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Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 163

By September 24, 2022Commentary

Okay, I will explain this one more time.  If you want to do good study on vax safety, you must remove CV-19 infection as a confounder.  You can only do that by setting up comparison groups that are matched on all relevant variables and that consist of A) a group that has been vaxed and has been confirmed by antibody testing to never have had a CV-19 infection; B) a group that has been vaxed and has had a CV-19 infection; C) a group that has never been vaxed and has never had a confirmed CV-19 infection; and D) a group that has never been vaxed and has been confirmed to have had a CV-19 infection.  When you have your groups properly set up and matched or adjusted for other demographic and health variables, then you can compare events.  And you ought to also be comparing those events to background rates–how often did they occur in a matched population pre-epidemic.  When someone does a study like this and it shows that group A has a higher than background rate and a higher rate than the other groups; let me know, because it will be the first one I will have seen.

What we do have and here is another study indicating this, is that there is a body of research finding that people who have CV-19 infections, especially serious ones, have higher subsequent rates of certain events than a matched  group without an infection.  In the case of this study, it was thrombosis, or blood clotting issues.  Those excess rates of thrombosis in the CV-19 infection group tended to diminish over time.  So when I see nonsense from Alex Berenson or any other conspiracy theorist, they always ignore the confounding effect of a CV-19 infection and they refuse to acknowledge that almost all vaxed persons have also been infected by this point.  Which in the case of those who were infected after being vaxed is kind of ironic, because it does show the limited effectiveness of the vax.  (Circ. Study)

And this research on neurological effects of a CV-19 infection similarly finds that among those treated in the VA system, persons with an infection were more likely to suffer strokes, memory and cognition issues and other neurologic conditions in the period more than 30 days after the acute infection than those who did not have such an infection.  These effects were greater in patients who were hospitalized for CV-19.  And please especially note that the study was done before vaccines were widely available, so there is no confounding with vaccine receipt.  (Nature Study)

There is at least one serious adverse event associated with the vaccines, especially among younger males, and that is heart inflammation.  This article probes for the mechanisms for this effect, and it appears to be due to interference with interleukin, an anti-inflammatory molecule.  The same mechansim appears responsible for heart inflammation in serious CV-19 infections.  (NEJM Article)

Lots of good news, as usual, on the completely incompetent and futile responses to the epidemic.  A lot of money was thrown around, most of it to no avail and huge amounts ending up in the hands of scammers and fraud artists  of various types.  This article says $45 billion in fraudulent unemployment benefits alone went out of the taxpayers’ pockets.  You would like to think that government rose to the occasion and showed us its best side–nope, we got the usual pathetic performance.  (Fraud Article)

And not only did Little Timmy Walz’ administration facilitate our own frauds, like the $250 million stolen from a program designed to provide meals for poor people, but he worked hard to ignore the public health consequences of his actions, so we had huge increases in drug overdose deaths and now we learn that more Minnesotans also are dying from alcohol abuse.  (Alcohol Article)

The people at the UK’s Center for Evidence-Based Medicine have been a steady source of rational information and assessment of research throughout the epidemic.  They have written a very useful set of articles on transmission of CV-19 and models, including this one on the defects of the models used for setting public policy.  (CEBM Article)

Boosters may help reduce the likelihood of hospitalization but this study finds that the protection lessens very substantially by six months after receipt of the booster.  (JAMA Article)

This is crappy work and I feel poopy about it but someone has to do it.  This study discusses some of the issues in attempting to identify CV-19 trends through wastewater surveillance.  (Medrxiv Paper)    And this is some shitty work on an algorithm for wastewater detection of CV-19.  (Medrxiv Paper)    And this turd of a paper discusses surveillance of multiple pathogens in wastewater.  (Medrxiv Paper)

The clinical testing of the CV-19 vaccines was undoubtedly rushed, and justifiably so given the toll of the virus.  But one thing that is hard to understand is why more work wasn’t done on dose level or dose timing.  That would not have added significantly to the timeframe for development and approval.  This paper discusses the lack of good testing of various doses of vaccine.  (Medrxiv Paper)

 

 

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