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Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 68

By December 14, 2021Commentary

There is a reason why I avoid the Minnesota briefings as long as I can.  I finally listened to the December 1st one.  I give DOH credit for being consistent.  No reason to stop terrifying people now.  So some Moronic variant terrorism, although they urged a little caution before you completely panic.  Lots of mask up even if you had twenty vaccine doses.  So they are also very consistent in recommending masking even though it absolutely does nothing to slow community transmission.  Lots of hospital terrorism with not a word about the role of vaccine mandates in reducing cases.  Astoundingly, they actually acknowledged that you can’t eradicate CV-19 and will have to accept its endemicity.  So why don’t you act like that will be the case.  My favorite reporter asked a question about why mask wearing is down so much.  I can answer that.  Because they don’t work and people know it.  And the next day, the Moronic variant was discovered in Minnesota so we got a special set of remarks about that, with a lot of stupid reporter questions.

Wow, I don’t know what to say, the New York Times published a lead editorial on Sunday that I almost could have written, basically saying we have to learn to live with CV-19.  It is behind their paywall so I will summarize for you.             It basically says we have to learn to live with it but then le’ts keep testing like crazy and let’s keep forcing everyone to get vaccinated.  I can also explain to you why they wrote this editorial.  The NYT is an arm of the progressive wing of the Democrat party.  They know the party is in deep shit and they know the epidemic has a lot to do with that.  So they are trying to provide cover for a pivot to a “nothing to see here, time to move on” attitude.  Fine with me.  (NYT Editorial)

And you won’t read this in the Minneapolis paper, which serves as the Walz administration official press outlet, but vaccine mandates are a major contributor to the shortage of hospital capacity.  The Wall Street Journal has a lead article today noting that several major hospital systems are dropping mandates because of the capacity pressure it causes.  (WSJ Story)

And in follow-up to the study I reported on last week regarding the defects of most modeling around the effect of lockdowns.  This is another piece of research along similar lines, critiquing a prior study claiming that Germany’s lockdown was effective.  In this case, using case data on date of report versus date of testing or symptoms led to completely different results of the evaluation.  The paper is a good reminder for everyone of how dependent modeling is on assumptions and on data quality and choices.  The re-analysis showed zero benefit from the lockdowns in Germany.  (Ger. Paper)

And yet another pretty well done piece of research on the relative effectiveness of vaccines and prior infection, this time from the Czech Republic.  As has other research, this paper finds that vaccine effectiveness against infection decays rapidly by six months.  But effectiveness against hospitalization or death lessens at a far slower rate and remains strong at six months or longer.  Booster doses appear to restore the initial level of effectiveness against infection.  Post-infection immunity also declines over time, but at a much slower rate.   (Medrxiv Paper)

Children routinely get seasonal coronavirus infections.  This study from Nicaragua compared the symptoms from those infections in children to those of CV-19 and found that on average, CV-19 actually resulted in lesser or equivalent symptoms.  So why are we rushing to vaccinate children?  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study from England shows that just as in adults, vaccinations in adolescents lose effectiveness against infection very rapidly.  (Medrxiv Paper)

And another study from England shows that the risk of reinfection in children is even lower than in adults and is extremely low.  There were even fewer actual illnesses following reinfection and almost all were in children with other serious illness.  No childhood deaths resulted from reinfections.  (Medrxiv Paper)

And this study from the US using a somewhat limited database also finds a low rate of reinfections.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This intensive study of households from the Netherlands found that children were as likely to be infected as adults, but had symptoms indistinguishable from other colds, while adults had worse symptoms.  There were more non-CV-19 respiratory colds than there were CV-19 ones.  The authors concluded that about 2/3 of all children in the country have been infected.   (Medrxiv Paper)

I missed this one earlier because I can’t keep up with everything, but obviously the responses to the epidemic have  created horrific damage in the developing countries, which really has hurt children the most.  This article details the likely toll of these suppression efforts.  (Nature Article)

 

Join the discussion 10 Comments

  • Ganderson says:

    My morning headline email from the Strib today is 100% panic porn- hospitals overwhelmed! Positive Cases! My local NextDoor feed has a long thread about a woman who encountered “gasp” a maskless individual at the local farm to table store. NY and CA have instituted statewide indoor mask requirements, and I’m guessing MA is next; here we’re requiring winter HS athletes to wear masks while they play. The number of people wearing masks outdoors is astonishing. I see no signs of any of the madness going away.

  • The Dark Lord says:

    the “covid response” was designed to 1) get rid of Trump (and yes the globalists in ALL the countries wanted him gone) 2) implement the great reset … so they created this monster but now have little or no control over it … the precautionary principle Karens of the world have emerged from their closets had are running the show in the majority of the countries and states of the world … and instead of pointing at them and laughing formerly “rational” people are terrified of a virus that can’t hurt 98% of them and are “going along to get along” with these mentally unbalanced people …
    I had always thought that a medical “cure” of some sort would eventually lead to a Zombie apocalypse but it turns out the most destructive “cure” the medical world has ever created was their non medical interventions they cooked up for Covid … (oh and the shots are treatments NOT vaccines) the years of life lost or destroyed will be in the 100’s of millions when its all said and done …

  • Debbie M says:

    And the vaccines were supposed to set us free. They’ve prolonged the inevitable….we are all going to get the virus at some point. Now it’s the vaxxed turn. I know, I know, less death and serious disease but we are no where near out of the madness. It makes me weary.

  • Harley says:

    All these experts are not familiar with the First Rule of Holes:

    “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!”

    Whether in Washington, St. Paul, or NYC, no one has the courage to realize their directives are wrong and to stop digging. The bad policy just keeps on coming………..

  • SteveD says:

    ‘And the next day, the Moronic variant was discovered in Minnesota so we got a special set of remarks about that’

    Hopefully remarks like this,

    omicron —> “moronic”

    omicron delta —> “media control”

  • Chet says:

    Kevin, thanks again for the excellent coverage. The report that looked at, and helped identify the shortcomings in, the German study on the effects of lockdowns was excellent. It’s sad how quickly people jump to conclusions based on data that was (intentionally or not) incomplete or inaccurate.

    It’s similar to the recent news that we should be grateful to our Resident in Chief for all the work he’s done to lower gas prices at the pump in the last two weeks, hahaha.

  • Abhijit Bakshi says:

    *Ahem*

    non-users (RR, 0.55; 95%CI, 0.40 – 0.77; p = 0.0004) and concludes that prophylactic use of ivermectin showed significantly reduced COVID-19 infection rate, mortality rate and chance of dying from COVID-19 on a calculated population-level analysis, which controlled for all relevant confounding variables.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356962821_Ivermectin_prophylaxis_used_for_COVID-19_reduces_COVID-19_infection_and_mortality_rates_A_220517-subject_populational-level_retrospective_citywide

  • Vaults says:

    Great piece, and like most others here it shines a light in the hysteria darkness. Given that the Czech study shows resistance to serious course of disease remaining high at 6 months, I’m curious what the Healthy Skeptic’s opinion is on boosters in those over age 65? Negative effects from the vaccine, although relatively rare, seem to be pretty well documented in young people but it is awfully hard to tease out a booster risk/benefit conclusion for those over 65 (who, unlike youngsters, are at risk from the virus).

    • Kevin Roche says:

      i got boosted, reluctantly mostly because I was annoyed that the pharma companies ignored the need to develop vaccines targeting broader segments of the virus to mimic immunity after infection. I doubt i will get another one. It does appear that a booster gives rise to a stronger response than after the second dose, but that may be a dosing interval issue as much as having 3 doses. Early studies, and the followup periods are short, also suggests that boosters do limit infection.

  • Abhijit Bakshi says:

    On boosters, the rubber hits the road in January or February latest. This is the 6 month cliff after the Israeli population boosting experiment. If things in dose 3 act like dose 2 (or don’t), we’ll start to see interesting data in that timeframe.

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