Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 155

Dr. Ashish Jha, our current national CV-19 response coordinator, and based on his general lunacy, a worthy successor to his predecessors, said something astoundingly sensible.  He noted that the virus is going to be with us forever and we basically have to adapt to.  He urged people to build up immunity by taking endless vaccine doses, which clearly worked so well for the Presidementia.  In the same press briefing he refused to discuss how the President got infected or why he got infected after all those boosters and in fact refused to disclose anything on the President’s condition.  Even the mainstream Democratic Party-loving media are getting frustrated and are saying this is the least transparent administration ever.  (Jha Briefing)

And one of Jha’s predecessors, the low-life Dr. Birx, trying to make money with a pandemic book, admits that the vaccines were never going to be able to stop infections, but that isn’t what she said when they were released.  We will get to the ultimate scum, Fauci, in a separate post.  But it is important that those we supposedly look to for guidance are evolving to a more reality based approach.  I think I and others have said forever that we could not suppress the virus and had to adapt to it, with as little damage to our general society as possible.

And speaking of that, here is an interesting paper from researchers in Germany finding that attempts to enforce epidemic restrictions and measures like vaccination brought out the ugly in society–authoritarianism, desires to punish, ostracizing persons from society.  Sound familiar?  A good read on what to avoid, which we didn’t here.  (SSRN Paper)

A lot of people are implying that the CV-19 vaccines increased overall deaths.  That is pure nonsense.  Here is a large study from researchers in the Netherlands which looked at multiple countries death records and found both that vaccination was highly effective against death from CV-19, with some diminishing effect over time and among the very old; and that it was not associated with any increase in non-CV-19 deaths, in fact there may have been a decline in overall mortality.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study continues the trend of finding that infection derived immune response is better than the one created by vaccination.  It looks at the effect against Omicron variants from various combinations and timing of infection or vaccination.  (Medrxiv Paper)

The role of children in the spread of CV-19 is unclear, but what is indisputable is that they are at very low risk.  This supposed meta-analysis of studies concludes that while the original version of CV-19 was less likely to infect children and they were less likely to transmit when infected, the current Omicron strains are equally likely to infect children and to be transmitted by them.  I am dubious given the number of individual studies showing a lower role by children even in regard to Omicron.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Okay, what is the point of doing a study on vaccine effectiveness if you don’t even try to assess prior infection status, like this paper.  It is worthless, and it’s claims of great benefits for vax are worthless.  The study does indicate, as have others, that Omicron variants have fewer lower respiratory tract symptoms and more upper respiratory ones.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Without any evidence, there are people on Twitter and elsewhere implying that the vaccines are associated with a lot of subsequent heart deaths.  There is literally zero evidence to support this.  But it is true that being infected with CV-19 is associated with an increased risk of serious heart events like heart attack and stroke.  And this study from Korea finds that being vaccinated lessens that risk substantially.  (JAMA Article)