1/ The Chinese insanity on display here - an 80,000-bed quarantine center FOR A COLD is very helpful for those of us on Team Reality, as a reminder of what can happen when governments get monomaniacally focused on stopping a minor respiratory virus…
1/ @elonmusk seems genuinely to be grappling with two impulses. He wants Twitter to be a place for free speech. But he also wants it to host "accurate" information, as he or some other arbiter sees fit.
The sooner he realizes he must choose one, the better off all of us will be.
2/ The great hope for all of us on Team Reality was that Elon would get Twitter OUT of the content moderation business, that he would bring social media back to its roots as a place where everyone could speak...
3/ And the ugly, messy, necessary business of free speech and debate could be conducted without cease, jour et nuit, until the robots come for us all.
Twitter in particular is especially suited to play this role, which is why authoritarians pay it such close heed.
We are way past that point. The all-cause mortality numbers in the mRNA countries this year are stunning. They are so stunning they almost have to be ignored, because the question they raise likely has a very dangerous answer.
Just another day when mRNA Covid vaccines raise the risk of myocarditis and death for young men, another day when American colleges press or mandate them on students.
Why are you forcing your students to risk death to enroll, @FordhamNYC?
Why are you forcing your students to risk death to enroll, @Harvard?
Why are you forcing your students to risk death to enroll, @ucdavis? (Two months!)
1/ This is why no one believes people like @meganranney anymore. In reality that study showed ~NO reduction in infections in the FIRST 60 days after the second booster. That’s right. The booster no longer works at all against infection. As for the apparent reduction in death?
2/ That study wasn’t run on an average group of people over 65. It was run on nursing home residents - the sickest of the sick. This was not a blinded study, so any apparent reduction in deaths could easily be due to physicians withholding the mRNA jabs from people near death…
3/ @CDCgov researchers did try to correct for that, but doing so is nearly impossible. Besides, even if the study is right, it doesn’t say endless boosters cut Covid deaths in people over 65 - it says they do in the tiny fraction of those people so sick they’re in nursing homes.
1/ Despite very loose counting rules, Covid is no longer in the top 20 causes of death worldwide. Stomach cancer, falls, suicide, tuberculosis, and diarrhea are all deadlier. Measured by life-years-lost Covid probably is not in the top 50…
2/ And no, the mRNA vaccines get no credit for the end of the epidemic.
To the extent infections and deaths are still happening, they are occurring only in the US and other advanced countries that used the novel shots. In countries like India, Covid ended long ago…
3/ To some extent, this difference represents massive financially and politically driven overtesting for Covid in the United States and Europe. The fact that countries like India are much younger helps them too. But the mRNA countries inarguably have had worse outcomes overall.