I am a little concerned about the suspension of use of the J & J vaccine. There clearly are serious potential safety issues that need to be addressed. But in any product used in millions of people, just by coincidence there will be a confluence of use of the product and some serious outcome. So given what is at stake in terms of getting the dictators who run our lives to give up their powers, we need to be absolutely sure that it is causation and we understand the mechanism of causation.
The blog is going to partly return to what it used to be. For too long I have ignored serious research on health policy and items on health business, so you will start to see a mix of those posts. If you are only here for CV, that posting will continue, but it will be interspersed with the typical items I covered, so just ignore what isn’t of interest of you. In the near future I hope to return to being a sleepy backwater of esoteric health policy research, because the hysteria around the epidemic has ended.
I may have understated the significance of the post yesterday from the Canadian medical journal on infectiousness in children and adults. Just to be very clear about that study, what it most clearly showed was that the majority, and in the case of children, the vast majority, of “positive” PCR tests don’t relate to people with viable virus. These positive “cases” are not infectious and aren’t infected. I am going to do a post with the tables from the study showing this. Never in history has a diagnostic test been so misused.
Okay, does anyone really doubt that there are people out there determined to do pseudo-research in regard to CV-19 and continue to spread panic by making up data and science about whatever, and whatever often involves masks. Here is absolute joke of an example, that also shows how abused preprints can be. (Medrxiv Paper) This researcher is concerned about the effect of ending the mask mandate and reopening businesses in Texas and claims that vaccinations have to be stepped way up to prevent disaster. Anyone who looks at what has happened in Texas knows that cases have continued to go down. What a bunch of crap.
The research does not support variant terrorism. Here is a major study in Lancet, a very high-end medical journal, on the effect of the B117 variant in Britain. (Lancet Story) The major finding is that there may be a slight increase in infectiousness and transmissibility, but there is no greater incidence of severe disease and bad outcomes. None. So stop the variant terrorism.
An important study looking at deaths among Medicare beneficiaries. (Medrxiv Paper) Over 28 million beneficiaries were included. 677,000 had confirmed CV-19, and 2.9 million had probable CV-19. (Curious about how they were determined to be “probably” cases.) About a third of the confirmed cases were in long-term care. The rate of death among community dwelling confirmed cases rose from an expected 4% to 7.5%. And among confirmed LTC cases, deaths rose from 20.3% expected to 24.6%. But get this, among people who were not a probable or confirmed case in LTC, there were an estimated almost 39,000 excess deaths, or a 35% rise. The authors try the usual under-diagnosis of CV-19 explanation, but have to acknowledge that a lot is not due to that. I don’t think any of it is, these are lockdown deaths among frail people. Interestingly, however, there were over 31,000 fewer deaths than expected in community dwelling Medicare beneficiaries, or 6% less.
I was probably a “probable”
Mid-March 2020 returned by plane from San Juan PR. Two days later I was sick with many Covid like symptoms but no fever. Back then in the Boston area you couldn’t get a Covid test unless you had a fever. About 10 days later symptoms cleared up. In a discussion with my PCD he thought I might have had Covid however, if I did, my immune system cleared it on its own. Thus this 69 year old male could be a probable-maybe? Anti-body testing wasn’t available then and for months after. Enjoy your postings.
This is a hit on J&J. Govt, CDC, etc wants a DNA modifying, ‘not-a-vaccine’ vaccine. Not an actual vaccine
Okay, I am going to say this again, and you need to trust me on this. I know a lot about genetics. I am co-founder of a company than manages gene therapies for payers. The vaccines do not affect DNA. People need to stop spreading that misinformation. it is a flat-out lie. They never get near the nucleus. They stay in the cytoplasm and use the protein making machinery there. What is wrong that people are determined to believe this outright completely fabricated garbage.
What is the difference between an asymptomatic Covid positive person and a false positive test?
Just wanted to express thanks to you for taking the time and effort to put out information about COVID. It is appreciated.
thank you for reading
Blood clotting is a known side effect of oral contraceptives and each of the six cases was a woman under 48. Would be nice to know if the six were also using oral contraceptives.
Im agnostic about the vaccines but in a couple months we are going to wind up with more doses of vaccine in the country than we have people.
I came for the CV info; I’ll be reading long term for the pithy analysis, common sense and occasional snark. Well done, very well done.