Science Ain't What It Used To Be

SCANALYZER The Happening World
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A rather sad article from the Brownstone Institute:
The Normalization of Dishonesty in Medical Science ⋆ Brownstone Institute

… In the introduction, the study authors make the following claim: “Infants younger than 6 months of age are at high risk for complications of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19)”

… for infants the risk of hospitalization is about 1/10th of the risk for the oldest age-group. It might be added that their risk of death is less than 1/330th of the oldest age-group. This is low risk, not high risk.

… Do they in fact understand, but choose to ignore or distort the facts to please their peers and superiors, trusting in the safety of numbers? Has dishonesty become normalized now in medical science?

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Elmo, of Sesame Street, gets the COVID-19 “vaccine” in PSA encouraging parents to inject their children with a shot they almost certainly do not need.

The video description reads:

Louie had many questions about Elmo getting the COVID-19 vaccine, so he spoke with their pediatrician to make the right choice. Louie learned Elmo getting vaccinated is the best way to keep Elmo and everyone they love around them safe. Now Elmo is ready for all the hugs!

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There’s this, of course:

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Fauci, who regularly gets tested for COVID, continued to swab after completing his five-day course of the Pfizer antiviral, Paxlovid, earlier this month. He tested negative for three consecutive days. On the fourth day, he “reverted back to positive,” he told Foreign Policy’s Global Health Forum.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says when he tested positive again, he progressively started to feel “much worse than the first go around,” referring to his mild symptoms when he contracted COVID-19 two weeks ago. Due to the worsening of symptoms, Fauci started another pack of Paxlovid.

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Just Wednesday [6/29/22], the Biden administration agreed to buy another 105 million doses of Pfizer’s covid vaccine for the fall booster campaign, paying $3.2 billion. At $30.47 a dose, it’s a significant premium over the $19.50-a-dose rate the government paid for the first 100 million. The vaccine is being modified to target early omicron variants, but newer variants are gaining dominance.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
– Benito Mussolini

Where is Antifa when you need them?

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In the meantime, China with their ZeroCovid policies seems to be doing better than ever:

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The cynics among us suspect that China’s lockdowns have very little to do with Covid and a lot to do with providing cover for an economic embargo against the US. There probably is some part required for all those HIMARS weapons the Administration sends to the Ukraine which is produced only in China and now – thanks to all those medically-essential Covid lockdowns – will unfortunately have to remain on order backlog for the next several years.

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China has had experience with SARS that educated their response to a highly related SARS2 virus (that causes Covid-19). Here’s an analysis of what happened then - which in part resembles some of the Western response during Covid-19: THE SARS EPIDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH IN CHINA: A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE - Learning from SARS - NCBI Bookshelf

Beijing municipal authorities, for example, kept hiding the actual SARS situation in the city from the Party Center until April. Initial deception by lower-level officials in turn led the central leaders to misjudge the situation. On April 2, Premier Wen Jiabao chaired an executive meeting of the State Council to discuss SARS prevention and control. Based on the briefing given by the Ministry of Health, the meeting declared that SARS had “already been brought under effective control.”

They further tried to cover up the sequelae (Long SARS): https://www.easap.asia/index.php/component/k2/item/237-v24n1-p37-38

The domestic media reported in 2009 that there were approximately 300 SARS survivors struggling with long-term complications in Beijing; 80% of these were forced to quit their jobs and 60% suffered from avascular necrosis, pulmonary fibrosis, or depression. In the first few years after the SARS outbreak, reports about the aftereffects of SARS were banned in the media. As a positive development later, both the central and local governments became aware of these problems and began taking steps to address SARS-related morbidity and reduce the financial burden on survivors. Within this context, one important step was the move in 2004 to establish an expert group in the Ministry of Health for patients suffering from SARS-related complications.

All in all, overconfident medical authorities from countries like Sweden (where the seat of ECDC is located) decided to disregard Chinese experience and lead the lemmings into the current ‘normality’.

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This essay from Naomi Wolf is really good and really maddening and really frightening.

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From Naomi Wolf’s article: “Facilities were so chaotic that the US FDA sent the company a stern letter.”

The recipient trembled. Next stern letter from the US Government would be in French!

The world is full of hungry bears which would quite happlly eat the ill-prepared, such as Ms. Wolf. We should direct our ire not at the hungry bears, but at our foolish & corruptible overlords. And perhaps we should ask ourselves why we gave such unreliable people power over us?

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I agree. Read it earlier, was about to post, you beat me to it.

Yes, it’s the funders with agendas more than the fundees who need to be brought to heel. Fundees tend to be academics, who can be relatively easily managed.

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In all fairness, countries like Sweden are probably the last ones to fault for “leading the lemmings”.
I recommend watching the live debate between Freddie Sayers and Martin Kulldorff
Martin Kulldorff: Lessons from Sweden for the next pandemic - The Post for a data and facts based perspective from June 22, 2022.

A separate piece by Johan Andenberg goes into more details on what is probably the most important and long lasting effect of the exaggerated COVID-19 lockdown measures - the impact on children.

The story is the same in all locked down and masked-up countries. In Germany, studies show an increase in childhood obesity, a deterioration of language skills and concerning fine motor deficiencies; in Norway, newspapers report a “wave of sick young people”. And in Britain, the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has admitted that lockdowns exacerbated childhood obesity. The share of children starting school with a weight problem has risen by a fifth since the pandemic.

Early indications suggest that Swedish kids, on the other hand, have been spared. According to a new study in the International Journal of Educational Research, the proportion of students with weak reading skills did not increase during the pandemic, and students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds did not disproportionately suffer. Of course, every individual study needs to be taken with a grain of salt: had the world’s politicians and policymakers heeded this principle in March 2020, it would have spared the world a lot of grief.

What price did Sweden pay for the health of its children? Strangely, in the nation that served as a control group during the pandemic, deaths not only ended up much lower than predicted, but lower than in most other comparable countries. According to the WHO’s latest figures, Sweden had an average excess death rate during 2020 and 2021 of 56 per 100,000 — lower than much of Europe and below the global average. The corresponding figure is 109 in the UK, 111 in Spain, 116 in Germany and 133 in Italy.

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According to my calculator, that is a [modelled] excess death rate of less than 0.06% of the population – in Sweden, which mostly did not over-react to the scam. 99.94% of the population not impacted.

Of course, in over-reacting Italy, the [modelled] excess death rate was twice as bad – 0.13% of the population. 99.87% of the population not impacted.

When are we going to stand up and say what the data is screaming at us – There never was a Covid “pandemic”? Not unless the definition of “pandemic” has been changed since the days of the Black Death … or even the Spanish Flu.

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Sweden’s increasingly dealing with “Post COVID-19 condition” or Long Covid - which might have a higher overall cost (in terms of QALY) than mortality in acute cases.

For example: New cases of Type 1 diabetes grew by ~10% during Covid-19 in Germany - this is something that reduces quality of life and subtracts ~20 years from life expectancy! SARS2 virus (that causes Covid-19) attacks the pancreas, so there’s probably direct causality.

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This brings us into the whole scientific issue of how to determine when post hoc is unambiguously propter hoc?

There are reports that English school kids are now suffering from much higher rates of obesity (which can lead to diabetes). Maybe that is a reaction to locking the little guys up inside for the duration of the “pandemic”. The problem of obesity is real, but the cause is quite likely to have been the lock downs, not the virus.

Then there is the issue of separating “Long Covid” from the health impacts of multiple injections of experimental medications which had not undergone the normal rigorous testing.

Identifying cause & effect is not easy in this kind of situation – and officialdom has done nothing to retain our confidence in their pronouncements.

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I would be very hesitant to speculate about causality. At the moment, anything beyond data collection and ruling out confounders is most likely aligned with a political agenda of some sort.

Here is a paper (gated, but Medscape allows free registration)

Loss of smell. Fatigue. Mental health challenges. Difficulty breathing and other lower respiratory diseases. Fluid and electrolyte disorders. Cardiac dysrhythmia and other nonspecific chest pains. Trouble with urination. Diabetes?

Statistically, these are the conditions that defined post-acute SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) infection, or long COVID, for 28,118 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 by PCR before the Omicron wave. The data, presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections 2022, can be used to guide diagnoses of long COVID, and may be the guide soon at Kaiser Permanente offices, said Michael Horberg, MD, executive director of research, community benefit, and Medicaid strategy at the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Research Institute, in an interview with Medscape Medical News.

“There are some real conditions you could ask about” if you were evaluating a patient who believes they have PASC, Horberg said. “And there are real conditions that are symptoms patients have but they don’t fit the PASC diagnosis.”

Given how much propaganda surrounded the COVID-19 response in most Western countries, it’s not surprising to see conditions like the so-called “long COVID” emerge. Some people speculate that given its broad list of vague symptoms and imprecise differential diagnostic, long COVID is similar to CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), which itself was surrounded by controversy as to whether it has real underlying physiological causes (link)

An April 2022 meta-analysis of long COVID occurrence found that estimates ranged widely from 0.09% to 0.81% (The Journal of Infectious Diseases)

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Forest plot for worldwide post-coronavirus disease 2019 condition prevalence. Prevalence estimates and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) are provided for each study with a relevant measure and for the meta-analysis of all such studies. For individual studies, the horizontal line represents the estimate, whiskers represent the CI, the size of the box represents the weight assigned to the study, and the color shading reflects the hospitalization status of the study population, as noted in the legend. For the pooled estimate, the width of the diamond represents the CI. Meta-analyzed prevalence and 95% CIs are calculated using random-effects models with inverse variance weighting as described under Methods. Measures of heterogeneity of prevalence estimates are provided.

My take is that something a) imprecisely defined, with b) widely varying prevalence, and c) that stands to directly benefit the so-called health care industry (pharma + medical profession) ought to be met with skepticism.

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Thankfully, the good doctor shared news of his impending retirement (source). Granted, the precise date beyond which he would no longer pontificate and chastise the hoi polloi is (relatively) far in the future.

I take relief in realizing that on the scale of the heat death of the Universe, the good doctor’s retirement will be here in a jiffy (is that a technical term?)

In the meantime, these could come in handy for a quick trip to the beach :slight_smile:

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Replying to my own post is not good form, however the news are that, sadly, the good doctor clarified his position yesterday: he will not retire but instead he may leave the NIAID director position he held since 1984 (coincidence?)

Those deplorables that were quick to get the champagne out and start celebrating last night would have to look for the cork (hint: if it’s not on the floor it may have embedded itself in the ceiling) and stick it back in the bottle. Given Fauci’s countless flip flops in the last 2+ years, we should not be surprised he came back out to further torture the logic of his prior statements.

(source)

“I’m not going to retire. No, no, I’m not going to retire,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to the President told The Hill. “I may step down from my current position at some time.”

Questions surfaced over Fauci’s retirement after Politico published an interview during which the disease specialist was reported to be “leaving by the end of President Joe Biden’s term.”

“I said a very innocent but true thing. I said whether it’s Donald Trump or it’s Joe Biden’s second term, I don’t intend to be in my current position in January of 2025,” he told The Hill during a Tuesday event. “What happens between now and then I have not decided, but the one thing I do know is that I have other things that I want to do in a professional way that I want to have the capability — while I still have the energy and the passion to do them.”

Age is but a number and clearly equals wisdom, at least in this very specific n=1 case. What we are asked to believe to be true is that in a country of approximately 350M there is no one else better qualified, more competent, or energetic than the current NIAID leader.

The press is incapable or unwilling to point out the obvious, he is impervious to Senate attempts to rein in his discretion - he is basically out of control and while I can’t read anyone’s mind, it seems likely very happy with his ability to continue to extend his 40 year reign as the head of the NIAID (2022 budget $6.3B source).

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You’re misreading prevalence. It’s 9%-81% not 0.09-0.81 percent. Here’s the definition: NIMH » What is Prevalence? It’s pretty alarming.

Yes, relying on self-reported symptoms is tricky, but those working in the field know how to account for hypochondria. For a more objective measure, consider this large scale study of resting heart rate: on average it took 15 weeks for unvaccinated individuals to recover, and it took about 9 weeks for the vaccinated ones. The reduction in the number of daily steps persists.

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Thanks for picking up on that. I think you’re right. Quite frankly, I find the wide variance in prevalence rates comforting, because it supports my hypothesis the definition of the so-called “long COVID” condition is all over the place. For you, that’s alarming. For me, not so much.

Regarding the second study you cite, I am skeptical of research articles with graphs that look like they’ve been produced using Microsoft Excel :wink:

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