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Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 35

By October 8, 2021Commentary

Readers, who I greatly appreciate, every one of you, sometimes tell me that they try to pass my posts and information on to people who have been terrorized successfully and those people just don’t want to read it or accept the data and information presented.  I bring this up not because I am so certain I am right in how I interpret the data or what I believe the appropriate response is; I bring it up because of what I have learned about humans.

We are not rational.  People believe what they want to believe and they have no interest in having that belief undermined or challenged.  It is like an electron in the lowest energy state.  It has immense inertia and it takes tremendous energy to boost it to a different state.  This characteristic of humans is worse among “intelligent” people, because they believe they are smart, and that is the hardest belief of all to challenge.  And if they are so smart, how could they possibly be wrong in their belief, in fact, it cannot be a belief, it must be truth.  So I no longer spend much time trying to convince the dead that they are alive.  I think and I write, people will do with it what they will.  Time demonstrates a belief to be truth or not truth.  And even then, the believers will not accept reality.

And at a macro national level, it takes a huge jolt to the system to change the level that the electron is at.  This is painful, but can result in a mental reset.  The only thing good about the completely insane and incompetent and corrupt Biden administration is that it is administering that jolt of truth–which ultimately cannot be avoided–abour so-called progressive and woke policies.  They destroy everything, most importantly the quality of people’s lives.  The biggest concern has to be that a foreign power decides to take advantage of the nitwits in charge of our country and our defense before we can get this group of morons out of office.  And once they are gone, hopefully it is for at least a generation.

On to the research.  It is going to be hard to capture this chart from Twitter in a way that makes it easy to read, so I am just giving you the link.  Phil Kerpen has done great work throughout the epidemic and this chart is an example.  And I must say, Minnesota doesn’t look too bad on age-adjusted deaths.  Now we have had one less wave than the Southern states, so we may yet catch up, depending on just how well vaccines actually work, but so far, just adjusting for age, not bad.  Of course Wisconsin is identical and didn’t have nearly the lockdown nonsense that we did.  (Kerpen Tweet)

This study from the UK on cases in children finds that there is no difference in severity between Alpha and Delta infections, none whatsoever.  With either variant, duration of illness was very short and there were few symptoms.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Another study on vaccine effectiveness, this one in adults 50 and over.  It found the mRNA vaccines to be about 90% effective against hospitalization, ICU use or ER visits.  Pretty impressive in a somewhat older group.  Effectiveness was somewhat lower in the very elderly.  The study only had less than 4 months of followup post vaccination, so it did not detect the lessening of effectiveness that some other studies noted, although that lessening is typically not as significant in regard to hospitalizations.  So if 90% of this population is vaccinated, what will the proportionate use of hospitalization be?  Not hard math–it will be 50-50 between the vaxed and unvaxed.  (Formula is a little more complicated but that is the basic result.)   (NEJM Study)

I want to note too in regard to the trend of studies just focussing on effectiveness against hospitalization that the “experts” and politicians need to be consistent.  If all we care about is serious illness, then why are we still measuring the epidemic by case levels.  And if the hospitalizations truly have to be for CV-19, then why don’t we only report those, not all the ones with incidental positive tests.

This study examined whether childhood vaccination rates dropped during the epidemic.  We already know that they did, but this study found that those rates remained suppressed into late 2020.  More good public health work by the experts guiding our response to CV-19.  More children will die because of this than will ever be threatened by CV-19.  And of course the minorities that these experts supposedly care so much about were the worst affected.  (JAMA Article)

All vaccinations have the effect of a general priming of the immune system.  This paper describes a study testing whether the polio vaccine would have the effect of boosting a response against attempted CV-19 infection.  It found that certain antibody and other responses did appear elevated following the vaccination.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study from Indonesia found that while Delta viral loads appeared slightly higher, the severity of diseases in patients infected with that variant versus other strains was no different.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Myocarditis in younger persons appears to be a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.  This paper compares the clinical course among young people with serious CV-19 disease, CV-19 vaccination and non-CV myocarditis.  In the case of both the vaccine and CV-19 disease related myocarditis, the disease course was milder and the outcomes less threatening to long-term health.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Join the discussion 10 Comments

  • Dan Riser says:

    Well if you look at just minneslowta, the nitwits have running the state and the generations have been a failure at seeing it.

  • N.S. Palmer says:

    The problem with intelligent people isn’t that they’re intelligent: it’s that they’re human, with all the attendant flaws and frailties:

    “Our minds go to work generating justifications for the conclusions our emotions have already reached. That’s why smart people often hold stupid opinions. They don’t get their opinions by thinking: they get them by reacting emotionally. They only start thinking when challenged to justify the opinions they’ve already chosen. Smart people are simply more adept at coming up with reasons for beliefs they adopted emotionally.”

    https://www.consilience-publishing.com/whysanepeople/

  • Rob says:

    It is also hard to compare hospitalizations now versus a year ago because of the stupid idea that there were no therapeutics – which was the policy needed to get EUAs (the PCR tests were only given EUA status). But thankfully enough doctors worldwide decided to buck that inane idea and started treating patients instead of telling them to stay away until they need a ventilator.

  • Colonel Travis says:

    Admitting you were wrong and questioning your beliefs, or even admitting “I don’t know” is so difficult that many people never bother. I did this, politically, a long time ago. “Why do I believe this? Why do I trust so-and-so, or even myself?” That was a giant shift in how I look at the world. I have found an effective way to get someone to think about things differently is to keep asking them why they think a certain way. You have to do this in person. After they answer, ask why about that answer. Then ask why again. Keep bombarding them with why, why, why. (Don’t be a jerk about it.) It’s the only way to get their mind working, if it works at all. I just look at how I operate. I never change my mind until I say to myself – it’s time to change my mind. People can blab at me all day long, but until I make the effort to rigorously think about whatever I’m thinking about, I’m not going to budge.

    We live in the most politically and emotionally charged world I’ve ever seen. People will sink their claws into their beliefs even deeper, rather than admitting they were wrong. Throw in the nonstop misinformation, bad information, missing information, outright lies, etc. from basically all sources coronavirus and changing minds is almost-guaranteed impossible.

    Like you said, Kevin, I believe the only thing that will work here for the collective is the passing of time. That could be a while. Maybe future generations will look at this era and shake their head and say – what in the sweet hell were those idiots doing?

  • Abhijit Bakshi says:

    “because of the stupid idea that there were no therapeutics”

    There are no therapeutics. Mass vaccination is the only way. All must be forced to take the needle. Those who do not are unclean.

    By the way, if you, like me, do not speak Icelandish (Icelandic? Well, the language they speak in Iceland anyway…), you will be happy to note that Google Translate hasn’t been wokified, yet, and it seems to me the translation it provides on this site is accurate: https://www.visir.is/g/20212167101d/stodva-notkun-boluefnis-moderna-her-a-landi-i-ljosi-nyrra-gagna (hint, it’s about a government decision on a certain “Modern” vaccine). h/t Alex Berenson, whom this blog has called a terrorist repeatedly.

    • Kevin Roche says:

      stop the lying, I never called him a terrorist, I said he spread undue alarm about the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines

  • quentin49 says:

    https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.04.21263507v1.full-text

    It would appear the Swedes were right all along. They are recommending no one under 30 be vaccinated for COVID19. They are right.

  • rob says:

    I’m 100% guilty of not liking my beliefs challenged. Just today I was in an argument about the “stolen” election. I don’t believe for a second that it was stolen but the truth is I haven’t spent more than 5 minutes looking into it. She says I’m an idiot because I refuse to watch all the videos she sends me “proving” it was stolen. My response to that is that I could undoubtedly find other videos “proving” the exact opposite and I have no intention of spending my life researching these hot topics that bring zero pleasure to me. I just don’t care that much. I have better things to do than get stressed out and angry about how horrible all the people who disagree with me are.

  • N.S. Palmer says:

    Regarding Rob’s comment, and with Kevin’s kind permission, here is a relevant section from my book *Why Sane People Believe Crazy Things: How Belief Can Help or Hurt Social Peace:*

    “Welcoming disagreement with our beliefs

    Being tolerant of other people’s beliefs isn’t just a matter of being nice. It’s very practical.

    As thoughtful people, we recognize that some of our beliefs are wrong. But which ones? How are they wrong? And if they’re wrong, then what’s right?

    The best way to find out is to tolerate disagreement with our beliefs. In fact, we shouldn’t just tolerate it: we should *welcome* it. And we should listen to disagreement as fairly as we can.

    If someone who disagrees with us proves that our beliefs are illogical, unsupported by evidence, or contradicted by the facts, then he or she has *done us a favor*. As a result, we can replace the incorrect belief with a more correct belief. We understand the world better.

    On the other hand, if the other person fails to disprove our belief, that’s indirect confirmation that our belief is correct as it stands. We can have more confidence in it.

    We make a great mistake if we invest too much of our egos in always being right. An old co-worker of mine named Tony had worked at Microsoft and was one of the smartest people I’ve met. Unfortunately, his abrasive personality eventually got him fired. That bothered me, because I’d rather work with abrasive smart people than friendly stupid people.

    Tony and I once got into a fairly heated political argument. At the end, it was pretty clear that he was right and I was wrong. Later that week, I bought him lunch. He was surprised because he thought I’d be angry that he’d proven me wrong. I told him exactly what I told you: He had done me a favor by correcting a false belief of mine.

    If I had refused to talk to Tony because we disagreed, or if I’d listened to him only with the goal of refuting what he said, I would still hold that mistaken belief.

    In a serious argument, as opposed to a political shouting match, the only way to ‘win’ is to *find out the truth*. Tolerance of disagreement is an essential step toward finding it.”

    https://www.consilience-publishing.com/whysanepeople/

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