Resisting Vaccine Mandates - with words, at least

SCANALYZER Tracking with Closeups
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That is a good laugh! If Lock Downs were so effective in almost totally eliminating flu, why have they been relatively ineffective in controlling Covid?

As to the differences between flu and Covid, it may be true to say that they are “not even remotely related” at the molecular level, but there is a lot of overlap at the symptom level. Of course, most of the people who tested positive for Covid had no symptoms – eliminating the possibility of any regular diagnosis of signs & symptoms.

One of the peculiarities is that, for years, the CDC has been reporting large numbers of patients diagnosed with “ILI” – Influenza-Like Illnesses. Some years had more people diagnosed with ILI than with Influenza. One of the unanswered questions is whether “Covid” has been with us for many years, lumped in with many other viruses as ILI. Maybe all that happened last year was that someone developed a not-very-reliable test for Covid? Of course, that still would not explain those genuinely frightening — but never repeated – initial photos & videos from China of well-dressed working-age men collapsed on the streets.

History will mock the over-reaction to Covid.

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22

“why have they been relatively ineffective in controlling Covid?”

Speculation on my part would be that covid spreads through the air better than flu. Also, when this started, people’s immune systems had a lot of experience with flu or at least flu shots. On the other hand, how do you know how effective the lockdowns were or were not? The ICU population did go down, but how much of that was from the lockdown, I can’t say.

I decided it was spreading as an aerosol long before the CDC called it. I built a powered HEPA air filter (looked very strange) for the times I just had to go out.

The delta version is many times more contagious than the original virus, but even so, it does not come close to measles. A person without measles immunity can walk through a room and get it from someone who walked through with the disease two hours previous.

There is no chance this version of coronavirus has been with us for years, though there are a small number of other coronaviruses that do circulate causing cold-like symptoms. I agree with your concern about ILI.

Far as photos go, the early covid pandemic in Ecuador overwhelmed medical and even the disposal of the dead. Did you ever see the pictures of bodies on the curb?

Re mocking, maybe. Then again, we are not at the end of it. One of the things that I am concerned about is active HIV cases that are sometimes infected with covid for months. Covid accumulates many mutations while in these patients. That may be the origin of the current version of concern–which looks like it is spreading in competition with delta.

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23

That is a good question – Would things have been worse without the Lock Downs?

The closest to a controlled experiment would be Sweden, which reacted much less aggressively to the purported epidemic and yet seems to have done quite nicely thank you. Florida has been less aggressive than many other States, and seems to have done better than most, despite having a large population of At Risk elderly. Many African countries apparently have had generally weak enforcement of whatever Lock Down policies they put in place, and yet seem to have avoided serious problems. However, let me emphasize that I have not researched this in detail and am open to new information.

What we do know is that the Lock Downs have imposed significant costs on healthy people – medical, social, economic – and we know those costs are not being tracked with the same vigor devoted to breathless media reporting on today’s “new cases”. At the end of the day, will the benefits of the Lock Downs have exceeded the costs? I know which way I would bet.

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“worse without the Lock Downs?”

Sweden: Aug 21. 2-21 post-analysis.

Sweden decided not to implement a full-scale lockdown during the pandemic.
It now has up to 10 times as many COVID-19 deaths per capita as its Nordic neighbors.
Sweden also didn't fare much better economically, suggesting its gamble didn't pay off.

That’s just the first one I found. Perhaps others say the opposite.

" will the benefits of the Lock Downs have exceeded the costs?"

It’s not going to be easy to convert to money so you can make a comparison. What is the value of a hospital ICU that is not at 110% of capacity? What is the value of an open ER? At the worst point in Los Angeles, there were many cases of people who were driven around for half a day trying to find a place that had room to take them.

I understand the problem of an exponential increase in cases and a limited capacity of hospitals to care for them. Unpopular as lockdowns were, the prospect of bodies on the curb (like in Equador) put the medical authorities in a bind. All I can say is that I am glad I didn’t have to make the decisions.

Mentioned this in a previous post.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03546-8

And this is a report from the NEJM.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2117446?query=TOC&cid=NEJM%20eToc,%20December%202,%202021%20DM510980_NEJM_Non_Subscriber&bid=724169573

It analyzes the difference between the two mRNA vaccines in a huge VA database.

Last paragraph.

“So let’s review what this study means and consider what it does not mean. We have two vaccines that vary slightly in effectiveness, although they are both highly effective. For any given person, the difference in vaccine efficacy between BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 is unmeasurable. In the United States, the availability of two mRNA vaccines has allowed us to ramp up vaccination efforts far more quickly than if we had had only one. The need in much of the rest of the world is enormous, and meeting it will require both mRNA vaccines, along with others that are currently being developed and deployed. Even if they are less able to protect against infection, many of the other available vaccines do a very good job of protecting against severe disease. Moreover, the study by Dickerman et al. gives us no idea how the vaccines will compare after an additional booster dose. So the lesson we take away is not about differences — it’s about similarities. We are lucky to have such good options. Vaccination with any vaccine is far better than remaining unprotected. The message is that the best vaccine is the one that’s available.”

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Florida . . . Fact Check: Does Florida Now Have Lowest Daily U.S. COVID Cases Per Capita?

"However, while Florida is experiencing low case rates now, it is the joint seventh-worst-affected state in regard to overall death rates per 100,000 people throughout the COVID pandemic as a whole, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data as of November 30.

Similarly, it has reported the 15-highest COVID case rate per 100,000 people throughout the pandemic as a whole, the CDC data also showed.

The top 10 states with the highest COVID cases per capita as of November 30 were nearly all led by Republican governors , with the exception of Rhode Island and Kentucky.

Biostatisticians told Newsweek that Florida’s current low case rate is a snapshot in time and should not be used to vindicate the effectiveness of no-mandate policies.

“It’s not appropriate to evaluate success in controlling the pandemic by looking at one snapshot in time,” Nicholas Reich, professor of biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told Newsweek .

“Sure, Florida is having quite low case and hospitalization rates right now, but they only got there after enduring one of the most intense periods of COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths that any state has seen yet…Those aren’t indicators of successful pandemic management overall.”

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Come on, Keith! You are quoting “Newsweek”, for Goodness sake. That is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Project Fear. Note the innuendo that the deaths are all the dastardly Republicans fault.

Surely any analysis of Florida would have to acknowledge that high population share of the At Risk group of the elderly?

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27

Sadly, valid evaluation any of today’s weighty issues - especially these regarding Covid - is nearly impossible due to the absence of what were once an objective, relatively unbiased media. Worse, this ideological illiberality includes what used to be reliable science journals and government data. “Studies” are all subject to ‘massage’ at minimum, if not outright falsification. Fact and opinion are totally miscible. For every putative fact, there is a countervailing fact and reductio ad absurdum “fact checks”. The resulting chaos and paralysis of rational understanding and consequent considered action by citizens as moral agents, is nigh on impossible, making rule by authoritarianism all the more inviting to many.

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I agree with the spirit and substance of your letter with the exception of this passage. While it is true that the infection fatality rate of Covid is probably roughly equal to the flu, it is manifestly false that the fatality rate of Covid is the same as any flu season within the last half-century or more. The proportion of infected individuals is much higher than even in a bad flu season, as evidenced by the much higher total mortality rate, which is approaching 1 M in the US. Even assuming there is an exaggeration of these numbers because of the “with Covid” versus “of Covid”, the death count is still much higher than any recent flu.

In a nutshell, it requires use of conditional probability:
P(death)=P(fatality|infection)*P(infection)
While P(fatality|infection) may be roughly the same as for flu, evidently P(infection) is much higher than even a bad flu season.

Regardless of controversy surrounding the attribution of cause of death, there has been an undeniably a large excess in mortality over the last 18 months or so. They can try to fake the cause but total death numbers don’t lie.

deaths
deaths1872×752 60 KB

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This is a good conjecture given the large numbers of individuals who have contracted the disease, even accounting for the exaggerations. However, the measures taken have probably been of little use, especially mask wearing. Most masks are so leaky as to be useless. Aerosols leaking around the edges of masks will be well mixed by turbulence in most indoor settings.

This pandemic is the sort of calamity that befalls humanity periodically. We just have to suck it up. Lockdowns and such only make things worse. Rule by epidemiology is tyranny.

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Thanks. You may well be correct. Even if the fatality rate is double that of influenza, the point I was aiming at is that it is an order of magnitude less than some other viral illnesses which could well become airborne in the future and with which we may have to deal. In such an eventuality as that, I would not be so resistant to ‘public policy by rolling emergency edict’. Again, these mandates come in the context of a government which acknowledges no limiting principles by which it will be constrained.

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That is true. Given the distortions in assigning cause of death in primarily elderly people with multiple pre-existing conditions, looking at total deaths is the way to go. It also serves as a useful reminder that roughly 8,000 people were dying each day in the US before Covid came along. (About 25,000 people dying per day in China). That context is squashed in Project Fear.

In terms of context, if we go further back in time than 2018, there have been prior years with deaths comparable to current times. Total Deaths are within previously observed variability. And then we have to note the large amount of anecdotal evidence that people have died unnecessarily during the Lock Downs because of being denied rapid treatment – heart attacks, strokes, undiagnosed cancers. Quantification is difficult, but some have estimated that as much as 50% of the “Above Trend” deaths have been due to Lock Downs rather than to Covid.

The politicization of the Covid issue has made it very challenging to get to the truth. We need to be humble about the limitations of unreliable data. The one thing that is starkly evident from the more reliable Total Deaths data is that earlier generations would certainly not have called Covid an “epidemic”.

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Indeed. TPTB make no pretense that their aim is transparency - to inform us of truth with simple clarity. Rather, the propagandistic nature of their variable pronouncements simply go by like cumulonimbus clouds on a windy day, even as we look upward, mouths agape (with masks covering them, naturally) in wonder. If this assertion were not true, wouldn’t they have gone to some lengths to explain each ‘correction’ of the previous absolutely certain policy pronouncement? But this never happened- every one of which was treated as though it had been received from on high, engraved on stone tablets and then went directly down the memory hole.

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This is incorrect. Your comment is a bit ambiguous but if you’re saying that the 2017/18 flu season was comparable, that is factually wrong. Only the tail end of that season can be seen in the graphic I posted but if you look at earlier data for that season you’ll find the totals are much lower.

Going back to the Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s, the number of excess deaths per 100,000 population was also lower. I can’t easily check the late 50s data right now ( on mobile) but I’ll bet it is also lower. I chose my words carefully in my previous comment, citing “half-century or more” time frame. The Spanish flu may have been worse.

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Getting reliable numbers for the “Spanish flu” of 1918–1919 is difficult, especially for less developed countries, but estimates at deaths worldwide range from 50 million to twice that. Deaths in the U.S. are estimated at 675,000. COVID-19 deaths as of October 2021 are estimated as 714,000, higher than Spanish flu (although smaller as a fraction of the population, obviously). But worldwide deaths from COVID are put at around five million—one tenth that of Spanish flu and, again, from a far larger population.

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That is where we get into the problem of the politicization of Covid leading to questionable data. There have been reports that perhaps only about 6% of that number died from Covid, with many of the others dying from multiple pre-existing conditions with Covid, and others being assumed to be Covid deaths without positive confirmation. It is very difficult to know what the facts are – and, as civilwestman points out, the authorities are not exactly falling over themselves to give us clear unambiguous information.

This leads back to the observation that only the Total Deaths are likely to be free from manipulation.

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I invite you to look at total mortality, plotted in my first comment on this thread. The official numbers for Covid may be exaggerated some but not by that much. Deaths don’t lie.

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"Come on, Keith! You are quoting “Newsweek”, for Goodness sake. That is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Project Fear . "

I don’t know what “project fear” is. Can you provide a pointer?

I thought Newsweek had been absorbed into “The Daily Beast,” but that’s several years out of date. The data in that article seems solid. If you can show otherwise, I would like to see it.

" Note the innuendo that the deaths are all the dastardly Republicans fault."

I didn’t take it that way, though both are probably connected through the psychological characteristics of humans facing a bleak future.

“Surely any analysis of Florida would have to acknowledge that high population share of the At Risk group of the elderly?”

I would be interested in such an analysis. Do you have a pointer to one?

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“Most masks are so leaky as to be useless.”

For the person wearing the mask, they may be imperfect. (If I am concerned I wear a tight seal N95 mask.) What masks are good at is capturing what a sick person is spreading around. Even the paper exam masks do a good job on that score. Wearing a mask is about protecting other people more than yourself. I am pleased to note that in the local area (Los Angeles) virtually everyone is wearing a mask in stores.

“have to suck it up.”

That was the case in the past when we didn’t know better and thought “bad air” caused disease and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. We know a lot more now and can modify our behavior, stay away from public gatherings, wear masks, get vaccines, etc. A high fraction of the “lockdown” in this area was people staying home without authorities ordering them. Would you forbid people who want to avoid getting sick from saying home?

“Rule by epidemiology is tyranny.”

I can’t make sense of that statement. Maybe you mean epidemiologists or county health officials? I know a few of the latter through their orders to USC. I can state that they were not happy about imposing restrictions and profited not one bit from doing so. If you want to make the case we should not have public health officials, you are going to get considerable pushback from me among others.

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“worldwide deaths from COVID are put at around five million—one tenth that of Spanish flu”

So far.

There are big chunks of the world that have hardly been touched, Africa and (of all things) China. What the new variations will do is not known.

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One of the many mysteries about this event is why there have been so few reported infections in sub-Saharan Africa. I can think of lots of reasons such as: low levels of vitamin D deficiency there (it appears that vitamin D reduces rate of infection or severe symptoms), low population density, low levels of travel among communities, genetic predisposition toward non-infection or immunity, endemic tropical diseases conferring immunity, or a host of other possible reasons. Or, maybe it’s just poor reporting of the actual situation due to a rudimentary public health system.

In a rational world, you’d think somebody would be trying to find out why one of the regions of the world with the worst public health infrastructure has been the least touched by this disease.

But ours is not a rational world.

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