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.