Coronamonomania Thrives in Darkness, Part 94

Oh my, running out of this title too, might just keep it going past 100.  Now Dr. Fausti is saying vaccinated people should wear masks.  That too is an incredibly stupid message if you want people to get vaccinated.  Can’t we just defund this political hack so we don’t have to listen to his baseless crap.  What was the point in getting vaccinated if we have to keep wearing masks.

When people see stuff about hospitalizations among the vaxed group, remember what Jeremy Olson reported from the DOH on July 14:  “Of 196 of those hospitalizations analyzed so far, only 51% of patients were admitted for COVID-19 while the rest were admitted for surgeries or other conditions and had their coronavirus infections identified through routine testing.”   GOT THAT, 51%, OVER HALF, OF HOSPITALIZATIONS AMONG THE VAXED WERE NOT “FOR” CV-19.  This is why I get so incensed at the state for not being forthcoming and transparent and why I get angry at knuckleheads like Alex Berenson who spread misinformation about whether the vaccines are working.  Cut that hospitalization rate I calculated in half.  And since DOH conveniently discovered this information in regard to breakthrough infections, it obviously had it all along for all hospitalizations.  What if half of all reported hospitalizations were not really because of CV-19?  Or even 25%?

Another vaccine success story, from Austria. Following a big outbreak, an entire region attempted to innoculate all people over the age of 16 in March of this year.  The district quickly got to 70% of the population vaxed while other regions were at 10% or less.  This district was compared with other similar ones without a rapid vax campaign.  The two groups–the vaxed district and all the unvaxed districts–had similar infection rates prior to the vaccination campaign and a similar trend.  About 3 to 4 weeks after the vaccination campaign, the rates began to diverge, continuing to rise in the unvaxed districts and falling in the vaxed one.  The estimated effectiveness was around 55% but this was in a non-fully vaccinated population, so early to see final effect.  Just as you would predict and I have been saying, the vaccine was least effective among the elderly.  More importantly given the way vaccines are supposed to work, hospitalizations were reduced by 78%.  The vaccine appeared slightly less effective against some variants.  (RS Article).

Vaccine rollout in the US was pretty much by age.  So you would expect a (transient) change in the proportion of deaths by age group.  (Transient because as I keep saying, the age structure of serious illness in a fully vaxed population will look like it did in an fully unvaxed one.)  This study found that age structure change in regard to deaths.  (Medrxiv Paper)   Countries with vax programs focussing on the elderly saw a shift in deaths away from the elderly, while those without that approach did not.

We were warned by some immunologists that attempting to suppress CV-19 would lead to rebound epidemics of other respiratory virus and that is what is happening, especially in regard to RSV, a very dangerous virus for children in particular.  This paper discusses such a surge in that disease in Australia.  And we are giving those virus good reason to mutate dangerously.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Did everyone who is said to have died from CV-19 really die from the disease.  Nope.  In Germany, which doesn’t have quite the crazy death attribution policy that the US does, a number of autopsies of CV-19 victims were collected.  84% were considered CV-19 deaths, 6.4% were not and the rest were unclear.  Please note that it is highly likely that autopsied persons had more serious disease, so I would assume that across all supposed CV-19 deaths, autopsies or ever good chart reviews would call as many as 20% of all deaths not really due to CV-19.  (RS Paper)    Another relevant finding of the paper is that only about 75% of excess deaths were due to CV-19.  The rest?  We know the answer, lockdown deaths.

This paper looked at reasons for vaccine hesitancy over the last few months and changes in those reasons.  (Medrxiv Paper)  Our completely unbiased press of course likes to blame it on rural Republicans.  (This paper was done by academics, so by definition they are also biased.)  The paper is based on self-reported Facebook surveys, so not all that reliable.  And the respondents don’t look like the population.  Hesitancy is highest and has stayed highest among young people, and why not, they aren’t really at risk from CV-19, so any level of adverse events is cause for concern.  Hesitancy supposedly declined over time, and you would expect that as many people wait to see if their neighbors drop dead after vaccination.  African-Americans had big rates of hesitancy which declined over the survey period, but stayed pretty high, with young African-Americans being very hesitant.  Lot of interaction among the variables for supposed Republican country hesitancy; including that the epidemic wasn’t as bad in those states due to better governance so people probably saw less need for getting vaccinated.  All in all, I think this is pretty much crap, due to a bad design.

A cautionary tale in looking at excess death analyses, as with most statistical analyses.  As is always the case it turns out that the data you use and the way you set up the analysis and the statistical approach you take can greatly change the outcomes.  (Medrxiv Paper)