Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 133

Posts will be up on the breakthroughs soon, but the latest week’s reporting, from yesterday, continues to show the decline in vaccine effectiveness against all events.  I have made this point over and over recently, and I am sure most of you are experiencing this directly, but we have a large number of cases, the vast majority of all cases, which are not being reported.  People are home testing and self-managing.  I have news for our public health experts (also known as dunces), this is the future.  Everyone is going to get exposed and infected multiple times and have cold or flu symptoms.  This is likely what happened with the four existing seasonal coronavirus strains and it is what is happening now.  So time to move on.

And speaking of moving on, are we ready to give up on the mask delusion yet?  Here is a paper that verifies what I have suggested before–masks are intended to be and are pathogen collection devices and something happens to those pathogens when they are on the mask, especially over extended wearing periods.  The assumption that the viruses just die is dead, excuse the pun, wrong.  Wear them if you want to, but don’t be deluded about their efficacy.  Among other things I love that the paper uses the Kansas mask mandate country paradigm for the study, since CDC tried to use flawed analyses based on Kansas data to claim that masks prevented cases.  (Medicine Paper)

Vaccination can have unintended consequences.  This study looked at subjects who participated in an mRNA vaccine trial.  Among this group, which included some who got vaxed and some who got placebo, the vaxed group when they got infected were about half as likely as the unvaxed group to generate antibodies to the nucleocapsid (N) protein in addition to the spike protein.  One relevance is that since seroprevalence surveys look for N proteins, they are missing a lot of vaxed people who subsequently got infected.  But an also obvious consequence is that these people are more likely to have repeat reinfections because their overall immune response is less broad than that of unvaxed but previously infected persons.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Our bodies are pretty smart and efficient.  Minor infections don’t generate strong, lasting immune responses.  There are just two many threats and our immune system can’t waste energy and resources on ones that aren’t so threatening.  So it is with CV-19.  This study says that Omicron, which is usually quite mild, does not generate good antibody responses to other variants.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study is slightly dated as it got caught in my pile of general health care research, but the trends are accurate I am sure.  The authors looked at the impact of the epidemic on non-CV-19 ER visits, hospitalizations and mortality among the Medicare population.  What I refer to as the terror campaign of excessive fear spreading by politicians and public health experts led to many people missing needed health care, which can lead to delayed diagnoses and missed opportunities for early treatment of heart attacks and other acute conditions.  The data bore that out as at one point non-CV-19 ER visits among this Medicare population were down by over 50% and stayed at a much lower level.  Subsequently hospitalizations and mortality rose, which as the authors suggest, indicates that failure to seek early care led to more serious illness.  (HA Study)

PCR testing has been appropriately criticized for serious misuse during the epidemic, particularly in regard to use of thresholds for positives that almost certainly were identifying non-infectious cases.  These authors wrote a paper about experience in trying to ascertain information about the use of PCR testing in England, including thresholds for positivity.  The results indicate that many labs were using cycle numbers above 30 as a threshold, which is probably too high.  (Medrxiv Paper)

I have no idea how accurate this is or if the findings will be replicated, but this paper suggests that just as viruses and other respiratory pathogens are transmitted via aerosols, so might constituents of the human immune system, such as antibodies, and postulates that in fact CV-19 antibodies are being spread in this manner.  Not sure I buy that.  (Medrxiv Paper)