More shenanigans’ afoot. What happens to the data stream when you mix vaccinated people in with the unvaccinated like Ontario is currently doing?
The Sound Of Settled Science
Does a high fibre diet prevent disease?
All doctors (and probably most non-doctors) have heard of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a type of cancer found primarily in children living in malaria-endemic areas in Africa. Denis Burkitt was the first person to describe the disease, and also the first person to propose that there was an environmental cause (now known to be simultaneous infection by both malaria and Epstein-Barr virus).
Most doctors probably don’t know that Denis Burkitt is also almost single-handedly responsible for the now widespread belief that dietary fibre is an important part of a healthy diet. Interestingly, Burkitt developed his ideas about dietary fibre after corresponding with a less well known doctor called Thomas Cleave (who hasn’t been allowed to give his name to any diseases).
Cleave was interested in the connection between diet and disease, and had noticed how the transition from a traditional diet to a modern diet, rich in refined carbohydrates, was associated with a massive increase in a large number of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. He even wrote a book on the subject. Burkitt was introduced to Cleave in the late 1960’s by epidemiologist Richard Doll (himself famous for discovering that smoking causes lung cancer).
Burkitt was deeply affected by Cleave’s ideas, and in particular his conception that all the “diseases of civilization” had a single underlying cause, but he took the data and went off in a different direction with it. While Cleave believed that it was the refined carbohydrates in the modern diet that were causing harm, Burkitt came to believe instead that it was the absence of dietary fibre that was responsible. Since refined carbohydrates are by definition low in dietary fibre, the two things track together perfectly, and it becomes almost impossible to say from observational data which is the causative factor and which is the confounder.
There was a big fly in the ointment of Burkitt’s hypothesis from the start, however, and that was the fact that the Maasai tribespeople in Kenya and Tanzania, who lived on a diet consisting almost entirely of meat, milk, and blood, showed none of the diseases of modern civilization, even though they had virtually no fibre in their diet. Burkitt, who spent much of his career in Africa, was well aware of this fact, but seemingly chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit his hypothesis.
Postcard From Iceland
Let ‘er rip.
Herd immunity must be achieved by transmitting the virus
One and a half months after the abolition of all domestic operations, a record number of people have been diagnosed infected in recent weeks, despite the fact that the majority of the population has been vaccinated.
Þórólfur Guðnason said in Sprengisandur in Bylgjan this morning that it is disappointing that herd immunity has not been achieved with vaccination. He says there is only one other way to achieve herd immunity, to allow the virus to spread throughout the community.
Þórólfur says that he has talked about it since the beginning of the epidemic that the crown virus mutated. This has now happened with the arrival of the Delta variant across the border.
He says, however, that the vaccination was not in vain. “The vaccination has prevented a serious illness, there is no question about that,” says Þórólfur.
Þórólfur says that it is necessary to respond to how many people become infected after vaccination. “We just need to shuffle the cards and come up with new plans,” he said.
You’ll have to use something like google translate to read the full article.
Update: And now he’s walking back the statement.
Acceptable Catastrophic Error
Is the phrase of the day. When the goal is universal vaccination you can make as many of them as you like. Grab a coffee.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics, Part One
The former Director of the CDC is making what I call an Acceptable Catastrophic Error. This is the kind of error one is allowed to make when they are perceived to have the correct opinion. Arguments and statistics used towards the goal of getting every single person vaccinated for COVID are given far less scrutiny and are accepted as true more readily, than any arguments or statistics that might be perceived as counterproductive towards that goal.
When the former Director of the CDC, or anyone else for that matter, says someone who is infected with COVID is 100 times less likely to die if they have been vaccinated, it does not matter how far off that number is. It will be readily forgiven no matter how inaccurate. It is the goal of universal vaccination, not truth, that appears to be most important.
There are a lot of acceptable catastrophic errors.
Lies, Damned Lies, Vaccine Statistics, Part Two
The last article focused on severely misunderstood statistics. Today I am focusing on what can only be described as a deliberate lie.
Today’s example is an impressive tour de force of falsehood. This example contains
- Cherry picked data
- Getting the cherry-picked data wrong by an order of magnitude
- Comparing the cherry-picked data against other data that do not represent what they are claimed to represent
All of which will be permitted, and repeated, because they promote universal-vaccination. They are Acceptable Catastrophic Errors.
It’s a long read but a very good one. You don’t need to be a math geek to see what’s been going on. The vaccine efficacy numbers are misinformation, and the authors explanation is excellent.
Masks don’t Work
A high level look at what has and hasn’t happened around the world. A story that’s told through 75 various charts and data sets. (Its a decent size file so you may have to wait a bit for it to download.)
Maybe masks work in some specific cases when worn properly but from a big picture public health perspective they don’t even move the needle.
No Mask Manitoba?
Manitobans woke up this morning to a full court press by their left leaning media (but I repeat myself) on the lifting of the mask mandate later this week. Reporters are filling their diapers and encouraging everyone else to do the same.
Dan Lett- The timing of these decisions could not have been worse. Although fully vaccinated people face minimal risk, there is growing concern continued outbreaks among the unvaccinated will lead to a vaccine-resistant strain of COVID-19. If that happens (many epidemiologists believe it is only a matter of time) the entire vaccination campaign will be back to square one.
The No. 1 thing we can do to avoid that apocalyptic future is to continue the use of masks in public indoor spaces. It is simply unfathomable Pallister and Roussin could have simply overlooked this epidemiological reality.
Instead of acknowledging the leading-edge of pandemic thinking, Pallister has given Manitoba a series of completely nonsensical, illogical changes.
and
Bartley Kives-Everyone also knows transmission of droplets can be reduced significantly indoors when people wear masks.
But while house parties of theoretically infinite size will soon be legal in this province and dancing in public places will remain as forbidden as it was in Footloose, the wearing of masks in indoor public places will no longer be mandatory.
This unexpected easing earned immediate scorn from some of the Manitoba physicians who have spent much of the pandemic trying and failing to convince the Progressive Conservative government to implement public health policies based on public health science.
Their general gist: Manitoba is doing away with one of its least restrictive and most effective means of preventing COVID-19 transmission before the more contagious delta variant becomes the dominant strain of the virus here and sparks a fourth wave of the disease.
The problem with all this is that we live in the information age and we can see what’s happening all over the world now. And what we can see is that MASKS DON’T WORK.
Worldview Has Nothing To Do With It
Scott Adam’s had an interesting tweet this morning.
As far as I know, no city, state, or country on the planet has beaten COVID-19 with Ivermectin or HCQ. Lots of places have limited access to vaccines whereas Ivermectin and HCQ are widely available. How does your worldview explain that?
What Scott Adams doesn’t know, or doesn’t seem to know.
Malone and Navarro
Spend an hour discussing the latest covid developments. Video here
Audio only version here
People have been poo pooing what Malone has to say but if you listen to the above and compare it to the latest report out of the UK it pretty much lines up exactly.
Update: Malone goes through the CDC’s powerpoint.
Ivermectin Hits The WSJ
The big thing about this article is not so much what it says, we’ve been seeing this evidence for months, its where it got published. Corporate news has been going out of its way not to talk about Ivermenctin. The Wall Street Journal picking up the story is a bit of a breakthrough.
Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.
In 115 patients with Covid-19 who received a single dose of ivermectin, none developed pneumonia or cardiovascular complications, while 11.4% of those in the control group did. Fewer ivermectin patients developed respiratory distress (2.6% vs. 15.8%); fewer required oxygen (9.6% vs. 45.9%); fewer required antibiotics (15.7% vs. 60.2%); and fewer entered intensive care (0.1% vs. 8.3%). Ivermectin-treated patients tested negative faster, in four days instead of 15, and stayed in the hospital nine days on average instead of 15. Ivermectin patients experienced 13.3% mortality compared with 24.5% in the control group.
Fun fact one of the authors, David Henderson is a good old boy from Carman, Manitoba
So, Fully Vaccinated Super Spreaders?
‘New science is worrisome’: CDC recommends wearing masks indoors, again.
According to the new science, she said, fully vaccinated people with breakthrough infections from the delta variant have a similar viral load to infections in unvaccinated people. That means the fully vaccinated are more likely to spread the virus with the delta variant than the original coronavirus.
The goal behind the guidance may be to protect both the fully vaccinated and the unvaccinated, health experts say, especially vaccinated people who may be immunocompromised and children under 12 who aren’t yet eligible to get their shot.
Why does that sound so familiar?
The Church of Science
How Science Lost the Public’s Trust
From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them.
“Conformity,” Mr. Ridley says, “is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.” Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for “science as a profession,” which he says has become “rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.” Increasing numbers of scientists “seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.”
No Evidence is No Reason to Stop
Science Table calls for vaccine certificates they admit have no scientific backing
“There is currently no scientific evidence of the direct impact of COVID-19 vaccine certificates on SARS-CoV-2 transmission or population vaccination rates, and there are important ethical, legal, accessibility, and privacy considerations concerning their development and implementation,” the group says as they call for the government to implement this useless idea.
Speaking of Ontario, “what is a –fatal asymptomatic vaccinated case– of COVID-19?”
JERUSALEM, July 22 (Xinhua) — The effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 has dropped to 39 percent in Israel, the country’s Ministry of Health said on Thursday.
French Guiana, We describe a COVID-19 Gamma variant cluster with a high attack rate even in fully vaccinated persons. The Gamma variant is the predominant variant in French Guiana which, as of July 2021, caused a third epidemic wave, threatening to overwhelm the hospital capacity (11). Such a low vaccine efficiency against infection by the Gamma variant was not expected
Did you hear the one about the fully vaccinated super spreader? It’s got a pretty good punch line. And does anybody remember Sweden? How’d they make out?
Immunity Debt
Is what you get when you lock people down and keep them isolated from one another. New Zealand is finding this out the hard way with an unprecedented outbreak of RS virus. And as it has yet to peak they’re getting worried about treatment supplies. Here is the NY Times story on it. Check out this chart, the bump of blue lines in the middle are normal years, the green line across the bottom was 2020, basically zero all year, and the red line is up until July 12 this year.
It’s not just New Zealand, the Dutch have the same problem, all over the US , France, South Africa and Australia, Japan
Immunity debt is a fancy way of saying you’ve lost herd immunity to something. That’s the hypothesis anyways. The other take away from all this is that our midwit public health officials can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. All they’re worried about right now is covid and getting herd immunity to that by only one method, needles in arms.
Welcome to complex systems.
Safe And Effective ®
A study recently published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity sought to estimate the extent to which drug trials underestimate side effects. It was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The study chose as its particular focus people being treated for high blood pressure with a certain class of blood pressure lowering drugs known as RAAS blockers (which includes all drugs with names ending in -pril and all drugs with names ending in -sartan). The advantage with looking at this particular class of drugs is that there are a ton of trials. Every major pharmaceutical company has its own RAAS-blocker. It should therefore be possible to draw relatively broad conclusions about the results – whatever they show, they apply to the entire pharmaceutical industry, not just to a few specific companies. It’s also reasonable to think that the results apply to other classes of drugs too – there’s no reason to think trials of RAAS-blockers have been done differently than trials of other drug classes.
What the study sought to do more specifically was compare the rate of serious adverse events in clinical trials of RAAS-blockers with the rate observed in the real world. A serious adverse event is any event that is potentially life threatening or that results in death, hospitalization or lasting disability. If a trial has been designed in such a way that it is representative of reality, then the rate of serious adverse events in the trial should largely mirror that seen in the real world.
110 trials of RAAS-blockers were identified by the researchers. Of these, 11 were specifically designed to look at older people (i.e. didn’t recruit anyone under the age of 60). The data on serious adverse events from these 110 trials was extracted and compared to real world data on deaths and hospitalizations taken from a UK government funded database of 55,000 people living in Wales, who were being treated with RAAS-blockers. Deaths and hospitalizations are not exactly the same thing as serious adverse events (which as mentioned above also include “life threatening events”, and could for example include someone who is treated in an emergency department after a fall but not admitted to the hospital), but they’re close enough to allow a reasonable comparison.
So, what were the results?
The Sound Of Settled Science
Hot enough for ya?
You’ll Still Have Cancer
But it will be a happy cancer!
Cancer patients to take part in LSD micro-dosing trials in New Zealand
Participants will self-administer LSD every three days, taking a micro-dose that induces effects at a “sub-perceptual level.”
5 Minutes with a Climate Sceptic
So what’s wrong with this narrative? In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem and its solutions. The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debate. The solutions that have been proposed are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.
“Rare” Vaccine Breakthroughs
Grab a coffee.
More and more stories like this one from the Boston Globe are popping up.
79 fully vaccinated Massachusetts residents have died, 303 hospitalized in very rare COVID ‘breakthrough’ cases, officials say
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have already been 4,115 reported cases of fully vaccinated people being hospitalized or dying with Covid-19 coronavirus breakthrough infections.
That’s as of June 21, 2021. Nearly half (49 percent) of these cases have been female and a little over three-quarters (76 percent) have been 65 years and older. There were a total of 3,907 hospitalizations and 750 deaths among those who had breakthrough infections, although not all of the hospitalizations may have been due primarily to Covid-19.
Here’s a study.
We found that severe COVID-19 infection, associated with a high mortality rate, might develop in a minority of fully-vaccinated individuals with multiple comorbidities. Our patients had a higher rate of comorbidities and immunosuppression compared to previously reported non-vaccinated hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Further characterization of this vulnerable population may help to develop guidance to augment their protection, either by continued social-distancing, or by additional active or passive vaccinations.
Alex Berenson has a number of thoughts
This flaw means the trials couldn’t provide definitive evidence on how well the vaccines work against serious cases of Covid. In contrast, the trials for monoclonal antibodies did prove they worked, because the companies that ran those focused on people at high risk.
The trials had at least two other major flaws. They followed most participants for only about two months after the second dose. And when they calculated vaccine efficacy, they ignored cases that occurred just after the first dose was given.
This meant that when Pfizer and Moderna said in November 2020 their vaccines were about 95% effective at preventing Covid, what they meant was that the vaccines were 95% effective at peak protection FOR A MATTER OF WEEKS.
Neither the companies nor anyone else had any way of knowing how well the vaccines would work in a year, much less in five years – or 20 years. They simply did not have any long-term data. How could they?
and
Data from England and Scotland show similar trends. In Scotland, hospitalizations have risen more than fivefold in the last several weeks. And more than half the people who died of Covid in the last week of June were fully vaccinated.
For a number of weeks now instead of useful information Canadians have once again been bombarded with this kind of fear mongering propaganda . Boiling a number of complicated systems down to one single simplistic variable.
They Fixed all This?
Right? And the whole being in a hurry and shielding everyone from liability thing?
A Little Jab ‘ill Do Ya?
Many years ago I learned the most fundamental rule of toxicology -it’s the dose that makes the poison-. One aspirin and your headache goes away, one bottle of aspirin and you go away.
Nature- Quarter-dose of Moderna COVID vaccine still rouses a big immune response
A little bit of coronavirus vaccine goes a long way towards generating lasting immunity.
Two jabs that each contained only one-quarter of the standard dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine gave rise to long-lasting protective antibodies and virus-fighting T cells, according to tests in nearly three dozen people1. The results hint at the possibility of administering fractional doses to stretch limited vaccine supplies and accelerate the global immunization effort.
and
In the earliest trial of Moderna’s mRNA-based vaccine, study participants received one of three dose levels: 25, 100 or 250 micrograms3. The top dose proved too toxic. The low dose elicited the weakest immune response. The middle dose seemed to offer the best balance: it triggered strong immunity and had acceptable side effects.
That 100-microgram dose ultimately became the one authorized for mass use in dozens of countries. But Moderna scientists later showed that a half-dose seemed to be just as good as the standard dose at stimulating immune protection4.
To find out whether a low dose might offer protection, scientists analysed blood from 35 participants in the original trial. Each had received two 25-microgram jabs of vaccine 28 days apart.
Six months after the second shot, nearly all of the 35 participants had ‘neutralizing’ antibodies, which block the virus from infecting cells, the researchers reported in a preprint published on 5 July1. Participants’ blood also contained an armada of different T cells, both ‘killer’ cells that can destroy infected cells and a variety of ‘helper’ cells that aid in general immune defence.
Now they don’t really mention straight up that lower doses should also lead to less adverse reactions from the vaccines but it certainly stands to reason that it should work that way. There is always a balance between efficacy and safety in dosage recommendations and in the mad rush to get these out the door and into arms you can see there being a lot of pressure on just making sure the damn things worked.