Coronamonomania Thrives in Darkness, Part 20

Just so everyone knows, you should prepare for a massive rise in inflation and interest rates.  No matter what the Federal Reserve does, it doesn’t ultimately control either inflation or interest rates; the market does.  And whatever knuckleheaded response it undertakes to try to control either of those, will have unintended, but known, consequences that only make it worse.  You cannot pump that much money into any economy, and create that much debt in relation to an economy’s size, without paying a price.  Anyone who doesn’t think that is true is living in fantasyland.  So enjoy that completely wasteful and unnecessary supposed CV-19 relief bill that gives hundreds of billions of dollars to reckless states governed almost exclusively by one party.  What a complete joke.  There really is no free lunch, and ours is about to get a whole lot more expensive.

And I encourage you again to watch the video, widely available on youtube and elsewhere, of the alleged president, really a puppet with unknown persons pulling his strings, attempting to explain the ironically named CV-19 relief bill.  If you voted for this, I would like to understand why.  He literally cannot even read a sentence.  Look at the face and the eyes.  He is senile and apparently going downhill fast.  This guy isn’t in charge of his own bathroom routine.  It is a bad, bad situation when the president is clearly not in control of anything or making any decisions.  Who is?  Whoever it is, we didn’t elect them and we don’t know what they believe.  Even the mainstream press is starting to wonder why he has neither addressed Congress, nor held a press conference.  The answer is obvious, he isn’t capable of doing either.  The over/under on when he is replaced via the 25th amendment is less than a year.

Masks are the equivalent to chains in the slavery era.  They are the symbol that you are owned by the government, completely cowed, conformist and acquiescent.  Never wear them proudly, always be mindful that they are mandated by an irrational and dictatorial few who control the levers of power.  There is no science or data that supports any significant benefit in limiting community spread of a respiratory virus.  The CDC clearly has been given marching orders to make up whatever data it can to support mask-wearing.  They have put out one horrible study after another, so bad that you have to think it is intentional, that someone knows the studies are pure bullshit and wants the public to realize that.  The latest, which again has been critiqued far better than I can do on Twitter, see ianmsc for example, is truly pathetic.

The study, found here, purports to examine the association of mask mandates and allowing restaurant dining with case and death levels.  (CDC Study)   Of course the results, as dictated by the new political masters, are that masks are good and restaurant dining bad.  The study is so dreadful that it is hard to know where to start.   But look at the supposed effect-tiny, tiny, tiny.  Mask mandates, not actual mask wearing?  Not that it would make a difference to CDC.  The usual time frame cherrypicking.  The usual ignore the pre-existing trend.  Don’t distinguish between indoor and outdoor dining.  Don’t adjust for potential confounders.  Very minimal effect shown even with the BS approach and very wide uncertainty bands far larger than the supposed effect.   Don’t take my word for it, read the limitations paragraph in the study.  Get rid of CDC, just a huge waste of taxpayer money at this point.

And speaking of masks here is another study that someone dredged up from the past, 2007, before this was all politicized, showing no benefit.  (Mask Study)   The researchers looked at mask wearing and hand-washing among university students residing on campus to determine if they limited influenza transmission.  Face mask and hand-washing were compared to face mask alone and control groups that did nothing.  To show you how whacked these studies can be, despite education on hand-washing in the combined group, hand-washing compliance was actually better in the control and the face mask-only groups.  The groups were approximately the same size.  There were 2 cases of confirmed flu in the combined group, 5 in the face mask only, and 3 in the control group.  Based on those small numbers makes no difference at all what you do and it is clear that face masks had no effect.  Notwithstanding the obvious non-effect on confirmed flu, the authors purported to find an effect on influenza-like illness, based on symptom reporting.  This is garbage, particularly because the intervention groups are less likely to report symptoms since they will believe the intervention is protecting them.

Is anyone seriously questioning the lack of efficacy of lockdowns, especially stay-at-home orders?  This paper provides more evidence that they made no difference in death levels, and suggests that any research finding that they do is subject to various biases, including one called exception fallacy.  The study is in the prestigious, but ideological, journal Nature, so the fact that they are publishing it means it likely is highly accurate.  (Nature Article)   The authors gave a significant statistical critique of prior research and proposed a better method taking a large number of countries and pairing up each with each other country and comparing relative levels of mobility reduction (time in residence) and deaths.  Doing this they found that almost none of the comparisons had any association between the mobility outcome and the death outcome.  A fairly compelling statement of the lack of value in lockdowns.

The reason there is so much research on the accuracy of various CV-19 tests is because the way they are used is so bad.  Here is another study on PCR testing.  (Medrxiv Paper)   The authors were particularly interested in testing people with a low probability of being positive, for example, random testing or testing asymptomatic people.  Five groups with varying levels of probability of being positive were retested for PCR positive results.  The group with the lowest pre-test probability of being positive had vastly more initial positive results failing to be confirmed on retest, with only 16% of initial positives being confirmed versus 68% for all the other groups combined.  In addition there were huge numbers of low positives which did not indicate likely infectiousness.  I am not making it up when I say that widespread testing in a low-prevalence population leads to a massive proportion of false positives.

Another study looking at antigen tests.  (Medrxiv Paper)   As much other research has shown, these tests actually do a better job than PCR at identifying who may actually be infectious.

In the period from April to November 2020 did people suddenly stop complying with mitigation measures, so that cases rose?  This study asked that question.  (JAMA Article)   This is self-reported survey data, so keep that in mind.  An overall index of compliance was highest in April, declining over the summer and increasing somewhat in the fall.  In terms of specific behaviors, the ones with the greatest decline were staying cooped up in your house, not having non-household members over to your residence, and avoiding eating at restaurants.  Oh, look which behavior had a huge increase over the time period–mask wearing went from 39% to 89%.  Really must have had a huge impact on cases, huh?

Another study looking at the effect of vaccination.  This one also compared people who had never been infected with those who had.  The big picture finding was that people who previously had been infected with CV-19 had a response after the first dose of the vaccine similar to that after two doses for those who were never infected.  (Medrxiv Paper)   B memory cells were also studied, and the prevalence of those tended to decline with age among vaccinated persons, consistent with well-established research showing a lower response to vaccines in the elderly.