In Coronavirus: Israel reimposes masks amid new virus fears the BBC reports Covid rates are rising in Israel. It’s the Δ virus. Somewhat more disturbing, the WSJ reports
About half of adults infected in an outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid-19 in Israel were fully inoculated with the Pfizer Inc.
The latter might seem to suggest possible breakthrough. I mean half are vaccinated! But perhaps not it’s not too bad since most Israeli’s are vaccinated; the article says 85% of adults are vaccinated and 50% of the infected are vaccinated. If I’m doing the Bayesian right, the ratio P[B=V|I]/P[UV|I]= r P[V)/P[UV]. with I means “infected”, V means “vaccinated”, UV unvaccinated and r the ratio of P[I|V]/P[I|UV]. With r=0.5*(1-0.85)/0.85 ~9%. So vaccinated indiiduals appear to be infected at roughly 10% the rate of the unvaccinated individuals. Go Pfizer!)
Turning to “etc”. Even the NYT seems to be treating the possibility of lab leak as worth dicussing. See “Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.” Honestly, I think we probably will never know.
This article seems to recognize a fundamental problem with the “it must be natural” theory which often seems to implicitly suggewst that if that’s the way all the past one happens, then absent clear and convincing evidence, we of must believe it’s natural this time. But obviously that’s not so. As the NYT author points out
Since most pandemics have been due to zoonotic events, emerging from animals, is there reason to doubt lab involvement? Maybe if you look at all of human history. A better period of comparison is the time since the advent of molecular biology, when it became more likely for scientists to cause outbreaks. The 1977 pandemic was tied to research activities, while the other two pandemics that have occurred since then, AIDS and the H1N1 swine flu of 2009, were not.
Plus, once a rare event, like a pandemic, has happened, one has to consider all the potential paths to it. It’s like investigating a plane crash. Flying is usually very safe, but when a crash does happen, we don’t just say mechanical errors and pilot mistakes don’t usually lead to catastrophes and that terrorism is rare. Rather, we investigate all possible paths, including unusual ones, so we can figure out how to prevent similar events.
I don’t have much more for now. So Open Thread.
Worrisome developments… After eight weeks of a downward trend, Florida cases and % positive both increased last week. The Delta variant is popping up around the State and finally the number of vaccine doses administered per week is plummeting. [About half the State has been vaccinated] http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/covid19_report_archive/covid19-data/covid19_data_latest.pdf
Russell Klier (Comment #203063): “Worrisome developments… After eight weeks of a downward trend, Florida cases and % positive both increased last week.”
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Huh? That data shows a roughly constant number of cases, a bit over 11K for the last four weeks. Plus some noise.
Russell,
The mix of vaccinated/unvaccinated is very age dependent, with 83% of those over 65 now having had at least one dose. With >50% unvaccinated among those younger than 45, it is inevitable that there will be continuing cases…. and unfortunately, some of those over 60-65 who remain unvaccinated will be exposed and suffer severe illness. But the death rate will remain low, since the susceptible population is much smaller than 4 months ago. The end of the pandemic will be slower than we might like, but it will end. I note that it now rarely makes headlines in the MSM.
Illinois cases have continued to decline. Deaths too, but more slowly.
SteveF, Thanks for the comforting words…. I’m gonna keep wearing my N99 mask anyway!
From lucia’s WSJ link:
*sigh*
More FUD. The highlighted phrase is, of course, a truism and as such is unnecessary except to scare people.
It looks to me like the states that were experiencing the second wave last summer (basically the sun belt) are mostly fairly flat in terms of new cases now while states further north seem to be decreasing. The states with flat cases seem to include ones with a high vaccination rate (NM, CO) and ones with low vaccination rates (MS, AL, GA).
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NV, UT, MO, and AR seem to have increasing cases. The first two have roughly average vaccination rates while the latter two are lagging. But other states that are lagging, like TN, SC and WV have falling case rates.
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So it looks to me like there is definitely an effect of immunization but that geography seems to have more influence on new cases than vaccination. But then, that is what I was expecting to see.
It occurs to me that there is a mechanism that could decouple vaccination and immunization. At this point, there is no limitation on vaccine supply. So low vaccination rates would indicate reluctance to get the vaccine. That reluctance is likely to manifest more strongly among people who have had the virus and recovered. So vaccination rate differences between states, might largely be differences in vaccination among the already immune.
DeWitt,
I have to cut the officials some slack. They do want laggers to come i and get vaccinated. That said: the Israeli laggers are probably lost causes. It seems the super-religious extreme is against the vaccines. Presumably on a religious basis, but I haven’t read the religious argument.
Mike M.,
I believe that could be the case in TN. TN is sixth highest population fraction of confirmed cases at 126,907 confirmed cases/million. ND is highest at 145,190/million. It’s certainly the case with me.
Lucia’s instructions said ‘Open Thread’… I hope this is appropriate.
I have read the 2018 report by Morabito Consultants, Inc. to the condo association on the building that collapsed in Surfside.
I was taken by the lack of urgency in the report. The column structural issues were not addressed until page 7 of 9 and the recommendation was: “…most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion”. Telling a condo association to do something in a “timely fashion” is like saying “sometime in the next decade”. I dealt with many such associations on civil engineering issues but not structural. Either this engineer was not very concerned about the structural issues found or they were not good at transmitting the urgency.
https://www.townofsurfsidefl.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/town-clerk-documents/champlain-towers-south-public-records/8777-collins-ave—structural-field-survey-report.pdf?sfvrsn=882a1194_2
Lucia,
“Honestly, I think we probably will never know.”
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Unless a very credible insider from China comes forward (risking assassination of themselves and all relatives), it is very unlikely we will ever know for sure. That said, I think the circumstantial evidence will probably reach a level where most people will conclude a lab release is the most likely source.
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I do hope that a global consensus forms to eliminate all such crazy research, but I doubt even that will happen. So long as the Darth Vaders (err… leading lights) of virology are allowed to create very dangerous new virus variations, I am sure they will continue to do so. They are obviously idiots.
SteveF,
We only learned of the Soviet anthrax leak when credible insiders came forward after the fall of the Soviet union and some documents became public. The fall of the Chinese government is likely far off in time.
Lucia,
“The fall of the Chinese government is likely far off in time.”
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For sure. The only imperatives for the CCP are preservation of the CCP.and preservation of its power over a billion+ people. If the CCP falls, I doubt it will be within the next 20 years. The CCP is utterly illegitimate as a governing entity, of course, but that doesn’t matter to those on the left.
lucia,
I think there are people who still insist that Alger Hiss wasn’t a Soviet spy.
DeWitt,
“Israel has only recorded five severe cases in the past 10 days, Prof. Balicer said.”
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The hilarity is that the reporters would never bother to explain if those people were vaccinated or not. My guess: not. Israelis have far more substantive threats to worry about than the already ended covid-19 pandemic.
SteveF,
Leaving out vaccination or previous infection status is designed to frighten everyone. If they wanted people to get vaccinated, the article would have included immunity status, assuming that all or most of the severe cases were not known to have immunity.
Chauvin has been sentenced to 22.5 years (15 years with good behavior under Minnesota rules). The tax fraud charges will probably add a year or two. I expect the Justice Department to charge and try him on civil rights violations, which upon conviction will bring his combined sentence effectively to ‘life’. Joe Biden will have not a clue about any of it, of course. The Justice Department is unlikely to tolerate the possibility of Chauvin being released in 16 or 17 years (in his early 60’s).
SteveF,
I also read he apologized to Floyd’s family. A bit late in the game!
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to kill him” (just abuse him and make him suffer).
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That is not going to help. Apologies from sociopaths are meaningless.
This combines data crunching and conspiracy theory to fry the CCP. I have no idea if it adds up:
https://twitter.com/charlesrixey/status/1408941314624921606?s=21
lucia (Comment #203083): “I also read he apologized to Floyd’s family. A bit late in the game!”
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Not late at all. No competent attorney would have allowed him to do it earlier.
2018 engineering report on condition of the collapsed condominium in Miami: https://www.townofsurfsidefl.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/town-clerk-documents/champlain-towers-south-public-records/8777-collins-ave—structural-field-survey-report.pdf?sfvrsn=882a1194_2
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A quick read suggests extensive water infiltration from cantilevered apartment patios (many with cracked/broken tile floors) may have caused concrete and reinforcing bar damage. The engineer states that apartment owner installed flooring on the patios made it impossible to evaluate the extent of structural damage, abut that tile breaks usually mean underlying structural issues with the concrete.
SteveF,
I also have read the 2018 report by Morabito Consultants, Inc. to the condo association on the building that collapsed in Surfside.
I was taken by the lack of urgency in the report. The column structural issues were not addressed until page 7 of 9 and the recommendation was: “…most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashionâ€. Telling a condo association to do something in a “timely fashion†is like saying “sometime in the next decadeâ€. I dealt with many such associations on civil engineering issues but not structural. Either this engineer was not very concerned about the structural issues found or they were not good at transmitting the urgency.
SteveF ” I expect the Justice Department to charge and try him on civil rights violations, which upon conviction will bring his combined sentence effectively to ‘life’.”
Since the prosecutor said the killing wasn’t racially motivated, I don’t think these charges are viable now.
JD Ohio,
Perhaps in a perfect world. I would consider betting my own money that there will be civil rights charges and a prosecution. Unless the first judge they get to throws it out with prejudice (I’m not holding my breath), there will be a trial. I wouldn’t want to be on that jury.
JD Ohio,
Chauvin has already made his first court appearance on the Federal civil rights charges. They include BOTH the Floyd case and a 2017 case where Chauvin pinned a 14 YO black boy to the ground with a knee to the neck. I will bet he gets at least another 10 to 20 years with no possibility of parole. Chauvin is likely never going to leave prison except in a body bag.
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Of course it is unfair to blame Chauvin exclusively…. he should never have been hired, and should long ago have been fired. That is not his fault.
There isn’t enough evidence to make this a race case, as far as I know there isn’t actually any evidence at all. He will walk on the one.
There has been a recent interesting case in Sydney, Australia which shows the relationship between vaccination and susceptibility and the delta strain. There was a party where one person unknowingly had the delta strain. There were 30 other people at the party, 4 who had had both shots (Pfizer) and one who had had their first jab of AZ, and so 25 unvaccinated. The result: 18 new cases all from the unvaccinated group.
Andrew Kennett,
Interesting. Looks like the raw chance of not getting infected is 12/30. If we make the null hypothesis that the vaccines provide no protection against the new strain, then combined odds for 5 randomly selected people to not get infected are (12/30)^5 = 0.0256. So only a 2.6% chance of that happening if the vaccines provide no protection against the new strain. The null hypothesis is rejected at greater than 95% confidence.
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So, we can be reasonably certain the vaccines provide some protection, but it would take a much bigger sample to accurately define the effectiveness against the new strain.
SteveF,
Considering the low number of cases in Australia, 0.12% confirmed cases, it’s unlikely that anyone at the party had infection acquired immunity. My guess would be that the ratio of total cases to confirmed cases is a lot lower than it is here too.
Rabbit hole…. link of information from the Town of Surfside on the collapsed building, including original construction plans and 2018 inspection documents.
https://townofsurfsidefl.gov/departments-services/town-clerk/champlain-towers-public-records-documents
I assume any inspection report will be full of CYA language so I wouldn’t over react to any particular “bombshells” in inspection reports until they are competently compared to others.
Andrew Kennett,
Can you clarify what happened? Were the 18 cases all symptomatic cases, or does the 18 cases include a combination of symptomatic and asymptomatic cases? (IOW, were all the people who attended the party tested?) If all were tested, then my calculation is correct. If the 18 were only symptomatic cases, then my calculation can be wrong.
SteveF,
My money would be that everyone else at the party was tested after an active infection was found. I think Australia does much better at contact tracing, partly because there are relatively few infections.
Contact tracing is pretty much a lost cause in the US. If requiring masks raises some people’s blood pressure, imagine the reaction when they are asked who they had seen in the last few days. You’d be lucky if they only said: “None of your business.”
Case was NSW which has (unfortunately) put a lot of reliance on contact tracing while being lockdown adverse. Now going into familiar country of gradually expanding insufficient measures until suddenly having to go into lockdown and with infection spread to other parts of Australia. Other Oz states in more recent times have gone for short, sharp lockdown to supplement contact tracing which look to be most effective and cheapest means of elimination. Quarantine-travel to NZ now suspended which certainly pisses our tourist industry.
DeWitt, why so many in US react with horror at anything that could be labelled “pro-social” (eg contact tracing) is still a mystery to me. It seems that if evidence was that masks provided excellent personal protection, then mask-wearing would be acceptable. If mask-wearing is promoted as protecting other people, then it seems to be dismissed as “virtue signalling”. Anything that seems to require cooperation (unless it is other countries doing what US wants), raises hackles.
Is this a Cold War leftover? “Pro-social” smacks of communism? Or is it mistrust of government. Individual US citizens that I know on whatever side in the cultural wars tend to come across as sociable, generous and community-minded but with these weird aversions.
Phil Scadden,
I hope Oz has the good sense to get effective vaccines into most people, and especially older people, ASAP. Unless you happen live on a smallish island, where access can be tightly controlled, other approaches are dubious.
BTW, this is the cultural issue with lock downs in the USA: https://www.deviantart.com/vekticolor/art/Don-t-Tread-on-Me-295914084
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The North American colonies revolted against the Brits. That is not a coincidence. I doubt people in Commonwealth countries understand the US founding and the culture that led to it.
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I will add: “don’t try to tell me what to do” is part and parcel of historical USA culture. It is not as strong a cultural trend as 50 years ago, but still strong outside coastal large cities.
Phil Scadden (Comment #203112): “why so many in US react with horror at anything that could be labelled “pro-social†(eg contact tracing) is still a mystery to me.”
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We don’t. Many of us (but far too few) react with horror at dictatorial actions. But surely that does not need explaining.
Phil Scadden,
Have you seen the TV series Lost? The character John Locke several times uses this line:”Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” I think it’s a pretty common attitude here. Also, the character name was purposely the same as the seventeenth century English philosopher.
SteveF,
As others have noted in a case like this in Australia everybody at the party was tested (and goes into home isolation if positive), in this case everybody has been tested twice and the some of the non-vaccinated who were negative on the first test have tested positive on their second test. The vaccinated were still negative on the second as well as first. One of the positives travelled to Melbourne before anybody was tested and there are now 2 cases in Melbourne.
The US doesn’t use contact tracing because the virus was already in widespread community transmission before it was possible to do so. The initial delay in testing was an epic blunder, but water under the bridge at this point. The local health organizations also weren’t ready for something of that scale. Once cases become large enough it becomes unmanageable. It may be the case that it would never have worked in the US (or Europe, etc.).
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Africa is now reportedly starting to get out of control.
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Get vaccinated, it’s a lot better situation than trying to contain the delta variant.
If you got a single shot of J & J, it’s likely a good idea to get a second shot of mRNA.
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Three Studies, One Result: Vaccines Point the Way Out of the Pandemic
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/health/coronavirus-vaccine-immunity.html
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“Most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters, one study found, so long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms”
“The study looked at mRNA vaccines and did not consider the vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson or AstraZeneca. Dr. Ellebedy said he expected the immune responses produced by those vaccines to be less durable than those produced by mRNA vaccines.”
“New research suggests that a mix-and-match approach may work as efficiently. People who have had a dose of the Johnson & Johnson or AstraZeneca vaccines may do well to opt for an mRNA vaccine as the second dose.”
Interesting perspectives. Thanks.
Oz is trying hard to vaccinate (so are we). Issue is both supply and logistics but at least they are able manufacture AZ. NZ wont get significant supply till end of July. Both countries are into over 65s tranche, but Oz is 16% overall population and well behind schedule.
Mostly, Oz has got pretty good at stamping Covid out and keeping it out despite being a rather large island. I would expect them to eliminate within a few weeks hopefully.
DeWitt, not much of TV watcher so unfamiliar with Lost. However, if the reference is to Lockean liberty, then what constitutes the Lockean “commonwealth” within the USA? (ie from Locke “In political society, liberty consists of being under no other lawmaking power except that established by consent in the commonwealth.”)
â€Don’t tell me what I can’t do.†seems to be something specifically rejected by Locke.
Tom Scharf (Comment #203119): “If you got a single shot of J & J, it’s likely a good idea to get a second shot of mRNA.”
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There is absolutely no evidence for that.
Once I get a single shot of J&J I find it best to stick with J&J for the rest of the night. But that’s just personal preference for me…
There’s not much data on J&J because there isn’t much data. It just hasn’t been studied nearly as much as the others. It appears to be on par with AZ. A single shot of J&J seems to be more or less on par with a single mRNA shot, which is fairly weak against the latest variants. You can wait around to see if anyone definitely proves it either way, or you can get a second mRNA shot which would appear to be low risk. YMMV.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/06/will-the-j-and-j-vaccine-need-a-boost-against-delta.html
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https://www.businessinsider.com/expert-johnson-vaccine-extra-shot-pfizer-moderna-delta-variant-2021-6
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It’s mostly speculation and reading tea leaves. Every 2 shot regimen shows definitive improvement after second shot.
Mandatory vaccinating for nursing home staff.
Australia.
Expect we will lose a lot of nursing staff who will opt out.
Much better to vaccinate mandatory all over 65 and forget about it otherwise.
Is it 80% of deaths over 65?
Not sure.
Angech, the problematic bit is that elderly having a no. of contraindications for vaccination (remember fuss about this in UK), and poorer development on antibodies. I know a lot of resthomes require staff to have flu vaccination. It is hardly new territory.
Funny old world Phil.
I remember a lot of talk about natural T -cell immunity before the vaccines got going.
Very quiet now everyone is getting the proper immune system stimulation.
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Vaccinations are still contentious as regards liability.
The amounts given are generally enough to stir an efficient immune response 10 times over but medicos still want to give a second dose ( overkill) to “ boost the immune system.
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yet when there is not enough to go around, or a problem like astra Zeneca, all of a sudden there is talk of giving a second or third different type of vaccine being Ok.
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I recall saying that the good thing about the 15 or so good candidates going around that it would provide extra protection if there was some resistance to one type of vaccine.
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The elderly have a very high risk of dying from Covid. The best way to protect all of them is to mandate vaccination where possible to all those at risk and have waivers signed by those who refuse to take the vaccine.
Contraindications are fairly rubbery when the option is death or severed disease.
Young people ( who work in nursing homes) are not going to volunteer when they are not at risk and will seek jobs elsewhere if mandated.
On the J&J
https://timesofsandiego.com/health/2021/06/27/experts-consider-if-recipients-of-jj-covid-vaccine-need-booster-as-delta-variant-takes-hold/
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It looks like some people are interpreting “no evidence exists either way” for J&J while we do have evidence from mRNA shots to mean they should get the mRNA shot. There is no evidence for J&J protecting against Delta variant because J&J wasn’t used in the UK or Israel where the Delta variant exists. So it’s just untested.
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I figures I’ll eventually get a booster. But I can wait to see if we get evidenced J&J doesn’t work or until they have boosters that have spikes from several variants.
angech,
A significant portion of the population does appear to have considerable resistance to infection. I spoke with my wife’s cousin last week about her husband getting covid-19. She was obviously exposed to covid (kissing and all that up to him becoming symptomatic), and cared for her husband at home with no mask or gloves when he was moderately sick (no hospitalization). Yet even though tested multiple times, she was always negative. Her experience is not at all unusual, although it is impossible to say if she may have had an earlier asymptomatic case she was unaware of. Many married couples on the Diamond Princess had one spouse contract the virus and the other not, even though they were quarantined together in small cabins. I expect there will be publications about ‘natural resistance’, where it came from, and yes, even whether T-cells are involved.
I posted a link a while back on how antibody testing missed a lot of cases. Part of it was that a lot of the antibody tests available weren’t very good. But that isn’t the whole explanation. There was another paper that looked at how fast antibody titer decreased over time after infection or vaccination. The authors used that to project how long immunity would last. But, AFAICT, there is no evidence that low antibody titer means low immunity. People who were infected 15 or 16 months ago do not appear to be getting reinfected at an increasing rate. That would be headline news if it were happening.
From what I’ve seen is that the surge in the UK from the Delta variant is still mostly young, unvaccinated people, not reinfections. There will be reinfections of both previously infected and vaccinated individuals, but we still have no evidence that a booster shot would make things better.
That leaves T and B cells as the first responders to infection in most people. But there are no simple tests for that as far as I know.
Worldometers.com has the UK yesterday with nearly 23,000 new cases, but only 3 new deaths and 257 serious cases. For comparison, the US had almost 11,000 new cases and nearly 4,000 serious cases and 137 deaths.
lucia (Comment #203128): “There is no evidence for J&J protecting against Delta variant because J&J wasn’t used in the UK or Israel where the Delta variant exists. So it’s just untested.”
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Tom Scharf (Comment #203124): “There’s not much data on J&J because there isn’t much data.”
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I think lucia has it right. It is not a case of less data than we might like; it is a case of no data. Zero. Zilch.
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Tom Scharf: “A single shot of J&J seems to be more or less on par with a single mRNA shot, which is fairly weak against the latest variants. You can wait around to see if anyone definitely proves it either way, or you can get a second mRNA shot which would appear to be low risk … It’s mostly speculation and reading tea leaves. Every 2 shot regimen shows definitive improvement after second shot.”
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The baseless speculation is coming from the usual suspects who at this point have zero credibility. The same people who shut down treatment with hydroxychloroquine on the grounds that there was no rigorous double blind study that was allowed to go to completion. The same people who advocated hugely damaging lockdowns on the basis of zero evidence. The same people who forced us into masks in spite of evidence that masks don’t work. The same people who have been irresponsibly pushing vaccines on everyone regardless of age, health, and immune status. The same people who short circuited the normal approval process and then failed to set up a proper system for monitoring adverse effects. The same people who have huge conflicts of interest as regards the vaccines.
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Note that there has been no meaningful testing of the vaccines on those already infected. No meaningful testing on children. No meaningful testing of mix and match. Yet they are advocating mass use of an experimental medical treatment in ways that have not been properly tested.
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No wonder many people are suspicious. The experts are not just planting the seeds of conspiracy theories; they are carefully fertilizing and watering them so that they grow strong and tall.
SteveF (Comment #203129),
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Good point about preexisting resistance. Most people in the same household as an infected person do not get infected. That suggests the virus is not all that transmissible. Contact tracing shows that most cases can not be traced, suggesting that transmission was due to casual contact. That suggests that the virus is hugely transmissible. A plain contradiction.
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Preexisting resistance could help explain the contradiction. Another possibility is that the virus is only easily transmitted under a narrow set of environmental conditions. The seasonal patterns suggest that is at least partly true.
I do not much care if my J&J vaccine protects me from infection, whether by the delta variant or by some other variant. I only really care if it keeps me from getting seriously ill.
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The claim with the mRNA vaccines last fall was that they do even better at preventing serious illness than infection. The J&J vaccine was less effective at preventing infection, but still highly effective at preventing serious illness. The delta variant seems to be better at infecting people, but causes milder illness. So at this point I see no cause for concern.
Mike M.,
And that claim was based on what data? IMO, that was an assertion without evidence to spur vaccination. Last fall there were more than ten million confirmed cases in the US alone and about sixty million globally. But there were only 22,000 vaccine recipients in the Pfizer trial and about the same in the Moderna trial.
We know that transmission is highly inhomogeneous. It’s likely that up to 80% of those known to be infected don’t infect anyone else. The superspreaders, OTOH, can infect 50 people or more. The little diagrams that looked like the mousetrap and ping pong balls used to demonstrate a chain reaction with one person infecting three people and those three people each infecting three people were not at all relevant to how things worked in the real world.
AZ and J&J are both viral vector vaccines, and they had comparable levels of antibody production relative to mRNA vaccines. Their efficacies during testing were similar. This is a broad comparison, there are differences. The biggest problem with J&J is its unknown real world performance, but it isn’t a stretch to bet that it will be closer to AZ than mRNA vaccines. It may be the case that it is equally effective against severe disease and death, but I would look to one shot AZ test data as the best source.
https://www.nationaljewish.org/patients-visitors/patient-info/important-updates/coronavirus-information-and-resources/covid-19-vaccines/vaccine-articles/side-by-side-comparison-covid-19-vaccine
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So far the variants are just more transmissive and do not appear to cause more disease and death * per infection *. They are only more dangerous because you are more likely to catch them. mRNA was shown to be 80% effective against original covid with one shot, but only around 30% effective against the delta variant for one shot.
They don’t really know yet (or ever?) but the current thinking is that issues with some spouses getting it and others not getting it has to do with over dispersion, some sick patients are much more likely to transmit it then others. There appears to be huge differences. It’s pretty sad, SAD!, that we don’t have a firm grasp on this data at this time.
Tom Scharf,
And how long after a single shot? My understanding is that effectiveness continues to increase over time after one shot. Maybe it never gets as high as two shots, but do we actually know? Weren’t there a lot of one shot recipients in the UK? Have they all received a second shot? I don’t know. Delta is surging in the UK, but as far as I know it’s mostly infecting young, unvaccinated individuals, not the one shot mRNA vaccinated. That information should be out there if anyone with access would bother to look. I’m not holding my breath.
The biggest problem with comparing one shot and two shot regimens is that the one shot data is usually from a couple weeks before a person getting a second shot. There is reason to believe that one shot efficacy will increase over time even without a second shot. I think there is very little long term data comparing people who totally skipped their second shot.
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EDIT: DeWitt: Our posts crossed. Most of the UK data is going to be for AZ I think.
DeWitt,
“Delta is surging in the UK, but as far as I know it’s mostly infecting young, unvaccinated individuals, not the one shot mRNA vaccinated. That information should be out there if anyone with access would bother to look. I’m not holding my breath.”
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Stories about the end of the pandemic are never going to be covered…. even while covid deaths have fallen to 3% or less of total daily deaths, and will continue to fall.
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In places like the USA and the UK (with both high total infections and high vaccination rates) the pandemic is all over but the shouting…. shouting mostly by people who don’t want the pandemic to end (either consciously or not)…. journalists looking for scary stories of doom, “public health experts” who will soon return to well deserved obscurity, lefty governors forced to repeal “emergency” regulations issued by fiat and instead govern with consent of their legislatures…. and their voters, and of course Democrats in Congress wanting to use the pandemic as an excuse to institute permanent leftist policies.
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But in spite of the shouting, the pandemic will end, and soon.
Tom Scharf,
“.. but the current thinking is that issues with some spouses getting it and others not getting it has to do with over dispersion, some sick patients are much more likely to transmit it then others.”
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Sure, but I personally know of at least three families where the virus was passed from one person to some of the people in the household, but not others….. and the “not others” twice included a husband or wife with by far the greatest exposure. My bet is that there is a wide range of susceptibility. Heck, we know for sure that most kids are more resistant than adults, so it would surprise me if there were not a range of susceptibility within the adult population.
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No doubt there is over dispersion as well, but that doesn’t itself explain the observations within households.
SteveF (Comment #203129)
“angech,
A significant portion of the population does appear to have considerable resistance to infection”
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An interesting observation.
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Some comments.
Covid as a life threatening disease of old people only [OK mainly], does not cause a problem to many people ie they appear immune or have resistance is more likely a result of older people having more ACE receptors hence being innately sensitive to catching the virus [it likes them].
It is not that children and young people have stronger or more robust immune systems.
They just do not take up the viral load as avidly as older people.
There may also be a problem with the antibodies produced to this virus also attacking our own bodies [auto immune response] which might explain the clotting syndromes expressed in the disease in severe cases and the clotting problems [rare] seen in the vaccine.
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We have had an interesting super spreader event with 30 people at a party, 6 were vaccinated health people, ? nurses.The 24 people unvaccinated all got it, so no resistance 24 out of 24. The 6 vaccinated people had no infection.
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To me this suggests more that catching the infection is more a combination of age , load and infectivity of the strain of virus.
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Analogous to your point in a Flu season I would regularly have patients who saw no need in having a Flu shot as they “never catch the Flu”.
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Even in a bad year it would be only 5% of people who would catch a Flu in any one year. This might be due to having had previous infections with residual antibody levels that helped moderate or stop noticeable disease.
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I for one would not count on natural immunity if I had to mix with a covid positive person for any length of time.
1. Some spouses are more infectious than others
2. Some spouses will be asymptomatically infected
3. Some spouses had less contact during the infectious period
4. Some spouses may have had a previous asymptomatic infection
5. Some spouses have better and worse immune systems
6. Sometime you just get lucky or unlucky with environmental conditions, etc.
7. Some spouses may have pre-existing natural immunity(?). I haven’t seen much info on this theory.
I think sorting this out is a big mess given their inability to do controlled experiments. Thus, we have nothing but speculation with varying degrees of validity.
angech,
“I for one would not count on natural immunity if I had to mix with a covid positive person for any length of time.”
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I got vaccinated as soon as it became available. Even if a significant fraction of people do have some resistance, you can’t know if you are one of the lucky ones. The risk for someone my age is simply too great to not be vaccinated (>70 and no other health issues, roughly 10% to 12% death rate for symptomatic illness).
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The flu vaccine is an interesting subject. I got the “extra-strong-for-old-people” dose two years back, and I was sick (with strong flu symptoms) for about 24 hours…. remarkably unpleasant. It is not clear to me if that is a good trade-off since the chance of getting the flu in any season is under 10%. I guess it depends on how the risk of death from flu increases with age, something I have not seen published.
Turns out there is an available flu risk vs age study:
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/6/7/ofz225/5510081
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Across multiple flu seasons, the risk of hospitalization due to flu in the 65 to 74 age group is ~0.3% per year, and the risk of death about 3.8% of those hospitalized. So annual risk of death from influenza of a little over 1 in 9,000, in that age group, while the overall risk of death in that age group is about 1 in 40 per year. Since the expected remaining lifetime in that age group is ~ 5300 days, flu decreases expected lifetime by about 0.6 day per year for the 65 to 74 age group. If the flu vaccine is 50% effective, then the benefit of the vaccine is an increase in expected lifetime of about 0.3 day per vaccination.
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If those numbers are accurate, then a day of for-sure flu symptoms following vaccination increases expected lifetime by 0.3 day. That makes the vaccine look a lot less attractive to me.
MikeM
Citation? I haven’t heard this. So it would be interesting to read more.
SteveF, I have never taken a flu jab because I thought it would prolong my life. To me, every day spent enduring the flu feels like a day out of my life, certainly a quality day out of my life. With the risks of adverse effects very low (especially if I had no previous adverse reaction), getting the jab feels like a no brainer. Most workplaces offer it free because cost pays for it self in reduced sick leave.
Mike M. Also interested in your citations because it appears that contrary evidence exists.
From UK
“An analysis of 38,805 sequenced cases in England revealed that the Delta variant was associated with a 2.61 times higher risk of hospitalisation within 14 days of specimen date than the Alpha variant. There was a 1.67 times higher risk of A&E care within 14 days. These figures take into account factors such as age, sex, ethnicity, area of residence and vaccination status.”
Mike M. “Many of us (but far too few) react with horror at dictatorial actions.”
Actually, this is the crux that I am interested in. What, in your opinion, constitutes “dictatorial action” as opposed to the actions of “lawmaking power established by consent in the commonwealth” (which I would have thought was Congress).
Phil Scadden,
“With the risks of adverse effects very low (especially if I had no previous adverse reaction), getting the jab feels like a no brainer.”
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The whole point of my post was that having a day “lost” to flu symptoms (which is what happened with my last vaccination) reduces the benefit of the vaccination. If you have a 5% chance of 10 miserable days (with the flu), and the vaccination cuts that in half (a 2.5% chance of 10 miserable days), and you ALSO suffer for a day from the vaccination (as I have) then a flu vaccination is not a great deal. 100% certainty of one miserable day versus 0.025 * 10 = 0.25 miserable day. I personally will suffer (on average) 4 times more with the vaccination. That is why I considered the total life loss calculation.
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Unlike covid-19 vaccinations (which are clearly beneficial and saves lives), flu vaccinations are marginal at best. Maybe the m-RNA vaccines, adapted to flu, will improve that situation. Maybe the m-RNA vaccines (adapted to rhinovirus) will improve common colds as well.
lucia (Comment #203146): “Citation? I haven’t heard this. So it would be interesting to read more.”
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Of course you have not heard it. It does not fit the narrative.
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My source is the experts interviewed on Fox News. It is not so much that I trust them, as that I distrust them less than Fauci and his ilk. This sounds very like what those experts said: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/14/delta-variant-covid-symptoms-include-headaches-sore-throat-and-runny-nose
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And there are the UK numbers posted by DeWitt upthread. Here is some detailed data from the UK:
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-the-delta-deception-new-covid-variant-might-be-less-deadly#toggle-gdpr
Interestingly, it looks like like the delta variant is much worse news for the vaccinated than the unvaccinated (Table 4). I suspect that is selection bias; vaccinated people who get sick are likely to be people who are at grave risk from any infection.
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Of course, there is a big caveat. The data from Horowitz (second link) are not age adjusted. So I don’t really know.
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There is a standard claim in epidemiology that as a virus evolves it becomes more contagious and less deadly. The first is obvious, but I have yet to see either a convincing reason or convincing evidence for the second.
Phil Scadden (Comment #203149): “What, in your opinion, constitutes “dictatorial action†as opposed to the actions of “lawmaking power established by consent in the commonwealth†(which I would have thought was Congress).”
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Off the top of my head: Governors claiming that emergency powers last beyond the next meeting of the legislature. Governors vetoing attempts by legislatures to reign in those emergency powers. Governors applying emergency powers capriciously. Governors applying emergency powers in a way that favors the powerful and disadvantages the less powerful. Governors blatantly violating fundamental rights, such as free exercise of religion and freedom of speech, in a discriminatory manner. Governors damaging children’s futures by closing schools in contradiction of scientific evidence.
SteveF,
So do you get the regular flu shot, or just skip it altogether?
Last year I went for my shot a few days after my 65th birthday. They were going to give me the senior version. I recalled stories about bad reactions, reflected that a week earlier they would have given me the normal shot, and made a snap judgement to get the normal shot. Haven’t decided what to do this year.
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There is a book out on vaccines by Peter Gotzsche, reviewed here: https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/05/22/vaccines-truth-lies-and-controversy/
I have not read the book. The review says that Gotzsche demolishes the anti-vaxers then moves on to the flu vaccine:
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The most problematic vaccine seems to be HPV.
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The book is pre-covid.
Well I could agree with first 3 as potential breach of “lawmaking power established by consent in the commonwealth” but it sounds like you want a different constitution for your lawmaking power.
I am anti any concentration of power to a single person as I think rule of democratically elected legislature better represents the “commonwealth” of Locke. It appears to be a fundamental flaw in constitution.
Just to make sure I understand: You do not think that existing constituted powers of governors are what the bulk of the people would consider as an acceptable law-making power.
SteveF. ok, understood. I might agree if I had adverse reactions too.
Phil Scadden (Comment #203154): “Just to make sure I understand: You do not think that existing constituted powers of governors are what the bulk of the people would consider as an acceptable law-making power.”
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I don’t know what you mean by “the bulk of the people” and I don’t know what they think.
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I do think that the powers claimed by many governors are incompatible with democracy and/or Republican government.
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I know that voters in Pennsylvania have amended their state constitution to reign in their governor’s emergency power. In Michigan and New Mexico (maybe other states as well), governors have blocked legislative attempts to reign in their powers. In Wisconsin, the state supreme court struck down the powers claimed by the governor. I think that a number of state legislatures have restricted their governors emergency powers, but I can not list them off hand. And it seems there are states where enough people are OK with extreme gubernatorial power grabs.
SteveF
“The flu vaccine is an interesting subject. I got the “extra-strong-for-old-people†dose two years back, and I was sick (with strong flu symptoms) for about 24 hours…. remarkably unpleasant.â€
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I was coerced by my laziness and peer pressure into having the extra strong flu ax this year.
Could not be bothered coming back to get the normal dose.
Could not talk the doctor into it .
Gov records the vaccination and would be a black mark for them.
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I used to have a half shot normal fluvax for many years and only caught the flu once despite continual exposure.
The double dose for elderly is unwarranted.
Will buy my own normal dose next year.
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Like your 0.3 of a day risk.
However if you get it I am sure it will last a lot longer than 0.3 for that individual and be a lot nastier than the jab.
Other point is there ar usually 3 variants most years they only change 1 so you end up having one of the same strains the same 3 years in a row instead of once.
Mike M. So if the State legislature has passed the same restrictions, then they might not be your choice, but would regard them as a lawful restriction on your liberty and comply?
Phil Scadden,
It’s not quite that simple. The state legislature’s authority is not absolute either. We don’t have a parliamentary government at the state or federal level. Any law passed must be compatible with both the State and US Constitutions. So a law passed by a state legislature and either signed or at least not vetoed by the state governor that, for example, had a disproportionate effect on religious activities compared to similar non-religious activities would likely be enjoined by the courts as a violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. That happened last year in, as I remember, New York and California.
A friend of mine just returned from two weeks in Provence. He said it was nice being one of the few tourists there. And, it not being Paris, everyone was very friendly. But more interesting is he said that a form from your doctor that you had a confirmed case of COVID-19 more than 30 days before was just as good as a vaccination certificate to get back into the US. Needless to say, I have seen or read nothing about this in the MSM. You still needed a recent negative test to get on the plane, up to 72 hours before for a PCR test or 48 hours for an antigen test. You could get an antigen test at a lot of places and get the results in fifteen minutes.
He said the airlines were quite picky about the time since having the test. There were people not allowed to board on his flight because their test result had expired, I forget whether it was coming or going.
Phil Scadden (Comment #203158): “So if the State legislature has passed the same restrictions, then they might not be your choice, but would regard them as a lawful restriction on your liberty …”
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Yes, provided they are not unconstitutional (as DeWitt pointed out). I would content myself with voting against the SOBs in the next election.
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“and comply?”
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I complied even with the garbage stuff.
DeWitt, I am only interested in fully lawful restrictions. My curiosity is about cultural attitudes to limitations on personal liberty that are enacted by powers equivalent to Locke’s commonwealth. Do you think that people who are bitterly resentful of this believe that the constitution gives too much power to government (to my mind, it gives way too much power to the president but that is another discussion), or, like Mike, that granted powers are being subverted and abused. In particular, that executive powers need to be restrained by the legislature (something I would applaud).
Phil Scadden (Comment #203162): “Do you think that people who are bitterly resentful of this believe that the constitution gives too much power to government … or, like Mike, that granted powers are being subverted and abused. ”
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I don’t think it is one or the other; there is a continuum, with more than one dimension. In March 2020, people saw the situation as an emergency and so accepted the exercise of emergency powers. There was, of course, criticism of this or that decision, but I don’t think that people were “bitterly resentful” of anything.
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But as time went on, the situation was no longer an emergency. That is true even if you think the situation was extremely dire. An emergency is an unexpected situation that requires immediate action; a continuing situation can be neither unexpected nor in need of immediate action.
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Furthermore, many authorities often seemed drunk on power, which they often exercised in a petty manner. And the restrictions ignored changing knowledge, most egregiously in keeping schools closed long after the evidence showed that was both destructive and unnecessary. And those in power stoked exaggerated fears in order to keep people in line. That is an abuse of power in itself.
MikeM
I think you are likely right. I have a friend who is clearly totally anti-mask, anti-vaxx and so on. It’s all over her facebook. But in-the-meat world, she complies. Doesn’t start arguments and so on.
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Americans do have a habit of expressing their disagreement with the government. It is considered a right to do so and many are very vocal. Most aren’t storming government buildings.
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Possibly more to the point: continuuing situations afford time for legislators to debate and act. State governors, mayors and so on are granted emergency powers to deal with situations where there is insufficient time for legislatures to act. The legislators chosing to not act is not a reason for the governor to usurp power and take control beyond what is granted in whatever act governs their emergency powers.
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Because of Covid some state legislators are tightening up language and schedules to clarify the situations during which Governors can exert emergency control.
I saw that you could attend Wimbledon if you had recovered from COVID-19, but only if you had COVID in the last six months. That seems arbitrary, to say the least. I’ve seen zero evidence that infection acquired immunity only last six months and there seems to be lots of evidence that it lasts much, much longer. I’m pretty sure it would be headline news if people who were infected in, say, April or May, 2020 were being reinfected at a high rate.
We had a high rise condo nearly collapse in Sarasota. It took 10 years of engineering and financial wrangling but the place is reopening. https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/home-and-real-estate/an-unlikely-heroine-steps-in-to-save-crumbling-dolphin-tower
Mike M,
“So do you get the regular flu shot, or just skip it altogether?”
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Since there was basically no flu season in 2020, I just skipped. This year (probably in October), I will get the weaker vaccination. I most definitely do not want the higher dose that makes me sick for a day.
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My guess is that international travel restrictions will make the 2021 flu season milder/weaker than normal.
Phil Scadden,
“My curiosity is about cultural attitudes to limitations on personal liberty that are enacted by powers equivalent to Locke’s commonwealth.”
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Locke’s commonwealth seems less limited in what government can reasonably do than the republic described by the USA constitution. The biggest covid-19 issues are related to governors resisting the clear will of their respective state legislatures, fighting all limitations on the governor’s own “emergency powers” in court, as well as via veto of legislation which would limit their emergency powers.
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The fundamental issue is: who controls the behavior of the individual? Democrat governors (all of the left) want pretty much complete “emergency” control over personal behaviors. This is utterly unacceptable to people who consider themselves “libertarian” or “conservative”. And there is little room for compromise; where conservative legislatures succeeded (via state courts) in blocking the covid-19 dictates of “progressive” governors, the progressive governors then refused to consider compromise with the legislature.
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Such is the depth of the political divide in the USA.
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FWIW, It seems to me very likely the 2022 election will hand control of the House of Representatives to Republicans and probably the Senate as well. Just another consequence of the left refusing substantive compromise. The left always over-reaches.
Steve – Locke didnt specify any form of government. I think that the US constitution could be construed as the form of law-making power “established by consent in the commonwealth”. The key to what a government can reasonably do within a Lockean framework is in that phrase. To my mind, “the consent of the commonwealth” could only be obtained by a democratic process.
At state level, it seems pretty strange to me that a governor could veto a majority decision of legislature.
Fun piece of advice to GOP here – https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
Suggests success of Trumpism was about war on “Upper Social Class” (not economic class) defined as:
“people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won’t even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, “expertise”, mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, “fast food”, SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too”
His suggested agenda for GOP is:
War on College (or college priviledge)
War on Experts
War on Upper Class media (eg NYT)
War on Wokeness
Seems to me that many commentators here would agree?
Phil Scadden,
Chick-Fil-A sandwiches are really good by the way.
Reality TV, not so great.
I was married at 24.
Cats are better than children. 🙂
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I’m not sure that’s what Trumpism was about.
There has been a fair amount of “My side gets to speak, your views are unspeakable” on the part of certain contingents on the left.
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I think there was an element of people liking that he would say…. whatever. To some extent he seemed to put a stake in the ground saying: Look. I get to speak too!
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Of course, the problem was then he would really, truly say…. whatever. It was often babble. ( Biden babbles but in a different way.)
Phil,
Democrat governors routinely block action by their legislatures via vetos of legislation. The also routinely fight those legislatures in state courts. There is a deep divide in what the left and right believe is the proper roll and scope of government.
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I think a big part of support for Trump (and no doubt the next Republican candidate for president) is that progressive Democrats do not act in the interests of their fellow citizens…. they do not even accept the legitimacy of the US constitution, and work actively to subvert the limitations the constitution places on government action, and ignore laws they disagree with. They do not consider that a citizen should have any more rights and privileges in the USA than someone from Guatemala who enters the country unlawfully. This can be seen most clearly in the Biden administration’s Southern border policies: illegal entry has exploded, and the Biden administration will not deport most illegal entrants, even if caught upon entry. Instead, they talk about eliminating the ‘root cause’ of illegal entry: Make every other country as wealthy as the USA, and then people will stop coming to the States. Guatemalans are just as important as US citizens….. no real distinction. The result: those least able to compete against cheap labor (most often cash pay with no taxes taken) suffer, while the elite get their lawns maintained for cheap. The bottom line message is clear: the Constitution and existing laws are ignored when that is politically convenient, because they are not considered morally legitimate. That is why I think the next election will hand control of Congress to Republicans.
Phil Scadden (Comment #203169): “To my mind, “the consent of the commonwealth†could only be obtained by a democratic process. … At state level, it seems pretty strange to me that a governor could veto a majority decision of legislature.”
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The U.S. system is based on restraining government. It is a republic, not a democracy. The Founders well understood that democracy can be consistent with tyranny. So the will of the majority is necessary but not sufficient. Hence, strict constitutional limits on government power, bicameral legislatures, executive veto, judicial review.
SteveF wrote: “That is why I think the next election will hand control of Congress to Republicans.”
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Well, we’ll see. As cynical as I am, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the dems consolidate power in 2022, while the MSM cries about “voter suppression” in the holdouts.
Phil Scadden (Comment #203170): “Fun piece of advice to GOP here – https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
Suggests success of Trumpism was about war on Upper Social Class”.
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That author actually seems to get a lot right, especially as regards his description of the “upper social class” (a.k.a., “elites”, “establishment”, “ruling class”, “cosmopolitan class”, “clerisy”, there is no really good term, hence there are many). He certainly seems more self-aware than most of his ilk.
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I must admit that I only skimmed the piece. I found his vaguely derisory tone to be incompatible with giving a long piece the attention that it likely deserves.
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His TDS keeps him from seeing that Trump, and many Republicans, are actually way ahead of him.
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But his big error is in thinking that Trump is about war on the ruling class. Exactly backwards. The ruling class has been waging war on the people for a long time. Trump is about fighting back.
Phil,
From your link:
Right. I read that far, and quit reading. Piss off. That’s not a basis for a serious conversation.
The irony being that democrats have no “coherent interesting message” beyond “Republicans evil”. They are so devoid of an interesting coherent message they’re trying to remove civil rights in the name of civil rights. Or how about supporting “women’s rights” and then championing biological males in women’s sports or claiming to be against racism and being the most despicable racists you’re ever likely to see in the media?
Lucia,
“Cats are better than children.”
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Cheaper and easier? Yes. Better? That is a value judgement which depends a great deal on your world view. One thing is certain: children have more potential.
SteveF,
Kids do have more potential. 🙂
I agree what is “better” is a value judgement and an opinion .
An example of too much authoritarianism is mandating vaccinations (or effectively mandating them by restricting behaviors for those who choose not to) that are currently under EUA. There are many people in the US who would do this if they believe they had the votes to do so. It isn’t a matter of how many people agree, it is a matter of forcing people to put potentially dangerous drugs into their body at a point of a gun.
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Note that the most egregious of these do-gooders aren’t particularly interested in first finding out if they can convince enough people by debate to get to the end result, they just want to mandate the result by government edict.
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I wish everyone would get vaccinated, and I think the cajoling and debate phase has come up short. I would rather pay the price of some innocent people dying by their own decisions and a lower number of people dying because others don’t get vaccinated before I would hand the power to mandate vaccinations to a group in power. I just don’t trust the people in government enough to do the right thing, they are only partially motivated to do the right thing and partially motivated by clinging to power by doing the will of a subset of the people.
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The fundamental issue comes down to how much you trust the people in power to do the right thing as it pertains to your value system. I want power restricted to prevent people abusing this process and I will live with the known drawbacks of this.
I read that formerly SSC post a long time ago. It is mostly reasonable, basically “attack the other side at their weakest pointsâ€. Both the left and right are not very good at herding their cats of self destructive policy from the extremists. Raid the capital! Defund the police! I find the entire process of painting the opposing side with a broad brush of their extremists rather tedious and repetitive. Crazy people vote for one side or the other. Get over it. Once it become a real policy platform then it’s worth discussing.
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A valid point is a preference of being ruled by incompetents who share your values rather than self declared competent elites who disdain you. I’ll take the prior. What has been particularly destructive to elite governance is that they virtue signal between each other on how much they disdain the rubes, and now define “democracy” as themselves being in power.
Tom wrote: “I find the entire process of painting the opposing side with a broad brush of their extremists rather tedious and repetitive.”
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I’d agree if not for the fact both sides condemn the crazies on one side (with the definition of “crazy” becoming increasingly normal), whilst the crazies on the other get a pass, if not a pat on the back, from their side. There is a distinct lack of quid pro quo that is driving extremism mainstream, on one side by tacit acceptance, and on the other by hypocritical attack.
Mark, not sure what you would expect from a self-confessed upper social class doing the writing. However, what follows is more interesting, especially the agenda at bottom.
“The U.S. system is based on restraining government. It is a republic, not a democracy. The Founders well understood that democracy can be consistent with tyranny. So the will of the majority is necessary but not sufficient.”
Mike M – I get the desire for constitutional restraints on what a majority can vote for. But when you talk about “restraining government”, I DONT get the idea that power of single person (governor), is able to veto, run rough-shod, over the constitutional desires of the majority in the legislature. To my mind, if you are going to one person a lot of power, then restraining that power by wishes of the legislature would be an important check.
I am much happier living in the tyranny of the majority than in the tyranny of a very small minority.
SteveF, do you have evidence that Republican majorities have been more willing to compromise than Democratic majorities? I looked for analysis but could find any. I did find survey https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/19/partisans-say-respect-and-compromise-are-important-in-politics-particularly-from-their-opponents/ which suggests republican voters slightly less happy with compromise than Democrats but difference is small.
Phil Scadden (Comment #203184): “I DONT get the idea that power of single person (governor), is able to veto, run rough-shod, over the constitutional desires of the majority in the legislature.”
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I don’t see how stopping a temporary majority from making a change is “running rough-shod” over anyone. If the people really want the change, it would be only a temporary delay. Possibly only very temporary, since legislative super majorities can override a veto.
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Governors using their veto power to retain emergency powers is a consequence of past legislatures foolishly enacting those ill-considered powers.
Oh, I don’t expect anything. Not my problem, I won’t read him.
Shrug.
Legislatures typically have the power to override an administrative veto, with something like a 2/3 super majority vote. Although these systems are imperfect they are fairly well thought out. Sometimes you need fast authoritative emergency action, but usually you want slow grinding use of government authority only where there is a clear mandate for change.
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Simple majority rule has some serious drawbacks in an evenly split two party system.
Phil
The governor is voted in by a statewide majority. So he represents every voter in the state.
Each legislator by a smaller number. They they represent only a fraction.
But the main thing is our system is designed to have things happen more slowly unless they are very popular. As there is “sausage making” and there are deals, I think slowing things is, on the balance, better. Sometimes the deals contains individual items that do not themselves have majority support. These are put in a pot of other popular things. Vetos sometimes block these things.
mark bofill,
“Not my problem, I won’t read him.”
Not mine either. When an author declares himself an arrogant a$$hole in the first paragraph, I stop reading. It is never worth reading the tripe such people write.
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Mike M,
Yes, many legislators simply could not imagine the kinds and durations of the many “emergency public health measures” put in place by governors…. mostly progressive governors. Locking the entire population in their homes? Indefinitely? Come on! That’s more Cuba than the USA. The laws allowing broad rule over all activity in a state simply by declaring a health emergency, according to the governor’s personal whim, were indeed ill considered.
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That won’t happen again. Some states have already tried to severely limit the kinds and (especially) duration of emergency health rules a governor can issue without legislative agreement. I have no doubt that the next pandemic, if there is one, will lead to very different ’emergency rules’ in most places than the absurd rules we have seen over the past 16 months. Power corrupts, absolute pandemic power corrupts absolutely. Count on several of those who were absolutely corrupted being thrown out of office in their next election.
As I was saying above, the extremists on one side are tacitly accepted. Can you imagine someone boarding a school bus and threatening children being handed a government job and accusing others of extremism? This is Biden’s America.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWthJqgkWvk
That particular article has some less than obvious statements that are meant more as satire. This is the same guy who wrote this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
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He’s is not a Trump fan, but he is one of the few who makes an effort to at least understand Trump fans with a much more charitable interpretation of their views than most. I’ve posted this link before, but for anyone who hasn’t read it, this is another long read of his on group social dynamics that was rather enlightening I thought. It’s partly a biting critique on virtue signalers, somehow those who profess tolerance the loudest manage to disavow half of the population with great emotion.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
It’s a judgment call on whether covid emergency measures were correct or not in each state, but it is clear that emergency measures would be needed if covid was much more deadly or wasn’t sparing children. These measures are wise to have, but YMMV when deciding when they are necessary.
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Locking down hard immediately might prevent the initial widespread community transmission, locking down hard after that might stop a week or two of exponential increase. Since there are so many unknowns it is really hard to get right, and if the entire US doesn’t act in unison then they become less effective. But hyperactive lockdowns every time a SARs like virus creeps up would also be unwarranted. We have not locked down before and everything was fine, and we didn’t lock down early with covid and it wasn’t so fine. I don’t think it is a very manageable problem, hindsight sure helps though.
The SC ruled on a very important case: AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY FOUNDATION v. BONTA, where the State of California forced non-profits of all kinds to disclose each year to the state the names of all major donors. Donor names were often ‘inadvertently’ disclosed publicly… surprisingly enough…..when the organization was aligned with the right, whereupon major donors to those organizations were subjected to “social pressure” and other abuse. The purpose of the disclosure requirement appeared to be little more than a means to allow left leaning organizations to go after all who contributed to things the left disagrees with. California’s fig-leaf defense was that they needed to know donor names to monitor corruption at non-profits. The Ninth Circuit twice reversed district courts that had found the disclosure requirements unconstitutional. As is becoming a frequent theme, the SC reversed the Ninth Circuit, and put a permanent end to this politically motivated coercion. They dismissed the fig-leaf defense by noting there was zero evidence donor names had ever been used by the state to investigate corruption, but that donor names had been routinely disclosed. I think it is an important first amendment victory.
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I note that this kind of coercion is only a problem in extreme left states like California; you know, the ones that don’t think the Constitution is legitimate.
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Seems the SC held back most of the 6/3 conservative/liberal rulings until the end of the term. In addition to Americans for Prosperity, there were two or three others with the same 6/3 split.
Tom Scharf (Comment #203193): “It’s a judgment call on whether covid emergency measures were correct or not in each state, but it is clear that emergency measures would be needed if covid was much more deadly or wasn’t sparing children. These measures are wise to have, but YMMV when deciding when they are necessary.”
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I think that almost everyone agrees with that. The issue is at what point the governor’s judgement has to yield to the legislature’s. I would say a month or two, at most. Definitely not a year plus.
FWIW, Canada has been mixing vaccines between the 1st and 2nd dose. I thought that was surprising as well as spreading the dates between doses as that is in no way tested for effectiveness.
Andrew P.
I received a Covishield vaccine on March 19. I asked for a Pfizer one for the second jab, which I received Tuesday afternoon, injected by a lady veterinarian. Satisfactory.
I would say the legislature should validate/invalidate the emergency powers of the governor within 30-90 days. This gives them enough time to debate them and act. It may be the case that they need to agree to actively invalidate or replace them in order to stop them, otherwise they stay in effect. Endless bickering should keep the orders in place.
Lucia, I missed this snot scrubbing paper …. JAMA on Covid prevention: “Benefits and Safety of Nasal Saline Irrigations in a Pandemic—Washing COVID-19 Awayâ€â€¦.concludes “Given the safety profile of these therapies, HS (hypertonic saline) nasal irrigations should be encouraged for patients and health care workers especially.†No new hard research date to back it up but a lot of literature references. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/
Russell,
Hypertonic saline usually stings mucous membranes. I thounght it was hypotonic saline.
Mike M,
Yes, the issue is that a single person making decisions that can ruin lots of people’s livelihoods is a very, very bad idea. No matter who that governor is, his or her priorities inevitably will lie with the constituencies that elected him/her, not the population as a whole. Evers and Whitmer are perfect examples of governors that did just that. Placing strict limits on scope and duration of emergency measures taken without legislative approval is the only sensible path forward.
SteveF,
It is indeed hypertonic as opposed to isotonic or hypotonic solution.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/fullarticle/2768627
SteveF,…. Yes it stings a little. I have 50/50 baking soda and salt mix in a mason jar and put 1/4 teaspoon in 4 ounces of water. Then apply. The numbers work.
DeWitt,
Hypertonic saline pulls water from mucus membranes, increasing fluid flux and swallowing. And may sting. Of course, you could instead just swim in the ocean a couple of times a day. Povidone/iodine seems to me more likely effective, but excessive use (that is, more than the prescribed dosage) could cause epithelial cell damage.
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Wait, no, any topical treatment for covid sounds too much like Trump’s rantings from 14 months back. I doubt topical treatments will be seriously pursued.
SteveF I agree the rinse feeling is a lot like getting a snootful playing in the surf at the beach. The other thing they recommend is mouth rinse with 26% alcohol [original Listerine strength]… That stings too!
The NYT’s laments they must prove racial discriminatory intent when they … ummmm … allege illegal racial discrimination.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/us/politics/supreme-court-arizona-voting.html
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“The 6-to-3 decision by the Supreme Court on Thursday that upheld voting restrictions in Arizona has effectively left voting rights advocates with a higher bar for bringing federal cases under the Voting Rights Act: proving discriminatory intent.”
“No longer, they say, can they count on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to serve as a backstop for preventing racially discriminatory voting restrictions.”
“… and thus requiring litigants to clear the much higher bar of proving purposeful intent to discriminate”
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The left’s lawyers were getting rather lazy. Just show disparate racial outcomes and racial discriminatory intent was assumed. This was always a very bad legal structure IMO. Their argument was basically if requiring ID’s for voting has disparate racial impact (probably does) then requiring ID’s for voting must be legally forbidden.
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I’ve never been convinced that any of these laws, or forbidding any of these laws, would have any real impact on elections. The people who would be restricted or allowed to vote are not typically politically engaged anyway. How many people who don’t even have an ID care about voting? It’s just hysteria.
Tom Scharf,
I can’t help but wonder how many people really don’t have ID. Perhaps the homeless?
It’s really hard to do anything with no ID. Not many people live off the grid. I doubt you can collect any sort of government aid without an ID. So most the poor are going to have ID.
lucia (Comment #203207): “I can’t help but wonder how many people really don’t have ID.”
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Dead people don’t have ID. People who have moved to a different state don’t have usable ID. Illegals often don’t have ID. Requiring ID would deprive those groups from voting.
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I am not kidding. It has been shown again and again that requiring ID is not a problem for minority voters. It only makes vote fraud more difficult. Hence, the bitter Dem opposition.
Tom Scharf,
Their is discriminatory intent, but not directed at minorities; it is directed at those who refuse to allow any measures which ensure all votes are cast by eligible citizens.
Tom Scharf,
Claiming that disparate impact is sufficient to prove discrimination is, IMO, an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. IOW, correlation is not sufficient to prove causation. Poll taxes and literacy tests were intended to discriminate against Blacks. Stacey Abrams and her ilk have never proved that there has been recent voter suppression. They only claim it when they lose an election and the MSM falls all over themselves to back them up, as opposed to the MSM’s treatment of claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Maybe Trump should have claimed that there was Republican voter suppression rather than fraud.
Seems the goalposts have once again shifted:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/americas-vaccine-fate-is-fragmenting/619358/
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“The U.S. was always going to struggle to vaccinate its way to the herd-immunity threshold for COVID-19—the point at which enough people have gained immunity that viral spread is limited. As I wrote in February, America’s vaccine reluctance and the evolution of new variants that can evade vaccines make herd immunity difficult to achieve and maintain. The upshot is that the coronavirus will keep circulating, looking for new bodies it can infect. For the unvaccinated, getting infected is probably a matter of time. “Everybody will end up getting immunity to this virus eventually,†Jha told me. “You’ll either get it through vaccination or infection.—
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So we need 100% vaccinated or infected? The entirety of the media is devoid of analysis of where the herd immunity threshold is, they just pretend it doesn’t exist anymore. Herd immunity is not covid elimination. It is the risk of large scale breakouts approaching zero. How one define “large scale” and “near zero” is worthy of debate.
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There will be mini forest fires around for a while, as there are in Missouri and Arkansas now. Florida and Louisiana are on the upswing. They are going to hit everywhere which either doesn’t have a high infected rate or high vaccination rate. The exposed fuel will be opportunistically burned.
From the continuing saga of “we are only going to censor the real Nazis”, Bret Weinstein has been demonetized by YouTube.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of-intellectual-capture-on
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Note how opaque and unaccountable the process is. Note how the net is always widening, never narrowing. An authentic slippery slope. Never hand a secret committee the power of censorship. I guess he just needs to move his channel to Parler, ha ha.
Apparently quite a few don’t have government issued photo ID according to info here. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debunking-misinformation-photo-id
Phil,
I have to admit I find the Brennan centers number implausible. That doesn’t mean it can’t be true. I don’t know how it was put together.. But this article does point out a counter argument.
https://www.nccivitas.org/2012/another-look-at-voter-photo-id-myths-and-f-a-q-s/
So when a case actually came to court, the side claiming people couldn’t vote for lack of ID couldn’t find a single citizen. Citizens are, of course, the only people who count with respect to voting.
84% of those 16 or older have driver’s licenses. For 25-69 it is over 90%.
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/number-of-licensed-drivers-usa/
That presumably includes illegals, who often can not get a license, people who have had their licenses revoked, and people in prison. Others have other types of ID. It is pretty easy to get such ID if you are eligible and need it. Frankly, the very few people who could not be bothered to get such ID probably should not be allowed to vote.
People don’t have ID’s because they choose to not have ID’s. End of story. It’s not hard to get an ID, but it also isn’t zero burden. You still have to get to the DMV and stand in line once every decade or so, and then renew by mail. It is also burdensome to fulfill endless other government mandates. IRS?
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Why not get an ID? One is that it costs $48 to get a driver license and $25 for an ID card. If you happened to watch US real time cop shows before they were banned by the information ministry, you would also find that a certain criminal element almost never had ID’s when asked (unless they were driving in which case it is mandatory).
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Although the libertarian slant is likely that ID’s shouldn’t be mandatory, they effectively are in the US. From driving, getting certain prescription drugs, buying alcohol, etc. you just can’t function very well without one.
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There is not doubt a very small element of people who are very burdened to get to a DMV and would like to vote in person.
Mike,
That’s the way I look at it as well.
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[Edit:
Lucia, wow. Not a single citizen…]
Lucia,
“Citizens are, of course, the only people who count with respect to voting.”
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One of the many problems with telephone surveys. You don’t know if the population is representative, or even citizens. You don’t know if the respondents are being completely honest, you don’t know if the respondents are to answer questions accurately, etc. 35 states always require photo ID or non-photo proof of residency prior to voting, 15 do not. Some states that have no routine photo ID requirement do require a photo ID the first time a voter votes in the state. The burden of obtaining a photo ID would then seem similar even if it is required only for first time voters.
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For me this is a nutty made-up controversy; you can’t check into a hotel without a photo ID. You can’t fly on a plane without a photo ID, nor open a bank account, purchase a car, rent an apartment, etc, etc. It is simply not credible that a substantial fraction of citizens who are eligible to vote can’t get a photo ID.
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Challenges to the many state voter ID laws are almost certainly bound to fail at the SC, if not at the district level. John Paul Stevens (no conservative!) wrote the 2008 opinion of the court in Crawford v Marion County; he concluded that production of a photo ID is not an excessive burden on voters, and that states have a legitimate interest in ensuring those not eligible to vote (minors, felons, non-residents, illegal aliens) do not vote.
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I’m actually surprised the Biden administration is trying to block voter ID in Georgia…. which is not much different from Washington State and many others. They are not gong to win this one at the SC, and even if they find a district judge to enjoin Georgia from following the new law, it seems to me unlikely the appeals court and/or SC will allow that to stand for 2022 election.
SteveF
You don’t know if they understood the question. You don’t know if they are really listening. And so on.
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The fact that when push came to shove in a lawsuit, the party that needed to show requiring IDs was a burden couldn’t find a single person in the entire state if Indiana to show the court that tons of people don’t have ID’s suggest that 11% answering “X” vs “Not X” to a question may just be the noise threshold on telephone surveys.
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Ok, I accept that not being able to produce a single example counts as strong evidence.
“For me this is a nutty made-up controversy; you can’t check into a hotel without a photo ID. You can’t fly on a plane without a photo ID, nor open a bank account, purchase a car, rent an apartment, etc, etc. It is simply not credible that a substantial fraction of citizens who are eligible to vote can’t get a photo ID”
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There is a real underground out there of people who do not use ID’s in daily life.
A cash economy for tradesmen who do not want to put in a tax return.
70 year old computer illiterate people like me.
Of course some of them do not want to be ID but then again they probably would not want to vote if they are so against the system.
When the system gets to hard to operate those that cannot operate it move into that demi world. that we fortunate people do not or are not able to see.
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re “a substantial fraction of citizens who are eligible to vote can’t get a photo ID”
Florida had a lot of people who were ineligible to vote but even they had mug shots which sort of proves your point.
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angech
I can’t speak for Australia, but taking cash and not evading taxes can perfectly well be done by people who have photo-ids! Heck, someone could use their photo-id to collect welfare or social security and then accept cash for under-the-table work which they hid to avoid reducing their welfare or ssn pay out!
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Having the photo-id you use to drive or present to whoever wants it doesn’t make it remotely more difficult to be a tax cheat!
Angech is probably correct that there are some people determined to live so far in the shadows that they do not want the government to even know that they exist. It is perfectly reasonable to deny them the vote.
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I will go further: It is unreasonable to claim that such people should be able to vote. They are not citizens. Even if legally entitled to citizenship, such individuals have, in effect, voluntarily surrendered their citizenship.
Repairman Jack would not want to vote
If you are a low income tradesman in the US, you are better off getting to minimum credit eligibility for social security. I doubt most of the people working under the radar understand this. There is the rather bothersome other taxes such as Medicare and federal income / state income taxes that might make it a bad “investment” overall. Low income people won’t end up paying federal income tax most of the time. You can’t avoid Medicare / SS though.
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I don’t know what happens to these people when they get old, but it probably isn’t pretty. Hope they have successful kids.
angech,
“70 year old computer illiterate people like me.”
I am also 70. I am amazed anyone my age could be computer illiterate. I have been writing code since 1970; Fortran, then assembly languages, Basic, and a smattering of others like HTML on an as-needed basis. Did your college/university not require computer programming?
angech,
“A cash economy for tradesmen who do not want to put in a tax return.”
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I don’t know anything about Australian laws, but people in the States who willfully avoid taxes are felons, and in most places, felons are not allowed to vote. Voting without any need to show ID facilitates the voting of all kinds of people who can’t legally vote. That is the whole point; Democrats want anyone who will support them to vote, even if those votes are unlawful.
SteveF,
Of course, tax cheats are only forbidden from voting if convicted. But still, I think the issue is irrelevant to whether they have photo-ID’s. Not having an ID doesn’t make it any easier to succeed in cheating on taxes.
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It’s true someone might want to go well and truly off the grid and then wouldn’t have an ID. But I would suspect in that case they wouldn’t even try to register to vote whether or not registration required providing an ID!
Tom Scharf
They may. Some may work “just enough” on the books and then work the rest off the books. That would evade a lot of taxes. Some may be collecting social security already. There are lots of options for working off the books.
Happy Independence Day.
Nobody blow yourself up tonight.
mark,
We’ve got the cats locked in so no one can blow them up! 🙂
Lucia,
Good! One of my dogs is extremely unhappy right now – he hates the sound of gunshots, thunder, and fireworks. Gonna be a loooong night.
I haven’t commented in forever. I only see one mention of Bret Weinstein and none of ivermectin. Weinstein needs your help. He’s willing to take on it’s hard to describe. The narrative, the corporations and the governments that have done a pretty poor job of things. One of the things he’s hammering on is vaccinating children. I think the climate debate was just practice for this one. With the climate debate, we saw the steamrolling of anyone who stood in the way. I look forward to your comments. Weinstein can be funded through Patreon.
Ragnaar,
I’m generally willing to at least listen to you with a sympathetic ear, and I also sympathize to a certain extent with Bret Weinstein. This said, you haven’t given us much to go on here. What’s going on recently with Bret Weinstein? I assume more than the usual troubles? I spent a couple of minutes casually searching and I haven’t puzzled it out yet. I have a vague impression that his podcast is going to be censored unless he self censors himself regarding something — he has to toe the CDC line I think?
If it’s not this, could you drop a link to illuminate the situation?
If it is this, well. A lot of people are subject to this sort of crap these days, I’m not sure how worked up it’s appropriate to get about yet another instance.
Ragnaar,
I had to google Bret Weinstein. I read his Wikepedia page. You’re going to have to tell me why you think I ought to fund him or whatever he’s doing..
None of the COVID vaccines have been tested for ages younger than 12 AFAIK. Anyone who volunteers their children under twelve for a vaccine trial is, IMO, a complete idiot. The primary benefit to vaccinating children is to adults who don’t want to be vaccinated themselves. The benefit to children is known to be minimal and the risks are unknown.
Influenza is different. Children are known to be at high risk from influenza. Now whether the influenza vaccine actually helps children is not known to me. I should probably look it up, but since I don’t have any young children it isn’t important to me.
DeWitt,
Influenza is different. Children are known to be at high risk from influenza. Now whether the influenza vaccine actually helps children is not known to me.”
Younger children normally are recommended 2 injections a month apart which makes it a bit of a trial for the parents [and child].
We never used to give the Flu vax routinely to children under 12 until the swine flu came along and then only to those children with panicky parents.
I cannot ever remember any children dying of the flu in 40 years of practice though I do know of elderly people who passed away with or because of it.
Children certainly seem to be more resistant to covid than flu but I doubt there is any increased risk of death in children with the flu compared to covid.
–
Steve F
One of my mates became a professor of computers but there were no computer courses in 1971 that I was aware of when we were going through.
angech,
Rare, but it does happen: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/2019-2020/2019-20-pediatric-flu-deaths.htm
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In a low population country like Oz, it’s not surprising you never encountered a childhood flu fatality.
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I never had to make a decision about my older kids getting vaccinated for flu because the vaccines only were recommended for kids starting 2005. My youngest (2007) would have been offered the flu vaccine but she was born in Brazil, and I don’t think it was available. The benefit for healthy kids looks small, but maybe kids with other health issues (increasing flu risk) would make it sensible.
Until a few days ago, he and Heying’s Wikipedia descriptions had towards the top, something like, he was spreading misinformation. That’s been removed. There was pushback and I left some mean comments on the page’s talk page, but others discussing it made better arguments than I. He has a favorable opinion of ivermectin and that’s the issue. He was interviewed by Rogan in the last 10 days, with Kory. That sums it up pretty well. You can give him money, but I think it would be better to support him on one’s Facebook or Twitter. And try to send a message to Youtube. They are screwing with his family’s income. They are doing the same thing to Weinstein that they did to Curry. Weinstein is not afraid to take on Youtube, large corporations, regulators, the largest things trying control the narrative. Heying is also involved as well and has contributed alot and risked alot. I see similarities between the overall picture of climate change and the vaccines. Thank you for your considerations.
Ivermectin. It’s safe. Close to 4 billion doses have been administered over 40 years. It went through what we might call normal safety tests. The Nobel prize was awarded for work on this drug. It’s ready, it’s cheap, it’s off patent. One might assume there’s no money to be made from it. It has been used as a preventative. I take 15 mg once a week. I have not been vaccinated and I suppose I am at medium risk given my age and smoking history. The prescription is available online in the U.S. last I checked and that’s how I got it at as apparently my healthcare provider couldn’t give me a prescription for it. Does it work as a preventative? See here:
https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Abstract/9000/Ivermectin_for_Prevention_and_Treatment_of.98040.aspx
Lawrie probably has the credibility. I’d say it’s ballpark as effective as the vaccines.
This is more fuzzy. It may work at early onset of Covid-19. It’s an anti-viral and anti-inflammatory. It may work for more serious cases. This is Kory’s area who is a frontline doctor with experience with such cases. Kory himself was attacked by Wikipedia and I spent time on that talk page as well. Apparently without doing any good.
Weinstein makes the argument, vaccines plus preventative ivermectin plus the immunity from all ready having Covid-19 may extinguish the virus. That ivermectin is an ally. I add, some people are vaccine hesitant. Insert ivermectin here.
He’s also seems to be saying, he doesn’t understand why we are vaccinating children and those that have all ready had Covid-19.
One of his points is something like this: It is immoral to vaccinate children with an experimental vaccine given the whole picture which includes their low risk of dying. In my words, sacrificing children for the benefit of old people.
There’s much to this story. One of the things to consider is regulatory capture. And some kind of capture going on with Youtube and Wikipedia. Who is in charge? We can certainly argue the WHO and the CDC are subject to capture. People used to question big Pharma. What happened to that? Who isn’t subject to capture. I think it’s Weinstein and Heying. Rogan and Taibbi.
Thank you. Lucia. I hope your platform is not subject to any risks based upon what I’ve written. If it is, I am sorry.
Ragnaar,
Who are “they”?
I don’t think there is any debate about it’s safety as medicines go. It’s used to treat parasitic conditions. Like nearly all medicines it has sideeffects. Possible liver damage is one. But quite likely, one dose to get rid of parasites is worth a little liver damage.
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That doesn’t mean there is no money to be made from it. A commercially available Ivermectine based horsepaste is made near here. I drive by the company all the time. I’m sure they make money. (Possibly more now since some people are eating horse paste. Perhaps some haven’t figured out how to get a prescription for a pill.)
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I have no objection to you self medicating with Ivermectin. But I’m a lot happier with 1 vaccination compared to self medicating with a medicine associated with liver damage. If I’m going to damage my liver, I’m doing it with wine!!!
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What age does he consider the cutoff for “children”? We (the US) aren’t vaccinating kids under 12. I don’t buy the notion that it is immoral to vaccinate those between 12-18. It’s a judgement call. Different people have different opinions. But I’d hardly call the decision to vaccinate immoral.
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We also aren’t forcing anyone to be vaccinated. But I knew about ivermectin when I was vaccinated. My preference is vaccination to taking weekly ivermectin. (You want to take ivermectin– fine. I have no problem with that. But I like the one and done vaccine compared to the pills!)
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Also, I absolutely wouldn’t support medicating kids between 12-18 with ivermectin if what you mean is giving them 1 dose weekly forever. (Or at least until the virus is wiped out which will probably take forever or longer). We know Ivermectin associated with liver damage. No one has long term safety data when it is used week in week out for-ever. So if your concern is “lack of testing” for side effects, that applies to ivermectin in the context of long term weekly dosing. If I were a parent of a 10 year old, I would be just as leery of giving them weekly doses of ivermectin as a vaccine.
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With regard to kids: It strikes me that any claim about “immorality” of giving vaccines applies just as strongly to ivermectin on a weekly basis!
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I get that perhaps Youtube, Facebook and Twitter perhaps have too much power. But I’m not going to donate to Weinstein just because he can’t make money with google ads! Nor am I going to give money to promote his ideas which don’t seem stupendously well founded. I think he should get to promote them. But I don’t see this as the big miracle he does.
Bret Weinstein is patient zero for the left turning cancel culture inward upon itself. I followed the Evergreen State saga as it was going on, it was insanity. Weinstein is pretty far left, but like Greenwald he objects strongly to limits on speech. He has been on Joe Rogan a few times. As he was a canary in the coal mine at Evergreen, he is also one at YouTube. It’s not enough to be mostly left, if you question any of the shibboleths of the hour then you can have your career threatened. He was run out of Evergreen and is now getting canceled from YouTube.
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The point only resonates if you have heard this guy talk for any period of time. He is pretty much plain vanilla leftism with a strong streak of free speech (like most left people used to be). He’s the least inflammatory person on the planet, Alex Jones he is not. He is also an evolutionary biologist and that type of thinking is banned on the left now. So what we have here is the left’s activists purity testing their members and reporting them to the secret censorship committee at YouTube for excommunication.
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The censorship going on has reached epidemic levels, and this has led to unknown levels of self censorship. If you are young and work at a Fortune 500 company, would you really be posting right wing invective on your social media accounts?
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I still hope that the free market will sort it out, but it should be noted that none of these companies did this type of behavior before they acquired monopoly positions. Unchecked power brings out the worst in people and companies. I think those censorship decisions should be public meetings, or be made public.
Ragnaar, Lucia,
Yes. I don’t particularly like that he’s getting hassled or threatened with demonetization. This said, his wake up call was four years ago now at Evergreen’s infamous ‘Day of Absence’. He’s a smart guy, I’m sure he’s figured out how the game works by this point. If Weinstein has positioned himself so he’s dependent on podcast income and he’s vulnerable to censorship damage, well, that was in my view a dumb thing for him to do. It’s not clear to me that it’s my problem to go bail out people who ought to know better. I hate to be cold hearted, but. There are likely thousands of people in Weinsteins shoes and more to come, am I going to donate to all of them? I don’t think so.
I don’t have the energy to find out the facts on Ivermectin, but my BS antenna is up because the reaction to speaking about is too severe. I really don’t know why talking about it on YouTube is a threat to anyone. Homeopathic remedies are probably all over the place on YouTube with much less medical backing.
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And … YouTube is not the medical police, the FDA has that responsibility. The worst case is that a lot of people hear about this on YouTube and they ask their doctor about it.
Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan, have a nice 3 hour sleep:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0
Tom,
Arm chair psychologists practice all over youtube!! Have you been involved in a romatic breakup. Do you think your ex was something of a jerk either all the time with everyone, or was their secret jerky behavior only visible to you? Go to youtube, immerse yourself in videos about “narcissists” then go on to apply your new find skills as a psychiatrist and diagnose them. ( The proper way to deal with them is also provided!)
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Need medical or somewhat medical advice on cramps? (Period or muscle.) That’s on youtube.
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Common symptoms of flu? Youtube! Advice on gonorrhea? Youtube!! (Yes. I looked. One video askes “Can Mouthwash Kill Gonorrhea?” (I watched the first few seconds… minutes. It sounds like the answer is No, not really. No. )
Tom-
That’s over 3 freakin’ hours. Who can listen to a 3 hour interview?!!!! Long haul truck drivers? I really don’t understand some of these shows.
On youtube: I know two people who joined MLMs (multi-level market) during Covid. So I googled around a little. I think the real money must be in making ANTI-MLM youtube videos that run ads. There seem to be tons of people who make these anti-videos over and over. I’m guessing it’s not just that they are upset. I’m guessing the ad-clicks make their cash register go caching!!
(Ironically the ads will often explain how to make money in an MLM. But…whatever.)
There are responses on a number of subjects. The Patreon model allows one to be less dependent on Youtube. Youtube is real and handles a lot of money. Many mavericks have appeared in the last 4 years. How do they take care of themselves? Weiss no longer gets paid from the NYT. Rubin seems to be creating an empire based on not being CNN. Peterson had a line, I am monetizing SJWs or something like that. One concern is that Youtube is captured. Maybe it’s not a concern. Maybe Facebook being captured is not a concern. But it is a concern when the journals are captured. When the field of climate science is captured. And when our top of the hierarchy medical establishment is captured. Can you do anything about that? My donation to Weinstein is just some minimal token. I appreciate that some of you have taken an interest in these subjects. I’ve heard something over these past years. Push back. Don’t wait for the other person to do it.
Thanks Ragnaar. I’ll think about it.
Tom Scharf,
If you have any sense, you don’t have a social media account where you post any sort of invective. Just because the Left is mainly doing the cancelling now doesn’t mean that they always will. And, of course, the Left feeds on its own. I bet Trotsky never thought during the Bolshevik revolution that he would have to flee Russia and would end up with an ice ax in his head, or Robespierre ever thought he would end up with his head in a basket.
“That’s over 3 freakin’ hours. Who can listen to a 3 hour interview?!!!!”
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That episode has 7.8M views, ha ha. Joe Rogan is actually a very good interviewer even though his origins might not suggest so (professional mixed martial arts fighting). Spotify gave him a $100M deal. He does long form interviews and he asks a lot of good (obvious) questions and allows the person to speak for himself. I don’t watch very many of them, but the ones I have seen are pretty good.
Lucia:
Thank you.
L Who are “they�
R Good question. Google who owns Youtube. They’ve taken down money making videos.
L Possible liver damage is one. But quite likely, one dose to get rid of parasites is worth a little liver damage.
R We have 40 years of data on it from many sources. It has been greenlighted many times in the past for other reasons. With liver damage, how do we assign weights to the various risks?
L A commercially available Ivermectine based horsepaste is made near here.
R The money made off of the vaccines is at least an order of magnitude greater. The vaccines have been granted some kind of immunity in the U.S. Poor countries are going to pay for the vaccines how?
L But I’m a lot happier with 1 vaccination compared to self medicating with a medicine associated with liver damage.
R My calculation is with ivermectin over the vaccines.
L But I’d hardly call the decision to vaccinate immoral.
R The risk/benefit ratio tells me that it is immoral. Less than one in twenty drugs have had as fast a rollout for children as this one. Children, in very general terms are not ask risk from the virus. Yes we can find 1 in 10,000 numbers here and there related to their risks. But giving them this experimental drug is immoral. We are seeing if we can take that risk, win and not have to explain why we did that.
L But I like the one and done vaccine compared to the pills!
R Here’s some new territory for me. Will your vaccine work against the variants? Will ivermectin? I don’t have a good answer on that. Ivermectin, all things being equal, has a broader attack compared to the vaccines. I assume that’s the reason it works in the first place. What does round two of the vaccines for the variants look like?
L Also, I absolutely wouldn’t support medicating kids between 12-18 with ivermectin if what you mean is giving them 1 dose weekly forever.
R I don’t think I said give ivermectin to those under 18. I am undecided on that question.
R A question I will be more direct on, why the institutional pushback against ivermectin? My healthcare provider which is quite large, could not get me a prescription. I suspect it’s a top down thing and my poor doctor, can’t make his own call on it. He’s a cog. That’s our healthcare system dealing with the pandemic. I’ll go with Weinstein on this. It’s about money. It seems the most reasonable explanation.
R As an aside, Weinstein was talking about the lab leak hypothesis over a year ago. When that was a Q-Anon conspiracy. The people that you’re relying on now, what were they saying?
R About the 3 hour Rogan podcast. Life isn’t simple. We have this virus inside a complex system which is each of us. In a complex system that is our family and jobs, inside the complex system that is our State and Federal governments along with our medical institutions and our drug manufacturing corporations, inside a system that is the world. 3 hours is getting off lightly.
Tom– But I think the views don’t scale for partial views. I clicked and started the video. I did not finish it!!! 🙂
What is it with Ranch dressing on pizza? The State Farm commercial where the pizza delivery woman brings Jake from State Farm several pizzas and what looks like two gallons of Ranch just ran. IMO, someone who puts Ranch dressing on pizza doesn’t really like pizza. I have a similar opinion about sour cream and Tex-Mex food.
Ragnaar
We assign it the same way we do with any other study on risks associated with medicines. Based on the data, we know the risk exists.
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We don’t have 40 years of data on people taking it once a week for a long, long, long time. That’s the use those proposing Ivermectin are suggesting. The complain about “no data” for other things. But there is no data on this use either.
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Obviously, we have different preferences about 1 vaccine vs. taking something day in day out for a long long time, particular as that sort of use hasn’t been tested for safety. I’m fine with that. You pick what you prefer. I pick what I prefer.
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On immorality: Ok. But I know people who think playing cards is immoral. And as I noted: I don’t think there is any “moral” difference beteween giving them an off-lable drug whose safety has not be tested for that use and giving them a vaccine whose long term safety has not been examined. (Besides that: in the US at least, no one is giving kids below 12 vaccine. And at least short term safety data exists for the over 12.)
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That’s being monitored. It appear it does work against the variants we’ve seen so far.
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The same exact doubt exists for ivermectin. We can have no empirical data for anything when a new variant comes out because we can’t collect empirical data until after the new variant circulates. ivermectin isn’t an exception there.
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By institution, do you mean Youtube and FAcebook? I don’t know.
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I don’t see “pushback” from other institutions. They are saying what they always say before fullly reported results from certain types of experiments they value. (Double blind, pre-registered… yada, yada.) Then doing what they always do isn’t “pushback”.
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I’m not sure what you are asking me. The CDC, FDA and so on aren’t saying anything about the lab leak theory. It’s irrelevant to the efficacy, safety and epidemiolgy issues they discuss.
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Perhaps. But it’s also much too long for me to bother to listen to. Give me a transcript!
Dewitt,
I once went on a date where the guy insisted on ordering the bratwurst and sauerkraut pizza. That might have been ok. But the pizza also had melted cheese and tomato sauce.
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I should have broken up with him right then.
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But no. And later one, he brought me peanut-raisin packed, high calory trailmix as a gift. He accompanied the gift by telling me he got the mix with carob chips because he knew how I loved chocolate.
FYI: At 1:56:00 in the video above, Weinstein talks about the lab leak theory and gain of function, that’s over a year ago. Also see 2:10:00.
https://youtu.be/pRCzZp1J0v0?t=6936
Lucia:
Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/
They talk about livers and safety. Note the 11 bullet points in the lower half. This is not a one off study. And note this line: “Finally, ivermectin has been used safely in pregnant women, children, and infants.†Which in context, the context of this paper, tells me it’s safe. Infants. I am not saying give it to those under 18. I am saying it’s safe. Safe for the vast majority of adults. I haven’t been able to find an objection to long term use. My dose is 15 MG per week. I weigh 165 and the dose is by weight mostly.
“Since 2012, a growing number of cellular studies have demonstrated that ivermectin has antiviral properties against an increasing number of RNA viruses, including influenza, Zika, HIV, Dengue, and most importantly, SARS-CoV-2.â€
The vaccines are targeted. Is my ivermectin better against the variants? It seems it can attack these guys right? The vaccines are targeted. Viruses mutate. And this is why a broad approach can be argued to be safer and/or more effective. Ivermectin is also an anti-inflammatory and Kory who has experience with this I think made the association between inflammation, lungs, and ventilators that he learned about while he was helping in the disaster of NYC early on. So some of use have the anti-inflammatory on board right now. I am not sure if you get that from the vaccine. And if any of us will need it for the variants.
About the lab leak. How do I score people who called the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. I give them a zero. A zero that lasts for 18 months. Because they don’t seem trustworthy.
To sum things up, it’s not so much about the vaccines. It’s about getting in an allied drug to win against the virus. Why would anyone be against this?
Ragnaar,
Fauci. Look up his history with HIV and his (still) futile quest for a vaccine rather than drugs.
Off topic but….. Outer bands of tropical storm Elsa are passing through. Current track and strength makes it a big Nutthin. But these things can change. The Gulf of Mexico is warm enough for rapid intensification.
RAgnar
Have you found published studies on long term weekly use? That’s the issue. I’m pretty sure you won’t. Your concern is supposedly about things not having been studied. But you don’t seem to care that your proposed use is not studied.
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So. Not in people. Cellular studies show splendid things for vaccines. But when it’s vaccines you don’t think that’s enough!
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Your guessing. So, you standard for invermectin is: your guess is good enough. But your standard for vaccines is “Prove it through long term empirical studies”. These are different standards.
I usually like living in Alabama. Really. But there are times that it sort of makes me think I’m living in a disorderly frat house. There’s fireworks on the 4’th yes. And the day before. And the day after. All night long. In my neighborhood.
There are police who live in my neighborhood, a State trooper and another county cop. They’re probably out there shooting off fireworks with everybody else…
[Edit – My God. I think it’s stopped.]
[Edit 2 — Well.. Mostly. Oh well. ‘Murica!]
mark bofill,
Here in the people’s republic of Massachusetts, there are electronic signs on the side of highways….. normally used for traffic information. Lately they have been promoting vaccinations against covid-19, but near the end of June, the messages switched to threats of criminal prosecution for the use of fireworks. Plenty of illegal fireworks this year, but definitely less than previous years, and none on the 5th. The dogs are pleased. I am pleased it is no longer all covid all the time.
Here in Albuquerque, a very blue city in a blue state, there were quite a bit of fireworks on the 3rd, lots on the 4th going rather late at night, and a little more on the 5th. So I suspect the main factor is legality of fireworks rather than politics.
Craploads of fireworks in my area of FL on the 4th, but only for about an hour and it stopped. Fortunately my dog is about 90% deaf now so his reaction was muted. You can get the “real” fireworks (artillery shells) in the county north of here. We have thunderstorms that are about as bad, so I don’t get huffy like a lot of people I see on local forums (obviously moved here from the blue states, ha ha). The forum posts and counter posts are quite entertaining, and quite predictable and repetitive.
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The big ones are quite illegal in my county, and quite tolerated on the 4th.
Most recent delta variant data from Israel:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-is-less-effective-against-delta-variant-israeli-data-show-11625572796
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“The vaccine protected 64% of inoculated people from infection during an outbreak of the Delta variant, down from 94% before, according to Israel’s Health Ministry. It was 94% effective at preventing severe illness in the same period, compared with 97% before, the ministry said.”
“The findings came as new cases of Covid-19 in Israel rose to a seven-day average of 300 on Tuesday from around 10 a day for most of last month.”
“In late June, Israel’s government expanded its vaccination campaign to include all 12- to 15-year-olds, due to a large portion of new infections occurring in that age range.”
“With more than 80% of Israeli adults fully vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, Israeli health officials are paying greater attention to how many develop serious illness. That number currently stands at 33, with the majority coming from the elderly immunocompromised population, according to health officials.”
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Pretty much as expected. Get vaccinated or get delta, it’s your choice. That’s overstating it, you can of course not get vaccinated and hope your area gets to herd immunity before your get it.
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I will preempt DeWitt and say that they still provide no data on previously infected people, as if they don’t exist.
As for YouTube being hyperactive against covid information, this type of statement is also propaganda but in the reverse direction. WSJ:
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“CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on Thursday that preliminary data collected from a set of U.S. states over the past six months showed that 99.5% of people who died of Covid-19 were unvaccinated.”
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This is simply misleading as a lot of deaths were in the Jan-Feb-Mar timeframe when almost nobody was vaccinated and the virus was peaking. A proper comparison has to normalize against the number of people who were fully vaccinated, the days they were vaccinated, and the virus levels of those days.
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I have seen some sparse data where this comparison was done correctly and the vaccine protection from death was closer to 70%. Unfortunately this way is actually an underestimate of vaccine effectiveness because seniors got vaccinated first and are more likely to die “with covid” instead of from covid, etc. So you also need to normalize against age group and try to remove the dying with covid group.
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The point is that I have seen effusive pro-vaccine propaganda like this many times over the past month and it is never called out, noble cause I suppose.
L Your concern is supposedly about things not having been studied. But you don’t seem to care that your proposed use is not studied.
R Here’s something:
https://www.antigifcentrum.be/sites/default/files/imce/Poster_Ivermectin_vs03b_2014.pdf
The patient took roughly the weekly dose, daily. They didn’t follow the prescription.
How to interpret this:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/ivermectin-oral-route/proper-use/drg-20064397
I am going to generalize. It is given one dose every 6 months for river blindness. I take that dose every week. Which is what my prescription says.
I am one of probably 250,000 people in the U.S. with these prescriptions. Are the alarm bells sounding because of that today? With refills, I have 39 weeks of my dose prescribed.
So using the above we have 1, 26, or 182 number of doses. We are the 26ers. Yes we are running that experiment now. Early results are good. You’re asking me to prove it’s not harmful. Which is difficult. But it’s more proven than the vaccines are. No substitute for time and experience. I think you know the vaccines have been greenlighted. That the same standards are not being applied to both things.
L But your standard for vaccines is “Prove it through long term empirical studiesâ€. These are different standards.
R You’re on the same argument Kory and Weinstein have made in reverse. There’s a high bar for ivermectin and a low one for the vaccines. Look at the advertising for the vaccines. The push. I know you can see a push. And you can see a political push. I see resistance from many quarters against ivermectin.
2/04/21:
No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;Â
No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and;Â
A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
3 bullet points from Merck – Quite involved in the initial development and distribution of ivermectin. B
You’ve pushed me to refine my arguments. Thanks
Raagmar,
A case report involving one person is hardly a study. But if her problems were due to Ivermectin, that suggests stay away from self medicating over a long period of time!! I mean, this does not sound good
Those symptoms are worse than many people’s Covid!
Raagnar,
You seem to be overlooking that there have been tons of formal, double blind studies for the vaccine!
Tom Scharf,
Given Israel’s vaccination rate, I doubt that there are many COVID-19 survivors who haven’t also been vaccinated. There was a study covering the period before vaccines were available that showed very good effectiveness of infection acquired immunity. As I remember, over at least a six month period ending in mid-December 2020, there were only ~150 reinfections from a total population of ~150,000 infected. The data covered about 25% of Israel’s population. But that was before Delta.
However, it should still be possible to break out those who were COVID-19 survivors who were also vaccinated. If it could be shown that infection plus vaccination was significantly more effective than vaccination alone, I might be persuaded to get vaccinated. This is another thing I’m not holding my breath while waiting.
https://joannenova.com.au/2021/07/mexico-uses-ivermectin/
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Restrictions on doctors prescribing use of ivermectin is either insane or willfully evil.
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I have been using Cattle Drench topical use ivermectin, vitamin D, and zinc since the shutdowns started. My partner does not subscribe to my view on meds, was vaccinated early, and she has been deathly sick with flu like symptoms several times now over the last number of months. Being in close physical contact, I have yet to get even a sniffle.
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I refuse to be a test subject for unapproved and possibly dangerous vaccines, so will not be taking the current crop of vaccines being offered. So far, I see the potential downside of being vaccinated greater than staying unvaccinated.
Ed Forbes,
Can you say ‘anecdotal’? I knew you could.
And you may be lucky enough to stay that way. Lots of people haven’t been so lucky.
An Emergency Use Authorization is approval of a sort and you wouldn’t be a test subject, or no more a test subject than if a vaccine were fully approved. OTOH, you are a voluntary test subject for ivermectin as a COVID-19 prophylactic, and not even ivermectin approved for human use. The problem also being that you aren’t part of an official study so your results are not going to help anyone else.
The only reason that the Pfizer vaccine isn’t fully approved is the exceedingly slow pace of the FDA. Pfizer filed for full approval in May, about two months ago. There is no reason to believe that the FDA won’t eventually grant that request. But if we had to wait for full FDA approval for a vaccine, we would have reached herd immunity, the pandemic would be over long before, at least in the US and most of the rest of the developed world, and a lot more people would likely be dead or have serious long term effects.
This is what the FDA says about veterinary grade ivermectin and COVID-19:
https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/product-safety-information/faq-covid-19-and-ivermectin-intended-animals
As the saying about pharmaceuticals goes: Safe, cheap, effective; you can only pick two.
The US has given out 331M doses of vaccine so far. 3.2B across the globe. So the near term safety of the vaccines is pretty much mapped out.
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The question is at what point would one one consider it safe enough trading infection risk versus the unknown unknowns of a future virus defect? I would suggest that answer is never given those numbers if one hasn’t decided yet. There is a chance some long term defect could crop up, it’s nearly impossible to gauge that number but it is probably pretty low given prior history and testing to date. For 65+ people the risk of death from covid is relatively high. If you want to stay unvaccinated then it probably makes sense to stay away from people until herd immunity in your area is reached.
Perhaps this is too severe, but I’m think recent ransomware attacks have crossed the line from mere criminal offenses into national security territory. The NSA/CIA should do something useful here and send a clear message by eliminating the source of the threat using kinetic tools at their disposal.
Tom Scharf,
We aren’t standing on the moral high ground here. At one point the NSA had, and may still have, by far the largest hacking group in the world. As I have mentioned before, they were incompetent enough to get hacked themselves and had their hacking toolkit, EternalBlue, stolen.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/29/der-spiegel-nsa-hacking-unit-tao
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/14/564006460/nsas-hackers-are-hacked-in-major-cybersecurity-breach
And in other ‘duh’ news:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hospitals-often-charge-uninsured-people-the-highest-prices-new-data-show-11625584448?mod=hp_lead_pos5
Confirmation of what we already knew.
DeWitt,
“Confirmation of what we already knew.”
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Yup. The prices are as fluid as a bucket of warm spit, and just as appealing. I would think this is something state legislatures could vet involved with, but AFAIK, no. I find it strange.
Any bets on when Indonesia, currently in third place, becomes the world leader in new COVID-19 cases/day? The doubling time is about two weeks right now, but it could be accelerating. Meanwhile, India is declining and Brazil may be declining.
DeWitt,
Brazil has been distributing the Chinese vaccine (with limited availability), but lately the more effective vaccines are becoming available. The number of confirmed cases has reached >10% of the population. In many places the pandemic seems to diminish rapidly when the number of confirmed cases reaches ~15% of the population, even without vaccines. One way or another, Brazil will see falling rates very soon.
Hospitals do overcharge for diagnostics. If you don’t need it stat, you may want to get an order and then get your xray/ctscans etc elsewhere. These companies can offer spectacular discounts for cash compared to those they charge insurance.
SteveF,
Unfortunately, Indonesia has less than 1% confirmed cases. India has about 2%, but I suspect that’s a serious undercount, as are the total deaths.
DeWitt,
As the saying about pharmaceuticals goes: Safe, cheap, effective; you can only pick two.
Thank you, so true.
–
Mike M. (Comment #203283 Here in Albuquerque.
I always thought it was a made up name from Disney.
Made my day.
I know it does not take much but still.
Thank you as well.
Angech,
“Albuquerque…
City in New Mexico, founded 1706 and named for Spanish administrator and viceroy of Mexico Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, Duque de Alburquerque (1617-1676); the name subsequently was altered by association with Portuguese hero Alfonso d’Albuquerque (1453-1515), the “Portuguese Mars,” famed as a great conqueror and champion of Christianity. Both men took their names from Alburquerque, a town in Spain near the Portuguese border, the name of which means “white oak;” it is said to be ultimately from Latin albus “white” (see alb) and quercus “oak”.”
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Disney had nothing to do with it.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #203293): “As the saying about pharmaceuticals goes: Safe, cheap, effective; you can only pick two.”
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Who says that? The pharmaceutical companies? They would like you to believe that, but it is not even remotely true. Most drugs on the WHO list of essential medications (including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine) are all three. Basically, those are drugs that are widely used and whose patents are long expired.
angech wrote: “I always thought it was a made up name from Disney.”
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Disney? Not thinking of Bugs Bunny are you? “I knew I should’ve taken that left turn at Albuquerque”.
Bringing any drug to market is very expensive. They become cheap after the patent expires and people can simply manufacture them without having to prove them safe and effective. You can’t skip that step in the US.
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There is without a doubt an issue though where drug companies slightly alter a drug going off patent and then market it as an improved version of the cheap drug, this barely better drug is then sold at high margins when the older drug is just as good. An example of this is “extended release” versions of drugs so that you only need to take them once a day. There is a market distortion where drug companies withhold this version of the drug for years waiting for the patent to expire. They know how to make it and it doesn’t cost much more to manufacture it.
Hospitals charging cash customers more is totally expected. Insurance companies go into extended negotiations with hospital groups for bulk pricing to lower their costs. Whether this is proper or moral is a completely different question. There have been various legislative efforts to try to fix this, forcing hospitals to publish cash prices and they have failed miserably to obtain the assumed goal of lowering prices for cash customers.
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The healthcare field is completely broken and that is why the left wins this argument, they will continue to win this argument all the way to single payer unless a semblance of a real market that lowers prices to single customers who can shop around occurs. You can’t compare prices in hospitals, you can’t review hospitals, you can’t review doctors, you can’t easily choose specialists like anesthesiologists. It is totally opaque and that’s the way the healthcare and insurance companies like it. Single payer is going to happen, it isn’t going to improve anything cost wise, but people are fed up with the status quo.
For the record, 6 months later and still no Sicknick autopsy report. There is definitely a cover up here, the question is why. My guess is that the report has some unflattering results to Sicknick such as recent drug use. Unclear how FOIA requests don’t get access to this.
Tom Scharf (Comment #203311): “Hospitals charging cash customers more is totally expected. Insurance companies go into extended negotiations with hospital groups for bulk pricing to lower their costs. Whether this is proper or moral is a completely different question.”
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Hospitals have large fixed costs. They must recover those costs somewhere and there is no reason for the mark up to be the same for all customers and services. It is like airlines. Or, for that matter, supermarkets. The fixed cost recovery gets tacked on wherever the market will bear it. That means things like emergency services and self-paying customers.
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The result is that pricing is totally opaque. I don’t know that hospitals “like” it that way. But given the realities of the market, they probably have little choice. If we don’t find a way to fix it, we will end up with some sort of single payer. That won’t be Medicare for All. It will be VA for All.
Mike M,
“I don’t know that hospitals “like†it that way.”
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I think they very much like being able to hide prices from individuals; it means they do not have to compete on price for people who are paying out of pocket. Of course, if every health care consumer had real ‘skin in the game’ in paying for health care, then a competitive market would easily develop. But skin in the game is exactly the opposite of every tax incentive the Federal government offers. And not coincidentally, skin in the game is the opposite of what health care providers want…. life is easier if no health care consumer ever says “no” to a crazy-expensive treatment with very little upside.
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If single payer does happen, then quality of care will certainly suffer, since bureaucrats will then be determining who merits specific treatments. It is ‘pushing granny off the cliff’, just like Republicans are always accused…. but this time for real, with bureaucrats doing the pushing. Will it lower cost? Maybe, but only if fees for services (doctors, hospitals, and all the rest) are set by bureaucrats….. reducing the income of people providing heath care services. That will receive push back from medical providers.
Tom Scharf,
“For the record, 6 months later and still no Sicknick autopsy report.”
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Of course not. Nobody on the left wants final word of what actually killed the guy released (my guess: probably a stroke from high blood pressure… maybe exacerbated by something like cocaine). If an autopsy report is not released in 6 months, it is never going to be released…. at least not until Republicans have the political muscle to force the issue.
SteveF (Comment #203314): “I think they very much like being able to hide prices from individuals; it means they do not have to compete on price for people who are paying out of pocket.”
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Which does not pertain to what I said.
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The hospitals have basically three groups of “customers”, two large groups and one small group. For one large group, they must take what the government decides to give them. For the other large group, they must compete on price. The small group has two subgroups; one that they have to treat pretty much for free and one that is at their mercy. They have little choice but to soak the latter. And given that, they of course want to hide the prices.
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There is a competitive market, with the insurers as customers. So the individual gets screwed. A more rational system would have everybody in the same market.
Mike M,
Sure, insurance companies negotiate prices. But that doesn’t mean the actual consumers (patients) have skin in the game; they almost never do. So no matter the cost, they want the best possible treatments. A real market would have individuals focused on costs vs benefits. That is not what we have now, and if single payer becomes a reality, the lack of a price sensitive market will be the real cause.
L You seem to be overlooking that there have been tons of formal, double blind studies for the vaccine!
R There’s no substitute for time. Safe in the medium and long terms is unknown because of the severe restriction on time travel.
But still have a problem. The vaccine hesistant. If not ivermectin what?
L A case report involving one person is hardly a study.
R You asked is it safe. I was looking for cases of it not been safe. It’s not safe at 7 times my current dose. You can say that about a lot of things. It’s hard for me to believe, my prescibed dose for 39 weeks isn’t safe at the 99% level. We’ve had about 40 years to look for adverse effects.
Application for inclusion of ivermectin on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines (EML) and Model List of Essential Medicines for Children (EMLc)
Overall evidence of safety:
ï‚· Over one billion treatments of ivermectin alone or co-administered with albendazole have been delivered in large-scale preventive chemotherapy programmes against lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis since 2000.
ï‚· Adverse events associated with ivermectin treatment are primarily minor and transient and associated with the baseline infection status and intensity of infection.
ï‚· Adverse event occurrence is similar with ivermectin co-administered with albendazole compared to albendazole alone.
ï‚· No serious adverse events have been reported in the published literature with the exception of IVR administration in loasis patients.
ï‚· As a precaution, ivermectin should not be administered to children less than 90 cm or weighing less than 15 kg, pregnant women, lactating women in the first week after birth, severely ill individuals.
ï‚· The geographical distribution of Loa-Loa is well known and those areas should be excluded from large scale programme.
It made the WHO’s lists of essential medicines for children.
Remember charity and goodwill to all?
You all might be interested. Quillitte who I give money to and follow on Twitter ran a hit piece on Weinstein and ivermectin. Guardian style I’d say, but that’s just me. 10 minute commitment. Quillitte is good, and they need money too.
Ragnaar,
Is it still a hit piece if it’s honest? Sometimes people with integrity disagree. It happens, even here.
If Weinstein really suggested large numbers of people were becoming ill from the vaccines, he screwed up. That or he owes us some extraordinary evidence. There’s no way around that. Best thing for him to do is apologize for screwing that up and move on from it.
Oh. Sorry, link.
Ragnaar
Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps getting infected. But that question is not an evidence the ivermectin works. Of course you have to decide for yourself. But I think you should be aware that you seem to have a different standard for vaccines vs. ivermectin.
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And you found one! That poor woman who self medicated exhibitted some seriously horrible side effects that resulted in her husband taking her to the hospital! That was just a case study. But we know things can go very, very bad if ivermectin is self-administered at high dosage for a long time! You found that evidence.
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The other cases you describe are for single short term doses to wipe out parasites. Then the usage stops. That’s not evidence of safety for the type of use you propose! You are proposing to use it at doses somewhere between that poor hospitalized woman and the approved usage! But you want to ignore the horrible outcome for the woman and assume the outcome at the very low, short term dosages somehow applies at higher dosages!
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Maybe you’ll be lucky and right. Or. Not. You don’t have data. (You think not having data is a problem for vaccines– but don’t notice the same exact problem for ivermectin!).
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Sure. That’s a great sentiment at X-mas. It doesn’t mean Ivermectin doesn’t have side-effects when used frequently over a long period of time!
SteveF (Comment #203317): “A real market would have individuals focused on costs vs benefits. That is not what we have now, and if single payer becomes a reality, the lack of a price sensitive market will be the real cause.”
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Indeed. The reliance on third party payers is the main reason that medical pricing is so dysfunctional.
Quillette is typical very free speech, although they do throw in some articles from the other side which is fine. The article does look like a hit job as it only indirectly quotes Weinstein and then piles on with guilt by association.
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I find attempts at isolated canceling of people who do podcasts, talk radio, etc. to be weak tea. These people are basically paid to be provocative and they have to fill time 24/7 so they always tend to overstate things. Tucker, Hannity, Limbaugh, MSNBC, etc.
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Let’s face it, Weinstein was a professor at Evergreen State, not exactly the center of intellectual power. He’s trying to survive like everyone else. He’s probably unemployable in academia now, which says a lot about that institution.
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Being wrong about things that have uncertainty is not a crime, it only serves to hurt your long term credibility when you refuse to see the facts after that uncertainty is reduced (Trump lost the election, I’m not voting for him again, ha ha).
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What is likely going on if Ivermectin is actually minimally effective is what happens with every drug at the FDA, lethargic careful analysis that will only approve things when all the “right” studies have been done and meticulously documented.
Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 disease: Too good to pass up or too good to be true?
June 2021
Open Forum Infectious Diseases
DOI:10.1093/ofid/ofab318
Authors:
Mark J Siedner
On balance, we are left with a compelling meta-analysis (indeed, a handful of them), suggesting a
modest to large benefit of a low-cost, widely available, well-tolerated therapy for COVID-19 – a
dream scenario – but based on studies with small sample sizes, design flaws, incomplete results, or
some combination thereof. Ultimately, guideline authors must review this data and ask themselves if
this information crosses the threshold for support of ivermectin outside of clinical trials. Although
some have argued that the minimal risk afforded by a well-tolerated medicine does just that, there
are secondary harms of early support for therapies prior to a solid evidence base, such as creating
drug shortages of essential medicines and the erosion of trust in the scientific community, which
has certainly been degraded over the past year. Nonetheless, if larger clinical trials ultimately
confirm the efficacy of this low-cost, widely available drug, we must be willing to add ivermectin to the long list of therapeutic agents in medicine for which the best we can do is guess the mechanism of action.
———————————
You decide. Contrast with the Guardian-style hit piece I mentioned above. Author seems not bad. I disagree with the amount of evidence being weak argument he used. At least one meta-analysis has been favorable. In light of this study, why is Youtube pulling down videos and Wikipedia for a brief time it seems, accusing Weinstein of mis-information?
Mark Bofill:
‘Large’ is subjective. You seem unsure if he said words to the effect of, there’s all kinds of harm, I know it. His argument goes something like this. Young people’s risk from Covid-19 is small. The risks of vaccinating them is greater than that, or we at least need to weight that possibility at a medium to high level. This is my interpretation of him, blame me if it’s wrong.
Lucia:
Is the problem the existence of people who will not get vaccinated or determining if ivermectin is safe? Let’s say ivermectin is not safe, a 15 MG per week dose. What’s the problem now? The bigger threat is what? Sacrificing a few crazies like me or not wiping out the Covid-19? The goal is to wipe out Coivd-19. Ivermectin has at least of 50% chance of helping with that goal. What I am trying to highlight is the interests arrayed against ivermectin.
We’re talking about the few overdose cases I found. Did I mention it’s on the WHO’s list of essential medicines for children? I put up a ratio earlier. 1, 26, and 182. The overdoses were around 182. Doctors are prescribing at around 26. 26 relates to once a week. 182 relates to once a day. 1 relates to its most common use. Given all the risks society has taken so far, for instance economic risks, some risk from volunteers is warranted. Especially by old people. But that seems to be drowned out by the establishment.
Remember charity and goodwill to all? Now take what we are doing as some kind of world leader and apply that poor countries. Across space and time. In debt them to us or our pharmaceutical companies. Vaccinate their children. If we screw up our children, we are in better shape to deal with that.
Tom Scharf:
“I find attempts at isolated canceling of people who do podcasts, talk radio, etc. to be weak tea.”
We lost the climate wars for similar reasons. CA’s grid is a disaster, nuclear power plants are being shut down. Essential pipelines are not built. Weinstein rather than accept losing has decided to fight. I think he’s a good example. They deploy the same tactics against him as they used earlier in the climate wars. In the past more than a year, have they taken more control from us than we have gained from them? Average it out across the country. And I trust each of you, to look at things and decide what’s best for you, your family and your society.
What I want to know is how long infection acquired immunity lasts and if it’s significantly less than vaccination immunity, why this is so. I don’t see much evidence that anyone is seriously looking at this. I also want to know how many people have been infected compared to confirmed cases. Unfortunately, a high rate of vaccination would seem to make this impossible to determine. We could really use a test for immunity that is much more reliable than antibody titer.
I think that using ivermectin plus zinc as a prophylactic rather than getting vaccinated is, to put it somewhat tactfully, questionable. If ivermectin/zinc is effective against preventing infection by SARS-CoV-2, then it would likely work as an antiviral early in the infection, like hydroxychloroquine/zinc/antibiotic was supposed to (and IMO likely does) work. That would be a lot safer than taking prophylactic doses forever when you might already be immune from an asymptomatic infection.
Ragnaar,
We need more context to identify what’s a problem. Above, you were complaining the medical establishment won’t promote it. You evidently think that’s a “problem”. But if it’s not safe, them not promoting it not a “problem”. And if it’s not proven safe, them not promoting it is standard practice under our system. Obviously, if it’s not safe it would be a problem if Ivermectin supporters tried to force the medical establishment to say it’s safe when it’s not.
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But now you are trying to switch the issue around to what’s the problem with X, but I don’t know what “X” is. My position is I don’t advise you to take it, but if you do, I’m not going to lecture or tut-tut you. But I am going to point out that your standard for Ivermectin seems to be different from your standard for vaccines.
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I think you wrote this before. I’m not sure what this is supposed to make me think. It sounds like a line from a Halmark Christmas special.
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No one is blocking poor countries from taking measures they think work. Some are trying Ivermectin. The CDC can’t stop that– they can’t stop it even if they are right and Ivermectin supporters are wrong.
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As for vaccinating the kids in poor countries: We haven’t even gotten adults in poor countries vaccinated yet!
Ragnaar,
Fair enough. I don’t actually care enough to listen to his podcasts to determine this, so from my perspective it ought to be just as likely that Quilette ran a hit piece that got this wrong.
The only valid reason to vaccinate kids IMO is to prevent them from being a vector to those who are endangered. To the extent that it allows herd immunity to be reached sooner then it is useful assuming there is little risk to the kids. A judgment call. Oldsters can get vaccinated but immunocompromised people really need to stay away from other people, especially the unvaccinated, until herd immunity is demonstrated in their area.
DeWitt,
I also think it is very strange how this subject of reinfection of the previously infected is completely ignored. Completely. I read somewhere a few days ago that said immunity for infection only lasted 6 months. No link or supporting data given.
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As far as I can tell it is at least a year based on the fact that if there was a significant reinfection rate we would be hearing about it very loudly from the usual suspects.
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Here is some data I found from the CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/06112021_covidupdate.html
“Cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection was significantly lower among previously infected persons compared with those with no prior infection (HR 0.06, 95% CI 0.05-0.08) (Figure).
0.31% (95% CI 0.03%-0.58%) were reinfected compared with 3.9% (95% CI 3.5%-4.2%) who developed primary infection.”
Tom Scharf,
“The only valid reason to vaccinate kids IMO is to prevent them from being a vector to those who are endangered.”
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Sure, but the reality is kids very rarely spread the virus to adults. It seems to me a close call, and one parents ought to make. Forcing kids to be vaccinated to go to school seems way over the top, especially since all the teachers have already had an opportunity to be vaccinated and are at very near zero risk from exposure to kids.
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Of course immune compromised individuals should stay away from other people….. and not just for covid-19, every communicable illness.
DeWitt,
It is not just the risk of re-infection (which seems low) but the risk of severe, life threatening illness after re-infection that matters. Good luck finding that information.
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What makes me crazy is the endless (apparent) desire to make the risks appear greater than they really are. The fatality rate among people over 80 (in Florida) with confirmed covid-19 was somewhere around 20% last year, and those at 70 years old with confirmed covid-19 had a risk of death of about 6%-7% (IIRC). Younger groups, and especially those under 45, had dramatically lower risk of death…. approaching zero.
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Why was this information not being blared by the CDC? It is almost as if they don’t want people to understand the actual risks of severe illness and death.
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In the UK, one public opinion survey found that nearly half of all Brits thought 5% – 10% of the population had already died from covid-19….. what we have here is a complete failure of the health care authorities to communicate basic information.
I’m not sure the climate wars were “lost”. Culture wise as far as the allowable discussions among polite company this might be true, although the reality is nobody talks about climate change unless they trust who they are with, it is just too divisive.
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As far as policy goes the trend seems to be more towards picking all the low hanging fruit and converting to clean energy as it can be afforded. This is not so objectionable. Things like the GND are still fantasy and any politician that actually implemented something that impactful would be run out of office.
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Personally I rarely read any climate change articles any more, the actual science moves pretty slowly so there just isn’t much going on. The models need to be verified and that takes decades, the whimsical RCP8.5 type of projections look even more unlikely than they did 10 years ago. The bulk of stuff in the media is just alarmism and shaming one’s political opponents. SSDD. Same sh**, different decade.
Tom Scharf,
The French voters recently rejected a climate policy change. As Pielke, Jr. pointed out years ago, doing something about ‘climate change’ polls well until people find out how much it costs to accomplish next to nothing. They should really attach ‘anthropogenic’ to ‘climate change’ as it’s really quite clear that ‘stable climate’ is an oxymoron.
Tom Scharf,
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Yes, there is not much happening in climate ‘science’. The most credible climate sensitivity value is about 2C per doubling of CO2, and I expect that is what it will turn out to be. Nothing catastrophic, but with some very long term impacts.
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The problem is that if sensible people ignore the issue, the crazies will do tremendous damage, economically and socially. If nobody objects when the crazies say sea levels will start to rise at 8 times their current rate, then very bad public policies could be enacted. And experience says reversing bad public policy is tantamount to impossible. I think it is worth paying attention to, even if nothign much ‘scientific’ is happening.
Tom Scharf,
That’s the assumption that is apparently being used in the UK for attendance at Wimbledon. Totally bogus IMO. I think it’s based on the known decline in antibodies in people who have recovered from infection. They’re mostly gone in about three months. That’s yet another reason why studies of seropositivity likely miss a lot of cases. But that clearly has nothing to do with actual immunity or we would have seen a lot more reinfections before now.
Also, the percent fully vaccinated doesn’t tell the whole story either. TN, for example, has less than 40% of the population fully vaccinated. Are we seeing a surge now? Not so much. TN has 12.7% confirmed cases. That means ~60-75% of the population likely has acquired immunity. If you assume that the same fraction applies to who gets vaccinated, then the additional immunity from vaccination ranges from 10 – 15%. That would mean 75-85% of the TN population is immune.
If that’s true, then TN should only see a small bump from Delta or whatever they’re calling it now. Missouri, OTOH, has about the same fraction of fully vaccinated people as TN. But the fraction of confirmed cases is 10.2%. So there should be a larger pool of susceptibles than TN. Not surprisingly to me, MO is having a significant surge in their new case rate but not much of a bump in the death rate, kind of like the UK.
More news of the duh, or dog bites man:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-children-risk-of-covid-19-death-or-serious-illness-remain-extremely-low-new-studies-find-11625785260?mod=hp_lead_pos3
A lot of the deaths were related to underlying medical conditions. A lot of the comments are that you would have been censored or banned on Twitter or Facebook if you posted this a month or so ago. Another comment was that five times as many kids died from influenza than COVID according to CDC stats.
Cases have risen slightly in Illinois over the past few weeks. It’s worth watching but not being alarmed yet.
lucia,
Illinois has a higher fraction of confirmed cases and a higher fully vaccinated fraction than MO. I think IL burned through most of its susceptible pool in the ‘surge’ from mid-March through mid-June. I will be quite surprised if there’s an increase in cases that comes anywhere close to the ~3,300 new cases/day in mid-April, 2021.
DeWitt,
It’s a very small increase. It could well be “noise” in what is actually a no-trend situation. It could even be “noise” in a decline. We’ll see.
Deaths are down.
And in other counter received wisdom news, there’s this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sophistry-at-duke-in-defense-of-masks-11625761644?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
So a behavior that had no control group was deemed responsible for low in-school transmission, rather than, say, the possibility that the probability of transmission between students was inherently low. No, can’t be. Trump was against masks, so masks are clearly a panacea and we can blame Trump for hundreds of thousands of deaths. A behavior which did have some control was distancing, which was shown to have minimal effect in the study.
The whole social distancing thing was bogus because transmission is almost certainly by aerosols less than 100 micrometers in diameter which do not fall to the ground in six or maybe even sixty feet, not droplets.
DeWitt,
100 nanometers, not 100 microns. 100 microns is plainly visible to the naked eye, and falls quickly…. about 26 cm per second terminal speed. Yes, 100 nanometer particles fall so slowly (below 1 cm per second terminal speed) that they can be easily carried by air currents, almost indefinitely. Incidentally, the time to reach terminal speed is very short for all small droplets…. on the order of 30 milliseconds for 100 micron droplets and a millisecond for 100 nm droplets.
DeWitt,
Keeping people 6 ft apart probably did have the side effect of limiting the number of kids in a room. So that may have helped.
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People staying home did the same and so likely helped.
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In that sense, social distancing probably worked, even if it helped for the “wrong” reason.
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One big problem is few people were discussing fresh air or filtration in any serious way.
The CDC has been tracking break-through cases…. a bit over 10,000 total cases (both symptomatic and asymptomatic). Symptomatic cases totaled about 7,400, with a bit over 100 million fully vaccinated. The rate looks very comparable to what you would expect from the vaccine trials…. risk of symptomatic cases is reduced by ~95%. The average risk of death among all symptomatic breakthrough cases is ~1.3%, although that is heavily weighted towards the oldest people. Among breakthrough cases, average age at death is 82, virtually identical to average age at death among unvaccinated people. The median age for breakthrough cases is 58, reflecting mainly that older people are more likely to be vaccinated.
Lucia,
“One big problem is few people were discussing fresh air or filtration in any serious way.”
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And I would add to that UV treatment of air. The issue is that adding these things is costly, and in many existing structures difficult or impossible. Yes, opening windows and exchanging the air is cheap, but only practical when the weather permits.
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I hope building standards are revised to reflect the risk of airborne pathogens like covid-19…. that also would reduce risk of influenza and colds as well. As part of new construction the added cost would not be so high.
It looks like the delta variant may be a lot less dangerous than previous strains of the Wuhan virus.
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The US has twice as many deaths per capita as the UK (where delta is predominant) in spite of the UK having 12 times as many cases per capita. Some of that is because deaths lag infections. The US has about the same rate of new cases as a month ago while cases have been increasing in the UK. But that can only account for a small portion of the difference: Cases in the UK are up by “only” a factor of about 2.5 from two weeks ago and a factor of five from a month ago. That is nowhere near the factor of 24 difference in apparent case fatality rate.
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CFR in the US seems to be about 1.5%, about the same as it has been for the last year. That is in spite of the vulnerable being vaccinated at a very high rate. The explaination could be that the vaccine is less effective for the most vulnerable, which would not be a surprise. CFR in the UK is about 0.2 to 0.3%, depending on the lag assumed.
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The US has cumulative cases about 40% higher than the UK, which might be part of the reason that the UK has such a big surge. According to the Financial Times, the UK passed the US for fully vaccinated a month ago. but they seem to be counting people as fully vaccinated once they get their final dose. If so, the UK is only just catching up with the US.
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker/?areas=gbr&areas=usa&cumulative=1&doses=full&populationAdjusted=1
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That suggests another possibility. Maybe one dose of vaccine is very good at preventing serious illness, but not so good at preventing infection from delta. That could account for both the relatively high rate of spread and low CFR in the UK. So we really need data broken down by age and vaccination status.
Mike M,
The UK has more than 85% of all people over age 50 already vaccinated, and over 95% of the most vulnerable. I think that contributes to the lower CFR in the UK, although the different strains could make a difference as well. In the USA, those who die are almost all over 60 and unvaccinated. In the UK, most cases are among the unvaccinated….. but those people are younger on average and unlikely to die. As I think DeWitt pointed out, the total fraction of the population with confirmed cases in the UK is well below the USA, so there is a larger pool of unvaccinated susceptible individuals; that along with a more infective variant may explain the surge in cases in the UK.
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Since the CFR is almost identical in breakthrough cases (about 1.3%) as in unvaccinated people, were everyone vaccinated, the CFR would be almost the same….but with far lower cases and deaths.
SteveF (Comment #203360): “The UK has more than 85% of all people over age 50 already vaccinated, and over 95% of the most vulnerable. I think that contributes to the lower CFR in the UK”
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I don’t see how that could be possible. The UK vaccination numbers are not so different from the US. It would be a stretch to claim that the difference can account for a factor of 2 difference in CFR. No way can it account for an order of magnitude difference.
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SteveF: “In the USA, those who die are almost all over 60 and unvaccinated. In the UK, most cases are among the unvaccinated”.
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Those two things are unconnected. Swap “UK” and “USA” in that sentence and it would still be true.
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SteveF: “Since the CFR is almost identical in breakthrough cases (about 1.3%) as in unvaccinated people, were everyone vaccinated, the CFR would be almost the same….but with far lower cases and deaths.”
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Good point. If true, then the different CFR in the UK has nothing to do with vaccination rates.
I have also been noticing the “more delta cases but less deaths” trend around the globe. This combined with the “we don’t know if delta is more virulent or not” language has put my radar up that perhaps this variant is less lethal.
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There isn’t really any evolutionary pressure on the virus to become more or less deadly. People die well after they are contagious so the virus really doesn’t care one way or the other as far as its survival goes. It could go either way.
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However there are lots of real confounders here. Primarily the age group of infection is likely much younger now due to vaccination and behavior changes in the population. Those most susceptible to the virus and more likely to die from it also may have previously been infected. Etc. The timing of cases to deaths also has to be accounted for. Hospital interventions may also have been refined to be more effective.
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But it should be possible to normalize for those things. What I have read is that there are different studies that show it to be more and less lethal.
I have totally given up on trying to figure out mask efficacy. The political pressure is just too high so confirmation bias rules the roost when the models need to be sufficiently complex to even deal with observational data.
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If one came to the conclusion that they were minimally effective and almost useless they would be banned by the information ministry (I have little doubt this would actually happen).
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Have you heard even once over the last year from the media that a diligent mask wearer was infected and became seriously ill? I have not. Obviously this happens frequently, but the narrative must be upheld. We just had a very significant step change in mask wearing and public behavior in my area (and most other areas I assume) so there should have been an almost immediate measurable effect in cases if mask efficacy was high. This didn’t happen.
“ Reduced sensitivity of SARS-CoV-2 variant Delta to antibody neutralizationâ€. It’s beyond my pay grade but I think it is really good news. Published yesterday in Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03777-9_reference.pdf
Mike M,
“Good point. If true, then the different CFR in the UK has nothing to do with vaccination rates.”
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Only if everyone were vaccinated; everyone isn’t. If in the extreme case you vaccinated every person over age 45 and left everyone under 45 un-vaccinated, then nearly all cases (over 90%) would be among the un-vaccinated population under 45…. who have about a 0.1% average chance of death per confirmed case. So the CFR would be quite near 0.1% for over half the population, and the number of cases in the older population reduced by ~95%.
This pretty much has to yield a reduced overall CFR….. like in the UK.
To put some numbers on it: Assume a population with 60% under 45 and 40% over 45 (similar to the USA). The average CFR for the over 45 population is about 5%, while it is ~0.1% for those under 45. So we would expect total cases to fall by a factor of about 0.6 + 0.4 * 0.05 = 0.62, while deaths would fall by a factor of about (0.6 * 0.001 + 0.4 * 0.05 * 0.05)/( 0.6 * 0.001 + 0.4 * 0.05) = 0.078. The drop in initial CFR would be expected to be a factor of about 0.078/0.62 = 0.125. CFR would initially be only about 12.5% as high as with no vaccinations. Of course, as the under 45 population reached herd immunity, the CFR would rise, because cases would fall much more than deaths.
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I didn’t make up the numbers for people vaccinated in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55274833
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They indicate ~93% of those over 50 in the UK have been vaccinated; and 95% of white people over age 50.
AFAICT if you are vaccinated and you get a breakthrough infection that lands you in the hospital (serious illness) then you are in the same boat as the unvaccinated in the hospital. Just as likely to have a bad outcome at that point.
You are just less likely to ever get to that point if vaccinated. Your vaccination has effectively failed, mostly this is immunocompromised and/or very old people.
Russell,
They are saying just the opposite: bad news. The variant is resistant to antibodies which target the original spike protein, making resistance from previous infections or vaccination lower. Which indicates a booster cocktail may be required. The immune response involves more than antibodies, so it is not yet possible to say how much more often the new strain would cause a “breakthrough” infection.
Pfizer is applying to the FDA to market third booster shots, these are identical to the original. They also have a different version tuned to variants in the works. They claim that a 3rd shot after 6 months provides significant protection against the variants. I think this is only antibody response etc.
SteveF (Comment #203365): “Only if everyone were vaccinated; everyone isn’t.”
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OK. I guess that is an example of Simpson’s paradox.
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But vaccination rates in the UK are not so different from the USA. So I don’t see how that could account for an order of magnitude difference in CFR.
Mike M,
Deaths are dominated by the elderly (and not just from covid-19!). If more elderly are vaccinated (as they are in the UK) and more elderly are cautious in their behavior (as I expect they are in the UK), then the CFR will be much lower.
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In the UK, 11.8% of adults say they are unwilling to ever be vaccinated…. unchanged from January, and 4.1% who are uncertain if they will be vaccinated. In the USA, the unwilling are 29%… unchanged from February, along with 8.3% who are not certain if they will be vaccinated. (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations#vaccinations-by-age)
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So the USA is unlikely to ever reach 70% vaccinated, while the UK is likely to reach somewhere over 85% of all adults, and they are already at ~93% of those over 50. 30% in the States is a hundred million people. People under 50 who refuse vaccination don’t run much risk of death, but those over 50, and especially over 65, do risk death. It is for me incomprehensible that people over 50 refuse the vaccines.
SteveF,
Yes a 100μm particle is likely visible, but unless the humidity is very high, it won’t stay at 100μm. 100nm is way too small. Inhalable particulate matter goes up to 10μm, see the EPA PM10 and PM2.5 standards for example, because particles that small can reach the lungs. Tuberculosis is transmitted by aerosols of 5μm and smaller because the cells the virus can infect are deep in the lungs. This led to the false idea that infectious aerosols for all airborne diseases must be less than 5μm.
Superspreaders are likely people who naturally produce large aerosol volumes from normal speaking and breathing. Here are a couple of links on disease spread by aerosols:
https://first10em.com/aerosols-droplets-and-airborne-spread/
https://first10em.com/covid-19-is-spread-by-aerosols-an-evidence-review/
From the second link:
Note that the failure of 70% of infected individuals to spread the disease to others is not necessarily evidence of possible widespread partial immunity. It is much more likely that those individuals do not produce large enough quantities of infectious aerosols for whatever reason.
SteveF (Comment #203370): “Deaths are dominated by the elderly (and not just from covid-19!). If more elderly are vaccinated (as they are in the UK) and more elderly are cautious in their behavior (as I expect they are in the UK), then the CFR will be much lower.”
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I don’t see it. Let’s say that 90% of the elderly in the UK and 80% in the USA are vaccinated. That is a factor of two difference. But CFR differs by an order of magnitude.
DeWitt,
Yes, 100 nm is smaller than a typical pathogenic aerosol (the covid virus itself is ~120 nm diameter!). But my point was that It is mostly very small particles, not 100 microns; 100 microns is easy to filter, but filtering that size particles does little to stop spread of the virus. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30323-4/fulltext
“These data show that infectious aerosols from humans exist in a wide range of particle sizes that are strikingly consistent across studies, methods, and pathogens. There is no evidence to support the concept that most respiratory infections are associated with primarily large droplet transmission. In fact, small particle aerosols are the rule, rather than the exception, contrary to current guidelines. These small particles occur without a need for a prolonged time to allow for desiccation, and they are of a size that is immediately respirable. ”
My emphasis.
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They discuss mostly sizes from a fraction of a micron to several microns.
MIke M,
“Let’s say that 90% of the elderly in the UK and 80% in the USA are vaccinated.”
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It is 93% of the over 50 population in the UK, and 77% in the USA…. 7% at higher risk, versus 23% at higher risk. Add in behavioral differences among the elderly, lower overall numbers of people that have had the virus in the UK, and a more infective (to the unvaccinated!) virus variant in the UK, and the difference in CFR doesn’t seem that strange to me.
SteveF (Comment #203376): “It is 93% of the over 50 population in the UK, and 77% in the USA”
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But how does it compare among the relevant age group, which would be those over 75 or 80.
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SteveF: “Add in behavioral differences among the elderly,”
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Not sure that even rises to the level of hand waving.
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SteveF: “lower overall numbers of people that have had the virus in the UK”
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That would reduce the difference between the US and UK, especially if the unvaccinated are largely those who have had the virus.
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SteveF: “and a more infective (to the unvaccinated!) virus variant in the UK”
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It is not clear to me why that matters.
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SteveF: “and the difference in CFR doesn’t seem that strange to me.”
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I guess there is no way to respond to that.
Mike M,
https://reports.opensafely.org/reports/vaccine-coverage/
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Vaccination rates for 50 and above in the UK.
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Age both doses At least 1 dose
50-54 80.6 86.7
55-59 84.9 89.3
60-64 88.2 91.4
65-69 91.2 93.3
70-79 94.3 95.6
80+ 94.6 96.4
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The highest vaccination rates are for the highest risk groups; not surprising when you consider that the oldest people were given the highest priority from the beginning for vaccinations.
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Here are the best numbers I can find for the USA:
(https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/)
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Age Both doses at least 1 dose
50-64 61% 69.2%
65-74 75.6% 84.9%
75+ 73.1% 82.25%
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When you consider that most deaths occur among the very oldest groups, those are very large differences…. the at risk fraction of people is a factor of 3 to 4 times higher in the USA.
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The more contagious strain makes a difference because it can spread faster among the un-vaccinated, and mostly younger, population, so raises the total number of (non-fatal) cases, which reduces the calculated CFR. The lower total case rate since early 2020 in the UK means a greater fraction of un-vaccintated people are still susceptible. Places like the Dakotas (and others) had the pandemic mostly die out before vaccinations started, when confirmed cases reached ~15-17% of the total population. That never happened in the UK.
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I still do not find the big difference in CFR between the USA and the UK at all surprising. I guess there is no way for me to understand why you do find it surprising.
As an example if all deaths were in 50+ age group, and the UK had 1% of that population at risk, and the US had 2% at risk, then the US death rate would be twice as high all things equal.
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Because the deaths are heavily concentrated in the older age group differences in that group dominate the calculation of death rate.
Tom Scharf (Comment #203380): “As an example if all deaths were in 50+ age group, and the UK had 1% of that population at risk, and the US had 2% at risk, then the US death rate would be twice as high all things equal.”
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Indeed. So a factor of two or three difference from that would be quite believable. But I am not buying a factor of 10.
Here is a real good analysis about why Trump supporters are so upset about the election and are willing to believe all sorts of claims about it:
https://noqreport.com/2021/07/09/must-read-twitter-thread-heres-why-we-know-the-2020-election-was-stolen/
Women’s soccer players lost in court.
The women were trying to use political stunts to get US Soccer to give them the benefits of the mens’ deal of higher bonuses, without giving up their higher base salaries and benefits.
It was revealed the women actually earned more money than the men, including on a per game basis.
The men’s number would have been higher if they had qualified for the world cup.
The women were offered the same collective bargaining deal by US soccer, but they wanted more money in base salary and other protections like injury pay.
Another week of bad results for Florida. The number of cases and % positive have been rising for a month. Last week there were 21,000 new cases. Vaccinations administered continue to fall. Gonna tighten up the mask straps another notch and stay home.
http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/covid19_report_archive/covid19-data/covid19_data_latest.pdf
Russell,
It matters who is catching the virus: young or old?
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So far, Florida’s death rate has continued to fall. It may rise a bit with an increasing number of daily cases, but I expect any rise will be proportionally less than the rise in cases (that is, the CFR will slowly fall, not rise).
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You got vaccinated right? Unless you are immuno-compromised, your risk of serious illness is pretty low.
Deaths in Arkansas have more than doubled in the last three weeks.Seems to be lagging 2-3 weeks behind cases. For the USA as a whole, case have started to move upward, but it is too soon to tell what will happen with deaths.
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It is important to recognize that vaccination does not much help the group at really high risk. Those are people so frail that their immune systems give an inadequate response. The flu shot does little to reduce flu deaths, probably for the same reason.
SteveF, thank you, yes I have been vaccinated, but I have several existing issues that make me wary ….. and my wife’s brother caught Covid and died after being vaccinated.
And in the mask insanity news there’s this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-98-degrees-out-why-is-my-child-wearing-a-mask-11625868126?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Do you see professional or collegiate athletes wearing masks when competing? I don’t. Nobody playing tennis at Wimbledon wore a mask when playing. And that’s not to mention the low risk of COVID-19 to a nine year old child. The summer camp in question is run by the Sidwell Friends School.
Mike M,
Arkansas has a relatively low rate of vaccination (35% fully vaccinated), while other states have higher vaccination rates… like New Mexico with 55%. Funny how the states with the lowest combined confirmed infection and vaccination rates seem more likely to have significantly increasing cases.
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“It is important to recognize that vaccination does not much help the group at really high risk. Those are people so frail that their immune systems give an inadequate response. The flu shot does little to reduce flu deaths, probably for the same reason.”
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Preposterous claim. Sounds like the exact opposite of what multiple double blind studies have shown. https://observer.com/2020/11/moderna-covid-vaccine-effective-age-gender-ethnic-groups/
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Do you have a reference showing that covid vaccines don’t reduce risk for the very elderly? Everything I have seen suggests the opposite. The Brits specifically targeted the very elderly (over 80) to receive the vaccines first; that would make no sense if the vaccines are not effective in preventing illness and death in that age group. It is true that breakthrough illnesses are more severe for the elderly… just like illnesses contracted without any vaccination are more severe for the elderly. That doesn’t mean the vaccines are not effective in reducing illness and death in the elderly.
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It is well known that influenza vaccines are far lower in efficacy than the m-RNA vaccines for covid, and vary in efficacy both year to year and across age groups. I don’t see that as having much to do with the efficacy of covid vaccines.
Does ivermectin work against the variants?
At 37:00:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOi2Pf8lrBc
Kory from the FLCCC. This is happening. We can wait for the authorities to speak, wait for the money to talk. Or like Kory, do something. A vaccine for an evolving thing like a virus is shooting at what was. How about we shoot at what will be? Or do both.
SteveF (Comment #203390): “Preposterous claim.”
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That which is expected can not be preposterous. The issue is immunosenescence: https://theconversation.com/why-vaccines-are-less-effective-in-the-elderly-and-what-it-means-for-covid-19-141971
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SteveF: “Do you have a reference showing that covid vaccines don’t reduce risk for the very elderly?”
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Of course not. I never made that claim. I referred to “people so frail that their immune systems give an inadequate response”.
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Correlation is not causation.
As usual the increase in cases are going to have multiple factors. Mostly I think it is delta combined with people’s change in behavior. Since vaccinations have stalled there is really nothing to wait for at this point, just let delta burn through the population it can reach ASAP to get to herd immunity.
Mike M,
“It is important to recognize that vaccination does not much help the group at really high risk.”
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This is rubbish; plainly false. The actual data from trials show the efficacy is substantial in all age groups. The fact that vaccines illicit less immune response in older people does not mean that vaccination “does not much help”. Vaccination provides substantial benefit.
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“…people so frail that their immune systems give an inadequate responseâ€. Inadequate…. as in not providing protection?
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You are just playing word games, wasting your time and mine. Cio.
Tom Scharf,
” Since vaccinations have stalled there is really nothing to wait for at this point, just let delta burn through the population it can reach ASAP to get to herd immunity.”
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I agree. If there is a substantial fraction of people who choose to not be vaccinated, then it is inevitable covid will continue to spread through that population until the population of susceptibles is reduced enough to drive the case rate to a very low level. Unfortunately, that also means some people will pay for their choice with their lives. You make your choices and live (and die) with the consequences.
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But public policies designed to protect those who choose to not be vaccinated have costs which will be borne by people who have been vaccinated and are no longer at significant risk of infection. I say get rid of all those policies.
It’s been bothering me about ivermectin and the variants.
Right at the beginning here: The FLCCC Weekly Update, for June 16, 2021
Kory says ivermectin works against the known variants.
Is it wise to believe him? What is the cost to him if he’s wrong while being in this dangerous area? Career ending. Lawsuits.
Under what legal theory would he face lawsuits if he’s wrong? How would it be career ending? (Real questions. Because I don’t see this.)
Correction:
The FLCCC is now suggesting one dose of ivermectin every 2 weeks. They used to say once a week. I had commented my prescription was once a week which when looking at what the FLCCC, I referred to as the standard preventative dose. So I think the safest thing to say is, weekly or every two weeks.
Lucia:
I don’t know which legal theory? He’s administering all kinds of ivermectin. I should not have brought that up.
Lucia:
Let’s say ivermectin is not safe, a 15 MG per week dose. What’s the problem now?
The problem to be solved is wiping out Covid-19. Ivermectin completes the solution. We then have:
The vaccinated
The immune from prior exposure
The ones on ivermectin
Some people are never going to get vaccinated so you’ll only have 2 of 3.
I know some people that will take ivermectin but not get the vaccine.
So winning the ivermectin battle for the corporations loses the war.
The more suspicious me thinks not winning the war now, give us more battles later, with someone to continue to save us.
I am disregarding the safety of ivermectin because raising questions about it, loses the war.
One thing we’re dealing with is people have had a lot of the establishment lately. Their mistrust of our institutions is pretty low.
Ragnaar,
I’m not dedicating my life to stamping out Ivermectin. But I also doubt Ivermectin is going to wipe out Covid-19.
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As you are self medicating, I hope for your sake it turns out safe and at least somewhat effective at the dosage you are self administrating. But I think it is foolish to not ask questions about safety mostly because you have some sort of hostility to corporations and/or to vaccines.
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I’ve already had a vaccine and I’m glad I did. I’ll take a booster for variants if that becomes available and is recommended. You get to make your own choice.
Ragnaar,
For what it’s worth, this is what the FDA has to say about safety of ivermectin
So Ivermectin has side-effects– including coma and death even at the low dosages where it is used. And you are proposing to medicate at higher dosages.
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You might end up fine. Or you might end up like that case study you posted where the woman’s husband took her to the hospital in seriously bad shape!
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https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19
Also, there is a clinical trial of ivermectin underway
https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/ivermectin-principle-trial-covid/
Lucia,
That study only is enrolling people with confirmed covid. So not an evaluation as a prophylactic. Maybe there are controlled studies for use as a prophylactic, but I have not hear of them. Could be that there is reluctance to give people the drug over long periods.
I would think that if you are going to take a prescription drug as a prophylactic, you’d take hydroxychloroquine. It might or might not work, but at Ieast it is known to be safe for long term use, especially at the very low doses recommended for prophylactic use.
Challenge trials would be appropriate here if one wanted actual evidence without the pandemic being so far along to make the point moot before an approval happened. Low risk, high potential reward.
Tom Scharf,
Challenge trials of Ivermectin might be great. But we’d have to get all the pro-Ivermectin people to volunteer. The pro-vaccine people have been vaccinated! I’m guessing the pro-Ivermecting people have convinced themselves it’s safe and works and won’t want to risk being in the control group. So they won’t volunteer. They just want to self medicate!
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If so, it wouldn’t be “corporations” faults.
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Anyway, you also need someone to fund the trials. Of course manufacturers only fund trials for things they might sell later. So you have a problem that the money has to come from somewhere else.
Ragnaar: Has FLCCC found a funding mechanism for double blind trials? Could the start some sort of “go fund me” from their enthusiastic followers? That would be a way for the research you hope for to get done.
One would assume that challenge trials would be less expensive to conduct than regular “wait and see” mass trials, however after you add the required insurance of the challenge aspect, maybe not. Obviously if you weren’t sold on Ivermectin than volunteering for a challenge trial might not be wise, although in this special case if you are young then the risk is still pretty low. Lots of clinical trials going on with paid volunteers. I have no idea if this stuff works, but in this special case time is a very important parameter in finding out the answer.
The strange thing about ivermectin is that in its normal use (against parasitic diseases) it is taken infrequently (every couple of weeks, even monthly) yet seems to work perfectly well. It is said to clear the body with a half life of ~18 hours, so long term protection seems odd. The drug is commonly used as a prophylactic against parasites, but with infrequent doses. It has been reported that people who take it become so toxic to invertebrates that mosquitos die after biting someone who has recently taken ivermectin. The drug is a potent neurotoxin for invertebrates, causing rapid paralysis and death, but can’t enter mammalian central nervous systems. The two people who discovered ivermectin split the Nobel prize for medicine.
Lucia:
I’ve argued ivermectin is safe. I’ve yet to see the ivermectin hospital admissions and deaths. I’ve conceded the point to move onto the bigger issue. Throwing everything at the virus. As we seemed to be doing a year ago when one looks at the economic changes.
A pandemic requires action now, for a top down hierarchy system that moves slowly. We have both looked to the top of hierarchy to make our cases. But I have looked more at one frontline doctor which all things being equal is more at the base of the hierarchy because that’s where most of us are. They, at the top of hierarchies having been telling us what to do for more than a year now. And what I am hearing is support for listening to them. If I ask, why should we listen to them? Appeal to authority.
You want to put ivermectin through a $20 million trial that will take some time. The pharmaceuticals aren’t going to fund that for a non-patented drug. I bet you can guess what they’re going to do with new drugs that may work as preventatives. If you take the point of view, it’s about money, maybe that will help. If you take the point of view that regulatory capture is real and in play, that may help. This is not some ideal situation. There are not guardians of science or medicine in control on this. There’s special interests in control.
Is there some rule where you question everything and that applies double to government? I am not sure I am picking that up from you.
And I’m going to be fine. I didn’t get the vaccine. We are resilient, we are strong, we will be fine. Which I have been saying for a long time. When Minnesota was seeing high daily death counts.
Lucia:
From an overview, we’re expecting these massive organizations to deal with something they’re not ready for. Some people say the best government is local. Because it can see what’s happening and react to it. But we rely on this monster that is dumb, and slow and is used to getting its way. This analogy applies nicely to Kory and the CDC or pick your acronym. You have been arguing from the big money position I think. Bigger is more right. Bigger has better vision. And it’s easy for a libertarians to say no that’s not true. If you agree with regulatory capture then it’s the pharmaceutical companies contributing significantly to what regulators say. For instance, you need a 4 month double blind study with 5000 people and anything less is not acceptable science. So they’ve captured. They’re making the rules. Are the standards we have consistent with big money’s standards? Yes. They can afford to develop new drugs. They can argue against drugs with low margins of profit. I don’t think any of this is controversial and the same things have been said for many decades.
Ivermectin is considered a zinc ionophore like chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, quercetin and quinine. This trial of subcutaneous administration of ivermectin includes the effect of zinc. If zinc is shown to be either necessary or increases the effectiveness of ivermectin, it will be indirect evidence that hydroxychloroquine plus zinc works too.
In another article in today’s WSJ, there is much moaning and groaning about 18-29 year olds are not getting vaccinated. Of course there is no mention of the possibility that any of them are already immune from asymptomatic infection, only whinging about how they could infect others when asymptomatically infected.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/young-americans-arent-getting-vaccinated-jeopardizing-covid-19-fight-11625995802?mod=hp_lead_pos3
The horror!
Ragnaar,
I honestly don’t know what, specifically, you want to happen.
There’s a lot of stuff in there and I’m not going to go in and fish out each thing to ask questions like “what does this mean”, “I haven’t said this” and etc. (For example: I don’t think I’m arguing from the ‘big money’ position. I think I suggested a way that small money people like you and Ivermectin fans can collect together to find out if Ivermectin really works.)
All I think I’ve pointed out to you is that
(a) Ivermectin used the way you want to use it might not be safe. It’s just a fact. That protocol has not been tested.
(b) There haven’t been double blind studies of the use you want to put it to. This is also just a fact.
(c) these two facts won’t change until testing has been done. This is also just a fact.
You seem to want me to not state these facts because they are “big money positions” and/or because the “the top of the hiearchy” have been doing something, or some one is “not the guardian of science”.
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The problem is a-c are, they are just facts.
“It is said to clear the body with a half life of ~18 hours…”
Yes, I’ve seen that plot. We don’t know what it’s all doing. But that’s par for the course. It’s complex. I take 5 tablets at once. Why can’t I spread them out? That’s not what my prescription says. Taken on an empty stomach, it more attacks the parasites as for its original use. Taken with food, it’s better, it sticks around more according to an FLCCC contributor who does prescribe it. Dr Syed it was: https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/Ivermectin-Dosage:7?r=95B5yNYM1tjAo5Lg7CXUuVyUTPf2EGjS I will say this about the half life plot. It’s measuring one thing. We are a complex system interacting with a complex drug, trying to fight off a complex thing.
DeWitt,
“The horror!”
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You really have to laugh, lest you become too depressed.
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Our idiot bureaucrats, and their idiot journalists fellow-travelers,could not tell the difference between their own a$$holes and holes in the ground in front of them. The issue IS NOT young people. The issue has NEVER been young people. The issue IS, AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN, older people who refuse to take the vaccine. Really, who cares if a bar-hopping 20-something gets covid? They don’t, I certainly don’t, and nobody should. It is the people over 50 who refuse the vaccines that lead to nearly all bad outcomes, socially, economically, and personally…. including, unfortunately, their own deaths.
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Blaming perfectly rational 20-somethings, who mostly understand they are at minimal risk, for the idiotic choices of older people (who actually are at risk) shows just how deranged our ruling “elite class” really is. It would be comical save for the disservice it does to rational policy.
SteveF (Comment #203422): “Blaming perfectly rational 20-somethings, who mostly understand they are at minimal risk, for the idiotic choices of older people (who actually are at risk) shows just how deranged our ruling “elite class†really is.”
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But of course, that is not the point. The point is people NOT DOING AS THEY ARE TOLD. How dare they.
SteveF/MikeM,
There’s been a lot of attempts to shame ‘young people’ through out this. It’s been totally not fair. As a group, they’ve acted better than I would ever have expected based on how ‘young people’ acted when I was young.
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Would I like them to get vaccines to slow variants? Sure! But that’s asking them to do even more for my generation and my mothers than we’ve already asked.
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I want Moderna and Pfizer to make the “variant booster”, the FDA nd CDC to promote. Then I and other at risk people can take it. That’s much more fair than trying to shame younger people!
It is notable that the media typically go wayyyyyyyy out of its way to never explicitly talk about the age / death disparity with covid in these types of articles. People under 20 have better protection than a vaccine for older people without ever taking one due to their age. Not getting vaccinated is a problem as far as linked transmission goes, but the media needs to be honest with their arguments. “Please do it for grandma” would be a good start.
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CA is implementing a really twisted rule that all kids must wear masks in school because they are worried that forcing only unvaccinated kids to wear masks would cause them to to be ridiculed. It’s bonkers.
Lucia,
In the early stages, asking for participation in the masquerade by young people at least made a little bit of sense. Since vaccines have been available to everyone over 45, that ask is completely unreasonable: Bureaucrat: “Young people should get the vaccines”. Young person: “Why? My personal risk is very near zero, and anyone who is really at risk is free to get vaccinated.”. Bureaucrat: “But some older people refuse the vaccines.”. Young person: “This is my problem? I don’t think so.”. Bureaucrat: “Good citizens display solidarity for social good.” Young person: “Go to Hell.”
This is a bit curious. The CDC changed it’s reference group for age group comparisons
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Before, reference group = 5 to 17 years old:
https://cdn.vidyohealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/vidyohealth-lessons-of-covid-19-01-980×333.png
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After (reference group = 18 to 29 years old):
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html
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They now show young age groups as <1x, ha ha. Just follow the science people, if you are allowed to. You can't handle the math of less than 1!
3.42 billion doses of covid administered.
7 billion people
25% if 2 doses, 50% if 1 dose.
Virtually all the older people with access.
The world must be a safer place.
187 million infected about 1 in 35 people?
Also from the CDC: As of April, 114.6 million estimated total infections, approx. 1/3 of the population. Table 2 gives an estimated rate of ~40% among younger folks (5-17,18-49 age groups).
Tom Scharf,
The CDC representation of risks is willfully misleading. They do not show absolute risks, rather relative risks….. and refuse to show just how tiny the risks are for children. The risk of severe illness among those younger than 12 is so close to zero that few would bother vaccinating children if that risk was accurately represented. And that would be the most reasonable choice for parents to make. It is not a significant childhood illness.
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The correct response to deaths among older people is to vaccinate older people, and warn those who refuse the vaccines what their actual risk of serious illness and death is. The correct response to potential new strains that can evade existing resistance is to develop boosters that target those new strains. Misrepresenting risks is never the correct response, but sadly, that is exactly what the CDC chooses.
angech,
“The world must be a safer place.”
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The world has about 200,000 deaths a day. Covid is adding about 7,700, down from a peak of 15,00 in January. So covid deaths represent ~ 3.5% of total deaths, and are almost all people over 60; average age of covid death in the USA is 82. If covid were to completely disappear, the world would be a safer place, but only slightly safer, and mainly for wealthy countries. Countries with a median age below 18 (almost all in Africa), where nearly everyone dies by age 60, are not really going to notice covid demographically.
On a brighter note: most of the 600,000 who have died in the USA either were receiving or would soon have been receiving Social Security benefits…. over the next decade Social Security payouts should be a couple hundred billion or more lower than they would have been. Same with Medicare, though maybe not quite as much drop as Social Security. But a hundred billion here and a hundred billion there and soon you are talking about significant money.
SteveF,
I suspect any savings to Medicare and SS benefits is more than made up by the costs of hospitalization for many of those who died or recovered. ICU care is really expensive and we had people on ventilators for months. Anyone who was on a ventilator for an extended period will need a lot of rehabilitative care. Of course based on previous experience, most of them will not last a year.
SteveF (Comment #203433): “On a brighter note: most of the 600,000 who have died in the USA either were receiving or would soon have been receiving Social Security benefits”
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And most of those would have stopped receiving benefits in a year or two.
Lucia:
I am sorry about my recent tone. I may be somewhere near the ‘acceptance’ stage.
There isn’t money for double blind studies. Your suggestion is good, we need to fund it ourselves.
What it looks like to me is the money train has left the station. The regulators have blessed that train.
Maybe the battle is in countries such as India. One of Kory’s approaches was to go around the world and find favorable ivermectin outcomes.
From one point of view, we and other countries are both running experiments. The test of ivermectin is happening. In the coming years, economists such as Lomborg and Tol hopefully will weigh in. So maybe it’s that I need to shift my time frame.
Yes the CDC table was misleading, and it was obviously intentional. They were hiding the lack of risk to young people, and almost certainly for political reasons. I will say I have found the CDC website to be stellar comparatively to the rest of the media, the information you are looking for is easily found in searches and it is written clearly and concisely. This example, not so much.
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One could represent the information as 0.10X, or 1/10 X, etc. I can say with confidence from my experience when my wife was teaching algebra that most Americans aren’t too swift with fractions, but that is no excuse in not presenting the data at all.
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You just know there was a battle over this in a design review at the CDC, I would just love to have a recording of that debate. The people make the silly arguments won.
The US isn’t the world. The EU, India, China, etc. could fund a large scale study of cheap drugs. Usually the fact this isn’t happening is because there isn’t justification for it, although there is always some chance the world is missing something due to a wrong consensus. It’s just a rare event, but not impossible. In these cases the burden of proof is on those who are stating a conspiracy is happening.
Ragnaar,
There is nobody in the USA or Europe willing to fund double blind studies (or heaven forbid, challenge studies!) on things like ivermectin. They have already spent the money on vaccines, which are certain to work (~95% efficacy), and there is little motivation to look for less expensive alternatives. If this sort of study is going to be funded, in is most likely in countries like India, not in wealthy countries.
Tom Scharf,
The data are presented in a way they can argue is “accurate”, but in fact the presentation is designed to maximize fear (so motivate vaccinations) not to inform about quantitative risks of hospitalization and death. The “less than 1” trope with kids is just designed to scare parents into having kids at minimal risk vaccinated. Make the teachers union happy…. forget the kids. The grouping of ages (5 to-17!) is designed hide the fact that prior to puberty the risk is uniformly tiny…. it starts to rise at about 13-14, and levels off again near 18-19.
Ragnaar,
No need to apologize. It’s just that it’s not entirely clear what you are hoping for.
It wasn’t and isn’t “the regulartors”. What largely happened in the US is the Trump administration funded “operation warpspeed” to speed up development of what appeared to be promising vaccines. It worked. We now have them.
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This decision wasn’t made by “the regulators”. It was made by the executive branch of the Trump administration. They identified a promising path and worked to get things out there. They succeeded.
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It may be true that other things might have worked. But whether the do or don’t, there was no systematic way to guess at it back in early 2020. Vaccines were funded. They work. There isn’t much need for taxpayers to fund every other guess any and every contrarian or not-thrilled-about-vaccines scientists might dream up. As a taxpayer, I’m not going to push for the government to fund that research because it’s not urgent.
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But if those contrarian scientists get funding from private people, they can do work.
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But not double blind ones. And not well designed ones. So the results are ambiguous and it’s hard to determine if any particular use is safe or effective.
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For better or worse, our regulatory agencies do have pre-existing protocols established by laws. They are designed to determine if something really is safe and if it really is effective. Approval of drugs wasn’t always this way– certainly medicine men and women of the 19th century did it differently! But this method has been developed and used here. The method of testing drugs pre-dates Covid.
I agree that us old farts shouldn’t ask youngens to get jabbed on our account, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for them to wear a mask for our sakes….. a real mask, N95 or better….and I think the government should be supplying them.
Ivermectin… another no vote. “ Ivermectin to prevent hospitalizations in patients with COVID-19 (IVERCOR-COVID19) a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trialâ€
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06348-5
Russel Klier,
Another study probably designed to fail. No zinc, no evaluation of serum zinc status and the treatment period was likely too short, the dose was too small and possibly too late. I’m not impressed. OTOH, if ivermectin were highly effective, there probably should have been some sign even in a poorly designed trial.
Conclusion: Ivermectin is probably not highly effective by itself. But this study does not show that a better designed protocol wouldn’t work. It does cast some doubt, IMO, on whether low dose ivermectin by itself is a prophylactic against infection.
Get vaccinated if you haven’t already had the disease.
Dewitt Payne. I am a card carrying pro vaxer.
DeWitt,
I think one thing that study shows: it is very difficult and expensive to design and test protocol by protocol especially if they protocols are designed by the seat of the pants. Presumably someone designed that one thinking it might work. Otherwise, it’s pretty expensive to do just to knock it out of contention. But then someone could say, “May be it would work if only the used zinc?” Or “Maybe it would work if they has a bigger dose?” “Or used it for a longer time.” Or in a different way.
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Big pharma, in contrast, does a bunch of foundational studies first. They test in vitro. They test in animals. This gives them a notion about dosage. They do a small study test for safety (and to some extent dosage.) Then the use the results of the small study to design the size and duration of the larger study.
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And, of course, at any stage, they might give up and decide the treatment doesn’ work!
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The big Pharma method is fairly systematic.
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It’s all well and good to lament that there isn’t a good mechanism for non-big Pharma treatments to get funded quickly. There isn’t. To some extent that’s unfortunate because maybe something cheap and easy might work. Hey, maybe leeches work!!
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But it doesn’t turn the non-evidence into evidence. And, as you note, the failures when they do do double blind tests makes it hard to believe Ivermectin has a big effect, Big effects tend to be easy to see.
Russell,
” I don’t think it’s too much to ask for them to wear a mask for our sakes….. a real mask, N95 or better”
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I strenuously disagree. It is much too much to ask anyone to wear a mask to protect people who have refused vaccination, and that is the real at-risk category. It is one of the things that pisses me off about air travel. If you are suggesting vaccinated elderly people (already at low risk) need further protection by forcing younger people to wear masks, then I disagree even more strenuously. That is, fortunately, never going to happen.
SteveF Wrong! I want them to voluntarily wear a mask to protect me…and I have been vaccinated…Twice. I need to be extra careful.
Russell,
Them wearing a mask is not the only way for you to get protection above and beyond vaccination. You can stay home, get groceries delivered and pretty well self isolate. I think this is much more reasonable than having young people wear masks. It will probably protect you more.
So, yes, I think it’s unreasonable to ask young people to wear masks for your sake. Just stay home!
I’m not convinced that the best way to protect higher-risk oldies is by vaccinating them and letting the disease rip in youngsters. It is youngsters that move the virus around, it is youngsters that give it to oldies, and if we let it rip through the youngsters then there is much more chance that there will be a mutant strain that may make youngsters seriously ill or that may bypass the vaccines.
Andrew Kennett well said.
Lucia, The number of cases is up by 94% in the last 14 days in the US [up 222% in my home, Florida] The current problem is Covid variation Delta, by the time Covid variation Zeta gets here it will be ravishing children and the vaccine will be useless.
In my lifetime the two viral scourges of Smallpox and Polio have been defeated. I remember the Polio fight….and this Covid battle is nothing like it. Staying home and hiding is no way to fight a war.
Russell,
Could not disagree with you more. Young people are not at risk. If you think you are, take whatever steps you think are needed to protect yourself. Please don’t put that burden on others. You seem close to hysterical about possible variants…. not good for clear thinking.
Deaths in Florida (7-day trailing avg) are now at 21 per day. For all of the USA, 216 per day. Overall death rate in the USA (all causes) is about 8,000, so covid now represents about 3% additional risk of death. The rise in the risk of death from Covid with increasing age almost exactly parallels the all-cause rise in the risk of death with increasing age. Considering that the average elderly person who dies will die of something other than covid 97% of the time, I think a bit of perspective is called for. A lack of perspective about risks leads to bad personal choices and bad public policies.
Russel,
Yes. Cases are up. Death’s are still down. Those statistics don’t tell me why you just can’t stay home. That will protect you.
I got it! The President issues an executive order. No one is mandated to get vaccinated. Businesses can only pay employees who have contact with the public if the employee is vaccinated. No one is required to get vaccinated, but if an individual chooses to work in a job where he or she has contact with the public, he or she is choosing to get vaccinated. Everyone I meet, from the postman to the checkout lady at the market will have chosen to be vaccinated. Period.
Russell,
You continue to see the only solution as burdening other people to reduce your fears.
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I don’t think the President has legal authority for that sort of mandate. Some governors might but I’m guessing legislatures would over turn those at this point.
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I never meet my postman. He doesn’t come to my door. He puts the main in a box. Your probably does too. You can wait for him to leave to go get it.
.
Why can’t you just stay home? Order goods from Amazon. Have food delivered. I’m not seeing why you can’t just modify your behavior.
Russel
Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet. (I only remember because of readings from Sunday mass!)
Andrew Kennett,
The age range of disproportionate spreaders of COVID-19 is adults 20-49. Not children. From what I have read, teenage and younger children are disproportionately low spreaders. See the results for schools in Sweden, for example. Now as an old fart, maybe people age 20-30 are youngsters, but I don’t think most people feel that way. I don’t expect laws to be passed that require vaccination for everybody. Deal with it.
Lucia, “With the more transmissible Delta variant spreading throughout the United States, COVID-19 hospitalizations are trending upward in more than two dozen statesâ€
Hospitalizations are up 11% in the last two weeks (36% in Florida). Increased deaths have lagged behind increased hospitalizations. The worst numbers come from States with the lowest vaccination percents. The time to get ahead of the curve is now. Swift and severe action is called for.
https://theweek.com/coronavirus/1002516/us-covid-19-hospitalizations-are-ticking-up-again-as-delta-variant-spreads
I got another Executive Order. Proof of vaccinated is required to get a Government check or subsidy. Soldiers to food stamp people, every one who choses to take money from the government also chooses to get vaccinated. States and local governments do the same…. unemployment recipients to garbage men choose to get vaccinated if they want their check.
Russel Klier,
On worldometers.com, Indonesia was number one in new cases and deaths yesterday at 40,427 new cases and 891 deaths. The UK was second in new cases at 34,471 new cases, but only 6 deaths and only 417 serious/critical cases.
Do you mean new lockdowns for your swift and severe action? It’s not going to happen. Mandatory vaccination would not be swift.
Russell Klier,
An EO like that would be enjoined instantly assuming Biden’s puppeteers would have him issue such an order which is highly unlikely. Vaccination takes weeks to months to achieve maximum protection. The current ‘surge’ would be over by then.
SteveF (Comment #203460): “For all of the USA, 216 per day. Overall death rate in the USA (all causes) is about 8,000, so covid now represents about 3% additional risk of death.”
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Dishonest data manipulation. The typical death rate this time of year is a little over 7000/day. This year it is surely less, because of harvesting by the Wuhan virus. Cases are going up and deaths are going up. It will likely soon be 10% of deaths with the Wuhan virus, maybe more.
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People in nursing homes are still vulnerable to the virus, so it makes sense to insist on vaccination of staff and maybe visitors. But otherwise, let people protect themselves.
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A few months ago, several people here mocked me for suggesting that there might be another summer surge. Well, it has arrived. Looks like largely in the same areas as last summer:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fcases-updates%2Fcases-in-us.html#cases_casesper100klast7days
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Animation of weekly cases by state here:
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2021/06/29/national-case-animation-june-26/
Sadly, there are far too many freedom hating totalitarians like Russell Klier in this country.
Lucia, I have been the King of staying home for 17 months. I did everything right…. masks, vitamins, Amazon, shots, nasal rinse and the cases are going up again. The only thing you offer me is to stay home some more. I probably don’t have a lot of months left in me and I ain’t spending them locked up. It’s time for those who haven’t taken the vaccine to stay home.
“It’s time for those who haven’t taken the vaccine to stay home.”
Russell Klier,
You are acting like the vaccine doesn’t work.
Andrew
Mike M, “When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.”
— Cicero
Andrew_KY, My wife’s youngest brother had two shots, three weeks later went on a fishing trip and caught Covid. He spent about six weeks in isolation on a ventilator and then died.
“My wife’s youngest brother had two shots, three weeks later went on a fishing trip and caught Covid. He spent about six weeks in isolation on a ventilator and then died.”
Russel Klier,
I’m sorry to hear that. But you know, this doesn’t prove anything, either way.
BTW, I’m a Scarlet-Lettered Vaccine Hesitant, and it seems like you must be out to solidify my position.
Andrew
Andrew_KY, I’m good with that. You have every right to not be vaccinated. Now stay home and don’t go near people who are doing it right.
Russell,
” It’s time for those who haven’t taken the vaccine to stay home.”
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You have it upside down: it is time for people who have been vaccinated to stop worrying about those who have not. It is also a good time for people to stop trying to force others to behave in ways they don’t want to; we have more than enough of that coming from Washington DC.
.
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Mike M,
The death rate from covid is very unlikely going up to over 700 per day. We are approaching 85% of the vulnerable population already vaccinated; there are a lot fewer potential victims than a year ago. Those who are at risk but have refused vaccination: If they die, then they die; not anyone’s fault but their own.
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If the seasonally adjust death rate is 7,000 (rather than 8,000) that doesn’t change the need for perspective about the risks of covid-19: elderly people are many, many times more likely to die from other causes.
“people who are doing it right”
Russell Klier,
Yes, the people shot up with vaccines that may or may not work.
Andrew
Russell,
” Now stay home and don’t go near people who are doing it right.”
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Is that ‘right’ according to God, Mohammad, Zeus, the Virgin Mary, and the Lord Jesus Christ, or maybe just ‘right’ according to Russell Klier? Please stop tying to tell people what to do based on your personal priorities. It is socially destructive and obnoxious to boot.
Russell
Russell: The young people would be plaintiffs suing to not wear masks. Having no argument for why they should not, you seem to be resorting to abusing the plaintiff.
Russel
First: I’m not required to offer you anything!
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Second: You were offerred a vaccine, which you took. So you know you are somewhat protected.
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Third: You are clearly able to stay home. But you want to take away freedom from others rather than give up going out! If you are worried for yourself and want to reduce your worries about covid: stay home. If you want to go out more than you want to reduce your worries about contracting Covid, don’t stay home. But it’s not fair to insist on taking away the rights of others just to reduce your worry!
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Depriving others of their rights in favor of your wants is not “doing it right”.
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SteveF, “The death rate from covid is very unlikely going up to over 700 per day.” Current data does not support that conclusion. Leading indicators [new case rate and % positive] have been rising for a month. lagging indicators [hospitalization and deaths] are now starting to increase. If I have learned anything from following this data it is that any predictions made will be wrong….sometimes by orders of magnitude.
The CDC published on July 6, 2021 “Laboratory studies suggest specific monoclonal antibody treatments may be less effective for treating cases of COVID-19 caused by variants with certain substitutions or combinations of substitutions in the spike protein.”
Some of these bad boy are already circulating. It’s time for the government to act.
“L452R is present in B.1.526 (Iota), B.1.427 (Epsilon), and B.1.429 (Epsilon) lineages, as well as the B.1.617 (Kappa, Delta) lineages and sub-lineages.
E484K is present in B.1.525 (Eta), P.2 (Zeta), P.1 (Gamma), and B.1.351 (Beta), but only some strains of B.1.526 (Iota) and B.1.1.7 (Alpha).
The combination of K417N, E484K, and N501Y substitutions is present in B.1.351 (Beta).
The combination of K417T, E484K, and N501Y substitutions is present in P.1 (Gamma).”
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-info.html#unweighted-proportions-substitutions-of-therepeutic-concern
Russell,
“Some of these bad boy are already circulating. It’s time for the government to act.”
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I believe you are mistaken about the risks posed by variants, but fortunately, “the government” is not going to act upon your fears. There will be some increase in cases in warm, humid places like Florida, where people have moved indoors (under air conditioning). DeSantis is not going to make any policy changes; you should at least recognize that. Nor are the Governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, or Texas going to change policies. Joe Biden has zero legal authority to issue draconian edicts, and if he tried, they would be instantly enjoined by Federal Courts. I guess living in a Republic is not ever going to make you happy so I suggest you get over it.
Russell,
You want it to be as safe as it was before the pandemic.
It.is.not.that.safe. It’s not going to be for a long time, at least another year due to global disease spread and it being reintroduced to the US constantly, even after delta burns through exposed communities in the US.
You can’t wait for things to return to normal before you choose to live your life again. Before the pandemic you chose to accept lots of risk in living your life. You got in a car and drove down the road, you exposed yourself to the flu constantly as well as innumerable other maladies.
So things are maybe 95% as safe for you now. You can live your life but still take precautions and avoid the most risk, crowded indoor poorly ventilated places with strangers. That’s the best you can do. You might get unlucky, but that’s the chances you take.
Covid PTSD and anxiety are common now. I see people who look scared to death at the grocery store. Start slow and you will get used to it, but still choose your outings wisely.
Russell Klier,
The evidence from the UK and Israel is that the death rate isn’t likely to go up very much. The US very likely has a smaller population of susceptibles than the UK. Most of the susceptibles are in the age groups where the risk of severe complications and death are low compared to the population pre-COVID.
Unless you strictly quarantine yourself, there is nothing that can be done to reduce your risk to zero. Even vaccinating everyone doesn’t reduce your risk to zero. Deal with it.
Russell Klier
Sure. That’s to be expected. But so? The monoclonal antibodies were rarely used because they require an infusion. They aren’t what’s driving the reduction in death. Vulnerable people being vaccinated is driving that.
See this about monoclonal antibodies from back in December:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/covid-antibody-treatment.html
A treatment that almost no one was using doesn’t work as well as it did before. That’s no reason to make young people wear masks.
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If you are worried, stay home!
SteveF, “Is that ‘right’ according to God, Mohammad, Zeus, the Virgin Mary, and the Lord Jesus Christ, or maybe just ‘right’ according to Russell Klier?”
That is right according to the Government of the United States. The President on July 4, 2021: “But our fight against this virus is not over. Right now, as I speak to you, millions of Americans are still unvaccinated and unprotected. And because of that, their communities are at risk. Their friends are at risk. The people they care about are at risk. This is an even bigger concern because of the Delta variant.”
Russel
Your list of “right” included “masks, vitamins, Amazon, shots, nasal rinse”. The US Government said nothing about vitamines Amazon or nasal rinse! You got to shot for free. I think that’s the right choice.
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But it doesn’t mean you get to take away other people agency. While the following is over the top, it is the extreme of the argument. You doing things “right” doesn’t give you the right to enslave other people!
Yeah. I know. Forcing them to wear masks isn’t slavery. But you want to dictate their behavior when you can protect yourself perfectly well by having a vax (which you were provided for free) and staying home which you are perfectly able to do. But you want to dictate the behavior of others!
Mike M. (Comment #203471): “Sadly, there are far too many freedom hating totalitarians like Russell Klier in this country.”
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Russell Klier (Comment #203474): “Mike M, “When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.â€
— Cicero”
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Not abusing. Just describing.
SteveF (Comment #203478): “The death rate from covid is very unlikely going up to over 700 per day. We are approaching 85% of the vulnerable population already vaccinated; there are a lot fewer potential victims than a year ago.”
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It seems to me that your predictions have been pretty consistently wrong. Not nearly as bad as the ‘experts”, but still a poor track record. It seems that deaths are going up, just about on schedule.
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My record of predictions has been no better. So I have stopped making them and content myself with expressing skepticism about pretty much all predictions of what the Wuhan virus will do. I hope you turn out to be right. But we shall see.
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By the way, the CDC says that 88.7% of those 65 and over have received at least one dose. Probably even higher for those 75 and older, which is where the risk gets really high. And probably at least half of the unvaccinated have immunity from being infected.
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Frankly, I find the numbers baffling.
—————
SteveF: “elderly people are many, many times more likely to die from other causes.”
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Probably true. And most of those who do die from the Wuhan virus would probably have died from some other respiratory infection before too long.
Who is the “government of the United States” right now? It’s pretty clear to anyone looking that the President struggles to even coherently read the autoprompt he stares fixedly at during speeches and constantly refers to flash cards. There’s no way this guy is making any decisions. He needs to ask whether he’s suppose to answer questions. He makes reference to things “they” don’t want him to talk about, like dignitaries daughters, which brings back a sparkle to his eye instead of the confused, “deer in headlights” he usually exhibits when placed on the spot.
Russel Klier,
Joe Biden is not the government of the United Sates, nor is he any kind of moral authority. The Federal government as a wold does not have the authority to do the things you want done. That is an important positive feature, not a flaw.
Lucia, you have that wrong. My “doing it right†was in response to Andrew _KY who preferred to not get vaccinated. My response is still the same. If you don’t want to follow the approach the government has laid out (ie get vaccinated!) stay home so you are not a risk to others.
There is zero chance we will get a population wide covid vaccine mandate in the US any time soon (or restricting behavior of the unvaccinated), they don’t even do that for elder care facilities. I think Russel is just venting at this point. I think that forcing a mandate of a drug only under EUA is quite unreasonable. After it gets formally approved then it becomes more debatable for places like elder care facilities and also it’s debatable for allowing private organizations to mandate vaccination for their purposes. I can go either way there under certain conditions.
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The death rate and age profile is just not high enough to justify government forced intervention when effective personal protection is freely available. Covid has mostly pushed people who were already near death over the edge, but there are exceptions. I wish everyone would voluntarily get vaccinated, but that’s a lot different than using the blunt force of government to do so. The people who support this also support many other things like banning Big Gulps so you need to draw a firm line. It’s not immutable, I can easily imagine scenarios where effectively forcing vaccination would be appropriate. This just isn’t it.
Tom Scharf, I am not in favor of the government mandating everyone get a vaccination. I am for the government not allowing unvaccinated people contaminate the the people who did it right. Non-smokers do not breathe the exhaust gasses from smokers anymore [Thank Goodness!]. Similarly I don’t think vaccinated people should have to breath the exhaust gasses from unvaccinated people. I don’t care if someone wants to kill themselves [slowly] with cigarettes. I just don’t want them to exhale. If you are not vaccinated [or haven’t already had the virus] you shouldn’t be out with the majority of the population at large.
SteveF “Joe Biden is not the government of the United Sates [sic]” True, but the CDC, NIH, Surgeon General and Donald Trump have all endorsed vaccines as the way out of this darkness for the United States. Trump started it. He put billions of dollars behind the effort to develop vaccines. He was extremely successful. He took a major victory lap, and rightly so. Now is the implementation phase. Enough people need to take the shot for the indicators [new infections, hospitalizations, deaths etc.] to trend downward. Currently all indicators are trending up. OOPS!
“stay home so you are not a risk to others”
Russell Klier,
Serious Question: By what method have you determined that I am a significant risk to others? If your position is “not vaccinated = deadly risk” that’s not a method, that’s a conclusion.
Andrew
If we had a vaccine against lung cancer that was 95% effective then I think smoking bans would be less necessary. I doubt the people who favor smoking bans would care if the vaccine was 100% effective they would still not want the stink of cigarettes in public places.
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I also think the science of second hand smoke is pretty sketchy and is full of bias. I don’t smoke, don’t like being around others who do, so I don’t complain a lot about it.
Andrew_KY, “By what method have you determined that I am a significant risk to others? ”
The President on July 4, 2021: “But our fight against this virus is not over. Right now, as I speak to you, millions of Americans are still unvaccinated and unprotected. And because of that, their communities are at risk. Their friends are at risk. The people they care about are at risk. This is an even bigger concern because of the Delta variant.â€
The guy who did the recent Trumpist thought process viral Twitter thread does a guest post on Glenn Greenwald:
https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/author-of-the-mega-viral-thread-on
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“RUSSIAGATE: THE ORIGINAL SIN …
But to many conservatives in 2016 and early 2017, it seemed equally preposterous that the institutions they trusted, and even the ones they didn’t, would go all-in on a story if there wasn’t at least something to it. Imagine the consequences for these institutions if it turned out there was nothing to it.”
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That was definitely my thinking at the time, they better be right about this or it is going to destroy their credibility. The recent “Capital Armed Insurrection” hysteria is the same playbook, and after RussiaGate I just knew the legacy media would overplay that hand, and they did. There is no surprise here that it was a one time event and not some mounting danger to democracy, most people already knew the media couldn’t be trusted to cover it fairly because of their previous behavior.
Russell Klier,
I didn’t ask what the president said. I asked how you determined that I am a significant risk, such that I should stay at home.
Andrew
Andrew_KY
Yes, you did ask my opinion… here goes. The health metrics [new infections etc.] have all been trending up for about a month, after hitting a hard bottom for several months. Everything I have read is that vaccinated people and people who have previously had covid are not at risk of spreading the disease, even if they do catch it [unlikely]. Since the general population is catching the disease in increasing numbers I deduced the unvaccinated people are spreading it [and catching it!] The way the United States has decided to fight this battle is through vaccination. Enough people need to be vaccinated [or recover from the disease] to make the numbers go down.
quod erat demonstrandum
Russell,
“If you are not vaccinated [or haven’t already had the virus] you shouldn’t be out with the majority of the population at large.”
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I do honestly believe you are a natural totalitarian. You want public control of all private activity…. or maybe more accurately, ‘Russell’ control of all private activity. News flash: that is not the way a representative republic, one with explicitly limited government powers, functions. People in our system have agency…. even agency to make what I think are unwise choices.
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I have consistently said here and elsewhere that people at risk (and that includes everyone over 50) would be wise to get the vaccines. I am saddened that many people have chosen to refuse vaccination, and that refusal will cost some of them their lives. But the suggestion that people be forced or coerced to be vaccinated is utterly contrary to human liberty, and I am utterly opposed to any such suggestion.
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What you want is not going to happen, and I think that is a very good thing.
SteveF, I too am against the Government mandating people get vaccinated. I am in favor of the government not letting unvaccinated people endanger the rest of the Country. Maybe 70% or so of us have been vaccinated or had the disease. That is not enough. The trend is still going in the wrong direction. We as a society don’t let drunk people drive cars, but we don’t mandate that they can’t drink alcohol. We shouldn’t let people at risk continue to spread the pandemic. A personal note…. the last time I voted for a Democrat it was Jimmy Carter.
Russell,
“I too am against the Government mandating people get vaccinated.”
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Utter rubbish. I didn’t say you were a Democrat, I said you appear to be a totalitarian, and everyhting you write confirms it. You are in fact asking for people to be forced to accept a vaccination. If you say that people who are not vaccinated (oh say, like my 13 1/2 year old daughter) must be held forever prisoner at home…. until accepting vaccination, then you are actually mandating that people get vaccinated… or else they stay a prisoner. It is a garbage argument in support of a completely idiotic idea. And fortunately one that most people will simply ignore. I won’t waste any more time arguing against such an idiotic idea. Cio.
Wow. It got spicy here all of a sudden.
mark bofill, yes it did! I can’t remember when I have had so much fun.
Russell Klier,
And I deduced that you don’t believe in the efficacy of the vaccine or you wouldn’t be here hoping to restrict me.
Andrew
I think you are for * effectively * forcing vaccinations on people to engage in normal and necessary public behavior. The rest is semantics.
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Most people have to work and shop. Their behavior is putting you at elevated risk and you want that prohibited by imposing on their rights instead of your rights. It’s a judgment call and a balancing of rights. Your answer of telling them to stay home is not justifiable IMO because it imposes too much on their rights of liberty and freedom when you have arguably adequate protection from a vaccine. In order for them to continue to engage in their previous same rights they would be required to inject a drug into their bodies that is emergency use only. That’s where the argument fails the balancing test in my judgment.
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If you are saying that them masking is adequate that is a different story. I don’t think that masking will protect you (it may help) and I suggest compliance from the unvaccinated would be low and impossible to enforce.
Tom Scharf,
My original position here was that unvaccinated people should wear masks in public…. good masks N95 or better. [I wear N99] But Lucia and several others jumped all over me for that radical idea. Having them stay at home was my fallback position.
Russell
The unvaccinated are only a danger to the unvaccinated. They aren’t risking the whole country. The people at risk people could get vaccinated if they wished to. Also: the unvaccinated at risk are not asking for other unvaccinated people to be forced to wear masks. It’s ridiculous for the vaccinated no longer at risk people to force the unvaccinated to wear masks to protect them when they know the risk they are taking!
Russell,
Going from impinging on other’s rights for no good reason to impinging on them even more isn’t the appropriate direction.
You should stay home if you are worried. That choice is entirely open to you.
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You could also try to find businesses that advertise that their entire staff is vaccinated. Or that advertise that the unvaccinated all wear masks. Or that require all their workers to wear masks. Or whatever. That’s your choice.
It’s been quite a day! So far I and my ideas have been called: a freedom hating totalitarian, idiotic and garbage. I am proud that I have not responded in kind. It is a significant maturation on my part. I used to be the one calling others childish names.
N95 masks are not comfortable to wear, especially in hot climates.
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A little anecdote. A few years ago, out of the blue, a big tree fell on me. It could have killed me but thankfully I avoided any fatal damage. Now it seems to me people should cut down all the trees to avoid the problem of falling trees. Is saving my life, and those of others killed by falling trees every year not worth cutting down all those trees? Am I being unreasonable? Is not saving lives more important than a few trees? I mean, some tree cutters may die in the process, but it is a risk I am willing to take to protect myself and others.
Lucia,
I did everything I was told to do [and then some!] for eighteen months. I am done staying home. Now it’s time for those small minority [20%] who haven’t had the virus or been vaccinated to do their part. More importantly, me staying home [which I am done with] would only solve the problem for me. Our country decided we are going to beat this thing by vaccination. We were wildly successful until a month ago. Then all the health metrics started trending in the wrong direction, at the same time as the number of people getting vaccinated fell precipitously. Finally me staying home is not a long term solution. I will need to stay home forever if we don’t win this war. The only way to do that is for the 20% to do their part.
DaveJR,
“N95 masks are not comfortable to wear, especially in hot climates.”
Tell me about it! I live in Florida, gardening is my hobby and I have Asthma. I spent 21/2 hours this morning outside in my N99.
Mike M,
“And probably at least half of the unvaccinated have immunity from being infected.’
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Evidence? I haven’t seen it.
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There does appear to be a range of resistance to infection and a range of propensity of the infected to spread the virus. At least half and perhaps 2 out of 3 infections appear to be asymptomatic or so mildly symptomatic that they are never confirmed. That gets us up to 20% to 30% with strong immunity and unlikely to suffer a breakthrough case. We can add to that those fully vaccinated, so with overall vaccination rate approaching 60%, that leaves 0.4* 0.7 = 0.28, 28% of the adult population neither vaccinated nor having had the virus; a lot of people. Some un-vaccinated are probably are more resistant to infection than others, of course.
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That said, it seems likely that given a sufficiently high dose of virus, even resistant people can become infected. The higher infectivity strains may now be able to infect un-vaccinated people who in the past were not infected.
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But if there is any doubt about the vaccines providing substantial protection, just look at the UK: very high vaccination rates among those over 50, and very few deaths, in spite of a large increase in confirmed cases among un-vaccinated (mostly younger) people.
Russell,
And other people are done wearing masks.
Did we? I think our country decided to make vaccines available to people who wanted them. I’m also not sure what “beat this thing” means. It seems to me we have largely beaten it. Deaths are down. Everyone who wants protection has it. That looks like beaten to me.
Other people wearing masks isn’t a long term solution. You’re asking other people to wear masks forever.
Metaphors are sometimes great. But I don’t know what you mean by “win this war”. Deaths are down. People who get the vaccine have good protection. Seems to me we have “won the war”. Obviously, you think we haven’t. But then perhaps you have a different idea of what the war was about or what winning it requires.
WSJ: “Health officials there said transmission of Covid-19 is increasing among younger, unvaccinated individuals. Of the 1,094 new cases reported on Saturday (in Los Angeles), 83% were under age 50, according to the public-health department.
…
“As cases increase, the urgency to get more people vaccinated is rising. Nearly 100% of new cases are occurring among those not fully vaccinated,†said Barbara Ferrer, L.A. County’s director of public health.”
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I’d be curious if this is real data, that would require tested people to say whether they were vaccinated. I suspect this is anecdotal.
SteveF,
Then you haven ‘t looked. Even the CDC says the ratio of the total number of infections to confirmed infections is 4.3 (3.7-5.0). That means with 34,794,746 confirmed cases as of today (worldometers.info), then the total number of infections is 149,617,408 or 44.9% with a range of from 39 – 52%. IMO, the CDC estimate is conservative, being primarily based on serological testing which is known to underestimate infections, especially when only using IgG and IgM as done by the CDC.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html
Note that the CDC estimates that only ~15% of infections are asymptomatic. That seems low to me.
Tom Scharf,
Unless there has been a sudden dramatic rise in breakthrough cases, it is pretty much inevitable that unvaccinated people will dominate confirmed cases.
.
One extended family I know rented a large beach house for 8 days, where 17 people stayed….. I believe 7 came down with covid (all under 40, no serious cases). Two people had previous infection and three were vaccinated; none of those got sick.
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Ya, unvaccinated people are catching the virus.
Russell Klier,
Here’s a modest proposal to eliminate automobile related deaths: Put governors on cars set at 5 mph and make it a capital offense to bypass it. IMO, your roundabout proposal to mandate vaccination, i.e. a choice that isn’t really a choice, is as unlikely to be implemented as my admittedly facetious proposal.
DeWitt,
Say what? Maybe you should read the link you provided. The CDC estimates ~115 million infections in total (a bit over 30% of the population). They may be wrong, but that is their current estimate.
DeWitt,
References to Swift’s Modest Proposal are apropos when faced with ridiculous suggestions.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #203522): “then the total number of infections is 149,617,408 or 44.9% with a range of from 39 – 52%. IMO, the CDC estimate is conservative, being primarily based on serological testing which is known to underestimate infections, especially when only using IgG and IgM as done by the CDC.”
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Thanks. And the percentage is surely higher among the unvaccinated, since one reason to not get vaccinated is having had the virus.
SteveF (Comment #203525): “Maybe you should read the link you provided. The CDC estimates ~115 million infections in total (a bit over 30% of the population). They may be wrong, but that is their current estimate.”
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It says right there on the web site that the data are months out of date.
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From the numbers on the CDC page, there were 26.7M infections. The Financial Times says that is the number as of roughly Feb. 1, but the CDC page says is up to March.
SteveF,
I did read it. Maybe you should read it again, including the fine print, not just the big numbers. That estimate of 114.6 million total cases was for February, 2020 to March, 2021, not today. The multiplier was 4.3. That would correspond to 26.65 million confirmed cases. There are now 34.8 million confirmed cases.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-kids-were-safe-from-covid-the-whole-time.html
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“All told, 600,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID over the course of the pandemic; just 0.05 percent of those were under the age of 18, a population that represents more than 20 percent of the country’s population as a whole.”
“According to the CDC, the mortality risk for those 85 and above is 610 times higher than for 18-29 year olds. The number is so large it is almost hard to process. If a given number of infections among 20-somethings would produce just a single fatality, the same number of infections in 85-year-olds would produce 610.”
“And though the skew is most visible among the very old, the effect is consistent across all age groups, with mortality risk doubling every five years.”
“Among 900,000 in-school pupils learning in North Carolina last fall, researchers would have expected, based on local transmission rates, about 900 cases of COVID. There were, it turned out, only 23. In another study, among 20,000 Nebraska students attending school all year there were, in total, two cases.”
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It is incredible at this point that we ever considered any other plan than vaccinating seniors first. Those people suggesting otherwise were clearly very bad at math. It is a little encouraging that sanity did in fact prevail.
From the Quillette hit piece on Weinstein and ivermectin:
“How does the evidence for the prophylactic efficacy of ivermectin stack up against the vaccines? It’s not even close. Remember: We don’t yet know that the drug provides any significant benefit. A high-quality study published in JAMA found that in a randomized clinical trial that included 476 patients with mild COVID-19, “a 5-day course of ivermectin, compared with placebo, did not significantly improve the time to resolution of symptoms.â€
The prophylactic effect is not the same as the treatment effect. The treatment deal is, you got it. They don’t even cite the correct type of study that looks at the prophylactic effect.
Talk about not even understanding the issue, including Lehmann. I follow Quillette and give them money. Weinstein and Heying I think are preparing a written reply.
I would be very cautious about using cases as a metric of pandemic severity. In Sweden around March 1, they had a surge in cases (almost doubling). Deaths stayed level or slightly decreasing. The pandemic in Sweden is now essentially over with cases, hospitalizations, and deaths at very low levels.
I also caution about allowing fear and panic drive your decisions. Life is going to go on and you cannot control what other people do.
DeWitt,
The CDC page is very confused. They use multiple dates, but at the very top of the page they say “Updated May 19, 2021”. That was the date I guessed was the correct one, but who knows? There have been relatively few cases since May 19.
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I will look for other references.
Russell, you start out your argument with the fact that new infections are happening with unvaccinated people not vaccinated people.
You use this face to argue that unvaccinated should stay indoors to keep you safe when you go outdoors.
Isn’t this an unnecessary step given your primary fact?
Russell, is your middle name Algernon?
MikeN
Calling me names [Algernon] is not a mature or intelligent way to have a conversation.
Lucia,
Your comments: “Seems to me we have “won the war†and “Deaths are down”
My reading of the data is different than yours. I use the National data from the New York Times, published daily, Updated July 13, 2021. After the approval of the vaccines, new cases in Florida and the US dropped quickly from mid January to May. The US data dropped from a seven day average of 250,000 new daily. The cases leveled off for a month but have been climbing for the last two weeks. Here is today’s tally:
Cases 25,661,+109% 14 day increase,
Hospitalized 19,700,+19% 14 day increase,
Deaths 330,+17% 14 day increase.
Florida fell similarly from the January high, but Florida cases have been rising for six weeks. The numbers are grim:
Cases 5,576,+257% 14 day increase,
Hospitalized 2,885,+50% 14 day increase.
Deaths 32, +26% 14 day increase.
These upward trends were coincidental with a dramatic drop-off in daily vaccinations in both the US and Florida.
It is my hypothesis that nearly all of these new cases, hospitalizations and deaths are unvaccinated people infecting other unvaccinated people. To get this trend turned back around it is my hypotheses that more vaccinations are needed. Until the virus is wiped out, it will smolder in the population and new variants can arise. It is notable that two viral diseases, Smallpox and Polio were wiped out by vaccines in my lifetime. The US medical establishment did it. They can do it again, but not they way we are going now.
“ Tell me about it! I live in Florida, gardening is my hobby and I have Asthma. I spent 21/2 hours this morning outside in my N99.â€
Wait wut? Are you inviting 40 strangers over to your house for gardening or are you intentionally inflicting harm on yourself because you’re irrationally afraid of catching it outdoors at your house by yourself? I realize people are irrationally afraid of this virus, heck I ran into an older Indian woman at the grocery store the other day wearing way over the top stuff and as soon as I realized I was scaring her to death by being within 15 feet of her I left the aisle and didn’t buy some things I wanted. It was that off putting. Don’t be that guy.
And also, I’m sorry your brother in law (?) died but one outlier death isn’t enough evidence for the rest of society to change how they view this pandemic. It’s obviously very real to you and I can see how our responses don’t actively relate to your situation.
Tom Scharf,
” It is a little encouraging that sanity did in fact prevail.”
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But discouraging that there was even a serious debate…. and it seriously was debated. You hunt rabbits were there are rabbits. You stop deaths by treating the people at real risk of death. The rest was politically correct posturing enabled by stupidity, dishonesty, or both.
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The other discouraging thing is that kids from 5 to 15 lost a year+ of schooling when they actually posed minuscule risk to each other and to their teachers. And this was clear by late last spring (normal schooling in several European countries showed that). Fear combined with stupidity (embodied by the teacher’s union) is a very bad combination.
Jerry,
“I was scaring her to death by being within 15 feet of her I left the aisle and didn’t buy some things I wanted.”
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I would have ignored her, just as I have ignored others gripped by irrational fear. These crazies are not my problem.
Russel
This is the data I look at right now. It’s also the NYT. Looks like we won– at least for now.
Russel
Even more reason to believe we won. People who want to be protected are.
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No reason to make unvaccinated people wear masks for the sake of people like you who are vaccinated. Nor for their own sake. They can get vaccinated.
Lucia, I use that same NYT death data curve but drill down to the most recent time period. The trend has switched to positive in the last two weeks. Also the new cases switched some time back, and that trend has always lead deaths.
Jerry, did you read the Asthma reference in my comment? The outdoor mask is for pollen, mold spores and red tide, all of which are Asthma triggers.
Lucia, this article articulates my concern better than I do. The virus has consistently hit Europe a few week ahead of the US. “Delta variant’s rise plunges Europe into uncertainty — and offers a warning to the U.S.” https://news.yahoo.com/delta-variants-rise-plunges-europe-into-uncertainty-and-offers-a-warning-to-the-us-090002409.html
lucia (Comment #203547): “This is the data I look at right now. It’s also the NYT. Looks like we won– at least for now.”
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On what are you basing that claim? The fact that cases are now much lower than 6 months ago? If so, then we “won” in June, 2020. Except that we didn’t.
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New cases in the UK are more than half way to the January peak. Israel has nearly as many cases per capita as the USA.
It seems that in the UK, 40% of cases are among the vaccinated. With 2/3 of the population having at least one dose, that implies the vaccine is about 75% effective. If I assume that the partially vaccinated are twice as likely to get sick as the fully vaccinated, that goes up to about 80%. Apparently, Israel has similar numbers. Both are dominated by the delta variant.
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It looks like the CFR in the UK remains really low, but that may the not be the case in Israel.
Did we create the delta variant with bad policy?
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How many generations of viral replication does it take to reach a given level of infection in the population? That depends on R0. Large R0 gets you there with fewer generations than small R0. More generations means more evolution. So by suppressing R0, we may have made the virus more infective.
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Of course, that assumes that suppression attempts work. There is little evidence of that, except in those places, like NZ, that managed to isolate the whole country.
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But it could be a lose-lose. Ineffective restrictions impose pain for no gain. Effective restrictions produce a temporary gain but eventually create a more transmissible virus.
Russell, just out of interest, what are you taking for your asthma?
DaveJR, Albuterol nebulizer
Russell, that’s it? No control medication or anything?
Russel Klier,
Have you ever thought about going to an allergist and investigating the possibility of hyposensitization therapy (allergy shots)? It worked for me and lots of other people. I used to be a basket case during tree and grass pollen seasons. Now, not so much.
DaveJR thanks for your concern. Over the years the DRs have tried a number of additions to the regimen, both steroidal and non-steroidal. I had complications from all of them. In addition, I live by a basic principle…never take a drug you see advertised on TV. [my system can’t even even tolerate aspirin]
DeWitt Payne, thanks for your concern. Been there, done that.
SteveF,
I didn’t find the CDC page confusing at all. The study period wasn’t changed by any of the more recent updates. The ratios are the important data on the page. It was quite clear to me that the total infection number only applied to the study period and was therefore out of date for current infections.
Russell Klier,
My daughter works in Big Pharma and she extremely dislikes a lot of the drug commercials. If you think you have to ask your doctor whether you should take some new drug, you should probably think about getting a new doctor who actually keeps up to date.
Russell Klier,
Serious Question: Are you comfortable with the Vaccine Gestapo/SS coming to my door to assist me with my shortcomings?
Andrew
It strikes me that a door-to-door vaccination campaign might be fertile ground for scammers. “The vaccine is free, but there is a $5 convenience fee. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to take cash and can only accept debit cards.” Then they inject the mark with saline and clean out his bank account.
Drug commercials are about getting patients to pressure doctors into prescribing their expensively developed drug over the competitor’s. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when, as DeWitt suggests, Doctors don’t keep up with the state-of-the-art and insist on maintaining practices they haven’t modified in 40 years. It does give patients (and Doctors!) an idea of what is currently possible that they may otherwise never realize!
MikeM,
That’s why I wrote “at least for now”.
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We do also have reports that the cases and especially deaths we are seeing is largely among the unvaccinated. Of course we aren’t getting specific details of how we know that and perhaps it’s misleading. But if true, I think that means we’ve won. People who want protection can get it. I consider that winning.
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Also: even if Δ starts breaking through, I have confidence that vaccines that protect against it will be made. If deaths start to mount, I think we’ll get another emergency authorization. (Fingers crossed! That’s politics!)
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So, the way I see it, we know we have tools to create protections. We don’t have the huge degree of uncertainty we had last year. I consider that a win too.
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The fact is: whether we “won” or not is an interpretation. (I’m guessing Russel requires “removed Covid from the planet” to call this a win. I don’t need that. I consider “it has become controllable” to be a win.)
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And reports say this is dominated by the unvaccinated (provided we use Bayes theorem rather than raw numbers.)
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Last year, we couldn’t chose protection. Now we can. I consider that a win.
Mike
Random mutation and evolution created it. We might have had fewer variants if we’d done challenge trials. But I doubt we’d have gotten tons of vaccine out to the world anyway.
Other than that, I don’t think we could have done anything.
(Well– one thing. NOT having mono-clonal antibody cures and letting those people die might have helped. At least some increase in variants is likely to happen in the bodies of people who can’t make their own antibodies but are saved by extrenally supplied ones.)
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Letting the vaccine rip would have just made the variants come sooner. Then the variants might have arrived before we had our first vaccine. So anything that successfully slowed spread while vaccines were being developed was likely good. The temporal rate of mutation is proportional to the number of infections per unit time. (Roughly: “mutation rate per infected person-day” * “number of infected people per day” = “mutations per day”.)
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World policies were likely imperfect. But perfection was always an impossible standard given the huge uncertainties and demographic realities.
Huh? I read your analysis, but this doesn’t follow. The problem is this is wrong
Large R0 means more people are infected.
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Virus can mutate in any infected person. A mutation doesn’t need there to be a “previous” mutation to build on. It just happens. If a particular mutation is more infectious, it is more infectious. Then it gets out and dominates. With large R0, a serious one is likely to arrive sooner rather than later in time.
Andrew_KY “Serious Question: Are you comfortable with the Vaccine Gestapo/SS coming to my door to assist me with my shortcomings?”
Your door? Your shortcomings? Serious Answer: YES
Andrew_KY,
In principle, I don’t mind that people knocking on doors. I also don’t consider them Gestapo. But I think it’s a poor use of governmental resources and a waste of money and worse: counter productive.
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I know a few people who aren’t vaccinated. Someone knocking on their door is not going to make any difference. They:
* Know it’s free.
* Know how to get it.
* Know what the governmental people are going to say about it.
* Have made up their mind about this.
* Governmental agents knocking on their door will not change their minds. If anything, it will make them oppose getting a vaccine more
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Sending the agents will cost money to cover personnel costs. (The census cost money. This obviously will too.) If the person who answer the door is vaccinated: No increase in vaccination occurs. If the person who answer the door is not vaccinated and currently opposes the vaccination, they will be hardened in that position. Even increases in deaths will not change their mind. No increase in vaccination occurs and reluctance among the already reluctant increases. In the rare case where unvaccinated person answer the door, they might decide to get the vaccine. But unless the person knocking has a batch of non-temperature sensitive J&J with them there right now or can drive them to a vaccination site right now these people probably won’t follow through and get vaccinated.
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So, in short: I think this program will result in fewer of the unvaccinated getting vaccinated. And we’d be spending money for this counter-productive program!
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Dumb.
MikeM, “ Did we create the delta variant with bad policy?†Thank you. I found this whole post thought provoking.
lucia (Comment #203566): “The fact is: whether we “won†or not is an interpretation.”
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OK. I misunderstood since I think of “won” as one half of a binary. Mission accomplished, nothing more to do. But we have made progress.
lucia (Comment #203567): “The temporal rate of mutation is proportional to the number of infections per unit time.”
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Of course. But mutation is not the issue. The issue is evolution. That requires mutation and selection. Difficulty in propagating enhances the selection of the “fittest”. For a virus, that means most contagious.
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I should not have said “Did we create it”. I should have said “did we help it become predominant”.
We are going to have a delta surge in the unvaccinated population, this is almost a certainty. It will very likely be much smaller than previous peaks because we only have around 25% or so of the population vulnerable.
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Similar to global warming, nothing we do in the US is going to affect the trajectory of new variants very much. A huge percentage of new cases will be in the rest of the unvaccinated world. This will then be imported within a couple months as the alpha and delta variants have been.
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Ultimately there will be a shift in evolutionary pressure from more transmissibility to vaccine and natural immunity evasion for the virus to survive and thrive.
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In my view, you want delta to infect as many people as fast as possible so we get to herd immunity in the US. Higher case rates are basically good news, you can think of it as these people are getting vaccinated the hard way. We have 90% vaccinated in the vulnerable population so we can ride it out fairly successfully. It’s time to let things be wide open, I see no reason to try to slow the spread down. Why would we? Real question.
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The unvaccinated have made their choice and vaccine trends show that not a lot of them are likely to change their minds. Imagine a much more deadly variant arises then those nations with herd immunity are in a much better position.
MikeM
Nothing more to do is rare at the end of wars. Didn’t happen when the Allies won WWII. Berlin was divided into regions. Didn’t happen after our Civil War. We had reconstruction.
MikeM
There is no mutation without evolution. And I wrote
So obviously,I said evolution is a issue.
Yes. And I as I also wrote
That’s referring to selection after mutation.
I don’t think so. Once the mutation occurs, the more infectious strains would still come to dominate because they reproduce more readily. They would spread in less time with a higher Ro.
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Now, the ratio might not drop as fast because the less virulent would also spread. But Covid would be spreading. And we wouldn’t have any vaccine. So the ratio would be irrelevnat.
Although we never even think about it any more, the possibility that an effective treatment of an infected individual could still happen. This has been an abysmal failure for the most part. I don’t doubt that this is pretty hard, like treating the flu in the elderly. We don’t appear to be very good at this for certain classes of viruses. I think the IFR did lower a bit over time, but there have been no miracles on this subject.
The UK’s one shot strategy was a good choice at the time, it is not a good choice now because you need two shots for effective delta protection.
Tom,
If they have enough vaccine they should be able to get the one-shot people in for their second though. I think they may not have enough to do it fast though? (I don’t know. But I know young people can’t necessarily get it yet.)
If anyone still doubts that Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t real, here’s a classic example from Nature:
But it didn’t have to be a partisan moment unless you were a victim of TDS. The inability to accept the possibility that Trump might have been right about anything is clearly pathological.
The single most important parameter in variants so far is the * trend * in percentage of the cases in the population. Both alpha and delta, took over in almost a purely mathematical and predictable way. They literally choke out the older variants to almost nothing in a matter of months. They are like weeds.
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The amount of increased transmissibility is then pretty easily estimated by how fast they take over. Unfortunately this increase also increases the percentage of the population required for herd immunity. If we didn’t have these mutations we might already be at herd immunity. The change from the original covid to delta is on the or (1.5 (alpha) * 1.5 (delta) = 2.25X). Multiplying R by 2 is going to change things.
I think the UK got most of their seniors to two shots already.
Tom Scharf, ” I see no reason to try to slow the spread down. Why would we? Real question.” You convinced me! I agree.
A further factor of note: I think the next wave of infections is too far along for any government program to have an effect.
For Lucia’s sake I’ll say it in metaphors…. “The train has left the station.” Anything the government does will be “a day late and a dollar short.” We better get ready to “take it on the chin.”
Russell Klier,
I believe those are called cliches rather than metaphors. Well, they may be metaphors too, but they are definitely cliches.
Russell,
So presumably, you now agree there is no reason for the unvaccinated to wear masks for your sake.
The unvaccinated anyway. At least for now, it looks like the vaccines protect somewhat against variants.
““That became a partisan moment,†Bailey says. “So many of us we were wired to not believe anything the president was saying.†Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, agrees. “It suddenly became sacrilegious for anyone in science to say it was OK for schools to be open,†she says.”
So the truth is the opposite of what Trump says. Grade school logic applied to a pandemic. Isn’t it grand? Here’s the claim. It obvious that politics are involved while that has not effected the science. I’d say it’s more like, they’ve tarnished science and it takes a long time to untarnish it.
Dewitt Payne When I wrote those I wasn’t sure they were metaphors so I did some research….. They qualify, but loosely. Next, I’m working on a post that is a Haiku made up of metaphors.
Lucia,
“So presumably, you now agree there is no reason for the unvaccinated to wear masks for your sake.”
Yes, for now. “Let er’ Rip!”
In addition to them catching the virus, I think would be appropriate for Moe Howard to give the unvaccinated a “Poke in the Eye”.
Russell,
The amount of time you need to spend at home protecting yourself will be shorter if herd immunity is reached sooner. That can be reached by vaccination or by infection. If cases are mild, one isn’t necessarily better or worse than the other.
Mind you, we can’t be sure people don’t get long covid or other things. But to some extent at this point, at least the adults are choosing for themselves.
L But not double blind ones. And not well designed ones. So the results are ambiguous and it’s hard to determine if any particular use is safe or effective.
“Carvallo et al also performed a prospective observational trial where they gave healthy volunteers ivermectin and carrageenan daily for 28 days and matched them to similarly healthy controls who did not take the medicines.40 Of the 229 study subjects, 131 were treated with 0.2 mg of ivermectin drops taken by mouth 5 times per day. After 28 days, none of those receiving ivermectin in the prophylaxis group had tested positive for SARS-COV-2 versus 11.2% of patients in the control arm (P < 0.001). In a much larger follow-up prospective, observational controlled trial by the same group that included 1195 health care workers, they found that over a 3-month period there were no infections recorded among the 788 workers who took weekly ivermectin prophylaxis, whereas 58% of the 407 controls had become ill with COVID-19.â€
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/
The above is not a double blind study. The latter part of the quote is astounding. Now tell me the bias? The workers very likely knew which they were. So if they didn't get ivermectin, they were either more or less careful. And the ones that did get it were either more or less careful. Worst case, the one's that did get it were more careful, and the one's that didn't get ivermectin were less careful. Logically it seems it's the opposite of the worst case is more likely. And most likely everyone was scared out of their wits and equally careful. It's human nature to balance risk, you know like health care people do. But if we weight each of the possibilities the best we can, we can say we controlled for it not being double blind. Weighting different possibilities is a common business tool for dealing with uncertainty. There's double blind like a robot, and double blind with our ability to reason. My claim is the argument has to be more than not double blind equals bad. This one standard by itself, isn't enough. Double blind is not some scepter of divine knowledge. Just as peer reviewed is not. Just as the CDC and the WHO is not. Nor is the scepter some end all of discussion.
Ragnaar,
The paper doesn’t say it was double blind. Reading the methods section it looks like it wasn’t even single blind. Totally sighted in fact.
It also looks like participants self selected, not randomized and it might be the iota-carrageenan (which has not been found to work in at least 1 double blind experimet!)
https://www.buongiornosuedtirol.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Nota-Journal-of-Biomedical-Research-Safety-and-Efficacy-Iota-Carrageenan-and-Ivermectin.pdf
Ragnaar
Ivermecting and iota carageenan.
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I don’t know about the second test. But the first set was not randomized. They were self selected. The ivermectic- carrageenan group self selected. That by itself can mean they behaved differently. There is no reason to assume that the ones who picked having a treatment were less careful than the ones unwilling to give the treament a shot.
Of course not. But double blind and at least not self selected reduces the tendency of confounding variables being more important than the effect you are trying to study.
No one here says discussion can’t continue. I’m just pointing out a difference in the amount of evidence. And our FDA is bound by rules and, like it or not, double blind and random is required to make a study outcome convincing. Otherwise it may point to something useful, but we can’t know or quantify whether the observed effect is due to something else.
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Of course, in this case, the observed effect may be due to iota carrageenan, which is safer than Ivermectin! It’s a food!
God has spoken.
Coulda been Thor too Lucia, I remember you hoping for a lucky lightning bolt from Thor or whomever to take out some of the Presidential candidates some time past.
lucia (Comment #203593): “And our FDA is bound by rules and, like it or not, double blind and random is required to make a study outcome convincing.”
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If the effect is large enough, there is no need for double blind or random. Almost all the really big medical advances were made without benefit of random double blind studies. Polio vaccine being a notable exception.
lucia (Comment #203593): “iota carrageenan, which is safer than Ivermectin! It’s a food!”
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Huh? It is naturally sourced, but that does not make it either a food or safe.
——-
Addition: Oh. It is used as a food additive.
Mark,
Wow! Well, it’s true I would have preferred the lightening to take out a president.
Mike M.
Could you elaborate on which advances fall in “all the really big” ones? I want to see if they are (a) recent and (b) drugs or devices.
Of course it’s true that really big effects don’t need double blind. But they also pass double blind tests quickly if they are done. (Somethings aren’t amenable to double blind studies. But drugs like ivermectin are.)
Yes. It’s precisely the stuff I mixed and sprayed up my nose. It’s in lots and lots and lots of food.
There are many kinds of evidence. Deciding to use only double blind studies, rules out other methods. The accidental fact of observation in Africa of lower case rates likely because of the prior use of ivermectin. We have the results from the differences in protocols in India’s states. There is more of this evidence. There is so much pointing to it working as a preventative it seems wrong to ignore it for the lack of double blind studies. Willful ignorance maybe. I can disregard what I see because of this one thing. We perceive. We don’t not perceive because of an arbitrary standard. We can make the double blind study our God. We can do that. All hail. I am here from the double blind police. I am here to help you understand your world.
Carrageenan. I saw it in one of the studies. I couldn’t find it as a supplement. Maybe I’ll look some more. I think I can say it’s an anti-viral.
lucia (Comment #203598): “Could you elaborate on which advances fall in “all the really big†ones? I want to see if they are (a) recent and (b) drugs or devices.”
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Every single advance made before the 1950’s. Which is most of the really significant advances in medicine.
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Double blind studies make it possible for companies to make billions off things that make little or no difference. Not at all clear that is a net benefit.
Ragnar–
Carrageenan is proposed for use as a nasal spray. Theres not a huge amount of evidence, but there was one study that came out recently– double blind. It worked. Another is ongoing.
MikeM
So not recent. Yes: advances made before we used double blind experiments did not use double blind experiments.
Making billions of thing that make little or no difference is possible without double blind studies. Double blind studies don’t prevent making things that make only a little difference, though it reduced the number. They do generally prevent things that make no difference. Still, alpha error does exist.
“Making billions of thing that make little or no difference is possible without double blind studies.”
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The fundamental issue is the consumer normally has no financial skin in the game; people were exposed to the cost of proposed treatments, then for certain the cost of treatment would fall. when people are not so exposed, costs skyrocket, as expected.
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Until the interests of the heath care consumer align wit the interests of those who pay, there will be endless conflict.
lucia (Comment #203602): “Yes: advances made before we used double blind experiments did not use double blind experiments.”
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But the interesting thing is that those were the really big advances. Have there been any really major advances since the 1950’s? Cancer treatment, I suppose, but that has really been many tiny advances. Lots of new vaccines, but none with the impact of the vaccines introduced before 1960.
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At least some of that is the medical equivalent of the future of physics is in the 7th decimal place. But I can’t help thinking that the trinity of big pharma, insurance (as SteveF points out), and government regulation plays a role via their control of incentives. Ans randomized double blind studies are central to that.
MikeM,
The strange thing is that low/no deductible health insurance has long been recognized as a moral hazard that boosts health care costs, Yet nothing has been done to mitigate that moral hazard. That is, I think, because people are uncomfortable dealing with cost versus benefit in health care…. the conversation doesn’t take place. It is very strange indeed.
Mike,
I suspect many of the advances you think were sudden and big were actually also a series of incremental advances.
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But in anycase: yes. Things in the fairly far past.
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Nothing you mention suggest double blind slowed anything nor make anything less impactful
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What it has done is elinminated untested patent medicine.
SteveF,
It’s all about thalidomide. That incident led to the Kefauver-Harris amendments to the FDA that required drug manufacturers to prove safety and efficacy before approval. The logical impossibility of proving something to be safe didn’t seem to bother them. But perhaps if it had been phrased as the benefits outweigh the costs, it wouldn’t have passed.
Mike
Where rhere any really major advances between 1900 and 1950? Name them so we can know what you mean by a major advance and then your question can be answered.
Honestly, I don’t think there is anything wrong with a series of minor advances if the net rate of advance is high. But at least you should name your advances if we are going to debate them.
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The “major” advance of small pox vaccines is 1796. And even that is not entirely a step function. The idea of vaccines had been around earlier. The just didn’t identify cowpox. So if you are going to compare progress before and after double blind experiments, we at least need to compare advances in the same amount of time. Not take credit for every advance from -∞ BC to 1950 and then point out we haven’t made the same number of “major” advances (whatever major might mean.)
lucia,
Major advances before 1950: penicillin and muscle relaxants.
That along with advances in anesthesia, which started in the nineteenth century and continued in the twentieth century revolutionized surgery.
Yep. Those are before the 1950s. And I want between 1900 -1950, so that qualifies. But in terms of MikeM’s argument that things were not “incremental”, it’s worth nothing that it was discovered in 1928. It was first used to treat an eye infection in the 30s. It was purified and isolated in 1940. Worked continued to prefect it’s use through 1959.
So this is something that involved some incremental work from 1928-1959.
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It isn’t as if this is an example that went from “discovery” to “application” overnight merely because double blind experiments weren’t done. It still took time. The time it takes no adays isn’t merely imposed by testing protocols. It actually takes time to find and refine things.
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Moreover, I’m pretty sure penicillen would have had no problem passing a double blind test had that been a “thing” back then. Double blind tests would not have stopped that.
DeWitt
Once again: something that was incrementally improved. Mike M seems to think this incremental improvement is somehow due to our wanting to have double blind experiments with thing somehow being “sudden breakthrough” before. Progress has always been characterized by incremental break throughs.
lucia (Comment #203608): “Where rhere any really major advances between 1900 and 1950? Name them so we can know what you mean by a major advance and then your question can be answered.”
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Antibiotics. Blood typing. X-rays. Vaccines for whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, yellow fever. Vitamins. Insulin. I am probably missing stuff.
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Along with the previous half century: The invention of modern medicine.
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Off hand, one advance since 1960 of that magnitude: The correct combination of glucose, salt, and water for oral rehydration.
———–
lucia (Comment #203609): “Honestly, I don’t think there is anything wrong with a series of minor advances if the net rate of advance is high.”
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Yes, especially if there is a cumulative effect. Like cancer therapy.
Mike M
Which includes the decision to use double blind experiments and understand statistics! But other than that, this is amorphous.
1960 is after 1950. Your task is to find breakthroughs between 1900-1950 so we can compare to the period afterwards.
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But beyond that, this isn’t an sudden break through. Oral rehydration therapy was proposed in 1831 by Brooks Oshaunessey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy There was incremental work from that time on, including after 1960!
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This is not an example of a “breakthrough” that did not involve incremental work. Incremental work is the rule.
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It’s just not the case that in the past we had all sorts of sudden “break through” that were slowed by double blind studies. Double blind studies are to reduce the number of useless treatments. They don’t speed anything up, but they don’t seem to have significantly slowed medical progress in general some treatments get held up. But they generally aren’t huge “break through”.
Sorry… IVR rehydration from 1831. Oral dates from 1953 (or that’s when a paper was published. ) But that still makes the general notion of “rehydration therapy” incremental.
(I’m trying to find the paper to see how it was tested.)
Update– the paper is 1953. So it’s not an example from before 1953. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13110052/
I don’t have details of the study.
I did not say anything about “sudden breakthroughs”. I said major advances. I suppose I did not define that. I have in mind things that actually increase average life expectancy.
Here’s a paper on oral rehydration therapy. It’s clear there was one heck of a lot of incremental work. This didn’t not just suddenly appear:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4B8A9C4B64657965297CCE1E21C108C7/S0025727300036905a.pdf/magic-bullet-the-history-of-oral-rehydration-therapy.pdf
Consider Eroom’s Law (read it backwards). Since 1950, the constant dollar cost of developing new drugs has doubled every nine years. That in spite of massive increases in knowledge of basic cell biology and synthetic chemistry as well as new techniques (computational chemistry, high throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry) that were expected to revolutionize drug development. Institutional factors are among the suspected reasons.
Boy this happened fast… The media have started using the “D” word [Doubling]: “U.S. Covid-19 Case Counts Have Doubled in Recent Weeks” https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-covid-19-case-counts-have-doubled-in-recent-weeks-11626198501
…or to mangle a metaphor… “The spit has hit the fan.”
Seeing a lot more reports of vaccinated people getting infected…even some deaths.
“Outdoor Wedding: 6 Fully Vaccinated Infected With Covid-19 Delta Variant”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2021/07/12/outdoor-wedding-6-fully-vaccinated-infected-with-covid-19-delta-variant/
“COVID-19: At least 8 fully vaccinated Vegas hospital workers test positive in ‘breakthrough’ cluster”
https://www.foxnews.com/health/at-least-8-fully-vaccinated-las-vegas-hospital-workers-test-positive-for-covid-19-in-breakthrough-cluster
“79 People Dead, 303 Hospitalized in Mass. Breakthrough Cases: Report”
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/71-people-dead-268-hospitalized-in-mass-breakthrough-cases-report/2429550/
Russell Klier,
Can you say anecdotal? I knew you could.
And if 100% of the population were vaccinated then 100% of the cases would be breakthrough infections. But that’s expected. No one has ever said that either vaccines or infection acquired immunity were 100% effective. The question, which does not appear to be addressed, is the effectiveness of the vaccines both for preventing infection and for preventing hospitalization.
Russell Klier,
What I want to know now is, why you advocate for mandatory vaccination, yet you undermine your own position by sharing stories of vaccines not working.
This is just fear mongering on your part. It’s irrational.
Andrew
DeWitt Payne,
That’s a good ostrich impersonation you do there.
Mike M wrote: “That in spite of massive increases in knowledge of basic cell biology and synthetic chemistry as well as new techniques (computational chemistry, high throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry) that were expected to revolutionize drug development.”
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They have revolutionized drug development, but we’re way past the low hanging fruit and incremental advances on natural medicine, just as discovery of groundbreaking science is far more difficult than it used to be and requires ever more complex technology and techniques. These revolutions have been required just to continue to advance at a steady rate. The biggest problem is still the leap from animal models to humans. Far too many fail at this stage due to side effects and have to be abandoned. The money wasted.
Russell wrote: “That’s a good ostrich impersonation you do there.”
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Applying anecdotal evidence is sticking your head in the ground. It avoids looking at the full picture, but DeWitt is quite right. Just as with the common cold, we don’t give a crap about infections. What we care about is whether they are going to kill us or land is in the ICU. It matters not how many vaccinated people “get infected”. What we really care about is what happens to them after that. Throughout the pandemic, this is a question that is consistently avoided by talking heads everywhere in the quest for sensationalist fearmongering.
DaveJR (Comment #203630): “They have revolutionized drug development, but we’re way past the low hanging fruit and incremental advances on natural medicine, just as discovery of groundbreaking science is far more difficult than it used to be and requires ever more complex technology and techniques. These revolutions have been required just to continue to advance at a steady rate.”
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No doubt the low hanging fruit having been picked is part of it. But the advances in methodology have not maintained a steady rate of advance in medicine. There is a steadily slowing rate of advance. At least some who have looked closely at that have concluded that there are institutional factors at play.
Life expectancy trend:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/
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That’s a gauge of all cause progress.
1850 = 40
1950 = 67
2020 = 78
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A lot of the early progress was in infant mortality. It’s leveled off lately. Most of the low hanging fruit have been picked.
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Some trends are like s-curves, slow progress, then rapid progress, then declining progress. We are at a phase where progress requires more and more effort and larger sums of GDP. I think we have gotten better at figuring out what is happening, but not so great at fixing things after their broken.
If you are fully vaccinated and very infectious person coughs in your face a couple times, you are going to breath it in and it is going to start replicating. You will likely test positive if you chose to be tested. No vaccine is going to stop this, however the vaccine has prepped the body to quickly fight the infection once it is recognized. This takes time.
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Most of the time the body will quickly suppress the infection. Some people can test positive. The nurses in question likely get tested routinely.
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Sometimes the vaccine will not work. Usually in people who have other serious issues.
Tom Scharf,
We knew from the beginning that the vaccines weren’t perfect. After all, some people in the vaccine arms of the trials became infected. Ninety-five percent isn’t one hundred percent. But it was a lot fewer than the number of people infected in the placebo arms and a much smaller fraction of those infected needed to be hospitalized.
It’s also possible to overwhelm the immune system. I’ve posted this story before, but it’s worth repeating in the current situation.
Once upon a time, the company I worked for decided that they should get into the agricultural market. So they set up a research farm. One of the things they looked at was a vaccine for mastitis in cows. Unfortunately when they did a challenge test, they miscalculated the test dose of germs by an order of magnitude or three. The cows died in 24 hours.
Using numbers here:
1-0.76)/0.76 * (0.2)/0.8
and
BAyes law
(1-0.76)/0.76 * (0.2)/0.8 = prob (infection| vaccinated ) / prob (infected|unvacticated)
=0.07894737.
So a vaccinated person has 8% the chance of being infected compared to an unvaccinated one.
Of course you can still get infected. But the vaccination seems to still be holding up.
This is a point estimate and just uses numbers in the article. Looks pretty good to me.
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Update: Actually, my “infected” should be replaced with “hospitalized or died”. That’s what they gave statistics on.
L.A. County is making Ragnaar’s position seem downright reasonable. They are now requiring vaccinated people to wear masks in order to protect unvaccinated people from other unvaccinated people. Insane.
L The paper doesn’t say it was double blind.
R I know. It was self selected. It was supposed to be an example of a self selected test with a minor problem. It being self selected.
L Ivermecting and iota carageenan.
R We are using our judgment. Look at the literature on Carageenan, I found very little of it. Should we also count that against the paper? I think we can knock a few percentage points off of our certainty because of Carageenan in the study. It’s possible the quoted study is fooling me. My link said Kory was an author. I don’t recall him mentioning Caragenaan other than in passing. If it was Caragenaan and not ivermectin in the paper causing the effect I think Kory is the kind of guy that would be telling us to take Caragenaan if that’s possible. I didn’t find any supplements yet and don’t know what the dose would be.
L But double blind and at least not self selected reduces the tendency of confounding variables being more important than the effect you are trying to study.
R But that’s not the only thing going on and it doesn’t have to be determinative. We weight different variables and operate under uncertainty all the time. The 100% certainty standard is of no use to us. We also weight the risk and benefits of using ivermectin now on large scales and even having as low as a 50% possibility of making things better for 100s of millions of people in the world. But this complex calculation does not have to have double blind as a killing factor. It’s not an I Win button for the pharmaceutical companies unless we play along with that.
L: And our FDA is bound by rules and, like it or not, double blind and random is required to make a study outcome convincing.
R: A systemic problem because people don’t listen to libertarians. We’ve been making up rules as we go along anyways with the pandemic, so it seems unfair to reimpose them just for ivermectin while bending them for the vaccines.
Just had another thought:
…so it seems unfair to reimpose them just for ivermectin while bending them for the vaccines.
If people see this happening, or think they see it happening, they lose trust in their institutions. Which makes things worse I’d argue.
R
It’s not evidence “against the paper”. It means that the evidence in the paper cannot be used to say Ivermectin had a protective benefit. It could have been the iota-carageenan nasal spray.
There’s this. It’s not peer reviewed. I don’t know if it passed peer review.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2021/iota-carrageenan-nasal-spray-results-of-test-in-ar/
Double blind experiments on carrageenan have been registered to do testing. These take time. I don’t expect to hear more until November. Tests may turn out to confirm early promising results or not. (This is really cheap and a food ingredient.)
Whether he mentioned it ‘in passing’ or not at all isn’t relevant to be above. The fact is it was used as described in methodology. If Kory isn’t logical enough to know that means any effect might be due to the Carageenan, then Kory is hardly worth listening to!
Of course. And I see an experiment that is poorly characterized, that uses a highly self selected cohort and is designed to confound the possible effect of ivermectin and carageenan.
No. The double blind is one of the flaws in this paper. If you are looking it as a study of the effect of Ivermectin, other flaws are:
(a) Not randomizied.
(b) Self selected.
(c) Huge confounding factor: Carageenan.
That’s four flaws. And (c) is a huge flaw. So are (a) and (b). Compared to those, the double blind is a minor problem!
I lean libertarian. I still want to see decent experimental evidence before I’ll say Ivermectin works.
I’m betting it was the iota-carrageenan that caused the effect. But we won’t know until there are further studies of the iota-carrageenan.
“More Vaccinated People Are Dying of COVID in England Than Unvaccinated – Here’s Why” At last a simple explanation about why some people are at high risk of dying even after two shots. [Even us old Neanderthals can grasp this report]. I know from my experience [and my wife’s brother’s experience] that vulnerable people are not being warned that they can’t depend on vaccination to protect them. https://scitechdaily.com/more-vaccinated-people-are-dying-of-covid-in-england-than-unvaccinated-heres-why/
Russell Klier (Comment #203645): ““More Vaccinated People Are Dying of COVID in England Than Unvaccinated – Here’s Why†At last a simple explanation about why some people are at high risk of dying even after two shots.”
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Thanks for the link, but I found his explanation unconvincing. The author says:
I can’t access his link, but I am suspicious of that claim. It does not make sense that the benefit is the same for the immunocompromised as for others.
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Qualitatively, he is right that it is possible for the fatality rate to be higher among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated, even for a highly effective vaccine. But he does not provide the numbers to actually show that is the case. And there seems to be something wrong with his numbers. He says:
But the Financial Times data for England (not the UK), shows cumulative deaths as follows:
93,816 Feb. 1
108,422 March 1
111,530 Apr 1
112,159 May 1
112,391 June 1
112,562 June 21
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Maybe he meant June 1, rather than Feb. 1?
Off topic – golf clap for President Joe Biden.
(link)
Mike M,
https://theconversation.com/most-covid-deaths-in-england-now-are-in-the-vaccinated-heres-why-that-shouldnt-alarm-you-163671
This link is the original article. The good professor engages in questions and answers at the end. I’ll leave that to you…. I learned
in high school to not argue numbers with a math teacher.
L The double blind is one of the flaws in this paper. If you are looking it as a study of the effect of Ivermectin, other flaws are:
(a) Not randomizied.
(b) Self selected.
(c) Huge confounding factor: Carageenan.
R We look at the same thing and are far apart on what it means. (a) Why not look at frontline healthcare workers? In ways they are a better test subject. (b) Let’s say I don’t take ivermectin. Then do I next try to catch Covid-19 because I am an Alex Jones kind of person? You still have a distribution of people and the hope is the problems cancel out, as happens frequently with measurements. One can add all errors in one direction. But I think that’s bias and on average, wrong. (c) I think the fight is over ivermectin. I am using a volume of discussion argument to say the study was mostly about ivermectin. My doing so means I have to lower my certainty around what the study says.
But there’s this. It’s something like 58% (bad) to 0% (good) for a large sample of over 1000 high interaction people (from memory) (Carvallo et al). This allows a lot of weight to cure the other problems. We have to weight that. Curry has written a lot about decision making under uncertainty. One of the easiest takeaways is no regrets actions. I sure looks to me that that applies.
lucia,
My understanding is that most, if not all, double blind trials are in a sense self selected because the participants volunteer for the trials. They are not selected at random from the general population. That was definitely true for the Pfizer vaccine trial.
Mike M.,
I found a correction that solves it I think. Correction: An earlier version of this article stated: “The report shows that 163 of the 257 people (63.4%) who died within 28 days of a positive COVID test between February 1 and June 21, had received at least one dose of the vaccine.†It should have read: “The report shows that 163 of the 257 people (63.4%) who died of the delta variant within 28 days of a positive COVID test between February 1 and June 21, had received at least one dose of the vaccineâ€.
Most COVID deaths in England now are in the vaccinated – here’s why that shouldn’t alarm you
https://theconversation.com/most-covid-deaths-in-england-now-are-in-the-vaccinated-heres-why-that-shouldnt-alarm-you-163671
DeWitt Payne (Comment #203650): “My understanding is that most, if not all, double blind trials are in a sense self selected because the participants volunteer for the trials. They are not selected at random from the general population.”
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I have seen it claimed that pharma companies are skilled at constructing double blind studies to subtly bias them toward the result that they want. I don’t know how that is possible. But stage magicians routinely do things that seem impossible. And pharma companies have billions at stake in trials. So I think it plausible that they have put great effort into finding tricks that would be overlooked by reviewers.
DeWitt
Sure. But from the set of volunteers, who gets control and who gets treatment is randomized. They aren’t reflecting the entire population. But you don’t, for example, have one group who is willing to take a treatment get it, and another group who is not put in the non-treatment group. When you do the latter, there can be real systematic differences in the behavior of people in the two groups that could confound the results.
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This ivermectin study did not randomize in anyway, shape or form. That’s a problem.
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MikeM
If Big pharma does know how to do that and does so, that’s a problem. BUT the Ivermectin – Carrageenan study Ragnaar is putting forward didn’t even try to randomize from within the cohort.
Russell Klier (Comment #203651): “I found a correction that solves it I think.”
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Thanks. Limiting it to the delta variant would effectively include just the most recent data, with very few deaths and a high vaccination rate.
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Russell Klier (Comment #203648): “The good professor engages in questions and answers at the end.”
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Except that he doesn’t. There are just comments, some of which challenge his explanation. It looks like he only replied to one of them and he only says “You can find more granular data in the linked PHE report”. But there is no linked report. There is only a link to a PHE web site that lists a whole bunch of reports.
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To me, it looks like a snow job.
Mike M.,
“To me, it looks like a snow job.â€
I haven’t seen that phrase in a while.
I’ve been talking about weighting things. Here’s where that comes from:
“Expected value is a theoretical value that shows the average return of an action you’d get if it was repeated infinite times. You can calculate expected value as the weighted average of all the possible outcome values — where the weight is the probability of the given outcome.â€
https://data36.com/expected-value-formula/
We assign probabilities to all the outcomes as well as either a cost or benefit (minus or plus value) to each probability. We do this even if we don’t realize we doing it. If not this, what?
Participants in medical trials are absolutely screened, and mostly for very good reasons. Mostly to make sure they are medically “normal”, or they are “abnormal” in the way they are testing for. Adverse events like somebody dying of a heart attack or stroke during a drug trial is a very big deal. They won’t want to accidentally over select for people who are predisposed to this or else their drug trial fails because of a bad selection process.
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If one selected only immunocompromised people for a covid vaccine study the efficacy results would be much worse. If one was marketing a covid vaccine that worked with immunocompromised people then they would intentionally select for it. It’s all necessarily very complicated.
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Can the system be worked? Absolutely. When I was doing pulse oximetry medical trials I attended some at other companies who did in house testing. They used their own employees and knew which one were good performers accuracy wise (humans have different accuracy here). Those would be invited back in subsequent tests. Our company had to use random volunteers, and one bad human can kill the entire trial in these tests.
At one level we have this study. At a higher level, we have the regulators. Who make the terrain the study lives in. Those imposing standards are doing that. They are not by default, seers. They are people that build the large structures that we and the studies live in. Granting them some kind of scientific truth status is silly. They are administrators with various levels of different kinds of power. Where the rubber hits the road is us. Do we rely on the administrators or people more like us, like Kory? We should have the ability to see corruption if not for ourselves, for our children. I’d say we are duty bound to keep on the regulators. If not us who? Trump or Biden? Maybe my Senator. When I say corruption, I mean the kind we’ve had for more than 50 years. We are always going to get some. Corporations trying to tilt things their way and perhaps giving money to politicians. I don’t mean Mexico type corruption.
You cannot look at absolute numbers of serious illness when one side or the other of vaccination has a dominant number of members. You have to look at the incidence rate. In the case of covid you also need to normalize by age group. You can go further (like throwing out the immunocompromised) but these are the main parameters.
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Using absolute numbers makes no sense, everyone with a clue about math knows it, and people who spread alarm with these numbers are being disingenuous and misleading. The headline here is clickbait, but that is standard practice now. The numbers of people who actually had their variant identified is pretty small (although the UK does it more than anyone else).
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The article does try to explain the numbers, but it should instead just show the relative risk numbers for each age group between vaccinated and unvaccinated in a chart. He instead uses a lot of words and analogies which doesn’t work nearly as well for me, but maybe he is just trying to explain it in a different way to the match challenged audience.
mark bofill (Comment #203647): “golf clap for President Joe Biden.”
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Yes, it is nice to hear Biden saying the right things re Cuba. Now let’s see what he does.
Food “science” is one of the worst offenders. Their observational studies tend to result in whatever the people paying for it want. Butter? Meat? Who the heck knows what the truth is?
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However my real beef (ha ha) is with the people who tell us what the “science says”. This is where the failing really is in most cases. Activists restate the results and an over compliant media looking for clicks parrots it. A lot time effect sizes are very small and this gets ignored, among many other ways to distort reality. Most credible scientists don’t want to fight this battle and just ignore it, to the detriment of their field.
I imagine Biden is pushing back against the recent BLM press release praising Cuba. What an own goal for them.
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Anti-Cuba protestors blocked some roads in Tampa a day ago, I was quite confused in what they were protesting against and needing to block roads for. Not helpful.
Tucker Carlson Today – Bret Weinstein – July 9, 2021. Video on Youtube as of today. He makes a good argument and you know Tucker doing his normal thing.
Tom,
Yeah, that’s the way I read it too.
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That’ll teach Biden’s handlers to let him near a microphone! ~grins~
mark bofill,
“That’ll teach Biden’s handlers to let him near a microphone!”
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Ya, dementia patients don’t have a lot of self control, and Biden is only going to get worse. I imagine he gives his handlers constant nightmares.
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Biden’s presidency is an interesting political case study: Democrats had not a single candidate who could plausibly get elected in spite of Trump being so reviled by the MSM and ‘elites’…. their only other choices were lightweights, crazies, and extreme lefties. Biden was the only plausible option, dementia or not.
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I remain convinced there is a very good chance Biden will resign in a couple of years to make way for Kamala…. one of the lefty crazies that Democrats recognized in early 2020 was un-electable. It will be interesting to see if panic sets in when Dems realize (yet again) that Kamala is an unlikable, dishonest candidate, and not likely to win any general election outside California.
Recent tweet:
@BretWeinstein
“Those who argue that large scale randomized controlled trials are the only reliable evidence in evidence based medicine have misled you. Now you can see why—large RCTs amplify systematic error in addition to signal, whereas meta-analysis amplifies signal, and corrects for error.”
RCT – randomized control trial.
I’d mention the Lawrie meta-analysis. With meta-analysis, it’s my understanding your hovering over the landscape and some get it wrong in one direction and that is offset by the others getting in wrong in the other direction. And the distribution shows the power zone which if it does work, shows the range that it works. It’s bracketing the answer.
Ragnaar,
Meta-analysis is theoretically better than a bunch of small studies that can’t give an definitive answer, if it’s done correctly. But meta-analysis can also be abused to give what looks a lot like a predetermined conclusion. IOW, the authors of a meta-analysis are not immune from putting their thumbs on the scale.
Tom Scharf,
Food science make climate science look good.
Raagnar,
I’ve seem nothing to make me believe Kory is either (a) more like “us” nor (b) more reliable than a regulator. You are throwing out a lot of soundbites followed by rhetorical questions.
Rangnaar,
It’s not my position that large scale randomized trials are the only reliable evidence. But the trial you brought up is really, really, really bad if used as evidence ivermectin works. I suspect it shouldn’t even be included in a meta analysis because it risks confusing the effect of iota-carrageenan with ivermectin. I mean, usually meta-analyses create screens to decide what to include and what to exclude. Their purpose is generally to overcome the need for “large scale”. But the filters screen out things that are just bad and this looks like one that wouldn’t pass the screen.
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Beyond the “carageenan” problem, not only was there no randomization, there was no attempt to even match participants to ‘similar’ people and do discussion of that. That’s really bad.
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It’s fine to post rhetoric about how we shouldn’t ask for perfection. But you need to explain why that trials included in a meta-analysis aren’t woafully deficient on several important points other than being “small”.
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They need a follow on trial that is designed to overcome it’s flaws because it’s really, really bad!
Tom Scharf,
Very few of the “variant break through” themed articles contain sufficient information to even do a leading order Bayes calculation. You need at a minimum % vaccinated population and %who meet the criteria of “ill” continued on being vaccinated (or unvaccinated since you either are or you aren’t.)
Often have neither number. I’ve definitely never read a news article that also gives data by age! So at best, one can do a quick calculation that doesn’t consider the possibility that demographics might matter.
Lucia,
“I’ve definitely never read a news article that also gives data by age!”
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Which makes me conclude that either the reporters are incredibly stupid, or more likely, they are not actually trying to inform their readers about true risks.
Biden say Facebook is “killing people” by allowing covid disinformation. The WH says it is identifying problematic posts for FB to remove.
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This is crossing a red line IMO. Private companies can censor as they wish, but the government has no business telling them what should be censored. There is an implied threat (or implied favoritism) when the federal government explicitly identifies what should be censored and works directly with private companies.
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I’m not taking any position on the content, in fact the articles I read today never bothered to identify a single post that is supposedly disinformation.
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This needs to stop.
Tom Scharf,
I am pretty sure the SC has ruled multiple times that any pressure on private organizations from government to censor is always unconstitutional. If Facebook targets the people/posts the White House identifies, then those people will likely have standing against the White House on First Amendment grounds.
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Of course, Alzheimer Joe is blissfully unaware of Constitutional niceties.
Lucia:
I ask rhetorical questions. Lately I’ve been trying to frame things as hierarchies which I picked up from someone. I could have said it this way, We rely on the top of the hierarchy or the base of the hierarchy to help us make decisions. The top of the hierarchies job is to have our trust and have vision. When it doesn’t, the base of the hierarchy should probably do something about it. Hierarchies can be authority hierarchies or competence hierarchies. Let’s say I am near the top of the hierarchy and say, it’s not a double blind so that’s it. Something that indicates I am stupid and I expect you to respect my authority. When you see that, look around at the base. Which Kory has more experience with that. He practices as opposed to theory.
An authority hierarchy can destroy just about anything even while people recite wonderful scientific things. A healthcare system so enmeshed in rules is going to be inefficient when dealing with new threats. Because control is coming from above. And this is why hierarchies die and are replaced. That’s just what I think. But another rhetorical question is why is the healthcare hierarchy we have so terrible? When it’s stressed, its failures become more apparent. If they try harder to maintain top down control during a pandemic, they just look stupid and desperate.
So now the real answer is a balance of the two hierarchies. The tendency to shift towards authority now is understandable. Vision is still needed, but that may come from the bottom up. But an arrogance from the top can prevent that. (An example is half the state’s governors.) And when authority keeps expanding, I don’t know?
Ragnaar,
I frown on rhetorical questions to the extent that you are actually not allowed to use them here. The reason is that the person asking is generally avoiding making direct claims or supporting them with any argument or evidence. They are also generally confusing in the sense that the person who states them may think they’ve made a point, but no one else really knows what it was supposed to be.
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So I request you stop posting series of rhetorical questions.
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Now on the hierarchy– I have no idea whether Kory is “the base”. But mostly, if we are talking about Ivermectin, I think this argument about “heirarchy” is beside the point.
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It seems to me, you, or Kory or someoen are trying to convince people Ivermectin works. You need good evidence. Inveighing against the hierarchy isn’t evidence.. Complaining about their standards isn’t evidence. You’ve brought up a study that is very poor evidence.
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I suspect if that study was remotely good evidence, you would be explaining why it’s good data. But instead you are switching to discussing a theory about hierarchies, rules standards and so on. I certainly accept that our health scare system and approval system has flaws. But flawed or not, if you want to convince me Ivermectin has been proven safe and effective, you need to bring up good convincing experimental results. You just haven’t done that.
Russell, I did not mean to call you names, and Algernon is a curious choice for an insult.
The combination of all the numbers you’ve been providing over the months, and now talking about your own death, just reminded me of the story.
It turns out I forgot the details, and Algernon was not as I remembered.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.†Yogi Berra
Well, l nailed this prediction. Florida, my State acknowledged 46,000 new infections last week…. a doubling from the previous week and a four fold increase in just four weeks. Florida no longer publishes the data, but from the curves presented all age groups, even over 65, have dramatic increases. Just to get your panties in a wad, anecdotal evidence. In the places I frequent, farmers market, pharmacy, old people have stopped wearing their masks. Foolish people! They think their vaccine will protect them. To finish with another Berra-ism: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
I forgot to post the data reference http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/covid19_report_archive/covid19-data/covid19_data_latest.pdf
Tom wrote: “This is crossing a red line IMO. Private companies can censor as they wish, but the government has no business telling them what should be censored.”
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More than that. They suggested cross platform “banning”. We already know these companies willing engage in censoring information democrats don’t like and engage in cross platform banning. I suspect the only reason this was mentioned so blithely is that these systems are already commonly used in a relationship that’s been gathering momentum since 2016.
Russell Klier,
You have presented zero evidence that the vaccines aren’t protecting the vaccinated. You need to show that vaccinated and unvaccinated have a similar risk of infection, not just rant about increasing new case rates. Everything I’ve seen that actually presented data, like in the UK, shows that ten percent or less of vaccinated people get infected compared to vaccinated or previously infected people and the risk of their hospitalization if infected is also less than ten percent of the risk for hospitalization for the infected unvaccinated.
Maybe a properly worn N95 or better mask would give you that much protection, but most people don’t have them. But most people were, in fact, wearing masks during previous peaks in the new case rate.
Russell Klier,
Sure, new cases are going up in all age groups, but the rate of increase looks to be lower in the older groups who have a higher rate of vaccination. That’s exactly what you would expect if the vaccines are working in the presence of a more infectious strain. But without knowing the actual numbers, one can only eyeball the data.
DeWitt/Russell
DeWitt is absolutely right. At a minimum, we need to know
%Vaccinated in some population.
% of those (ill/hospitalized/dead) (which ever) who have been vaccinated (or unvaccinated) in the same population.
Then we can apply Bayes theorem.
Unfortunately, these data trackers don’t provide the necessary information. They were likely designed before people started being vaccinated. No one thought about the importance of letting users be able to apply Bayes theorem.
From this NPR report: “97% of people who are hospitalized from COVID now are unvaccinated.”
I found that COVID act now reports that “56% of the entire U.S. population has received 1+ dose.” While that doesn’t show how many have reached the “full protection” stage of final dose + 2 weeks, because the vaccination rate has been dropping, I’d guess that most are, say 50% of the US population. Because no doses have been given to under-12s, the rate among 12+ will naturally be somewhat higher.
At any rate, if we assume 50% are fully vaccinated, and they represent only 3% of the hospitalizations, Bayes’ rule gives an estimate of 97% reduction in hospitalization risk if one is fully vaccinated. Usual caveats — behavior is similar in both groups, etc.
Russell: “Florida no longer publishes the data…”
But you posted a link to the Florida Dept of Health report with graphs of weekly case count by age group (among other metrics). So what additional data are you seeking that they don’t publish? Is it just the numbers underlying those curves?
Lucia, Dewitt Payne,
“The absence of evidence is evidence of monkey business”
By design the CDC stopped collecting information to make breakthrough analysis possible. “As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause.” https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html There are widespread reports from the states of breakthrough death. The numbers are not collected uniformly and are hard to access, … Mass. 79, Illinois 151, California 79, Louisiana 29, etc.
To get the data you need for analysis, you almost need to wait for the bodies to stack up and count them yourself. This post laments the CDC action:
“Should we track all breakthrough cases of COVID-19?” https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/should-we-track-all-breakthrough-cases-of-covid-19-202106032471
Russell,
We could still use bayes rule to see how well vaccination keeps us out of hospitals if the proper data were provided. It looks like it is collected for (a) hospitalization and (b) fatalities.
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That would still be something. But the proper information is not on Florida’s page (nor most people’s.)
Q: If we track 10 different extreme weather types and have 100 independent sites in the world, what is the chance of a 1 in a century weather event occurring any year?
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Please send your answer to Team Science at the the NYT. Those guys have been in full AGW propaganda mode the last week. It’s really hack journalism. I read just one article and it was cringe worthy.
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IPCC AR5: “In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scaleâ€
FYI: There hasn’t been an EF5 tornado in over 8 years. The normal frequency is about one per year. This of course means it’s just an expected statistical anomaly according to experts. If we had a record number of EF5 tornadoes in the past 8 years it would obviously mean…
Tom Scharf,
What got me started worrying about global warming hysteria was the obvious heavy admixture of “green” and “left” politics in all of climate ‘science’…. leading to endless wild-eyed proposals of destructive public policies. If it were just nutty science, I would have ignored it. But it is not just nutty science…. it is nutty science intimately tied to even nuttier, dangerous, and very destructive public policies.
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The only reasonable expectation is that global warming (AKA climate change) will continue to be both studied and reported on with a heavy dose of green/left propaganda. There will never be an honest discussion of the scientific issues, nor an honest discussion of costs and benefits of proposed policies, because those conversations are not at all desired by people promoting the doomsday propaganda. Just ask Micheal Schellenberger.
I’m having a real hard time verifying the “More than 99% of recent deaths were among the unvaccinated” talking point.
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Most of the quotes in the media just say Fauci said it, have no attribution, or point back to an AP analysis. This has no underlying data available and it is just assertions.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fcf43d9731c76c16e7354f5d5e187
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Then there is this:
https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/unvaccinated-individuals-now-account-for-the-vast-majority-of-covid-19-hospitalizations-and-deaths-in-the-u-s-according-to-available-data/
“…the director of the U.S. CDC, Rochelle Walensky, said at a 1 July 2021 White House briefing that preliminary data from January to June 2021 suggested that about 99.5% of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. occurred in unvaccinated people.”
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This timeframe is biased as it includes peak deaths when most of the US wasn’t vaccinated. The CDC officially doesn’t do this calculation for unknown reasons and this is also just an assertion without data.
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This appears to be the best data I have found from Israel (Pfizer):
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00947-8/fulltext
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They show their math:
“Individuals were defined as unvaccinated if they had not received any doses of BNT162b2, and as fully vaccinated if at least 7 days had passed since receiving the second dose of BNT162b2. Incidence rates were calculated for unvaccinated and fully vaccinated individuals aged 16 years and older for each SARS-CoV-2 outcome after excluding people with previous laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Data were stratified by age group (16–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74, 75–84, and ≥85 years, based on 2020 census data), sex, and calendar week.”
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Very importantly:
“Person-days for the fully vaccinated group were ascertained each day by multiplying the proportion of people who were fully vaccinated with two doses of BNT162b2 by the census estimates for each age stratum. Person-days for the unvaccinated group were determined each day by subtracting the number of person-days contributed by those who were vaccinated from the total census population for each age stratum; this process was repeated, summed, and aggregated for each day of the study period.”
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So correctly done IMO, I’m sure it could be stratified further but this is magnitudes better than talking point assertions from experts.
Table 4 holds the data exactly as I was hoping for (scroll down for death data or see the PDF).
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Vaccine effectiveness
Age <45 years = 100.0% (no deaths in vaccinated group)
Age 45-64 years = 96.9%
Age ≥65 years = 98.7%
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So, wow. Pretty impressive. I expected it to be lower.
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Sorry DeWitt, ha ha: "Individuals with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection were excluded from person-day estimates.". You just get no respect.
Tom Scharf,
Excluding those with a previous infection entirely is a lot better than counting them as unvaccinated. It’s not at all clear, however, that there are many previously infected but unvaccinated people left in Israel.
https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/TessLawrie:0
Lawrie discusses the Guardian’s hit piece. Things like the body of evidence, what is scientific evidence in this case are also discussed.
Ragnaar,
Can you give me a 1-2 paragraph synopsis in your own words? If it’s worth watching, you should be able to do so.
Ragnaar,
I mean… seriously a 1 hour 50+ minute podcast whose title is “Help LBRY Save Crypto”. I’n not interested in Crypto currency. If there is something relavant to covid:
1) Tell me the minutes where that is discussed,
2) Give me a synopsis of the points/ argument you think you want me to hear, read, understand.
I could grow old watching or listening to that thing and still have zero idea of what point you think you are making. But presumably if you have a point, you can make it!
Lucia:
I didn’t know about the rhetorical questions deal. I’ll try hard not to do that.
The hierarchy is the point. We want a competence hierarchy so that the best treatment wins, or contributing less expensive and safer approaches are not excluded. But we have an authority hierarchy here. And authority is no way to practice medicine or science. Regulatory capture works against both of these things as well. And regulatory capture when it occurs, hijacks the authority hierarchy. The EUAs under the hierarchies own rules suggests no other existing alternatives. And they exist. The hierarchy is corrupt. Whereas in other countries, it’s not so corrupt and they move forward with ivermectin. That it’s corrupt is my opinion. I believe I can see. There’s always some level corruption with government . But if there was one time, given how terrible they’ve told us it was, and all the things they had us do, to not let corruption win the day, it would be for this situation. That would be a heroic thing. But no.
About the study I brought up. I am still going with the 58% to 0% along with the sample size curing most weaknesses. It is just one study.
I just posted the Lawrie interview. I am convinced the evidence is there. We take all kinds of evidence into account. They discussed some of what we talked about earlier about a reliance on RCTs. I am going to try to scan my replies for question marks.
Ragnaar,
I think it is “beside the point” and irrelvant.
I think the first question is “Do we have evidence that Ivermectin works” and whether it is safe.? Only if the answer is in the affirmative do we then turn to whether the “hierarchy” is creating some difficulty.
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You continue to avoid discussing the evidence of whether Ivermectin is safe and effective.
Then bring it forward, explain it and defend your position. Don’t retreat into an argument about “the hierarchy”!
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Just stick to evidence about whethe Iver… works and is safe.
Tom Scharf,
Thanks for the link to that study…. it is the kind of study the US MSM should be reporting on, but don’t.
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“Age 45-64 years = 96.9%
Age ≥65 years = 98.7%”
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Of course, according to some, 98% reduction in risk is not good enough. I think anyone for whom that is not good enough should resolve to stay home… forever. That is the only way to eliminate the last 2% covid risk. And as DeWitt correctly points out, if they do need to drive somewhere (like the doctor’s office, for treatment of all their other illnesses), they should limit their speed to 5 or 10 miles an hour…. you can never be too safe you know.
Something curious in the Florida data linked by Russell Klier (Comment #203688). On page 7, there is age stratified data for vaccination (looks like first dose), cumulative cases, and cases in the last week. There is a pretty good correlation between the last two. New cases are 2.5% of cumulative cases for age <12, declining to 1.2% for 65+.
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Why would there be a positive correlation between new case rates and cumulative case rates? It suggests that age is a risk factor in transmission, due to biology and/or behavior. Relative to population, both cumulative and new cases peak for the 20-29 age group.
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The ratio of new to cumulative cases declines pretty much linearly with percent vaccinated, but the fit implies that to reach zero would require 180% vaccinated. I have no idea why.
SteveF, Tom Scharf
And Israel has a mandatory mask law, and the means to enforce it…. Which was my original position.
Russell Klier,
If masks worked as well as you seem to think they do, we wouldn’t need vaccines or drug regimens. But they don’t. New cases are still increasing in Israel. According to the original post above, Israel reinstituted masks on June 25. The seven day moving average of new cases/day (worldometers.info) nearly doubled from 372 on July 7 to 732 on July 17.
SteveF, Tom Scharf, Dewitt Payne,
Your three scientific reviews of the data from Israel tells me [a layman] two things:
1. It is safe for seniors to venture forth in Israel, and
2. It is not safe for seniors to venture forth in Israel.
It confirms one of my basic tenets for public policy making:
“Shooting from the Hip” is much better than “Analysis paralysis.”
Russell Klier,
Life isn’t safe. Staying in bed all day will eventually kill you.
It’s relative risk. If everyone is masked then the vaccinated are 98% less likely to die. If nobody is masked then the vaccinated are 98% less likely to die.
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The speed of the overall disease spread may be slower with mask mandates, but that is likely not going to affect the final outcome much, just how fast we get there. We had mask mandates during the worst period of this pandemic and they are far from an effective answer. If someone lets you choose between a mask and a vaccine, choose the vaccine.
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Mask mandates were easily justifiable when it was buying time to get everyone vaccinated.
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You can of course do both, and feel free to do so. Some people are comfortable being vaccinated and going without a mask, and they have data to back up that risk decision. Unvaccinated people going without a mask, especially those over 50, are making a questionable decision. I’m all for letting delta burn through the population at this point unrestricted. Vaccines have been walk up service for over a month and many places will deliver them to your door.
Tom Scharf,
“Mask mandates were easily justifiable when it was buying time to get everyone vaccinated.”
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I think that might be more accurate if you substituted ‘if’ for ‘when’. The efficacy of simple masks is very limited, if they do anything at all. N95 may be better, but only if properly fitted. And for most of the pandemic it was unlawful to sell them to the public. Full facepiece positive pressure masks, supplied by air from a pump passing through a 0.2 micron high efficiency filter, are probably very effective. That would a little expensive, not to mention very weird at the supermarket, and having to recharge the batteries all the time would be a pain. But you can never be too safe when it comes to covid you know.
“%Vaccinated in some population.
% of those (ill/hospitalized/dead) (which ever) who have been vaccinated (or unvaccinated) in the same population.”
Looks to me like numbers available for UK. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001358/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_18.pdf A spreadsheet with the numbers is also provided. They are getting enough cases tracked over 28 days for their case fatality numbers to mean something (and fortunately a low number).
Stratified by over 50, under 50.
oh, general population vaccination here. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55274833
Shockingly, never-had-a-mask-mandate Sweden, with a population a bit over 10 million, and far fewer vaccinations per million than the USA, has only 200 cases per day, no recent growth in cases, and about 1 death per day. (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/)
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A few might wonder how this is possible, without any masks be required. The answer is probably that Sweden has enough people with acquired immunity (from infection) that there are just not enough susceptible people left for the virus to spread much.
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Every region will stamp out the virus when enough people have immunity…. either from infection (like Brazil…. with masks everywhere but few vaccinations) or from enough people being vaccinated. The end is the same, only the path is different.
WSJ: Unvaccinated Americans Are Behind Rising Covid-19 Hospitalizations
https://www.wsj.com/articles/unvaccinated-covid-19-hospitalizations-11626528110?mod=hp_lead_pos8
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“AdventHealth, which manages 41 hospitals across seven largely Midwestern and Southern states, said about 97% of roughly 12,700 Covid-19 patients treated this year were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.”
“HCA Healthcare Inc., one of the nation’s largest hospital systems, said its data show fully vaccinated people account for less than 1% of its Covid-19 patients.”
“Of 51 Covid-19 patients at the hospital on Saturday, 43 weren’t fully vaccinated. Two of the vaccinated Covid-19 patients had suppressed immune systems, according to UAMS.”
“More than 99% of cases and more than 98% of hospitalizations (in NC) and deaths since May were among people who weren’t fully vaccinated, the state said.”
“From Jan. 25 through July 13, 98% of Covid-19 hospital admissions in Arkansas were people who weren’t fully vaccinated.”
(note the kind of stat that includes Jan/Feb is a bit misleading due to timeframe of the surge and lack of vaccinated people at that time)
SteveF,
you wrote: “N95 may be better”… Better still, a mask designed for asthmatics, workmen and athletes. They claim: “RZ’s Allergy Mask filters out 99.9% of particles down to .1 micron”. It’s adjustable, tight-fitting, no fog, and uses particulate filters that are replaceable. Not legal where masks are required for Covid because it has exit valves, but I have only been challenged on it at the cardiologist’s office. [They ask me to wear a surgical mask over it.] Has a dramatic effect on reducing asthma problems especially while gardening. RZ M2 Mesh, USES https://rzmask.com/pages/uses MASK SPECIFICATIONS & TESTING https://rzmask.com/pages/technical-information
SteveF (Comment #203730): “A few might wonder how this is possible, without any masks be required. The answer is probably that Sweden has enough people with acquired immunity (from infection) that there are just not enough susceptible people left for the virus to spread much.”
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That is silly. Sweden has has just about the same total cases per capita as the USA and has many fewer fully vaccinated. There have had somewhat more cases than the UK but far fewer vaccinated.
Tom Scharf (Comment #203731): “(note the kind of stat that includes Jan/Feb is a bit misleading due to timeframe of the surge and lack of vaccinated people at that time)”
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Calling that “misleading” is being nice.
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It is outrageous that they do not give apples-to-apples comparisons. People can readily see that the experts are “misleading” them, which only adds to the boundless reservoir of mistrust that public health authorities, the press, etc. have accumulated. And they leave the field open to those who make their own misleading comparisons against the vaccines (the UK has more deaths per capita among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated!). It is almost as if they want people to mistrust the vaccine.
MikeM,
Journalists aren’t experts about data analysis. I think they just ask a question they think is meaningful, get a number and write their article.
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It would be nice if the statistics pages accumulated by NYT added some relevant info to their daily data but someone has to realize it needs to be collected, recorded and disseminated. I’d like to see the daily statistics for # vaccinated and the hospitalized and dead broken out by fully vaccinated, partly, not at all and previously infected. But someone would have to collect that, complie it, then the people posting would have to reorganize their scripts…. yada yada. And many people wouldn’t know what to do with that extra info.
Mike M.,
Sweden (and the USA) has somewhat more cases than the UK? I guess if you define somewhat as nearly 40% more, then you are correct. But I would put somewhat in the 10% or so range. In the UK, confirmed cases are about 8% of the population while it’s close to 11% in the USA and Sweden. But the UK is in the process of catching up, which I didn’t expect but is clearly happening. The new case rate is rapidly approaching their previous high and shows no signs yet of slowing.
OTOH, the number of deaths and serious cases in the UK is low so they don’t appear to be too worried. They had a full house, 140,000 people, at the British F1 GP at Silverstone and large crowds at the Open this weekend as well as at Wimbledon last week. Few masks in evidence in the crowds. I think you had to be vaccinated to go, though.
lucia (Comment #203738): “Journalists aren’t experts about data analysis. I think they just ask a question they think is meaningful, get a number and write their article.”
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Sure. But they are far too willing to unquestioningly accept any number that fits their narrative and to ignore anything that does not fit. So they are part of the problem. A big part.
The ‘experts’ still recommend vaccination for those who have recovered from COVID-19, claiming that there will be a significant boost in their immunity. But everything I’ve seen is based on speculation or assertion with no data other than possibly antibody titer. Then there’s this, which actually does some research:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210608/No-point-vaccinating-those-whoe28099ve-had-COVID-19-Findings-of-Cleveland-Clinic-study.aspx
IMO, the speculation that infection acquired immunity won’t last as long (i.e. infection only within the last six months to get into Wimbledon as a spectator) as immunity from vaccination has not been supported by any meaningful data.
It’s possible the media who quotes the Jan/Feb timeframes did do their data analysis correctly. They did not show their work though, and I can’t trust them to do it right because of the political pressure involved to highlight vaccine efficacy (and the childish desire to shame their political opponents).
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I’m a believer in vaccine efficacy, but after climate change reporting I can’t trust them to do the right thing when it involves even a whiff of culture wars. This is exactly where most of the media fails to understand that their desire to report “moral clarity” on some issues backfires spectacularly on other issues that really matter. Mostly peaceful protests. Russia collusion. Extreme weather. “Restrictive” voting laws. The US media came in last in a recent global poll of trust across 46 countries.
https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2021/us-ranks-last-among-46-countries-in-trust-in-media-reuters-institute-report-finds/
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Blaming the readers no longer works.
The Open (UK golf) was restricted in attendance to 32K per day. The only masks I saw were the workers. I think they usually allow around 100K or so.
Speaking of extreme weather, you might have missed this recent report.
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-old-school-hurricanes-atlantic-frequent.html
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
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“Researchers found no evidence on the timeline of larger than normal numbers of hurricanes forming over the past few decades—instead, it showed that the numbers were on par with prior spikes in the late 1940s and early 1880s. They also found no evidence indicating that modern hurricanes are any more powerful than those in the past.â€
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Do a search on “hurricanes climate change†and you will find nothing but the opposite conclusion cited in recent news articles.
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I’ve been watching this for over 15 years (exactly since my hurricane insurance went up over 30% due to them starting to use climate models to estimate rates). The game on long term trends here is how to estimate small storms that may have been missed before the satellite era. People estimate it differently, but the right answer is to not do this estimation at all and only examine the trends for large storms which are never missed when they make landfall. It has been known basically forever that there is no long term trend up or down in the US for Cat3 landfalls.
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So somehow the media always finds a way to report “more powerful storms†anyway by parroting people who only look at very recent data. Houston gets epic rainfall and “hurricanes are wetter†makes the rounds based on one storm. The media and partisans may want to examine recency bias. Partisans so desperately want to invent a new counting method to show what they truly believe.
Good article on the damage done by the “Panic Pandemic”: https://www.city-journal.org/panic-pandemic?wallit_nosession=1
Lucia,
“Journalists aren’t experts about data analysis.”
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Definitely a candidate for understatement of the week.
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Even “science” journalism is technically very weak. It is common for me to find errors in popular scientific rags when they report about new publications. The errors are often so glaring that they betray the journalist hasn’t a clue what they were writing about.
Mike M,
Sweden had a large fraction their total covid deaths before testing was commonly done in Sweden (40% of deaths, 8% of confirmed cases), so total cases are even more understated than in the USA. Sweden also had schools open for those up to 16… and certainly some of those adolescents have immunity they don’t have in places like the UK and much of the States. And as always, the number of immune people needed to drive the pandemic to near zero depends on other factors…. from weather to cultural to behavioral to population density. What is clear is that Sweden is not seeing any big increase in cases or deaths, in spite of relatively low vaccination rates.
SteveF (Comment #203749): “What is clear is that Sweden is not seeing any big increase in cases or deaths, in spite of relatively low vaccination rates.”
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That is true. It is also clear that the UK is having a huge increase in cases in spite of a high vaccination rate. And deaths are up by a factor of 5 since late May / early June.
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It seems clear, at least to me, that any simple explanation must be wrong.
The most plausible explanation is a more transmissible variant combined with a more open society. Unvaccinated people are being exposed at a high rate to a more transmissible virus. Then there is seasonality which is also a factor in US south. Everyone is driven indoors. The younger and vulnerable people are largely also the least likely to get a serious illness, and they know that … because that is the science. The media tries real hard to not amplify that fact to their own detriment.
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The last US surge was the “big one” as far as death goes, this one will likely be a moderate one in case load, but with much less death attached largely due to the age profile of those infected. The Midwest and other areas may also likely get a seasonal surge when it is their turn in the box.
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We will then be effectively done until evolution produces a vaccine evasion variant. Who knows how likely that will be, but my guess is they can produce a booster for it pretty promptly to avoid large scale deaths. We probably have learned something along the way and will protect the most vulnerable first.
â€It is also clear that the UK is having a huge increase in cases in spite of a high vaccination rate. And deaths are up by a factor of 5 since late May / early June.â€
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https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vaccines-highly-effective-against-hospitalisation-from-delta-variant
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“the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is 96% effective against hospitalisation after 2 doses
the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is 92% effective against hospitalisation after 2 dosesâ€
“The analysis included 14,019 cases of the Delta variant – 166 of whom were hospitalised – between 12 April and 4 June, looking at emergency hospital admissions in England.â€
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Definitely more cases are going to produce more bad outcomes, it’s going to scale. The question is whether these case increases are telling us something different about the vaccines, the virus, people’s behavior, seasonality, etc. Note that the UK only had one dose for a while which I think is largely corrected. One dose is definitely less effective for delta.
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The UK also got their death rate to less than 10/day for a while, so all increases are going to look relatively large. Their population is 3x Florida.
Thanks Phil
I think the only trouble with that report (from the pov of Bayes) is the table of who was vaccinated and got sick is a for such a long time. (Or maybe I haven’t read it– but I think that means I can’t know what the level of vaccination is for the whole population over all time? )
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I only skimmed…. I’ll look again.
The data specific to the Delta variant can only go back as far when Delta started to make an impact in the UK. (early May). From a Bayes point of view, you could take a worst case of 70% population with one shot and 30% with second. Those reports are produced pretty regularly so you also have option of doing report to report differences. Frankly, the numbers look pretty good however you cut it.
Tom Scharf,
“We probably have learned something along the way and will protect the most vulnerable first.”
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Some of us have, but blue state governors only agreed to prioritize vaccination of those actually at significant risk after proposing lunatic plans designed to punish racial oppressors (AKA elderly white people) by withholding vaccinations and prioritizing vaccination of ‘oppressed’ individuals who were not actually at significant risk. Only political reality (Dems would for sure get thrown out of office!) kept them from doing it. It was as ugly a display of racism as I have ever seen. I found it absolutely shocking. I do not believe for a second that those people learned anything, nor do I believe they think protecting those actually at risk is the best path.
Mike M. (Comment #203750)
July 19th, 2021 at 11:59 am
SteveF (Comment #203749): “What is clear is that Sweden is not seeing any big increase in cases or deaths, in spite of relatively low vaccination rates. -That is true. It is also clear that the UK is having a huge increase in cases in spite of a high vaccination rate. And deaths are up by a factor of 5 since late May / early June.”
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“It seems clear, at least to me, that any simple explanation must be wrong.”
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A pithy comment.
The vagaries of both the spread and the damage caused country to country and state to state, Summer and Winter, re occurrences and their severity defy simple logic.
Multiple factors both in the severity of the different viral strains and the variations in the populations they affect and the climate and politics seem to make huge differences.
Even totalitarian states like China, Russia North Korea and Australia have wildly different patterns
angech,
Explanations may not be simple, but they certainly must be logical. The reality is that in the UK the rate of vaccination varies from very high (those over 50, and especially over 60) to moderate-to-low (young people). The number of cases in the UK is increasing dramatically, but much, much less the number of deaths…. because nearly all the truly vulnerable people in the UK have been vaccinated, and it is mostly the unvaccinated who are catching the virus. There will be some ‘breakthrough’ cases among the vaccinated (we knew this from the double-blind vaccine trials), but the data are clear: the risks of both symptomatic illness and severe illness are greatly reduced among the vaccinated. The death rate rises much more in proportion to cases in the USA because many people who are at significant risk have simply refused the vaccines. They made their choice, and they suffer the consequences. It is a tragic choice, and not a simple one to understand, but the consequences are not at all difficult to understand.
The CDC vaccination allocation equity and ethics scoreboard last November was not their finest moment, to say the least. Multiply the science by zero and add in their social justice ethics. Ultimately their … ahem … courageous stand was ignored by almost everyone in the US and elsewhere in the world.
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They helpfully record their meetings. A good thing. They are on the record over and over justifying allocation based on race (aka equity). See the November meeting discussion at 1:09:00 here for them discussing this issue. The self congratulations on their ethical virtue is quite tiresome. This is following the science apparently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF_3ALxYjv4&list=PLvrp9iOILTQb6D9e1YZWpbUvzfptNMKx2&index=58
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The first few minutes of this one are a hoot of doublespeak. This was a month later after they changed their mind after “feedback” and put 75+ in the 1B priority. “We aren’t considering race! We spent huge amounts of time struggling with equity!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPElO2dBqmU&list=PLvrp9iOILTQb6D9e1YZWpbUvzfptNMKx2&index=2
Indiana University is mandating vaccination for students, despite not having FDA approval. I haven’t seen if any school districts are mandating, but in Virginia it looks like masks will be required for unvaccinated students.
I'm closing comments to start a new thread at
open-thread-july-21 . Comments from july 20, 21 have been moved.