I've been seeing some sensationalist news articles about this or that cause of death, implying that people in the US are dying in great numbers of something mysterious. 'Tis not so; people WERE dying in great numbers of COVID-19 in 2020-2023,

https://twitter.com/Truth_in_Number/status/1861870019426103697

but after 1.3 million US excess deaths (and probably more than 25 million global excess deaths) the worst of COVID appears to be over. Avian Influenza might someday be our next pandemic, but so far that virus hasn't evolved the ability to spread in people and I hope it won't.

FDA has announced plans to pull phenylephrine off the market as an oral decongestant. After years of knowing it’s ineffective, experts said in September: it’s safe but doesn’t work. No need for more studies. I agree. If you’ve ever felt like OTC decongestant pills did nothing for your congestion, you’re not alone. Phenylephrine, found in many OTC meds, has NOT been shown to be any better than a placebo, in MANY studies over the years.

If the new IA poll came from anybody but Selzer I'd dismiss it as noise, but she is one of the best in the field. I still think Trump's gonna win IA but if it's even close in IA then he's in big trouble elsewhere. Remember in both 2016 & 2020 Selzer had much higher Trump numbers for IA than everybody else expected; turned out most polls were underestimating Trump.

@kareem_carr There are some great discussions of this exact issue on this website:

electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Pres/M… @kareem_carr THE big question is, is the average pollster:

1. underestimating Trump's votes again, in which case he'll win big.
2. OVER-correcting for their past errors, in which case Harris will win big.
3. getting it just right, in which case we won't know the outcome for several days.

### How a Little-Known Technical Debate in the 1960s Shaped NASA’s Future—And Our Present When the **Eagle** landed on the Moon, not everyone at NASA was celebrating. Some engineers were disappointed, knowing the method used to get there was a dead end that didn’t create any orbital infrastructure for future missions.

How to evaluate a non-fiction book.

A thread. 1. Read the Introduction
2. Read the last chapter
3. Read five pages from the middle
4. Look for reviews by domain experts

IF the COVID vaccines cause ANY sudden deaths, they're FAR FEWER than the virus causes EVEN AMONG YOUNG MALES, who are the subgroup at highest risk of heart issues from the shots & are at low risk of death from COVID.

The vast majority of COVID deaths among young were unvaxxed. Excellent new study from Oregon looks at every young person who died within 100 days of a COVID shot (because it's well known that basically all vaccine harms occur within about 40 days). Also they looked at all young who were reported to have died of COVID & linked vax data.

A friend asked me about a new video by one of the people behind this old video:

factcheck.org/2020/08/new-pl… Until fairly recently I thought there was about a 90% chance the virus that causes COVID jumped species from some animal to some human OUTSIDE ANY LAB, and about a 10 percent chance it was a lab accident

I've just been accused of being a Pharma Shill, and told I should keep politics out of discussions of COVID-19. This was in a thread about Dr. Scott Atlas, who was one of President Trump's advisors. I had pointed out data showing that in US Counties, vaccine percentages were much higher where Biden won in

These are the sites I follow most closely right now to monitor the state of the pandemic
biobot.io/data/
cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr…
viz.covid19forecasthub.org
ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess… By exploring these sites you can learn:

1. How infections and reported cases have risen and fallen during this pandemic. In particular, from the Biobot site you can see that early in the pandemic only a tiny fraction of infections were detected because

From the questions people ask me, I know many are confused about the various types of COVID-19 testing that are available. So here's an explainer: 1. A PCR test is the most sensitive answer to the question "is there viral genetic material in my nose or throat right now?" It has two disadvantages:

Very important study gives strong evidence that mask mandates slow down infections.

medrxiv.org/content/10.110… Two clever ideas:

1. A number of districts simultaneously changed their policies while others in the same State did not, creating a natural experiment.

2. The authors used a "difference in differences" analysis so that confounding factors are irrelevant.

Since May 2020, I've taken part in weekly Zoom calls with a diverse group of experts to discuss the latest scientific news about COVID-19. This messages that I sent to the group after the most recent call might be of general interest; Here are links for a few of the points we talked about today:

1. Talks by Trevor Bedford, who is one of the world's top experts on viral phylogenetics:
bedford.io/talks/

We seem to be moving into a phase where immunity and its evasion by the virus is the biggest factor in determining infections and severity.

This has some important implications.

1/n

https://twitter.com/adamjkucharski/status/1536613170223120384

Booster shots are very important. As is our ability to UPDATE VACCINES.

Wearing a GOOD mask and paying close attention to its fit is really important. Cloth masks aren't enough now. See @masknerd for more about masks.

Florida's Governor once again thinks he knows better than the medical experts who recommended COVID-19 vaccines for small children. He thinks it's too soon. Every Infectious Disease expert I know thinks the exact opposite of what the Governor thinks. I know Pediatricians who will get their kids vaccinated as soon as possible.

The Governor is wrong. Very wrong.

South Africa study finds that issuing Pulse Oximeters to people with COVID-19 and calling them regularly to check on their O2 levels caused a HUGE decrease in mortality, by getting those who needed hospitalization into the clinic sooner. And it's a cheap, safe, easily scalable intervention!

nytimes.com/2021/10/05/wel…

From FB's account of yesterday:
“We’ve done extensive work hardening our systems to prevent unauthorized access, and it was interesting to see how that hardening slowed us down as we tried to recover from an outage caused not by malicious activity but an error of our own making.” In plain English: because their physical door locks depended on the network that their first mistake had taken down, it took them a while just to get into the building to start fixing their mess.

Superb post by Jeffrey Morris on the nuances of analyzing vaccine data when all the variables are changing at once, AND there are many covariates that must be factored in for the conclusions to be valid. Please read the whole thing carefully. It will reward close attention.

A recent CDC study is the latest to find the mRNA vaccines have a huge lifesaving benefit even against the Delta Variant of SARS-CoV2.

If you have neither been vaccinated nor had a laboratory-confirmed infection with the SARS-CoV2 virus then you should get vaccinated ASAP. Scobie HM, Johnson AG, Suthar AB, et al. Monitoring Incidence of COVID-19 Cases, Hospitalizations, and Deaths, by Vaccination Status — 13 U.S. Jurisdictions, April 4–July 17, 2021. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. ePub: 10 September 2021.

I will probably get my third dose of an mRNA COVID shot this Fall, whenever that is offered to me. I think that's a good idea.

BUT IT'S NOT WHAT MATTERS MOST.

Getting first and second shots into people who haven't had two shots is extremely important. If I thought going without my third shot would help somebody else get their first or second shot, then I would forgo my third shot.

To those who still question the safety and efficacy of these vaccines: you are trusting the wrong people. There are HUGE amounts of data from many countries now. But if you distrust scientific experts, try a simple experiment: visit the websites of 20 FOX TV LOCAL AFFILIATE STATIONS AROUND THE U.S.