Coronamonomania Thrives in Darkness, Part 48

Just one quick warning on vaccine misinformation. Someone, probably a Russian or Chinese troll, is circulating emails claiming personal knowledge of all these horrible events following vaccination.  This is fake, don’t fall for this crap.

Another study on vaccine effectiveness, this one relating to the Pfizer version.  (Medrxiv Paper)   The study suggests that protection was relatively weak, particularly in the T cell arm, within two weeks after the first dose, but became very robust after the second dose.  Again, two weeks is probably too short a time to assess the effects of even one dose, but it is encouraging that after two doses, the adaptive immunity appears very strong.  The vaccine appeared effective against variants as well, although perhaps not as effective.  An interesting side note was the identification of significant cross-reactive immune responses to seasonal coronaviruses.

Here is a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal detailing all the harms to children from the lockdowns and being out of school.  (WSJ Article)   This is lasting damage to many of these children.  Just criminal.

And here is yet another study demonstrating the children play almost no role in transmission, including asymptomatic transmission.  The study comes from Germany and involves intensive testing and contact tracing among daycare centers.  (Medrxiv Paper)  Children, parents and staff were tracked.  Adults had about a 75% greater rate of infection.  There was no evidence of asymptomatic spread by children, none.  Don’t believe the nonsense about either asymptomatic transmission in general or from children in particular.  It is just politicians and public health bozos grasping at any justification for keeping their powers in place.

You may recall the incredible waste of money on the Minnesota model by our incompetent Governor and the absolutely abysmal lack of utility of the output of that model.  The state lied about it and covered up the fact that they essentially gave up on that model.  The Mayo Clinic developed a model which apparently the IB has relied more on and which appears to be a little more accurate.  In this paper, the researchers behind the model discuss the current state of the epidemic in Minnesota.  (Mayo Article)   The model focuses on taking into account changes in contact levels.  It is not clear that seasonality is taken into account, but it has to be for any accuracy.  The authors says cases would continue to rise in Minnesota over the next couple of months, until summer, based on their assumptions about vaccination rates and that we are seeing a rise even with a fair number of vaccinated people.  They failed to take into account the lag time to fully develop adaptive immunity from vaccination.  I do not understand the claim that the spring wave would have been even worse than the fall one without vaccinations.  No data supports that, and their approach seems very flawed.  The also erroneously assume that vaccination effectiveness will last only a year or two, because adaptive immunity to seasonal coronavirus doesn’t appear to last long.  The much more analogous MERS and SARS coronavirus infections, however, left an immune response that lasted for decades.  The model may be better but the reasoning is quite flawed.  I think we have already peaked in active cases, will likely sit at a plateau for two to three weeks and then see a rapid recession to very few cases by June.

Another interesting study on the disappearance of other respiratory viruses during the epidemic.  (Medrxiv Paper)   Researchers from Canada compared prevalence during the epidemic with the prior five years.  Influenza and RSV basically disappeared, while rhinovirus remained present in smaller amounts.  Seasonal coronavirus prevalence was also reduced.  The researchers attribute this in part to mitigation measures, but that is complete BS, because somehow CV-19 managed to evade all those mitigation efforts.  They did note the more likely explanation, which is that CV-19 has some ability to exclude other respiratory viruses.