Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 165

I am having long hiking days so getting to summaries is a challenge.  I did see that the New York Times finally woke up to the fact that closing schools has done tremendous damage to children’s education, sending them backwards.  Anyone knew this would happen but the NYT and lots of politicians and public health experts cheerled the school closures.  Of course I also see that the truly despicable tub of lard Incompetent Blowhard and Liar-in-Chief claimed that Minnesota’s schoolchildren didn’t really lose any school time due to his mandatory shutting of all schools in the state.  He is a flat-out liar who gets away with it because the media in Minnesota is a paid arm of the Democrat party.

Hey, have I mentioned that masking is a worthless strategy to prevent spread of CV-19 in the community.  Yes, I have.  And here is a study from Spain finding that mask mandates for schools in Spain made zero difference, that’s right, no effect.  And in the US we still have schools torturing kids with face mask requirements.  (BMJ Article)

A reader sent this article from The Atlantic, which used to be a great publication with lots of contrarian and thoughtful pieces and is now just an ignorant woke rag.  The article discusses how we will all have the opportunity to take 40 more boosters this fall.  It is called A Simple Rule for Planning Your Fall Booster Shot.  I have an even simpler rule, if you already had three doses of vaccine, it is pointless, perhaps even counter-productive to take another one.  Don’t take any more vaccine doses.  They aren’t going to keep you from getting infected any more than the original three did.  (Atlantic Article)

Another study finds that children are more often asymptomatic or have mild infections than adults, and that high viral loads in children don’t lead to worse symptoms.  And then the authors worry that this means that we need to test them lots more cause they may be spreading “colds”.  How about we just leave the kids alone, we have done and are doing enough to ruin their lives.  (JAMA Article)

Here is a long and informative article giving the background on the human immune system, how the CV-19 vaccines have performed, including against different variants, and discussing future vax development.  Here is one obvious conclusion:  “it would be reasonable now to recalibrate goals for CV-19 vaccines”.  Really, you think so, maybe we can stop hallucinating that they might have a lasting effect on infection or transmission risk.   Here is another money quote:  “boosting every 4 to 6 months to maintain high serum neutralizing antibody titers may not be a practical or desirable long-term strategy”.  I am telling you right now, if you have been boosted once, forget any more doses.  As likely to hurt your immune response as help it.   (NEJM Article)

This study seems pretty obvious, but it is good to have confirmation.  It studied the association between blood levels of CV-19 nucleocapsid antigen and seriousness of disease in hospitalized patients.  Those levels generally reflect the amount of viral load, although other factors can affect it.  As you would suspect, the higher the viral load, the more serious the case is.  (Annals Article)

Portugal’s population is 98% vaxed.  In this context, there are still tons of breakthrough infections.  Having a prior infection and being vaxed, was more protective, however, than being vaxed but not having a prior infection. (NEJM  Paper)

Yet another paper finding very modest levels of protection against infection from even a third dose of vaccine, and once more, there was not adequate followup time to detect the likely worsening protection over succeeding months.  Protection against symptomatic infection was somewhat better.  (SSRN Paper)

A paper than needs to be read carefully to understand what a nothingburger it is.  It purports to be a re-examination of serious adverse advents and adverse events of special significance in the Pfizer and Moderna trials used for FDA approval.  Read the limitations section first, tells you all you need to know about how pathetic this is.  Then look, the authors claim the risks were higher in the vax arm than the placebo arm.  So much higher that over 99.9% of recipients had no adverse reaction.  Pretty freaking safe.  Oh and look, they have a category for deaths and hospitalization, but nowhere in the article or in the supplementary material is that data given.  Why?  Not scary enough?  Oh, maybe it is because there were zero deaths and almost no hospitalizations in the vax arm.  (SD Article)