1/ Lost in the desperate public health push for the vaccines is the reality that the ro is once again not cooperating. The third wave in the US clearly peaked weeks ago. Positive tests are down 40% and hospitalizations almost 20%...
2/ The Christmas spike was an even bigger lie than the Thanksgiving spike. And these trends clearly have nothing to do with vaccinations (almost no one in the US has received two doses) or masks (which have been everywhere since last summer). Virus gonna virus...
3/ Now we have a few weeks of heavy breathing about death counts (match them certificates, boys!) ahead, but this was the truly national wave. The one we were told to fear. And it’s over. Without hospital overrun or bodies in the streets or even much disruption of normal life.
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1/ The media keeps saying not to worry about the VAERS reports - you vaccinate old people, some die later, too bad. (Which is the opposite of what they say about #Covid - and doesn’t explain why flu vaccines, given to huge numbers of the elderly, don’t cause similar reports)...
2/ But okay. What about younger people? I looked at people under 50 who were hospitalized within three days of getting the shot.
No broken legs a month later here - the case for causality is strong. These are serious cases in young, mostly healthy adults (HCWs). I found 259....
3/ On a per-vaccination basis, that’s 40x the reported rate of the flu vaccine per-dose. Butthe real gap is much bigger, bc the second #Covid dose is much worse, and this is nearly all first doses.
I urge you: read the reports. They are sobering. Meningitis. Stroke. Severe ITP.
1/ I've now watched "Making A Murderer." Only four years late, I know. But I think it's worth discussing in the context of the current media environment because it helped guide organizations like the Times onto the destructive path they've now taken...
2/ I don't know if Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbach. What I do know is that the documentary very, very skillfully misrepresents the case. Reading outside articles makes clear that it does not offer a fair view of the prosecution's evidence...
3/ This is more obvious in Season 2 than Season 1 (because the filmmakers had much less to work with in Season 2, and so they're stuck with @ZellnerLaw's wild goose chases. Here's a hint: if you have a 1272-page appeal, you have no appeal.)
1/ If I'd told you last March that in 2020 #Covid would kill about 1/5 as many Americans under 50 as drug overdoses;
That you would probably not know anyone who had died;
That you almost certainly would not know anyone under 75 who wasn't already very sick who had died;
2/ That regional hospital systems would NEVER fail to keep pace with the number of Covid patients (that is, they would always have beds for both Covid and non-Covid patients);
That the field hospitals would be basically unused;
That most people would recover quickly;
3/ That children (aside from those with extremely serious comorbidities) would prove to be close to immune to serious effects from #sarscov2;
And that there would be NO serious supply chain effects (i.e. food and energy have ALWAYS been available);
1/Another datapoint from Israel, and it is far less hopeful than it first looks.
The Health Ministry reports that of 715,000 people who got two vaccine doses, 317 had positive Covid tests more than a week after the second shot. "Only" 16 were hospitalized.
Here's the problem...
2/ Israel hit 715,000 second doses on Jan. 19. As of Jan. 15, it had only 243,000. So setting the cutoff a week after the second dose means it is capturing only 1-3 DAYS of data for most of those 715,000 people. The effective denominator is far lower than it appears...
3/ Further, we don't know how many people have been tested or what the positivity rate is - it is possible that people are NOT being tested with mild symptoms because they believe they are immune (or reacting to the second dose)...
From a reader. One can argue about the number of non-Covid excess deaths, but he is right - the difference between using a 2% increase in deaths in 2020 as a baseline and a 1.5% decrease makes a huge change to the baseline relative to the number of reported #Covid deaths...
The reason this matters is that if the baseline is higher, the total number of excess deaths is lower (well below the number of reported Covid deaths) - which means that the argument that many reported Covid deaths are just shifted out of other categories becomes stronger...
It may seem strange that such a small change (-2% vs. 1.5%) could have such a large impact. That fact tells you as much as anything just how much about #Covid is the product of media hysteria. If this were a genuine emergency, we wouldn't be arguing about "with/from" deaths...
Attention citizens! Your Dept. Of Pandemia offers this updated Q&A on the vaccines.
Q: I've heard some people have died after being vaccinated.
A: We don't hear a question.
Q: Should I be worried?
A: No. Those deaths are unrelated.
Q: How do you know?
A: We just do.
Q: Can you be more specific?
A: Because vaccines are safe.
Q: How do you know?
A: Because they haven't caused any deaths.
Q: But people have died after being vaccinated.
A: Those deaths are unrelated.
Q: How do you know?
A: You already asked that, dummy.
Q: Okay, what about the miscarriages?
A: What about them?
Q: I read late-term miscarriages were very rare.
A: Are you doing Internet research again? Asking Dr. Google? Who do you think you are?
Q:
A: Exactly.
Q: I'm just trying to understand.
A: There's nothing to understand.