Everyone in Israel belongs to one of four HMOs, and Maccabi is the second-largest. The study covers 50,777 members who got the vaccine among 480k age 60+. It's not a "small HMO"; the sample is huge and robust.
Nationwide cases and hospitalization have dropped—it's just disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
As for the Moderna trial, Berenson criticizes it for being allegedly lax in its definition of "severe COVID." But then it's all the more impressive all 30 examples were in the placebo arm (9 hospitalized, 1 died) compared to ZERO who got the vaccine. fda.gov/media/144434/d…
Remarkable efficacy. While Moderna picked the endpoint of reducing "severe COVID" (30-to-0) the data also show it reduces hospitalizations (9-to-0); that just wasn't the criteria they submitted to FDA in advance. Berenson has claimed falsely otherwise several times just today.
Berenson has been pretty adamant about blasting this kind of misinformation today, writing several tweets with these basic errors and lots of ALLCAPS.
The problem for this theory is not a problem at all.
In most states, cases are down, hospitalizations are improving. These places are removing restrictions (that they previously removed and only re-imposed when cases shot up in November).
Context: There’s nothing suspicious about an 86 year-old man dying in his sleep. We knew garbage like this was coming. Antivaxxers always seize unrelated events that inevitably occur when large numbers of vaccines are administered.
For example, here’s Alex Berenson spreading panic porn that 148 people have been reported to have died sometime after taking one of the vaccines. Doesn’t mean vaccines had any role. As of last week 11.3 million doses had been administered!
I wrote an article about this. The WHO didn't say anything about false positives, doesn't suggest cycles be reduced, and not much changed from old guidance.
Context: Bizarre that so many folks are misrepresenting such a milquetoast document to mean something sinister. It doesn’t say anything like this. Just read damn thing!
It's not even new. The prior version of the document already said “patients with high levels of circulating virus (viral load), relatively few cycles will be needed to detect virus and so the Ct value will be low.” archive.is/FkKlq
Contrary to Julia, calling out dangerous misinformation *does* help his constituents. And while doing this certainly could be a full-time job, as a hobbyist debunker myself, it only takes a little knowledge of how the internet works to dig up deleted tweets.
Context: They're an odd belief that all deaths are being classified as COVID-19. Untrue. All of the normal sorts of deaths are still occurring at about the same rate.
The flu is indeed very low, as confirmed by testing, but the mitigation measures taken against COVID are even more effective against the flu (which is less infectious).