Home with family and friends for the Holidays? Not if Task “Force” member Dr Birx has her way. Welcome to the “It’s time for Dr Birx to go” magnum opus.
“home with neighbors and friends may not be a safe place in specific communities.”
That’s one of the key messages of Dr Birx’s talk in Boston Friday. Birx has now officially gone completely “off the reservation” as she tours colleges and spreads a special kind of COVID crazy.
It will be clear when reading the low-lites of her talk that Birx has never left April.
Birx is a non-elected appointee who now feels she has the right to tell you to shun and be suspicious of friends and neighbors. You know what’s coming next: “stay away from your family.”
Birx bases her recommendations on an apparently severe case of ASDS: Asymptomatic Spread Derangement Syndrome. That and apparent innumeracy. With perhaps some consistency bias and man-with-a-hammer syndrome.
Birx: “we do see early signs that we saw across the South after Memorial Day, a sense that there is early asymptomatic silent spread occurring in communities... that's what we saw happening in the South; people let down their guard when they were with friends and family”
This is pure speculation on Birx’s part. First, is asympto spread significant? The evidence (and Lord Fauci) say no but Birx uses the dramatic sounding “silent spread” (other types of spread are loud and obnoxious) to hook her audience including lazy biased media and officials.
And how does Birx say we should detect the evil “silent spread”?
“What we need is better surveillance testing for finding the asymptomatics”
So there it is of course-MORE testing of non-sick folks. And Birx gives us a hint as to what type of testing she has in mind...
“data tells us very clearly that the way you find that is the way the universities are finding it: regular testing. And if you wait until people have symptoms, you waited too long because there is so much asymptomatic spread before that”
“So much asympto spread before that”? Nope. Studies show there may be 2 days prior to symptom onset where transmission could be significant. What are the chances of catching someone and getting them test results in that tiny window?
Regardless, she wants to test the general population the way universities are testing: mandatory tests every 3-14 days to look for virus. In non sick people. Something she calls by the dystopian phrase “sentinel surveillance.”
On campuses this has resulted in countless students being locked up with no symptoms. This type of testing has never been done for any other disease ever. Historically you first need to be ill. If Ill enough, then you get a test.
As most folks (other tha Birx) know by now the tests are either highly prone to error with up to 60% false positives (rapid tests) or overly sensitive with up to 90% false positives (PCR tests). rationalground.com/why-mass-pcr-t…
Yet Birx wants you and your family to submit to serial mandatory testing and then have your liberties restricted based on the potentially bogus results. Sound crazy to anyone? But wait there’s more. MUCH more.
Birx:
“just by looking at someone you can’t tell they’re infected. I know we want to all believe we’re well...the amount of asympto spread is quite large and we have to find ways to detect it through sentinel surveillance but we also have to act like others could be infected.”
So there’s the ASDS talking again. The same irrational fear that has driven much of the failed worldwide policy since March still lives in Dr Birx. She wants you to treat others as if they are lepers. Especially close friends, and as I said, next it will be your family.
Note an incredibly important omission by Birx: she never mentions illness. Symptoms don’t matter to Birx. You can feel great, but if you test positive you are a virus spreading zombie to her. This whole thing for Birx is about cases. She wants to see cases stop “casing.”
As if cases in non sick people meant something. There are stacks of graphs from around the world created by other “non believers” that prove cases in no way correlate with what should matter: serious illnesses and death.
More of Birx’ ASDS: “(in Spring) we were all together trying to stop the spread by doing what we could which was locking everything down. We didn't understand the depth and breath of
the asymptomatic spread at that time. The CDC thought it was about 17%.“
(Get ready for the fear kicker): “We now know it's 2-3 times that amount (Huh!?) but it may even be greater than that when you start to look at these college data.” that maybe up to 80% of individuals under 30 are asymptomatic...
“...and we are still getting the data from all of the colleges.”
We are now 2 months into 1st semester and hardly anyone is seriously ill on college campuses.
Birx then says watch the TREND: “when you go from a 0.9 to 1.1 or 1.3 (% positive); that's your early warning sign. It's not when you go from 4 to 4.5. It's the delta. It's the trend...and the rate of rise in that trend. So now is the moment to increase surveillance testing.”
No matter that at 1% we are at background noise levels of positivity. With current testing protocols, false positive levels due to test specificity alone (before sensitivity and contamination issues) are at least ~ 1% and we are seeing many areas flatline around 4%.
So Birx is divining “trends” in noise. Kinda like listening for satanic messages in Beatles or Zep albums when played backwards.
Birx wore her favorite talisman, a mask, during her entire talk. With new info that they work: “in Phoenix. They went to a mask mandate. And if you look at the most recent CDC MMWR about Phoenix, it shows 2 weeks within a mask mandate they were able to plateau and come down.”
Dr Redfield’s cloth vaccine hard at work! Except that it’s all conjecture. Which even the CDC admits. The image below taken from this very CDC report contains a whole page worth of disclaimers, the first being correlation is not causality. Oh yeah - that.
Seems Birx and the CDC think we will fall for the tiger rock just like Homer. They don’t think anyone will read that far into their report. Doh!
Then Birx reminds us that by going on vacation, we spread the virus.
“As you know most Europeans go on vacations in August, so what you are seeing now with these rapid case rises are the asymptomatic spread that occurred post going on vacation.”
Hmm... why hasn’t the “Birx Asymptomatic Virus Spreading Vacation” hit Sweden? (Note Swedes love their vacations)
Birx: “in US [ ] that post Memorial Day outbreak across the south begin to move north; it went into first AR and MO and up into OK and KS then IA and now in WI. These are people that have gone on vacation, most likely picked up the virus asymptomatic, brought it back”
Sure, this scenario described by Birx completely ignores normal resp virus seasonality a la Hope-Simpson. No matter, once again she says with no scientific evidence that the spread is because we did something bad. We went on vacation and became asymptomatic viral vectors.
Birx scolds again that “people let down their guard when they were with friends and family, and they took off their masks and they shared dinner or they shared drinks inside and those become spreading events.” How. Dare. We!
Of course for Birx fighting the casedemic, herd immunity is not a thing. No one is immune from false positives after all! Birx:
“I think I have made it very clear my position on herd immunity; there is no place in US that has enough baseline infection to prevent the next wave”
Many many eminent, non-biased non-TDS scientists disagree
Yes Birx wants everyone to hide from becoming a “case” in the “next wave.” Clearly Birx is in the “vaccine or bust” camp. Yet any unbiased expert will tell you a vaccine silver bullet is a pipe dream.
But fear not, Birx reminds us:
“I come out of science so I welcome private discourse and discussion and data driven analysis. I don't welcome when it becomes public and people take public divergent opinions because I think we do have consensus on the task force“
That consensus would likely not include @SWAtlasHoover, because Birx is really saying “I like science and debate but only when it agrees with me and the rest of the BRF task force because WE know what’s best.”
There is no end game mentioned. Nothing indicating any of this will ever stop. If the past is any indication, her recommendations will only get more invasive. Ask yourself if Dr Birx and her task force cronies Fauci and Redfield deserve to take your liberties.
In my opinion it is long past time for Birx, who continues to tilt at the casedemic; sees asymptomatic spread everywhere; and wants you masked and tested regularly, to go.
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A new way to look at lockdown severity and its effects. We have all heard of the Oxford lockdown stringency index described here bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/resea… which uses 17 indicators to come up with a lockdown stringency score. What if we looked at cumulative stringency? 1/8
By cumulative stringency I mean the area under the stringency curve. I decided to look at the period from Feb 15 to June 30 2020 and sum the daily stringency scores. The max score for this 137 day period would be 13700 = 137 days * 100 max score. 2/8
As with my prior studies I looked at Western Europe. First the cumulative stringency scores, where Sweden is lowest. No surprise, but note Finland Iceland and even Norway score low. 3/8
Imagine if our “leaders”, “experts” and a majority of the population were this rational. Written by a fund manager whom I will not cite unless he requests. 1/8
“Honestly, the policy response is not hard once you accept that (1) this is mitigation not suppression, (2) we have a clear understanding of who is vulnerable and who is not, and (3) 30-40% of the population will be infected (with disease break point at 15-20%)” 2/8
“...regardless of what we do.
If you are vulnerable (old, diabetes, obese, etc.) – take every precaution. Test frequently. Have pulse oximeters to detect if 02 levels are falling. Do all you can to minimize person-to-person contact – and to keep fit and healthy.” 3/8
More plots for your consideration, focusing on W. Europe. The first looks at Oxford lockdown stringency. Did it affect the maximum daily deaths/million? The maximum stringency certainly did not for these 18 countries. In fact there is a weak correlation in the wrong direction. 1/
Meaning that the countries with harshest lockdowns had higher max daily deaths/M. Digging further, let’s look at the first day each country saw significant fatal infections. I lagged reported deaths (7d ma) by 25 days to approx day of infection. Then... 2/
I plotted the first day of 2020 where infections lead to 0.5 deaths/M. Note that the earlier the pandemic began ramping up in a country, the worse the max daily deaths/M. Not a bad R^2. 3/
Sweden: the undeserved battle ground of the pandemic mess. Thankfully we do have at least one country that did things differently to help us learn what really matters in our policy responses. Folks love to cherry-pick pairwise comparisons to support their views. Maybe tho ... 1/
... policy actions don’t matter much at all as far as the virus’ trajectory. Which if true would mean we ruined economies, mental health and so much more for little if any benefit. So I decided to do some analysis using OWID and Oxford Lockdown Stingency data to look at this 2/
I plotted daily Cov19 deaths per Million using a 7 day ma on a log scale to show growth rate. And then I shifted this curve 25 days earlier to approximate deaths by day of infection. I also plotted lockdown stringency to look for any correlation to virus trajectory. 3/