflu saga" of twelve years ago:

The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.

Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials. We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination. The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.

Day 721 Retrospective: With COVID

On Friday the truth came out about Massachusetts COVID stats: only half the patients usually reported as hospitalized for COVID are actually sick from the disease. The numbers are still a bit wonky, though:

To identify patients admitted for COVID-19, the Baker administration is using the drug dexamethasone as a proxy. The powerful steroid, used to quell the inflammatory storm in severely ill COVID patients, is also commonly used to treat other conditions, such as septic shock or swelling in the brain.

On the Godwin's Law front, the pet owners of Hong Kong appear to be hiding their hamsters from the genocidal government, perhaps under the floorboards.

Massachusetts cases were up just over a percentage point.

Day 720: The Tiniest Victims

The news of the day was looking to be our poo again, but China has decided to cull a bunch of hamsters because eek, tailless rat COVID, of course:

Officials said on Tuesday that it was not clear that the virus had been transmitted to humans from imported hamsters. But they called on residents to surrender hamsters imported since Dec. 22 to be tested and euthanized to prevent any further spread.

“They’re excreting the virus, and the virus can infect other animals, other hamsters and also human beings,” said Thomas Sit, assistant director of Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation department. “We don’t want to cull all the animals, but we have to protect public health and animal health. We have no choice — we have to make a firm decision.”

Massachusetts cases were up about one and a twelfth percent again today. The MDPH is still putting the data in a random spot instead of the archive.

Day 719: The Curious Case of the Barking Nazis

Yesterday the sequel came out to David Cole's column The Curious Case of the Barking Nazis, but it turned out to be much more politics than COVIDics. Let us instead travel back in time a week to when Dr. Robert Malone's appearance on Joe Rogan was still news and Nazis were still barking mad:

So you invite a Covid “mRNA scientist” on your show and the segment that goes viral involves not science but history.

How the hell does that happen?

Last week, when Joe Rogan hosted social media exile Dr. Robert Malone, the phrase that rightists came away repeating like Pollys wanting crackers was “mass formation psychosis” (MFP).

The term went so viral the AP fact-checked it (yes, the AP fact-checks theories now. Please do CRT [critical race theory] next).

Malone invoked MFP to explain public manipulability during the pandemic. MFP, he said, “comes from European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the ’20s and ’30s” when “a very intelligent, highly educated population went barking mad” because people had “free-floating anxiety and a sense that things don’t make sense” and “their attention was focused by a leader on one small point, just like hypnosis.” Thus “they literally became hypnotized and could be led anywhere,” so they attacked “the other [Jews]” because Hitler told them to.

Hitler laser-focused a hypnotized, anxiety-ridden people on the Jews, and a highly educated population went “barking mad.”

Except that’s just not how it went down. Malone was repeating a bad Facebook meme (“Ever wondered how the Germans blindly followed a madman and killed six million Jews? Now you know! Please like & share”).

David Cole is a Holocaust historian, so he goes on at length about how it really went down, and concludes:

So what’s my point, beyond trying to appeal to the dog demographic by saying “bark” a hundred times (to all my new canine readers, Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? You are! You are!)? When you rely on stale clichés like “Hitler hyp-mo-tized the Germans who went mad and killed the Jews,” you miss out on understanding the actual mechanics of how these things happen. You rob yourself of the ability to comprehend.

That's promising, but he gets back onto today's left-right politics instead of today's COVID-driven madness. PlagueBlog questions whether it was really one wrong point of history that stuck from the Joe Rogan show. If so, then it stuck because we are a crazed mob now, regardless of when exactly the pre-war Germans went barking mad. But I think Cole got this impression from overactive censors. Even if you can manage to censor five hundred thousand (alleged) vaccine deaths, there's no stopping Godwin's Law.

As of press time, the MPDH had not published today's numbers to the archive, though we did find it elsewhere afterwards.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up about one and a twelfth percent.

Day 718: More COVID Humor

The Babylon Bee comes through again with a new, improved COVID test, and the bad cat provides one meme above the fold:

Day 717: Genes for COVID

A Polish study has found more in a lengthening line of genetic predispositions toward more severe COVID. In Google translation:

[Marcin Moniuszko and Mirosław Kwaśniewski] have identified a genetic variant that more than doubles the risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19. It is estimated that even 14% of Poles have it, although in the overall European population it occurs with a frequency of about 9%. According to the authors of the discovery, it could help in the early identification of those most at risk.

You may also have heard about the recent Neanderthal DNA result, or a previous study out of Sweden. There's also a genome browser.

The MDPH seems to be taking the holiday off.

Day 716: Intracranial Infections

Steve Kirsch reports rumors of increased intracranial infections and asks whether it's caused by masks, vaccines, or PCR swabs. (Mere chance is never an option.) The comments are pretty divided, though some commenters are going with "all of the above".

Day 715: Don't Stop Believing

A little pandemic humor from Jon Rappoport for the weekend: “Help me. I stopped believing in the virus.”

When did you stop believing in the virus?

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment. I was watching a cooking show a few weeks ago. The host was making a shrimp dish. I fell asleep and had a dream. Dock workers were throwing cases of vaccine vials into the ocean. When I woke up, I felt lighter. My daughter called from college. She said she was taking a leave from her studies and coming home. Her thesis advisor had just been fired for writing an article defending the 1st Amendment. I miss my daughter. I was glad she was coming back.

And then you stopped believing?

I think it was around that time.

Did something traumatic happen to you?

No. I lost my cat for a few hours, but I found her in the living room closet.

Any marital problems?

No. But I haven’t told my husband I stopped believing.

Why not?

He wears a mask when he goes out in the backyard to work in the garden.

I see. So I would call what you’re experiencing a spontaneous suspension of belief.

Is it serious?

It could lead to irrational actions. We don’t have a mental disorder label for it yet, but I have seen it in a few patients. It’s a regression into childhood, basically. A person abandons responsibility.

It goes on like that.

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 713: The Supremes Split the Difference

Today the Supreme Court effectively struck down OSHA's novel vaccine mandate but upheld CMS's novel vaccine mandate.

On the topic of whether you should be taking novel vaccines, Alex Berenson digs up some very interesting data from Alberta (bottom of the page), substantiating negative efficacy in the first fourteen "immortal" days after vaccination.

P.S. The local poop is definitely in freefall.

P.P.S. Somerville is trying to come late to the vax mandate party.

Massachusetts cases were up one and five-ninths of a percentage point today, which is down from yesterday but not plummeting like the poop.

P.P.P.S. Alex Berenson reports the Alberta government has already censored their own data, but you can find the smoking gun in the Wayback Machine if you missed it.

Day 712: Immortal Time Datacrime

The bad cat explains the immortal time fallacy using saline (and calls it datacrime). But the transient immune depression from the jab make the numbers even worse:

those who get a booster are, for at least 14 days, MUCH more likely to get sick. this is high hit probability fire to run across. the risk, in the middle of an omicron surge, is very high to begin with. this is not a time you want to be immuno-suppressed.

and if they do get sick, likely because they got the booster, they are not counted as a booster illness. they get counted as a “double vaxxed.”

[...]

clearly, boosted is the highest risk group in our example.

but it will read as the lowest.

[...]

this definitional deception has literally taken a product that increased risk by 47% and made it look like 58% VE. note that this is UP from the 48% it reported as saline. yup, swapping in a product that does actual harm will, under these measurement modalities, read as HIGHER vaccine efficacy than saline. this calculation mistakes harm for benefit.

Note that while these infection numbers don't dispel claims that the vaccines reduce severity, bad cat has his paws on some numbers that do imply it's original antigenic sin all the way down.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up one and seven-ninths of a percent today, which was more than the Tuesday lull but less than last week's highs.

Day 711: When 500,000 Americans Died and Nobody Noticed

A Redditor dredged this 2012 Vioxx story out of the wayback machine (the live page is paywalled). Once again, it stars crazed madman Ron Unz, doing the math that nobody else bothered to. In this case he extrapolates 500,000 deaths from Vioxx out of the excess mortality for the years it was on the market:

Senior FDA officials apologised for their lack of effective oversight and promised to do better in the future. The Vioxx scandal began to sink into the vast marsh of semi-forgotten international pharmaceutical scandals.

Then in 2005, as he now remembers it, Ron Unz "was reading my morning newspapers, as I always do, and noticed tiny items about an unprecedented drop in the American death rate. Hmm I said, I wonder if that might have anything to do with all those other stories about that deadly drug recently taken off the market and all the resulting lawsuits."

The year after Vioxx was pulled from the market, the New York Times and other media outlets were running minor news items, usually down-column, noting that American death rates had undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline. These were what Unz, a dedicated news browser, was reading.

Typical was the headline on a short article that ran in the 19 April 2005 edition of USA Today: 'USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.' During that one year, American deaths fell by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation's population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly "surprised" and "scratching [their] heads" over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.

[...] Unz went back to those 2005 stories. Quick scrutiny of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the US Government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offered Unz some useful clues.

"We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn," says Unz. "Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in the national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population.

"The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates."

The impact of these shifts, Unz points out, was not small. After a decade of remaining roughly constant, the overall American death rate began a substantial decline in 2004, soon falling by approximately five per cent, despite the continued ageing of the population. This drop corresponds to roughly 100,000 fewer deaths per year. The age-adjusted decline in death rates was considerably greater.

"Patterns of cause and effect cannot easily be proven," Unz continues. "But if we hypothesise a direct connection between the recall of a class of very popular drugs proven to cause fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses with an immediate drop in the national rate of fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses, then the statistical implications are quite serious."

Unz makes the point that the users of Vioxx were almost all elderly, and it was not possible to determine whether a particular victim's heart attack had been caused by Vioxx or other factors. But he concludes: "Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx [the author's italics], a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility."

The Reddit thread also implicates Pfizer's related withdrawn drug, Bextra, which, while deadly enough, doesn't seem to have been quite the silent overlooked killer that Vioxx was.

The moral of this story is don't be so sure that you'd necessarily notice hundreds of thousands of excess deaths due to heart complications of a wonder drug that the drug company knew about all along.

In local news, an intrepid PlagueBlog reporter notes that the COVID sewage numbers are no longer shooting straight up.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up about 1.5% for the Tuesday lull.

Day 710: Djokovic Released From Concentration Camp

After spending the weekend in an Aussie Impfung Macht Frei camp, unsuspecting tennis player Novak Djokovic is free on visa. He may even get to play tennis, though seeing the police tear-gas his fans and other rubberneckers today, along with the looming threat of yet another jackbooted functionary re-revoking his visa, can't have inspired much confidence in the reigning Aussie Open champion.

Massachusetts cases were up approximately one and two-thirds percent daily over the weekend and today. The promised new hospitalization numbers are on their way into the MDPH, but won't be out until Thursday, or possibly a week from Thursday, due to the reporting schedule.

Day 709: Missives from the Ministry of Truth

The bad cat agrees with PlagueBlog about the truthiness of the fact checkers:

we, the experts, have asked a couple people hand-picked to tell us what we wanted to hear and decided that there is no such thing as the thing we dislike and are now playing a semantic game around a chosen name and descriptor to deny as a matter of lexicography the existence of the underlying mechanism that it describes.

a 24 year old media studies major from vassar who could not get a more impressive job than “anonymous truth minister at a failing masthead” said so.

so, the matter is settled.

Coming tomorrow from the MDPH: real hospitalization numbers.

Day 708: Concentration Camp Fail

Australia exceeded 100,000 cases in a day for the first time yesterday, despite the best efforts of fascism (though due in part to a reporting backlog).

In unrelated news, it seems you can no longer tweet "Impfung Macht Frei" in Germany.

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.