Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 171

The national report on math and reading proficiency has garnered a lot of attention for showing what was obvious to everyone; closing schools and disrupting in-person learning has set children back years in their educational attainment.  Minnesota had one of the steepest drops in math proficiency.  Congratulations Little Timmy Walz and his owners, the teachers’ unions.  But it isn’t just the epidemic doing this, I think it is the relentless woke bullshit which is now pervasive in our schools.  Woke teachers and administrators don’t care about students learning anything other than their racist garbage and perverted gender ideology.  In fact, they think be able to read and do math contributes to inequity and is discriminatory.  China leaps ahead, the US falls behind.

You can call it what you want, but I will keep calling it the terror campaign.  When Little Timmy Walz, Jan Malcolm and a host of others nationally and in the state kept scaring the living shit out of people and trying to get them to live in their basements forever, I don’t know what they thought the result would be, but it was pretty obvious to anyone with a brain that one outcome would be people afraid to go to routine medical appointments or show up at an ER when they symptoms of an acute exacerbation of disease.  And that missed care would mean more deaths.  This study shows just that.  It looked at people who missed appointments during the early phase of the epidemic and found that cancellation rates had risen 77% from the rate before the epidemic and that this increase was associated with greater mortality.  (NBER Study)

Alex Berenson and others in their vax safety quest have claimed there are fertility issues.  As usual there is zero evidence to support this.  Oh and look here is a study showing that in California, birth rates actually increased in 2021, following a decline in 2020 that was due to foreign-born mothers not traveling to the US.  The US birth trends mirror California’s and extend through the third quarter of 2022, when you expect to see any of that evil impact Alex keeps making up.  But Alex won’t be talking about this study because it won’t help him sell books.  (NBER Study)

The authors try to spin this study of sixth grade infection rates as showing vax benefits, but it shows no such thing.  They compared sixth graders in middle schools, whose older classmates could be vaxed, with those in elementary school.  There was zero difference in total infection rates.  None.  Even the authors concede that this suggests that being vaccinated does not magically limit transmission to the unvaxed.  And their findings of reduced infections among vaxed students fails to include a long-enough study period to identify the ubiquitous waning of protection and ignores the effect of prior infections.  (NBER Study)

More evidence, this time from Italy, that isolating adolescents, especially males, from school and other interactions had a detrimental effect on mental health and behavior.  (Medrxiv Study)

Ivermectin was one of the early treatment flash points, with a lot of people wanting to believe that a treatment that has no plausible mechanism of action against CV-19 might be the secret to either not getting infected or to clearing an infection quickly.  Unfortunately for those people there is little evidence to support the belief.  Here is another study finding that outpatient use of a three day course of Ivermectin for people with mild or moderate symptoms had no significant impact on the time to recovery.  (JAMA Study)