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Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 92

By January 25, 2022Commentary

But I won’t, so this epidemic needs to end soon or I will run out of series titles.  Random notes–over 10% of Minnesotans who supposedly died from CV-19 were vaxed.  We peaked about two weeks ago, I believe and are headed rapidly down.  That won’t stop the terrorists, they will cling to this forever if possible.  And there can always be another wave, when the vaccines clearly don’t stop infections or transmission to the degree promised.  All right, here we go with the research.

The only people who don’t accept the immense damage we have done to children, and their parents, with our epidemic response are the teachers’ unions and the politicians they buy.  Here is yet another study cram-packed with the negatives of closing or restricting school, including poorer behavior by the children and bad responses to that behavior from parents.  (NBER Study)

This is why you have to be so careful about some things you see regarding “negative” vaccine effectiveness, or people who are vaxed at some point actually being more likely to be infected.  There are a number of factors that can affect this analysis, and they are often not taken into account.  One is whether the likely of testing, and therefore of an infection being detected, is the same in vaxed and unvaxed persons.  This paper explores that issue and finds that the vaxed were twice as likely to test.  But this was a survey, not a study of actual behavior, so I would be careful assuming the vaxed are likely to have more detected infections.  In fact, because they have more mild infections, they may be less likely to be counted, and I have noted elsewhere the phenomenon of people just using home testing and self-management.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Two years in and people still express uncertainty about whether there is some cross-reactive immune response from prior coronavirus infections, notwithstanding ample research on that score.  This paper again finds that there is a conserved helper T cell response to coronavirus that includes CV-19.  This response was present in recovered patients, vaxed persons, and also in pre-epidemic samples.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Readers of the blog know I am fond of case rates and tracking them to test severity and compare sub-groups.  This paper from the VA system uses case rates to find that being vaxed reduces the risk of death to about a third that of unvaxed persons, after including adjustment for a large number of factors, including health status.  Case rate analysis can have issues, such as variation in the detection rate of all infections (the denominator for a case rate analysis) over time, but this result is pretty consistent with what we are finding in Minnesota. The other thing that surprised me given the number of factors considered, was the apparent failure to include prior infection in the analysis.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Why is Omicron more transmissible, if it is?  One reason, according to this paper, may be that it has a shorter serial interval, that is the time between symptoms in one person and symptoms in a person they infect.  This could lead to faster growth and more people running around infecting others at the same time.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Another Qatar study looks at vaccine effectiveness against Omicron infection.  It finds that a booster reduced infection risk significantly, and it appears as if the effect of time from vax was adequately adjusted for.  In both vaxed but unboosted and boosted cohorts, there was very little serious disease from Omicron.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This research covering 25 European countries finds that higher vaccination rates were associated with lower total mortality.  This is complex research and I think looking at case rates tells you more than do these overall excess mortality studies.  This is especially true when you consider pull-forward effects of CV-19 deaths among the elderly.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study from Hong Kong confirms that while the absolute risk of carditis following vaccination is low, it is elevated in regard to the background rate, particularly in young males.  So it does change the risk/benefit analysis.  (Annals Study)

 

 

Join the discussion 2 Comments

  • Tyler says:

    I would like to see a graph of all deaths and hospitalizations(covid and non-covid) for the first 14 days following vaccination for each round of vaccination vs overall state averages for a similar time period. It seems to be one statistic with little research? By lumping “with covid” and “from covid”, “unvaccinated” with “partially vaccinated”, we need to find another approach to data with an alternative baseline. If we were to drop covid and instead use ALL deaths and hospitalizations of vaccinated vs unvaccinated vs partially vaccinated /100,000 it may start to paint a different picture. Scientists are working hard to quantify covid related data that is continually corrupted or otherwise poorly reported. If the details are blurry, paint a bigger picture.

  • James L. Edholm says:

    Try “Coronalunacy” for your next series :>D

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