Pshaw!

Researchers at Boston University have combed through the death certificates, and Covid deaths were severely undercounted during the height of the pandemic.

Thank-you Captain Obvious. 

This was clear from the most cursory examination of excess death data.

The covid-19 pandemic was perhaps the greatest natural disaster to befall America and the world in modern times. Research out today, however, indicates that we’re still underselling just how deadly it truly was.

Researchers at Boston University and others examined national death certificate data collected in the first two years of the pandemic. They estimated that the official tally missed nearly 20% of covid-related fatalities between 2020 and 2021, amounting to 155,536 uncounted deaths. These missing cases were more common among minority and disadvantaged communities, likely reflecting longstanding disparities in how deaths are investigated in the country, the researchers say.

This sh$# ain't rocket science.

Both the death toll and the bad statistics are a natural consequence of having a public health establishment opposed to the idea of public health.

25% Lower All-Cause Mortality

Get your vaccines.

A new study covering 30 million Frenchmen shows that not only is there no increase in mortality from MRNA Covid vaccines, but mortality is significantly lower.

At a glance

• Among 28 million French adults aged 18–59, those who received an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine were less likely to die in the subsequent four years than those who remained unvaccinated, corresponding to a 25% lower risk of death from all causes.
• Although vaccinated adults were 74% less likely to die from severe COVID-19, the reduced mortality risk persisted after COVID-19 deaths were excluded from the analysis.
• The study found no increase in the risk of deaths from cancer, heart disease, accidental injury or any other major category: in every case, vaccinated individuals had equal or lower rates of death.

For years, a lingering question has shadowed COVID-19 vaccination campaigns: are mRNA vaccines safe in the long run?

While many studies have established that COVID-19 vaccines prevent severe illness and death in the weeks and months after injection, sceptics have continued to ask whether any hidden harms might surface later on.

Now, one of the largest long-term vaccine safety studies ever undertaken – including data from more than 28 million adults aged 18 to 59 – offers the clearest answer yet.

Get your damn vaccine.  Covid f%$#s you up.  MRNA, adjuvant, it does not matter. 

H/t Dr. Eric Ding

Well Imagine That

From Reason magazine, we have a report that shows that mRNA COVID vaccines do not have increased mortality, in fact, morbidity, including long COVID, has decreased.

When JFK, Jr. has lost Reason, he's lost everyone.

A few years before he took over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called COVID-19 shots the "deadliest vaccine ever made." More recently, various anti-vaccination activists have been claiming that the mRNA vaccines are causing a turbo-cancer epidemic.

A huge new French study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network deflates those claims and confirms the safety and efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals for nearly four years. They found not only that vaccinated people have a 74 percent lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, but also that those individuals have a lower risk of death, period. Specifically, people who received the shots have a 25 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.

Because COVID-19, is associated with increased cancer rates, blood clots, heart attacks, etc.

As for the turbo-cancer claims, the researchers report that the incidence of tumors among vaccinated adults is 769 per million. For the unvaccinated, the rate is versus 853 per million. In other words, vaccinated adults were about 15 percent less likely to be diagnosed with cancer than those were unvaccinated.

The researchers sought to control for various confounders, such as a healthy-vaccinee effect, where healthier individuals are more likely to opt for vaccination, or a frailty-related bias, where those in poorer health may avoid it. They also note that vaccinated individuals in their study were generally older and tended to have more co-morbidities, such as obesity and chronic illnesses, which would usually be associated with an increased risk of dying. (The different results, they note, might be partially explained by the fact that vaccinated individuals tend to be more socioeconomically advantaged.)

Get your f%$#ing shots (I did, though I got the the adjuvent based Novavax), and wear your f%$#ing masks.

Have I Said That We Are F%$#Ed Lately?

I vaguely recall saying so recently.

This time it's H1N1, which appears to be only a few genes away from creating a new and lethal pandemic.

Last winter, 2024-25 I predicted on my social media platform that we were about two years (which would include next winter as well) or less from the virus [H1N1] developing human to human transmission capacity.

It’s a big prediction to make, and I hope that I am wrong, but with as little as one to three mutations in a notoriously mutagenic virus, person to person spread of H5N1 has really just become a matter of “when” not “if”.

That said, it is difficult to predict the mutational leaps a virus may or may not make. So as we head into the winter of 2025-26 I felt like it was a good time to update everyone on my thinking about this virus. I am still not certain when H5N1 will being spreading between people, but what I can say is that we are incredibly close to having a second pandemic in 5 years become a reality.

The reason I believe we are closer than ever is that H5N1 is only one to three mutations away from developing the capacity for human-to-human transmission. Well, really only one mutation, but the additional 2 or so mutations would make it spread even faster, and some of those mutations have already been detected in the wild.

Typically, when highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses make the leap to people, they come with greater transmissibility than a typical influenza and greater pandemic causing potential.

The United States is not prepared to face another pandemic, especially not one where the current mortality rate is up to 50% (likely to drop, but still may be higher than SARS-CoV-2). Political will is also ensuring a lack of preparedness by defunding surveillance, testing, and research supporting rapid development of a H5N1 vaccine that could be rapidly produced, much like the COVID-19 vaccine.

Not to worry, I'm sure that the health authorities are on the case  ……… Bueller???  Bueller???  

Wear Your F%$#ing Mask

You know all those reports of an unprecedented surge in lung cancer among young non-smokers? (See here and here where I called noted this)

Well, we now have an explanation, and it's what I, as well as professional health experts who actually know what the f%$# that they are talking about, suggested that this was tied to the Covid pandemic.

A study is not saying that dormant cancer in lung cells can be activated by COVID and flu.

Gee, you think:

Hidden in the lungs of some breast cancer survivors are tumour cells that can remain dormant for decades — until they one day trigger a relapse. Now, experiments in mice show that these rogue cells can be roused from their slumber by common respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 or the flu.

The findings, published in Nature on 30 July1, seem to extend to humans too: data from thousands of people show that infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is linked with a nearly twofold increase in cancer-related death, possibly helping to explain why cancer death rates increased early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

………

DeGregori and his colleagues wondered whether acute inflammation caused by a respiratory infection could also reactivate dormant cancer cells. To test this, the researchers genetically engineered mice to develop breast tumours similar to those in humans and to seed dormant tumour cells into other tissues including the lungs. Then, they infected the animals with either SARS-CoV-2 or influenza.

Within days of infection, dormant cancer cells in the lungs of the mice kicked into high gear, proliferated and formed metastatic lesions. But it wasn’t the pathogens directly that caused this to happen, the researchers learnt: it was a key immune molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which helps to rev up the body’s response to foreign threats. They confirmed this by engineering mice to lack IL-6. In these animals, the dormant cancer cells did not multiply nearly as quickly.

Obviously, this applies to a very specific lung cancer case, but it does appear that this mechanism might be at least part of the explanation for the Covid cancer surge.

Gee, Ya Think?

A study from Michigan State University concluded that premature ending of school mask mandates during the pandemic resulted in 22,000 deaths.

So much for, "Kids don't get Covid." 

Someday we Americans may stop quarreling over our response to the COVID-19 pandemic — lockdown orders, social distancing and so forth — but one category of debate may never become immune to second-guessing.

That’s the impact of anti-pandemic measures on schools and schoolchildren. According to popular opinion, these were almost entirely mistaken or ineffective.

A newly published study from data scientists at Michigan State University knocks one pillar out from under this claim. It finds that the abrupt removal in 2022 of mandates that children wear masks in school contributed to an estimated 21,800 COVID deaths that year — a shocking 9% of the total COVID deaths in the U.S. that year.

It should be noted here that while many of the deaths involved children, a lot of them were people like teachers, school janitors, etc.

………

In February 2022, about 50% of public school children, or more than 20 million pupils, were in districts with mask mandates; then, over a period of six weeks, almost all those districts rescinded their mandates. “You can see how that would create a pretty substantial surge in infections.” 

Most of the surge, [Michigan State University Professor Scott] Imberman told me, was a “spillover effect” in the communities outside the schools themselves.

The Michigan State finding undermines several myths and misrepresentations about COVID spread by the right wing. These include the claim that children are virtually impervious to COVID, which has been refuted by the injury and death toll among children. 

A related misrepresentation was that children can’t pass on the infection to adults. In fact, because many children didn’t show symptoms of the infection or had only mild, flu-like symptoms, they functioned almost like an undetected fifth column in spreading the virus to adults.

The rush to set aside Covid precautions, and note that this was done by the Biden Administration, and I would argue that this was their worst mistake.  (maybe 2nd worst mistake when one looks at the 2024 campaign) 

In shutting down public health emergency mitigations to soon, they extended the duration and incrased the duration of the public health emergency.

Gee, What Could it Be?

Over at The New York Post, they are wondering why so many young people are having strokes lately.

They are wondering if it's excess caffeine consumption, like that hasn't been the case for about 400 years, or maybe hormonal birth control (70 years), or Adderall abuse (30 or 60 years depending on how you count).  

Why has there been a spike in strokes among younger people, "With a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealing that between 2020 and 2022, there was a 14.6% increase of strokes among people aged 18 to 44."

2020? What happened in 2020? Do you remember anything happening 2020? I know that I remember something.

Well, if you click through to the article, something that I recommend that you do NOT do, you will note that there is a word missing.  It does not appear once in the article.  That word?

Covid!

Yeah, what could Possibly have happened in 2020 that led to a spike in strokes?

Maybe a disease that is known to attack the epithelial cells lining the circulatory system causing clots might have something to do with this.

Morons. 

The Joy of a Savage Book Review

Wendy Orent has a deliciously, and wholly justifiably, nasty review of David Zweig's new book on school lockdowns during the height of the Covid pandemic.

If you don't know who David Zweig is, he's not only a big supporter of the psychopathic Great Barrington Declaration, he was at the official rollout of the declaration because of his close ties to the principals behind that document. (He's an anti-vaxxer, hates masking, and thinks [STILL!!!] that children are immune as well)

​“I love research,” David Zweig says in the introduction to An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” That love isn’t evident in his book. At a time when the so-called “legacy media” are chastised for trying for too much balance, for struggling to maintain an appearance of even-handedness, Zweig discards any pretense to objectivity. He detests school closings, so much so he’s devoted an entire book to it. This long and highly repetitive text ranges in tone from apparently sober discussion to a protracted wail. But evidence-free, light on statistics, absent any other viewpoints, and not infrequently wrong, all his arguments amount to the same thing: Zweig is angry that schools closed during the early months of the pandemic. And he wants to make sure you know it.

And we know how much psychological damage the school closures did, because among children, suicides, suicide attempts, and emergency treatment for mental health issues ……… Checks notes ……… fell precipitously during the lock-down, to the tune of 12-18%.

Middle school and high school are bad for your mental well-being?  Hoocoodanode?  

………

But what infuriates Zweig is that he thinks schools shouldn’t have been locked down in the first place, since other countries (read: European countries, mostly unnamed) didn’t lock down at all, and anyway lockdowns were pointless even from the beginning. How do we know? Because the arguments were based on models. The very notion of models has a strange effect on Zweig:  garbage in, garbage out, he intones, and he makes sure we know that all these models were wrong. They were based, for one thing, on pandemic influenza, which is all the modelers had to go on, as the 2003 outbreak of a related coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 behaved in an entirely different fashion from Covid:  it spread sluggishly, late in the course of infection, and generally in hospital settings. But pandemic influenza is also not a perfect model for Covid. Unlike Covid, flu is often spread by surface contamination. Basing Covid response on influenza led to hygiene theater: the scrupulous hand-washing and sanitizing; the meticulous scrubbing of food packages; the disinfection of surfaces, including (when the lockdowns partially lifted) shopping carts. None of it mattered much. Covid’s chief manner of spread is airborne, as several aerosol scientists (including Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist Zweig holds up to particular scorn, though it isn’t clear why), demonstrated quite early on.

​Still, the “experts” had to work with what they knew, and what they knew was influenza. At first, no one seemed to think the new disease could be worse than influenza, which, after all, has killed up to 80,000 Americans, mostly elderly, in recent years, according to the CDC. And no one knew if schools were going to drive transmission rates or not. Certainly, children in school settings sometimes drive influenza outbreaks. So, in “an abundance of caution,” state and local governments shut the schools down.

That decision enrages Zweig, who argues that influenza kills more children than Covid, but when you look at the actual figures you wonder what he’s smoking. According to Jonathan Howard, physician and author of We Want Them Infected, some 450 children had died of Covid by May of 2021. Zweig claims that in several given years, influenza claimed far more. For instance, according to Zweig, in the year 2012-2013 the CDC attributed 1160 children’s deaths to the flu. This contradicts the CDC’s report itself, which listed pediatric influenza deaths as “more than 170.” According to the American Hospital Association the highest pediatric death toll ever recorded was the year 2009-2010, when the novel Swine Flu pandemic took 288 children’s lives. Zweig’s “love of research” has failed him here. Is this carelessness, or inventiveness? There’s no way to know.

I'm going to try not to over-quote here, because the whole review is a thing of beauty. 

Assholes like Zweig should be exiled from polite society.  They literally have the blood of millions of people on their hands.

Maybe they could go to Mars with Elon. 

Simple Answer to a Simple Question

The Surrey Now-Leader (a weekly in British Columbia) asks, "Why are B.C. kids sick all the time?"

Covid!

There, that was easy.

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. It’s been a rotating door here of sickness. Someone is always sick. Since September, and I don't even know if blaming schools and daycare is the reason. I need family immunity help. Any tips? ” – shared by a mom on social media, December 2024

Wear a fucking mask, and put them on your kids!

………

B.C. schools restarted during a summer surge of COVID-19, and since then, it’s been a neverending parade of viruses infecting schoolchildren and their families. In the lead-up to the holidays, B.C.’s pediatric laboratory RSV test positivity rate was hitting last year’s high of 30 per cent. Meanwhile the pediatric RSV admissions were outpacing last year’s, as per the latest report of the Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program. At the same time, influenza infections were ramping up.

In the fall of 2022, parents were told to blame “immunity debt” for the surge in children and youths’ respiratory infections. Immunity "debt" or "gap" was proposed to result from the lack of immune stimulation due to the reduced circulation of microbial agents and reduced vaccine uptake during the early years of the pandemic.

………

But is this really what’s going on? Many scientists didn’t buy it then, and don’t buy it now. Some have pointed out that increased levels of infectious disease have persisted after several years without widespread mitigations -- and kids who weren’t even born yet during lockdowns bear much of the brunt of current infections.

(emphasis mine)

Wear a fucking mask, and put them on your kids!

I get it. Our whole corrupt sick society is opposed to the very idea of public health, but some very basic, and rather inexpensive, rediations will protect your kids, preventing things like brain injury and long term immune system damage. 

………

On Oct. 22, 2024, at her last update on B.C.’s respiratory illness season, [BC Provincial Heath Officer ] Dr. [Bonnie] Henry stated as much: “If you’ve had COVID recently, you’ve had a boost to your immunity, so that’s a good thing.” 

Bonnie Henry is a fucking moron.

Wear a fucking mask, and put them on your kids!

I would note that Dr. Henry is still tepid about Covid being airborne, and has removed requirements for first responders to be vaccinated.

Note that it has indisputable that Covid is airborne since March of 2020, when the choir outbreak in Mt. Vernon, Washington occurred.  (Also, the whole droplet theory put forward by public health experts gets the physics of particle sizes and how long they remain in the air wrong)

If indeed “immunity debt” is the result of too few infections, and lasts for years, would it follow that not only airborne but other mitigations should be avoided? Should kids drink untreated water, consume unpasteurized milk, and stop washing their hands? This might seem like a good way to strengthen children’s immune systems -- were it not for the fact that we know what happens without hygiene: prior to 1850, before these advances in science and sanitation, roughly 50% of children died before their 15th birthday.

Yes, but wearing masks is uncomfortable, don't you know.

Wear a fucking mask, and put them on your kids!

………

In the absence of public health measures to limit transmission, repeated waves of infection will continually surge through the population, driven by the evolution of new variants and the waning population immunity from infection and vaccines. If you are lucky, your most recent vaccine will offer you some protection against being infected, but this protection varies from one person to the next and lasts only for a few months.

Don’t get us wrong, the vaccines are very important, but their main benefit at this point is to decrease the risk of ending up in hospital, in the ICU, or dying. They also diminish, but don’t eliminate, the longer term risks to your health, which are also severe outcomes, as anyone who has developed Long COVID will tell you. These long-term effects are shockingly common, and rising as our population gets reinfected over and over, as both the STAT Canada and Institut National de Santé Publique du Québec reports showed.

 ………

One of us (T. Ryan Gregory) coined the term “immunity theft” to describe the negative impact of SARS-CoV-2 on the immune system. 

Also, lung damage, heart damage, a correlation to early onset cancers, and cognitive impairment.

At the risk of repeating myself:

Wear a fucking mask, and put them on your kids!

More and more evidence is accumulating that the virus damages our immune system, making us more vulnerable to future infections. Crucially, T cells, a class of white blood cells in our body that play a vital role in our body’s defence against other infectious diseases, are depleted and exhausted, even with mild COVID-19 infections. Some of this effect seems to come from the SARS-CoV-2 virus directly infecting these cells.

Simply put, COVID-19 infections weaken our immune systems. This makes us more prone to reinfection with SARS-CoV-2, infections with other viruses (e.g. RSV), reactivation of dormant viral infections (e.g. shingles, Herpes-Zoster virus), bacterial infections (Group A strep,TB) and even rare fungal infections. To make matters worse, the infections themselves may also be more severe. Being infected with SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses or bacteria at the same time can also make things worse, in adults as well as children.

It should be noted here that two of the three the authors of this OP/ED, Doctors. Lyne Filiatrault and Arijit Chakravarty are medical doctors, and the third, T. Ryan Gregory, is a PhD evolutionary biology.

Let me leave you with one thought:

Wear a fucking mask, and put them on your kids!

Also, avoid poorly ventilated public areas.

The Stupid, it Burns

The state of Louisiana has forbidden the state health department from supporting Influenza, Covid, and Mpox vaccines.

This means that they are forbidden from even mentioning that they have the vaccines available at their facilities.

A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.

Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.

NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department's Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state's largest agency.

According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.

Yeah, "Not put in writing," for when you told to do something illegal or incredibly stupid.

Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department's work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department's clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.

 These folks are doing the level best, by means fair and foul, to kill as many of us as possible.

This Is F%$#ed up and Sh%$

Shouldn't doctors know that, unlike an IQ test, health is not relative, and health outcomes shouldn't be normalized over a population? pic.twitter.com/ltayBVTdrZ

— Zagreus | Escaping Long Covid Hell (@zagreusrevival) November 28, 2024

The idea that a serious medical condition is less significant because it has become more prevalent is insane.

Covid is still a threat.

Wear your f%$#ing mask, get your f%$#ing vaccine, and avoid the f%$#ing unvaccinated.

Like Nominating Osama bin Laden to Head Homeland Security

Trump has picked Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. 

this guy is the proximity author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for allowing Covid to run wild, because we would all end up with natural immunity.

This is f%$#ed up.

Cinderella has Covid

In a profoundly weird and depressing week, I had the opportunity to say something that was weird and amusing.

My eldest was going to go to a performance of the musical Into the Woods with friends, and we were going to give them a ride to the theater.

I just got a text from my kid, and tonight show has been canceled.

One of the actors has come down with coronavirus. 

Sharon (love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife) has not yet gotten the message, because they are in a conversation at the post service Oneg and their phone is off.

I tap her on the shoulder, and whisper in her ear, "Nat's play has been canceled, Cinderella has Covid."

She looks into my eyes, and we both collapse into hysterical giggling.

I do not know what the future is going to bring, but find someone you can laugh with.

Posted via mobile.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Biden oversaw the single biggest removal of social benefits in American history, which resulted in the single biggest increase in poverty in American history. He called this "Bidenomics."

Then Kamala said she'd do nothing differently while campaigning in a $62,000 gold necklace. pic.twitter.com/uhEzzH5SGG

— Holding Dems Accountable (From the Left!) (@PushBidenLeft) November 8, 2024

This is indeed true.

While Biden did not have to power to keep all of these programs in place while facing a hostile, and honestly nihilist, Congress, he did have the power to keep many of them in place, simply by not declaring that the Covid emergency was over.

He declined to do so, because he and his people had decided that the appearance of normalcy was more important than the actual state of the ongoing pandemic and the condition of the people most effected by the pandemic.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.

But It Does Not Effect Kids!

I am, of course, referring to Covid, and the claim the it does not effect children is a lie.

Children are getting sick once or twice a year, and prospect of long disabilities is mind boggling:

Since the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded.

These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat. If we do, we can help our kids with a few straightforward and effective measures.

The spread of the mistaken idea that children have nothing to worry about has had some help from scientists. In 2023 the American Medical Association’s pediatrics journal published a study–which has since been retracted—reporting the rate of long COVID symptoms in kids was “strikingly low” at only 0.4 percent. The results were widely publicized as feel-good news, and helped rationalize the status quo, where kids are repeatedly exposed to SARS-COV-2 in underventilated schools and parents believe they will suffer no serious harm.

As an aside, even if this were true, the parents would be getting sick from their kids, and they would be suffering severe illness, disability, and possible death.

In January 2024, however, two scientists published a letter with me explaining why that study was invalid. Some of the errors made it hard to understand how the study survived peer review. For example, the authors claimed to report on long COVID using the 2021 World Health Organization definition, but didn’t properly account for the possibility of new onset and fluctuating or relapsing symptoms, even though that definition and the subsequently released 2023 pediatric one emphasize those attributes. Any child with four symptom-free weeks—even nonconsecutive ones—following confirmed infection was categorized by the study authors as not having long COVID.

In August, the authors of the study retracted it. They did not admit to the errors we raised. But they did admit to new errors, and said these mistakes meant they understated the rate of affected children.

This was deliberate Great Barrington declaration deception, just like the anti-masking humbuggery that was done at the Cochrane Review. 

In reality, the occurrence of Long Covid in youth is pretty firmly in the double digit percentages.

There is an entire extremely well-paid industry dedicated to peddling this anti-vax/anti-mask/anti-public health bullsh%$.

Billionaires who don't care that their workers die pay good money for this sort of crap.

No

Can Stanford Tell the Difference Between Scientific Fact and Fiction? Its Pandemic Conference Raises Doubts

—Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

Stanford has been captured by conservatism and by its role as the birthplace of many tech bros, and as such, we find that its support for pseudoscience has been purchased by its reactionary and delusionary (and very rich) alumni.

The first two paragraphs tell you all you need to know:

On Oct. 4, Stanford University’s newly minted president, Jonathan Levin, opened an on-campus conference about pandemic policies by expressing the hope that the proceedings would “bring together people with different perspectives, engage in a day of discussion, and in that way, try to repair some of the rifts that opened during COVID.”

He was followed to the lectern by the conference organizer, Stanford public policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, who described the event’s goal as fostering “dialogue with one another rather than having a situation where the goal is to destroy people who disagree with you.”

Jay Bhattacharya is one of the prime movers behind the "Great Barrington Declaration" which said, "Just get everyone sick, it will be fine, and I want to go to the movies."

The Great Barrington crowd was wrong and dangerous and ignorant, and and remains wrong and dangerous and ignorant.

That Stanford's president gave his stamp of approval to a group of people whose scientific credibility ranks somewhere around that of flat-earthers is yet another sign that Stanford is overrated.

Yeah, I've Noticed

It appears that professionals in public health have noticed that Covid infections screw up your ability to drive as well.

In Maryland, it has been obvious that the drivers have gotten worse.

Not only are drivers less attentive and less skilled, but they also seemed to be more prone to what I call, "Road Rage Lite."

I shudder to think what it is like driving in Boston:

Abstract

Objective

This study evaluated the association between acute COVID-19 cases and the number of car crashes with varying COVID-19 vaccination rates, Long COVID rates, and COVID-19 mitigation strategies.

Background

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to significant concern over long-term post-infection sequelae, especially in the Neurologic domain. Long COVID symptoms, including cognitive impairments, could potentially impact activities requiring high cognitive function, such as driving. Despite various potential impacts on driving skills and the general prevalence of Long COVID, the specific effects on driving capabilities remain understudied.

Design/Methods

This study utilized a Poisson regression model to analyze data from 2020-2022, comparing aggregate car crash records and COVID-19 statistics. This model adjusted for population and included binary variables for specific months to account for stay-at-home orders. The correlation between acute COVID-19 cases and car crashes was investigated across seven states, considering vaccination rates and COVID-19 mitigation measures as potential confounders.

Results

Findings indicate an association between acute COVID-19 rates and increased car crashes with an OR of 1.5 (1.23-1.26 95%CI). The analysis did not find a protective effect of vaccination against increased crash risks, contrary to previous assumptions. The OR of car crashes associated with COVID-19 was comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol at legal limits or driving with a seizure disorder.

Conclusions

The study suggests that acute COVID-19, regardless of Long COVID status, is linked to an increased risk of car crashes presumably due to neurologic changes caused by SARS-CoV-2. These findings underscore the need for further research into the neuropsychological impacts of COVID-19. Further studies are recommended to explore the causality and mechanisms behind these findings and to evaluate the implications for public safety in other critical operational tasks. Finally, neurologists dealing with post-COVID patients, should remember that they may have an obligation to report medically impaired drivers.

Lovely News

In the journal Nature Medicine, a paper is showing that,"SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells are not durably established in the bone marrow long-lived compartment after mRNA vaccination.

Translated into English, it means that immunity to the disease falls off of a cliff after 3 months.

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mRNA vaccines are effective at protecting from severe disease, but the protective antibodies wane rapidly even though SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells can be found in the bone marrow (BM). Here, to explore this paradox, we enrolled 19 healthy adults at 2.5–33 months after receipt of a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine and measured influenza-, tetanus- or SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) in long-lived plasma cell (LLPC) and non-LLPC subsets within the BM. Only influenza- and tetanus-specific ASCs were readily detected in the LLPCs, whereas SARS-CoV-2 specificities were mostly absent. The ratios of non-LLPC:LLPC for influenza, tetanus and SARS-CoV-2 were 0.61, 0.44 and 29.07, respectively. In five patients with known PCR-proven history of recent infection and vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific ASCs were mostly absent from the LLPCs. We show similar results with measurement for secreted antibodies from BM ASC culture supernatant. While serum IgG titers specific for influenza and tetanus correlated with IgG LLPCs, serum IgG levels for SARS-CoV-2, which waned within 3–6 months after vaccination, were associated with IgG non-LLPCs. In all, our studies suggest that rapid waning of SARS-CoV-2-specific serum antibodies could be accounted for by the absence of BM LLPCs after these mRNA vaccines.

The study does not do a comparison between mRNA and other vaccines, so it is unclear whether this is an artifact of the Covid virus or of the mRNA vaccines, but I'm due for a booster, and I am getting Novavax, and I recommend that you do to.

Remember though, I am an engineer, not a doctor, dammit*, so my advice is simply based on my very flawed gut, and nothing else.

Any shot is better than no shot.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Headline of the Day

A “Biosafety” Organization Partnering With Dr. Jay Bhattacharya To Guard Against Viruses Is Like A Zebra Teaming Up With A Lion To Promote Vegetarianism

—Science-Based Medicine

It should be understood that Jay Bhattachary is an antivax doctor, who has argued against vaccinating children and was a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested that no measures at all should be taken and that herd immunity would result in 3 months.

He continues to maintain this.

In a previous article, I discussed scientists who believe that allegedly leaking SARS-CoV-2 from a lab was one of the greatest crimes in human history, but that purposefully spreading it was merely a forgivable oopsie. Specifically, I discussed the partnership between Biosafety Now, an organization that purports to be dedicated to preventing a potential pandemic, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an anti-vaccine doctor who partnered with a pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate to deliberately spread SARS-CoV-2 during an actual pandemic. A “biosafety” organization partnering with Dr. Bhattacharya to guard against viruses is like a zebra teaming up with a lion to promote vegetarianism.

Dr. Bhattacharya, a member of the Board of Directors at Biosafety Now, identified two core problems with SARS-CoV-2: 

1. It likely came from a lab
2. Not enough unvaccinated people contracted it

………

Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff are not merely wrong. They are charlatans and quacks who are dispensing deadly advice, and who need to be held accountable for their role in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

This man is a dangerous quack.

I Can Haz Prro

So, now we know that former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was the one that altered the mortality data from New York nursing homes.

I don't mean that he directed it, I mean that he was the one who changed the numbers himself. 

If this is not a crime, then the law needs to be changed.

Actually, it is against the law, because he lied under oath to Congress about it, but that law only applies to little people, and not "Rat-Faced Andy" Cuomo:

Earlier this summer, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo squared off for a closed-door interview with seven members of a Republican-led congressional subcommittee investigating how New York handled the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Cuomo was asked repeatedly about a State Health Department report that deflected blame for the thousands of people who died of Covid at nursing homes in early 2020. Mr. Cuomo stood by the report and said he certainly did not review it and insisted he had no memory of seeing it before its release.

But a review of emails and congressional documents appears to show how Mr. Cuomo not only saw the report, but personally wrote parts of early drafts.

………

Mr. Cuomo apparently inserted language to underscore how “community spread among employees or possibly visitation by family and friends were relevant factors” that contributed to nursing home deaths.

“The larger text,” Ms. Kennedy noted, “is what he added.”

The email exchange among Mr. Cuomo’s aides, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was one of many sought by the Justice Department and a law firm retained by the State Assembly as it prepared to impeach Mr. Cuomo in 2021.

In another example cited in congressional documents, one of Mr. Cuomo’s top aides wrote an email on June 29, 2020, asking for someone to “please print two copies and drop at mansion,” referring to the State Health Department report and Mr. Cuomo’s Albany residence. A week later, the report was released with some of Mr. Cuomo’s revisions included.

Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the early stages of the pandemic initially brought him national attention and widespread praise, and became fodder for his memoir, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

Now there is a book that has not aged well.

But as months passed, the state’s response began to draw critical scrutiny, with the more than 15,000 Covid-related deaths among nursing home residents emerging as a focal point. The Times reported in 2021 how top aides to Mr. Cuomo pushed to hide the number of deaths in state nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic.

………

The renewed focus on the state’s pandemic response comes at what may be a politically sensitive moment for Mr. Cuomo, who is said by some to be weighing a run for mayor of New York City next year.

Those rumors have intensified as controversies have surrounded the current mayor, Eric Adams. Last week, the city’s police commissioner, Edward Caban, and Mr. Adams’s counsel, Lisa Zornberg, both quit after federal investigators sought information from or searched the homes of several top officials and seized their phones, including Mr. Caban’s.

As an aside, I have been following the whole Adams corruption investigations, keeping track of the various reports, and this has begun to resemble Fibber McGee's closet.

Rat Faced Andy may be the only person looking at a Mayoral run who is worse than Eric Adams, and Eric Adams may the most corrupt Mayor in New York history.

Andrew Mark Cuomo, would you please go now?