Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 162

Anti-vax safety nuts, and they are nuts when they persist in spreading mis-information despite having no evidence to support their statements, continually ignore the best sources of data about whether the CV-19 vaccines have any widespread serious safety risks.  Those sources include electronic medical records and large health claim databases.  This study uses several extremely large European EHR data sets to explore a multitude of potential serious adverse events.  Such events were rare, around 10 out of 100,000 vaccinated people.  The adenovirus vaccines, J & J and AstraZeneca were more likely to be associated with them.  After appropriate adjustments, blood clotting disorders and organ vasculities were the only events likely to be causally associated with vaccines.  The fact that there is not a significant safety risk with the vaccines won’t stop the Alex Berenson’s of the world from lying about it and it also doesn’t change the low effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing infection, although they are better at limiting serious disease.  (Medrxiv Study)

Here is another large study on excess deaths, which finds no evidence of connection to vaccine, but also wrongly attributes all the excess to CV-19, when a huge proportion is due to lockdowns and other epidemic response effects, like an increase in homicides and drug overdoses.   Supposedly the US has experienced over 1.1 million excess deaths during the epidemic, with the vast majority being among the elderly.  But on a relative basis, the proportionate increase was greatest among 18 to 49 year olds, which is due to drug overdoses and homicides.  The authors completely ignore changes in causes of death in their zeal to claim all the deaths are due to CV-19.  (Medrxiv Paper)

The interaction between CV-19 and other pathogens is of interest.  This paper finds that bacterial infections were equally common among those persons infected or not infected with CV-19, indicating that CV-19 does not limit bacterial infections, as it appears to do with some respiratory viruses.  (Medrxiv Paper)

A large study from England evaluates factors associated with the risk of hospitalization and death, finding the usual connections to serious pre-existing disease.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This is a modeling study from Australia on the impact of population immunity from infection or vax on epidemic trends.  Prior infection is found to provide more durable protection against subsequent infection but vaccines are said to create greater protection against death.  I doubt that is true, once a person has been infected.  (Medrxiv Paper)

One of the factors in transmission is the stability, and therefore infectious capability, of the virus in the environment and various types of environments.  This study looked at the relative stability of different strains in human biological fluids like mucus.  The original strain was more stable than the subsequent variants in liquid biological fluids, but there was no difference in dried ones.  This is interesting because Omicron in particular appears to be more infectious than earlier variants, but that must be due to mutations allowing for greater receptor binding as opposed to greater environmental stability.  (Medrxiv Paper)

The study describes a factor which makes it less likely that the rate of infections in vaccinated people has been accurately detected.  Vaccination makes blood antibody tests for the nucleocapsid protein less accurate, so the authors used a more sensitive assay which found twice the level of infections as the prior test, suggesting that breakthrough infections are even more common than the data currently indicates.  (Medrxiv Paper)