Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 20

The NFL is trying to become unwatchable with its woke bullshit.  Shut up and play.  And can you imagine supposedly being woke and then banning an African-American woman from doing the national anthem because she isn’t vaccinated.  We are becoming like Germany, where government-imposed facism was happily enforced by big corporations.  If you haven’t seen it, watch and listen to the version of the national anthem that she would have played if the hypocritical ideologues running the NFL had any brains or aesthetic sense.  (YouTube Link)

The reason I have this website, at no small expense, is because it is a lot harder to shut you down.  They can do what they did to Parler, but hopefully you can always find someone to host your site.  It is simply astounding, however, that in the world’s supposedly leading democracy there is such an effort by the government to suppress speech.  I suspect at some point, if I get enough followers, Twitter and Facebook and even LinkedIn will try to shut me off, but they can’t cut the website.  So I encourage people to sign up here to get the information.  That way if I disappear off social media you will still be able to find the posts.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post about the execrable Joe Biden, that we are headed toward most cases, hospitalizations and deaths being among the vaxed.  I don’t view this as anything unusual, it is just math as more and more people are vaxed, immunity wanes or never took hold in the frail elderly or other vulnerable groups and, most importantly, this is a respiratory virus that isn’t going away and we keep using PCR tests with oversensitive thresholds.  But the public should be aware of this and in Minnesota I am going to make sure they are.  In Ireland, it is already acknowledged that over half of hospitalizations are among the vaxed, and about 16% of deaths.  As the story notes, however, the absolute numbers are much smaller.  (Ireland Story)

Epidemic of the unvaccinated my ass.  In the same part of the world, here is a story reporting that on a UK warship, on which every person is vaccinated, there have been over 100 cases.  Please note that these cases also occurred despite the obligatory mask wearing, which a former CDC director told us were better than the vaccine.  But I am almost certain that every one of the cases is asymptomatic or mild.  Excessive testing strikes again.  (UK Story)

Here is the latest report from the UK public health agency on vaccine effectiveness.  (UK Report)   According to the report about 58% of the population was fully vaxed as of early September.  Blood donor surveys and other data in the country in the country suggest a total immunity of around 95% among adults, wiith 18% coming from infection alone.  The vaccines appeared very effective at preventing hospitalizations due to Alpha or Delta infection, in fact the data suggest slightly greater effectiveness against Delta.  As you would expect, the vaccines are more effective in younger as opposed to older persons.  What the data also very clearly show are dramatically lower rates of death and hospitalization among the fully vaxed versus the unvaxed, and again, the unvaxed group must include some persons with prior infection, so the benefits of vax are understated.

This CDC report examined vaccine effectiveness against hospitalizations among a cohort of veterans treated at the VA.  Effectiveness was around 95% in those under age 65 and around 80% in those older than that.  This is obviously a heavily male cohort and may have health status characteristics inapplicable to the general public.  The vaccines were equally effective before and during Delta dominance.  Also note that once more, inexplicably, those who were unvaxed but may have had prior infection were not detected and put in a separate bracket, thereby likely understating vaccine effectiveness.  And no express assessment of risk trends depending on length of time since vaccination.  (CDC Study)

And this CDC study examines vaccine effectiveness agains ER or urgent care visits and hospitalizations.  The study used data from nine states during the period from June to August, when Delta had become dominant.  For those persons who were vaxed and admitted to a hospital for CV-19, the median time from vax to hospitalization was around three and a half months.  People going to the ER/UC who were unvaxed were about 4 times more likely to have CV-19 than were those who were vaxed.  There was a notable decline in vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization in persons age 75 and over.  Once again, no controlling for prior infection status or assessing effectiveness depending on time since vax.  (CDC Study)

This study from the CDC also looked at effectiveness, this time in 13 states, from April to mid-July, so when Delta was becoming dominant.  It claims that the vaxed were 5 times less likely to be infected, and ten times less likely to be hospitalized or die.  However, from the early part of the study period to the latter part, the proportion of infections among the vaxed tripled, and the proportions of hospitalizations and deaths doubled, which was faster than the growth in the number of vaxed persons.  (CDC Study)

As you can tell from a couple of comments already made in this post, PCR testing frustrates me.  I have constantly pointed out that the cycle number should be routinely reported, partly because it is meaningful to treating physicians as it indicates viral load, and partly so that the distribution of cycle numbers and trend over time can be reported to the public so we can understand the trajectory of the epidemic better and so we assess how many cases are really cases, and how many are just garbage low positives.  This study once more notes that viral load is indeed clinically meaningful and that cycle numbers are informative for that purpose.  Research is often funny because it inadvertantly reveals how biased researchers are.  In this study a significant portion of the patients had no detectable virus.  But instead of acknowledging that they probably weren’t actually infected and that CV-19 must not be what caused the symptoms landing them in the hospital, the researchers conjured up explanations like false negatives, or the virus was hiding.    (JID Article)