Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 167

Dave Dixon got some more information on the revisions to the breakthrough data released by DOH.  They have not improved their ability to identify people vaxed outside the state or at federal sites, although they claim they catch a lot of non-Minnesota vaccinations.  The “improvement” was solely in matching information in different databases.  Here is DOH in their own words:

“Our new matching process improved on the old one in several ways. The first was to increase the accuracy of the algorithm. This allowed us to link more cases with their vaccination data in MIIC which results in an increase in the number of people who were previously listed as unvaccinated being moved to vaccinated or boosted. A second improvement was that the new process is much more efficient and allows us to perform a full match of our entire case dataset to the vaccination data in MIIC on a weekly basis. Previously, we could only query MIIC once, at the time a new case was reported to us, which pulled an individual’s vaccination information at that moment in time. Because vaccination information gets reported to MIIC very quickly and because a person is not eligible for VBT until 14 days after the last dose of vaccine, querying the data in this way meant we could capture vaccination history accurately for the vast majority of our cases. However, sometimes the organizations that report information into MIIC have errors that lead to duplication in reporting which can make it seem like a person has more vaccinations that they actually do. This happens most commonly when a person lives in a congregate care setting and their vaccinations get reported to us by both their health care provider and their residential facility. This might for example make it seem like a person who had just completed their second vaccine and was fully vaccinated seem like instead they had received 4 vaccines and thus get classified as boosted or a partially vaccinated person who only has 1 mRNA vaccine appearing as though they had received two and thus get classified as fully vaccinated. We employ deduplication techniques to help catch these errors and the MIIC team routinely reviews the MIIC data to clean them up and correct them, following up with providers if necessary to clarify any duplicates. However, for a very small number of people these errors occur in a way that our deduplication code can’t detect (for example, the residential facility reports the duplicate doses but transposes the month or the year). These duplications get caught by the more detailed manual review in MIIC but because our old method only allowed us to query MIIC once, we could not reap the benefits of those updates in our old matching process. Now, with the full case dataset being queried weekly, we will be able to capture these changes.

This process actually impacts cases and hospitalizations as well as deaths but because deaths are far more likely to occur among unvaccinated people and people living in congregate settings, the change is more obvious. For cases and hospitalizations any changes as a result of deduplication were offset by the additional cases being picked up by the new algorithm.”

And Dave pointed out to me in comments on the response, that it is inaccurate to call people who have received at least one dose of vaccine “unvaccinated”, and at a minimum it would be nice for DOH to let us know how many unvaxed people got at least one dose.

The outstanding folks at the Center for the American Experiment have released two papers on the deleterious effects of the lockdowns.  The first details the economic impacts and finds that Minnesota had one of the strictest lockdowns and took a large and continuing economic hit as a result, billions of dollars.    An additional finding is that in states like Minnesota that had recovered to their pre-epidemic per capita personal income, due to inflation, many have no re-slipped below that level, and Minnesota is one of those.  The number of people employed in Minnesota has still not returned to pre-epidemic levels, notwithstanding the Incompetent Blowhard’s bragging. Our low unemployment rate is a fiction caused by people leaving the work force–between the feds and state you can get everything paid for so why work, and you can always just engage in massive fraud, like say promising to feed school kids, and make a lot more than if you worked.  (CAE Paper)

A second Center paper looked at the impact on children’s education.  It found that as usual, the closing of schools had an extremely negative impact on children’s learning.  I have railed about the treatment of children during the epidemic forever, but Little Timmy never cared about them.  He sold them out to teachers’ unions for a few dollars each in campaign contributions.  He just wants them indoctrinated to vote for Dem insaniacs to keep them in power.  He is fine with killing them at the moment of birth.  He is fine with mutilating their sexual organs when they are very young.  He simply could care less about kids.  Judge him by his actions.  He especially hates minority children and is the systemic racist in Minnesota.  His actions caused a huge number of minority children to simply leave school and not come back.  As the Center paper lays out, education in Minnesota, which was going backwards even before the epidemic, has seriously regressed now.  But at least the Incompetent Blowhard will now have his precious equity–no Minnesota child of any race or ethnicity will know anything.  (CAE Paper)

A number of people, especially on Twitter as usual, have made a big deal out of a Pfizer representative acknowledging that the vaccines were not tested on their ability to stop transmission and this is different than what they were promoted on.  This is the usual ignorant nonsense from the anti-vax crowd.  As I routinely point out in data, the vaccines are about as effective as a typical respiratory virus vaccine, i.e. not very effective within a few months of administration.  I have also made it clear that I don’t see a basis for encouraging most people to either get vaxed or boosted, especially if they have had CV-19.  So people who don’t like the vaccines should be happy with this state of affairs.  But no, of course they have to twist anything they can find and make up issues in regard to safety.

Let me try to explain some basics about clinical trials. You have an endpoint or endpoints, which are the basic results you are measuring.  Transmission was not an endpoint in the trials, it was never intended to be.  There is no reason why it would be.  What you are measuring is whether people get infected after vaccination.  You can’t transmit if you don’t get infected.  So the logical inference was that if the vax prevented infection, they would prevent transmission.  When it turned out that the protection against infection didn’t last long, it was also apparent that vaccinated persons who got infected could transmit.  The research has been inconsistent about whether they are as likely to transmit as unvaxed persons.  So just hold off on the crap about Pfizer lied.  That is a complete mis-interpretation of what was said.

This research letter found that the period of culture positivity following an infection was similar between Delta and Omicron infections and there was no difference in duration of culture positivity among unvaxed, vaxed and boosted persons.  (NEJM Article)