December 28, 2021
"Having the humility to acknowledge that there’s a lot that no one knows and is unknowable right now is going to be really important."
Said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, quoted in "The C.D.C. significantly lowers its estimate of Omicron’s prevalence nationwide" (NYT).
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85 comments:
What a disingenuous comment. We know - for a fact - that Omicron has NOT killed a single person and that the symptoms are mild.
Maybe this guy should look at what the South African experience has been!
The Left doesn't want covid to end. Ever.
Unknown unknowns? Unheard of!
I would caution against predicting the outcome of Omigod variant too soon- the early data looks like it is much less dangerous, but this is really early days yet, and I wouldn't want to make predictions for the US based on the data coming out of South Africa, which has a greatly different demography and testing regime.
With a "D" in the White House, its suddenly time for lots and lots of nuance and qualifiers and no Federal leadership required and..and..and.. "lets not quibble about who killed who"-ing in order to cover for the dems.
Unexpectedly!
Does this remind anyone of The Light Bringer's claims that you couldn't drill your way to energy independence and you'd need a magic wand to improve the US economy?
Unfortunately, the silliness only ends when the testing for COVID ends, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
"If science can't be questioned it's not science anymore it's propaganda & that's the truth" ~
@AaronRodgers12
Rodgers made it clear that he’s not a fan of the way certain aspects of the pandemic are being handled.
“If science can’t be questioned it’s not science anymore, it’s propaganda,” Rodgers said. “That’s the truth. When someone comes out with a scientific study, what do they always say? They say it’s a peer review. What does that mean? It means people in the same field have gone through it, questioned the hypothesis, questioned the research and looked it up to see if this research stands up. That’s what science is all about.”
link to tweet
"Zero conversation about alternative treatment"
I dunno about you, but I believe everything the CDC and "science" tells us about the CV-19, vaccines, masks, and lockdowns.
But then I'm a libtard.
Fool me once, shame on you,
Fool me twice, shame on me,
Fool me 100 times, call me a Democrat.
Nothing the CDC says can be trusted. NIH and CDC have both wrecked their credibility by choosing politics over science. Elizabeth Holmes could have been running them.
He's moving the goal posts after he lost the game.
I was saying that exact thing a year ago. Can I be a CDC official now? I'll cut the Big Guy his percentage.
Haven’t the science bureaucrats (Fauci, et al) been guilty of a lack of humility all along. We have been mislead for a few years by so-called
arrogant science spokespeople who act out the classical tragic flaw of hubris or arrogant pride. It been scientific hubris all along, and the results have been tragic. Rand Paul has been trying to hold Fauci accountable on this issue, with limited success so far.
. . . . . "humility" . . . .
That's a good one.
Here is the Biden plan to combat Coronavirus.
https://joebiden.com/covid-plan/
Ctl+F humility not found.
much of this ignorance is 'self'inflicted - wish not to know ; extinguishing / abandoning curiosity
Hmmm. So he's finally figured out that he can't tell his ass from a hole in the ground. How many holes in the ground did that take?
do i have this right?
1st, they told us that EVERYONE would get the OhmyGod variant
Then, people noticed that the OhmyGod Variant was significantly safer than the vaccines
THEN, they said; "Oh MOST PEOPLE are NOT getting the OhmyGod variant, so you're STILL in danger"
did i miss any steps? Also, WHY should i listen to ANYTHING these idiots spout off?
Look at the omicron hysteria. If it's getting ramped up, we have a political catastrophe for it to cover.
I absolutely agree with the sentiment and have been saying this since March 2020 (On record at my own site, thanks). It is infuriating to read conservatives already jumping in on this thread to pretend that it is only the liberals and government agencies who have been the only offenders on this. I have been a conservative for decades, but their confirmation bias, intractability, and general pigheadedness has been insane these two years. The liberals were initially more insane, but the conservatives have overtaken them since last April. Doubling down on their priors whatever the data is. No. Just no. Buy a mirror. The assurance with which the covid skeptics have asserted poorly-substantiated opinions has exceeded even liberals - and that ain't easy, because that is what liberals essentially do about science, is seize on any scrap that they think supports their POV.
Progressives for a hundred years have been arrogant, authoritarian bastards who follow an impressionistic scientism to try and intimidate opposition rather than verified science. In the last year or so, conservatives have said "Hold my beer. We can be stupider than that."
Skin in the game. Talk to people who have actual skin in the game on any controversial issue. That's more likely to reflect reality. People who might lose jobs, or have relatives in danger, or work in current health care (I am not counting retired physicians and nurses, who are usually about the worst sources for medical opinions), or have careers in jeopardy if they get it wrong, or lose lots of money - those are the people to pay attention to. And the commenters here generally aren't, even though they are well above-average in intelligence and training. Doesn't matter. You don't have skin in the game, not just annoyance at wearing masks (Tyranny! Stalinism!) The humility comes first.
"Last week, the C.D.C. said that Omicron accounted for approximately 73 percent of variants circulating in the United States in the week ending Dec. 18. But in its revision, the agency said the variant accounted for about 23 percent of cases that week."
- NYT
That's horrible in multiple ways and almost certainly killed quite a few people who were assumed to have Omicron but actually had Delta and would have benefited from the antibody treatments.
Rochelle Walensky (I have a sense of impending doom) is in way, way over her head and Fauci is, well, Fauci.
The C.D.C. significantly lowers its estimate of Omicron’s prevalence nationwide"
The real numbers are probably even lower, if you consider reports about the efficacy of the PCR test to be true. Link to CDC Lab Alert page
If what I read on that page is understandable (and I'm not sure it is) the PCR test, the most used test, the nasal swab, can't reliably tell the difference between the flu and covid.
Again, if this is true, that's going to significantly inflate the numbers. According to rumor and inuendo, that's what health authorities want. Can't very well implement more invasive emergency authorizations, like vaccine passports, if the magnitude of the current emergency is not at least matched to the last one.
It is just 2 weeks to slow the spread.
Just 2 weeks.
And it is illegal to test people coming over the Southern Border. Or even really try to stop them coming.
We are going to ban travel from South Africa though.
Now they want lot be humble and mindful of known consequences vs. unknown benefits? They/them can FRO.
“Haven’t the science bureaucrats (Fauci, et al) been guilty of a lack of humility all along”.
Yes, and through inaction as well as utterance. For many months, major tech companies have been doing all they could to censor and manipulate public opinion on Covid, banning this or that statement on the grounds that the truth is already fully known and understood. All of that has been done in a spirit the opposite of humility. How often has any of these major medical people spoken out against that? There have no humility when it comes to the bullying of people they think are their opponents, but humility becomes a virtue again when their actions are under discussion.
gilbar said...
Then, people noticed that the OhmyGod Variant was significantly safer than the vaccines
Link please
Then, people noticed that the OhmyGod Variant was significantly safer than the vaccines
VAERS confirmed over 6000 additional COVID-19 vaccine death reports
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told reporters, and the UK Health Security Agency confirmed, that at least one person who tested positive for the variant had died. As of Dec. 18, 2021, that number had risen to 14
to recap: 1 (or 14 (or 3333)) is LESS THAN 6000
Thanx for playing!
Found on Insty : "Leave it to Adam Andrzejewski and OpenTheBooks.com to expose the fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s annual pension would reach nearly $350,000 if he retires at the end of 2021 after 56 years of bureaucratic service. And that doesn’t include an annuity he would also get worth more than $8,000 annually."
Must be nice to be a powerful bureaucrat...
El Gato outing the miscreants
They say it’s a peer review
And we could all wish review meant more than it does, it might cut down on the number of unreproducible, published studies. Reviewing is a thankless task, the work is voluntary, and a thorough review is hard work. Especially if the data and code not available. OTOH, some of the most important papers have been rushed into publication without review. Dirac's first paper on quantum mechanics, for instance, was pushed into Proc. Roy. Soc., A, by Fowler. Dirac's paper on the quantum theory of radiation was published one month after submission. I think the lesson here is that high quality research by first rate scientists needs little review before publication, especially if few can follow the contents. OTOH, when there is a great deal of marginal research driven by the need for publication and funding, then the available review process is overwhelmed and inadequate.
Let said:
“If what I read on that page is understandable (and I'm not sure it is) the PCR test, the most used test, the nasal swab, can't reliably tell the difference between the flu and covid.”
I read the CDC page differently. The current test can not test for both flu and COVID. The other tests can do both from the same swab, so you don’t have to swab someone twice.
Asst Village Idiot: "You don't have skin in the game, not just annoyance at wearing masks (Tyranny! Stalinism!"
The nation was shut down. Millions lost their livelihoods. Children have had the education disrupted for 2 years.
Your BS argument that only some have "skin in the game" is a lie.
Every single person in the US has "skin in the game".
Every. Single. One.
Humility to a guy like Fauci? Now that is absolutely hilarious.
My humble and unschooled opinion is that this variant will have infected just about everyone by the 4th Of July. Come November it will be time for the annual flu and covid vaccines.
Ah Assistant Village Idiot--at age 78 my wife and I certainly have skin in the game. Having watched this year's Christmas crumble (with family here from London for the first time in two years) devastating my Los Angeles based family--we've got skin in the game.
Seems to me that you may have a touch of the Washington D.C. disease--very long on hubris and very short on humility. But then your mileage may vary.
As for my family members--both in London and in California--we're all vaccinated and boosted and wear our face diapers like good little boys and girls when we are out and about or in the presence of other people. But I am not going to rag on the unvaccinated--there are people with honest fears of vaccines.
18 months ago, I told people that our WuFlu problem was that the "experts" did not know what to do, but they had to do something, anything to defend their positions. Hence, the fiasco we have experienced for nearly two years.
Rather than challenge, the corporate and tech media and decided to go fascist (fauciist?) and censor opinions contrary to the "experts".
We are slowly entering the phase of WuFlu normalcy. We will eventually be treating it as a common cold or flu, as it should have been all along. The appropriate protocol is to identify and protect the vulnerable and let the rest of us live our lives. It will be funny when the "experts" come to that conclusion.
One of my few remaining old wargame buddies just told me he can't make it over this week because he has Covid and must quarantine for 5 or 10 days. He is a thorough D and eagerly jumps through all the hoops; his daughter is finishing her residency and is the fount of all wisdom. Her advice all along has been to jump through every hoop, twice if need be. (I exaggerate. A little.)
My wife asked when he was here last and I said almost a fortnight ago. She then wanted to know all the details of my friend's testing experience, but I don't think it will be of much use so I'll wait for him to get better and he can explain.
Idaho, with the nation's lowest vaccination rate, and where no one but the most Karenish wears a mask, has a case rate sinking faster than a greased safe.
How, oh how can that be?
VAERS confirmed over 6000 additional COVID-19 vaccine death reports
gilbar, pretending that means something is utter horseshit. The US averages about 8150 deaths per day from all causes. The number of Covid shots administered so far is about 150 percent of the population. So if the people getting the shots were similar to the population, the implication is that you would expect about 150 percent of 8150, i.e., 12,225 of them to die within 24 hours after receiving the shot. In fact, if only 6000 of them died in that period, it seems that getting the shot cuts your risk of dying within a day by more than half.
VAERS confirmed over 6000 additional COVID-19 vaccine death reports
Of or with vaccine(s) a la of or with SARS-CoV-2. We know there are excess adverse events closely correlated with the vaccine(s), especially in the young. We know that the spike protein is pathogenic in some cohorts. We also know that while the vaccine(s) offer limited personal protection, a number of people still develop the disease and transmit it to others. And the fully vaccinated are at greater risk from the Indian and South Africa variants, and only have limited protection (~3 to 5 months) against the original Wuhan virus.
re: Idaho
How, oh how can that be?
The science of masks was established 40 years ago. The physics of the several transmission modes long before that. The science of sequestering in place was established over several outbreaks. As for the vaccines, they are one means to stimulate immunity, albeit unknown safety profiles and with poor viability over time and variants. Most people have natural immunity that is either preexisting (e.g. keying of other strains but less mutable components than the spike protein) or acquired, or resistant to disease progression through innate differences and early, effective, safe, inexpensive therapeutic treatments, or are simply not at risk of infection. For one, we knew from Spring of 2020 that planned parent/hood was neither a good nor exclusive Choice. This virus has a risk profile where the young are at lower risk of disease progression a la polio and other diseases where the young are particularly eligible to develop natural immunity without progressive effects, and less likely to transmit the virus to others.
Excerpts from the link:
Experts said they were not surprised by the revisions, given that the C.D.C.'s estimates are rough guesses.
"I think this is one example among many where scientists are trying to project an air of confidence about what's going to happen."
"I don't know how the C.D.C built their algorithm, but human beings made these programs, and humans are fallible."
Disregarding all the above, NYT writer presses on: These predictions will likely become more accurate over time as more data on Omicron is collected. Likely. Journalists have their own flavor of hubris.
Replace CDC with IPCC & Omicron with "climate change" & explain why the comparison is inapposite.
Ignorance is Bliss wanted a link to my statement,
that more people have died from the vaccine, than from the ohmyGod Variant
So, i posted links... Including one that showed that up to 14 people have died WITH ohmyGod
and another showing that THOUSANDS have died With the vaccine
so, of course;
jeff HAD TO jump up, and say: "you're a big Meanie gilbar! you're overstating things"
(apparently, not being aware enough to see that i overstated BOTH SIDES)
Since, somewhere between NO ONE and Nearly No one has died OF the ohmyGod variant,
It's pretty clear it's SAFER than the vaccine
Jeff, i don't expect you to grasp this (because you apparently can't, or WON'T read)
ps. IF you could (or, would) you'd have noticed the word ADDITIONAL in my link
But you can't, so you won't
Hmmm. A humble healthcare professional. What other wonders does Wisconsin have in store for us?
who else is getting the sense that our /health-providers-protectors/ expected the induced gain-of-function virulence of the virus to persist through its mutational evolution
What is this thing you call “humility”? All I see, Right and Left, is something more closely resembling religious certainty.
It’s a sad thing for our country that the CDC didn’t put that message forward from the beginning. Instead, Feds have been waging war on States for control of the narrative. And they’re still silencing voices they consider opposition to Fauci et al.
Too little, too late.
"Having the humility to acknowledge that there’s a lot that no one knows and is unknowable right now is going to be really important."
Where's he been for that last two years?
Heck, the last 3 months?
Note: you don't issue a "vaccine mandate" when "there’s a lot that no one knows and is unknowable right now"
There should be some corollary to the Gell-Mann effect in the medical field.
You visit your doctor with a complaint. He does a bunch of expensive tests that provide no certain conclusion, then prescribes something to relieve the symptoms.
You go home, turn on CNN, and hang on every word of Fauci's latest pronouncement. As if he has any more certainty about the issue than your GP did.
It was important two years ago.
gilbar, I'm not accusing you of overstating things. I'm accusing you of having no idea what you're talking about. Even with your "additional" deaths, the total number 12313, is only about equal to what you would expect over a day and a half from normal causes. And for several reasons, as VAERS itself explains on its website, the VAERS data cannot be used to reliably estimate the rate of adverse reactions. For one thing, for Covid, there is no time window specified for what events should be reported. It just says "after vaccination". So a death reported post-Covid shot could be five minutes after the shot was administered or several months later. Most other vaccines have time windows specified for different events, but not Covid.
There's a reason for that. VAERS is meant to bring possible adverse events to the CDC's attention for further study, not to estimate how often those events actually occur. Last summer there were reports that young men were getting myocarditis (heart inflammation) after adminstration of one of the mRNA vaccines. But VAERS data alone was not enough to quantify the risk. Studies were done that established (i) myocardities risk was slightly elevated for young men by the mRNA vaccines, but (ii) myocarditis risk was greatly elevated for patients of all ages if they contracted Covid. Both of these results have been extensively publicized, and most doctors are convinced that the small risk to young men from getting vaccinated is greatly outweighed by the risks they face if they contract Covid without having been vaccinated.
I am not an expert on this. But UPenn biostatistician Jeffrey Morris is, and on his blog, he debunks many of the anti-vaxxer assertions. More importantly, he actually did a study using CMS (i.e. Medicare) data to compare death rates of vaccinated Medicare patients over the two weeks after they were vaccinated to the usual death rates of similar Medicare patients prior to 2020. There was no difference. This is a highly credible study with millions of observations. With that many observations, statistical estimates are very accurate.
I urge anyone with concerns about the safety of Covid vaccines to go look at Morris's blog and read some of the stuff he's written there. Much of it is debunking anti-vax scare mongers. The same names keep coming up again and again. Some of them even "reply" to Morris via Twitter, and he debunks those as well. The fact that they reply shows that they are aware of what Morris says, and they know they're wrong, but that doesn't stop them from continuing to misinform their readers. Gee, some of them are trial lawyers. Who'da thunk it?
Asst Village Idiot: "You don't have skin in the game, not just annoyance at wearing masks
Well, you've correctly labeled yourself as an idiot
It's my life, it's my health. I damn well have skin in the game.
I will listen to calls for "humility" and "respect" when they're coming from people attacking all "vaccine mandates", "vaccine passports", and Big Tech censorship about "Covid misinformation".
Reality check: if the "Covid vaccines" work to block transmission of Covid, then you should be able to chart "State Covid vaccination rate" vs "State Covid infection rate" and get a nice inverse correlation.
But that's not what you get. What you get is a scatter plot that says "these items have no correlation".
Which means there's 0 "public health" justification for any "vaccine push".
"But the unvaccinated are overwhelming our medical system"!
So what? Shall we have a "condom mandate", and throw in jail anyone who gets an STD, because they shouldn't have gotten it if they'd used protection?
No?
Well, if we can't force people to put something ON their bodies, we certainly can't force them to put something IN their bodies.
"Doctors and nurses are feeling overwhelmed!"
I'll listen to that whine when hospitals aren't firing people for not having got the shot.
People demonstrate their humility by not forcing shit on other people. So, by all means, let's get some humility going
Jeff said:
Both of these results have been extensively publicized, and most doctors are convinced that the small risk to young men from getting vaccinated is greatly outweighed by the risks they face if they contract Covid without having been vaccinated.
That's nice. Most doctors are "convinced" about a lot of things.
That doesn't mean I'm going to listen to them, and that doesn't mean I should listen to them
And it most certainly doesn't mean they, or any level of government, should have the right / power to force me to listen to them.
Now, given that the Covid death rate for "young me" is pretty much zero (MN has had 170k cases for ages 20 - 29, with a total of 29 deaths. 30 - 39 is another 170k cases, and 113 deaths. That's over the last 20+ months), and that not every one of those Covid deaths was "myocarditis", I find the claim that "you're at a bigger risk from Covid" to be questionable, at best.
But, even if it were true, it still wouldn't justify forcing people to get the shot if they don't want it
Jeff: "I urge anyone with concerns about the safety of Covid vaccines to go look at Morris's blog and read some of the stuff he's written there. Much of it is debunking anti-vax scare mongers."
Does Jeffrey Morris of the Univ of Pennsylvania receive any direct or indirect funding from pharmaceutical companies or the federal govt?
Why you might ask?
Because of things like this:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-largest-health-care-fraud-settlement-its-history
Studies show that academic research studies reflect the policy preferences and desired outcomes of the funders of that research approximately 100% of the time.
The corruption runs very deep in our decaying republic.
The "good news" is there are about 9 more recently "minted" pharmaceutical billionaires now......
These vaccines are not vaccines but symptom suppressor. The polio vaccine stops polio in its tracks. Kids with the polio vaccine don't get polio and don't transmit it to others. These "vaccines" do neither. They reduce the severity of the infection to a cold-level response instead of a pneumonia-level response, but they don't stop the spread of the virus.
As the virus mutates, the vaccines will be less and less effective. But, the latest Oh my God strain has mutated to a cold-level infection. For 99.99% of the people, colds are not a big deal. Take Nyquil or the cold medicine of your choice, drink plenty of water and take it easy for a few days. Then you can resume normal life. Two weeks later, you've recovered. These sky rocketing case numbers are good as everyone is getting a cold, but few if any are dying.
https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/epi/covid-19-epi-confirmed-cases-post-vaccination.pdf?la=en
Looks pretty conclusive that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, right? At least, that's what the bar graphs would have you believe. But take a look at the running data here:
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data
That's right: the RATE of infections among the vaccinated has actually become higher than that of the unvaccinated. In raw case numbers, the vaccinated are overwhelmingly the largest segment of new cases during the largest surge of 2021. Maybe American data is different- given how aggressively the CDC and the White House are keeping you from the actual numbers, I strongly doubt it.
I don't imagine this will change any minds, and it certainly can't vacuum the vax from your DNA. Nonetheless, the information is here for historical purposes. Tribunals accounting for vax criminals, for one.
I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic. We lived in DC. Nothing changed. no masks, still had school. A few pools closed during the summer. Other than that, we just went on with our lives. Polio was a real terrible disease. covid has a survival rate of well over 90%.
Different country then. Different as in more individual responsibility, less reliance on daddy government.
Now, its pretty much 'live in fear, obey your masters'.
We are more gullible, less informed, more hysterical. More feminine than we were then.
Rabel said...
"That's horrible in multiple ways and almost certainly killed quite a few people who were assumed to have Omicron but actually had Delta and would have benefited from the antibody treatments."
*************
What's the evidence to support your assumption that some people were assumed to have Omicron when they actually had Delta?
Maybe folks like Aurora Health should keep the monoclonals active for wee bit longer, annoying as they are to the jab-centric, no treatment indoctrination.
Another situation where there were wrong. So many times wrong. They have zero credibility.
https://aapsonline.org/bidens-bounty-on-your-life-hospitals-incentive-payments-for-covid-19/
I heard the Voice of Donald Rumsfeld calling on my wavelength.
gilbar, pretending that means something is utter horseshit. The US averages about 8150 deaths per day from all causes. The number of Covid shots administered so far is about 150 percent of the population. So if the people getting the shots were similar to the population, the implication is that you would expect about 150 percent of 8150, i.e., 12,225 of them to die within 24 hours after receiving the shot. In fact, if only 6000 of them died in that period, it seems that getting the shot cuts your risk of dying within a day by more than half.
If you're going to call something "horseshit" you should at least get the statistics right yourself. That "150 percent" is over a period of about a year. The VAERS reports mostly refer to deaths within a short period of getting the so-called vaccine, a period over which more like 1% of the population is getting the shots. It's the correlation of the deaths with the timing of the shots that is the concern. That's apart from the fact that VAERS is known to vastly underreport deaths, and as gilbar mentioned, the 6,000 number was in addition to those already reported.
The fact is that we don't know the safety of these shots.
This year, more than 300 athletes around the world -- some as young as 12 -- collapsed unexpectedly, mostly due to heart problems. Nearly 200 of them died.
What did they have in common? The vast majority, if not all of them, received the experimental COVID-19 vaccines based on mRNA spike proteins. That relationship appears not to be coincidental, despite attempts to dismiss the possibility.
now... Jeff? HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE DIED WITH the OhmyGod variant? Any? Any at all?
Who cares?? Who trusts or believes anything those idiots, who have been lying to us for 2 years, say now?? We are done believing their lies.
That's nice. Most doctors are "convinced" about a lot of things.
That doesn't mean I'm going to listen to them, and that doesn't mean I should listen to them
And it most certainly doesn't mean they, or any level of government, should have the right / power to force me to listen to them.
I listen to doctors carefully but make my own judgements. Doctors concerned about my cholesterol have tried me on three different statins and Ezetimibe. Each time I suffered a tendon injury within two weeks of initiating treatment. The most recent one kept me from going to gym for almost six months. My own judgement is that sitting on my couch reading Althouse all day on a statin is worse for my health than not taking one and reading Althouse between sets at the gym. Especially since Chuck seems to have given up.
In contrast, my hypertension medication works with no problems.
I agree with you about vaccine mandates. Even if they weren't a violation of your rights, there's no public health rationale for them. Vaccines don't stop transmission of Omicron, which is so infectious we're all going to get it, vaccinated or not. They do lessen the severity, and that's reason enough for me to get vaccinated, but it's not reason enough for a mandate. And once Paxlovid becomes widely available, I may get off the Covid booster merry-go-round as well.
"I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic. We lived in DC. Nothing changed. no masks, still had school. A few pools closed during the summer."
Perhaps masks were not called for because of the primary means of transmission of polio:
"Polio is spread when the stool of an infected person is introduced into the mouth of another person through contaminated water or food (fecal-oral transmission). Oral-oral transmission by way of an infected person's saliva may account for some cases."
https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/poliomyelitis/fact_sheet.htm
Mask-wearing was called for during the Flu Epidemic of 1918, but, as with today, some resisted wearing masks.
People in authority almost always think they are infallible. We definitely see this with the Fauci/Francis Collins /CDC contingent. It is good that one of their number at least pays lip service to humility.
Good science is a process - it welcomes the clash of ideas and debate. When we use it for political ends and employ it to quash research it ceases to be science.
Fauci/Collins et al. should remember the words of Justice Jackson: “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” Brown v. Allen 344 U.S. 443, at (1953) (Jackson concurring in the result).
now... Jeff? HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE DIED WITH the OhmyGod variant? Any? Any at all?
With, or from? I'm sure many have died with Omicron, just as many die with a common cold, but that doesn't mean that was the actual cause of death.
gilbar, you've really got to stop with the bullshit scary numbers. 300 athletes died! How many died in 2019? More important, how many died from Delta, which is still out there? I'm not going to waste any more of my time following your links. I did that the first couple of times and found nothing but bullshit.
Drago, you know as well as I that not everyone is corrupt. I have not looked into Prof Morris's funding, but I do know that biostatisticians do a lot of studies on drug effectiveness and side effects. That's their job. Most of that work is funded by drug companies, because the FDA requires the drug companies to fund it rather than the FDA doing it themselves.
I think you already know that I'm a retired PhD economist who spent a career doing econometric and statistical work for the Fed. What Morris did with the CMS data to evaluate the risk of Covid vaccination is a valid way to assess the risk, and the number of observations he had access to made for a very powerful result. Funding doesn't matter here unless you think the Medicare reporting systems were all set up years ago just to create fake results in 2021.
Jeff: "Drago, you know as well as I that not everyone is corrupt."
Nin-responsive, probably for good reason, eh?
Jeff: "I have not looked into Prof Morris's funding,..."
I see we are done here.
The corruption and politicization of the academy and "peer review" is itself at pandemic levels.
Your defensiveness and white-knighting without any relevant evidence is duly noted.
doctrev said...
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data
Date Dec. 24, 2021
Age All ages
Unvaccinated Rate Per 100,000 31.93
Unvaccinated Cases 1536
Partially vaccinated Rate Per 100,000 29.43
Partially vaccinated Cases 356
Fully vaccinated Rate Per 100,000 32.39
Fully vaccinated Cases 7425
Vaccination status unknown Cases 2
While the graph changes when you change the date range, the information in the table does not. Since it defaults to 30 days, I'll guess that that's what the above data is
There's almost 5x as many unvaccinated cases as partially vaccinated, and almost 5x as many vaccinated cases as unvaccinated
So over 80% of the population is vaccinated (given that the rate per 100k for those is fairly close to each other), and ~3-4% is partially vaccinated
That's pretty close to "herd immunity", if the vaccines provided any actual immunity
Instead? Wel, the known infection rate for teh vaccinated is higher than the rate for the unvaccinated. And since teh only real known effect of the "vaccines" is to make the virus's effects less severe, and since they don't have universal, every day testing, this means the asymptomatic are less likely to be added to the totals, and the vaccinated are more likely to be asymptomatic.
So this data underestimates the "vaccinated" infection rate, and still has them higher than the "unvaccinated".
@Drago,
Right. So in the absence of any information, your default assumption is that everyone is corrupt. So how do you choose which experts to believe? As I've already explained, I do have some statistics expertise, and I'm quite able to judge Morris's statistical work. I'm not just taking his word for it, unless you think he's actually lying about the data itself. That's a quick way to end a career.
@doctrev, it appears that Omicron is pretty good at escaping the vaccines. It's also true that people who are more vulnerable to Covid (over 60, health conditions) and/or more exposed (job and/or location) are more likely to have been vaccinated. Put those together and you get what you're reporting. I'm not saying this is meaningless. Rather, it confirms that the vaccines are not doing much to slow Omicron.
Jeff said...
@Drago,
Right. So in the absence of any information, your default assumption is that everyone is corrupt. So how do you choose which experts to believe? As I've already explained, I do have some statistics expertise, and I'm quite able to judge Morris's statistical work. I'm not just taking his word for it, unless you think he's actually lying about the data itself. That's a quick way to end a career.
This is not true.
Global Warmists have been caught lying about data multiple times. This error has ended no careers. But if you show even the slightest bit of skepticism you will get no more research grants.
Right now we have drug companies applying to hide their research data for 75 years.
There are daily stories about healthy athletes collapsing on soccer fields with heart attacks. This happening once in 2019 would have been headline news, much less 100's.
There are nurses testifying that doctors fear for everything they have if they connect the current surge of myocarditis to the vaccines.
And the Giant corporations are working with the federal government to censor disinformation.
When was the last time the people hiding information and turning to censorship were the good guys?
I know I wont get an answer from you. I know you are just going to deflect and throw euphemisms. I just want you to know we see right through you. You are not as smart as you think you are but you have some intelligence.
The thing you truly lack is self awareness. You need to go back and read your posts from an outside perspective and be critical of them.
Only then will you see how transparent you are.
It is true that this round of COVID is occurring in the fully vaccinated and recently boostered. All of my positives in the past two weeks have been vaccinated. Including me. An acquaintance who is an elementary school teacher told me that most of their staff are sick with it. If it weren’t Christmas break they would have had to close the schools. And the majority of them are fully vaccinated and boostered. I do think the vaccine makes you less likely to get seriously I’ll, but truthfully the clinical course of this illness is highly unpredictable. I used to think of it like the flu and considered prognosis by risk factors such as age and underlying conditions. Then I had a young person get infected and die who was healthy. That has really shaken my assumptions.
Just to raise the cynicism level a bit, what if the CDC has noted many people (myself included) have started to think of Omicron as the "good" COVID-19? To keep the "appropriate level of caution" (panic) up they need to downplay the prevalence of Omicron. It's not like they haven't pulled that same kind of lying at earlier points in the time of COVID.
@Jeff, given the new information about omicron that's all that matters. @Greg has correctly looked at some of the data, but dig deeper. ALL of the age range categories show "pandemic of the unvaccinated" even as the aggregate shows that the fully vaccinated have higher rates of infection. By coincidence, the age group data was disabled for most of the holidays.
The idiots at Ontario Public Health are TRYING to hide the broader implications of the data, and failing horrifically. Don't you feel safe now? At least Canada has better public data than the United States, even when the government is lying about it.
Drago, perhaps I'm naive, but I'm not as cynical as you seem to be. During my years at the Fed and in the Army before that, I met a few assholes, but most of the people I knew were honest. Most of the disagreements over policy issues were honest disagreements over how to interpret data, and of course there's always confirmation bias lurking about. But the kind of outright dishonesty you apparently think is common is not. I thought Ben Bernanke was a terrible Fed chairman, but I didn't doubt his personal integrity. I think he honestly believed the bailouts of 2008 were necessary. He was mistaken, not corrupt. And he did not understand how damaging the bailouts would be.
I believe the bailouts were largely responsible for conservatives loss of faith in the system. Remember, they were largely done under Republican auspices. The Bear Sterns bailout in March of 2008 was questionable at best. As many predicted at the time, rather than serve as a warning shot across the bows of highly-leveraged Wall Street firms, it encouraged them to lever up even more. The worst offender was Lehman Brothers, and when the Fed finally refused to bail them out in September all hell broke loose. Lehman's failure put AIG well under water, but AIG's creditors had more pull than Lehman. So we were all treated to the sight of the least deserving getting paid bonuses funded by taxpayers.
Scale is so important when the "experts" say it is, anyway. I remember when five horses died at Santa Anita a couple seasons back and experts wanted to shut down the whole sport of horse racing. But hundreds (!) of young healthy athletes dropping dead after getting an experimental vaccine is nothing to Jeff. That's a whole lot of "nothing to see here move along"ism. How do you explain the VAERS graph looking more like a hockey stick than Michael Mann's famous global warming "evidence" ever did, even under his severe manipulation? That is some fucking graph!
(copy and paste link because Instagram always fails to link as hypertext)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CXU6L-JLcB8/
Jeff: "@Drago,
Right. So in the absence of any information, your default assumption is that everyone is corrupt."
Your motte-and-bailey approach isn't going to cut it here.
I never even intimated that "everyone" is corrupt. I was quite specific about who I assume to be corrupt until demonstrated otherwise.
I stated quite explicitly the academic research/"peer review" processes have been greatly corrupted.
Which is why I wrote that. Only you can answer why you avoided what I wrote and substituted in something else if you are so confident in your position on this topic.
Jeff: "Most of the disagreements over policy issues were honest disagreements over how to interpret data, and of course there's always confirmation bias lurking about. But the kind of outright dishonesty you apparently think is common is not."
My experience with many years in the Navy, government and corporate world at a senior level tells me you are wrong.
Not to mention the facts, of course.
Jeff: "I believe the bailouts were largely responsible for conservatives loss of faith in the system."
You can believe that if you wish, but you'd be wrong.
The exposure of the entirety of the feckless republican "leadership" as dem-lite operators who supported a weaponized government against conservatives played a much larger role than the 2008/2009 bailouts in creating this working class-based populist republican revival which is reminiscent of the Teddy Roosevelt era.
Those republicans were all about breaking up the monopolies, investigsting corrupted procurement processes, etc.
Achilles said...Right now we have drug companies applying to hide their research data for 75 years.
--
Well, technically FDA..but..you know the thing!
75 yrs based on dot matrix printer output.
"I'm not joking!"
Jeff said...
Drago, perhaps I'm naive, but I'm not as cynical as you seem to be. During my years at the Fed and in the Army before that, I met a few assholes, but most of the people I knew were honest. Most of the disagreements over policy issues were honest disagreements over how to interpret data, and of course there's always confirmation bias lurking about. But the kind of outright dishonesty you apparently think is common is not.
"Trans women are real women".
At one time, you could claim that "most of the disagreements over policy issues were honest disagreements", but that is no longer the case. The CDC KY "Covid vaccine effectiveness" study could not have been released if there were honest people at teh CDC who were willing to stand up and stop dishonesty.
And if there were any honest people in public health willing to stand up, the study would have been laughed out of existence.
Then there's the "1200 public health experts letter on the George Floyd protests", which "discovered" that Covid didn't infect protests that had the right politics.
Whatever was true when you were in, what's true now is that the US Federal Gov't is corrupt from top to bottom, and that any decent human beings in there are keeping their heads down
Did Morris trash the CDC KY study as junk science? No? Does he trash any other left wing claims by the Feds?
No?
Then no, I don't trust anything he puts out. And neither should you
"Clinicians and health systems should consider heightened risk of progression to severe COVID-19 associated with race and ethnicity when determining eligibility for mAbs.
▪ The FDA has acknowledged that in addition to certain underlying health conditions, race and ethnicity “may also place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.”20
▪ FDA’s acknowledgment means that race and ethnicity alone, apart from other underlying health conditions, may be considered in determining eligibility for mAbs. It is ethically appropriate to consider race and ethnicity in mAb eligibility decisions when data show elevated risk of poor COVID-19 outcomes for Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC populations), and that this risk cannot be adequately addressed by determining eligibility based on underlying health conditions (perhaps due to underdiagnosis of health conditions that elevate risk of poor COVID-19 outcomes in these populations). At the present time, MDH has found that available data show this elevated risk. While health systems should thus consider the elevated risks of progression to severe COVID-19 associated with race and ethnicity when making decisions about whether individual patients are eligible for mAbs, it is always the case that health care providers “should consider the benefit-risk for an individual patient.”20"
https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/hcp/mabethical.pdf
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