Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 183

We have a new winner in the ongoing campaign for dumbest piece of epidemic research.  It purports to be a review of the literature on vaccine efficacy.  Here is a sentence from the abstract:  “One of the ways to stop this pandemic, is to vaccinate the population and gain herd immunity.”  Seriously, someone wrote that as of December 27, when this study was posted.  Right now, the vast majority of infections are in people who have been vaxed and often boosted.  This displays the rampant ignorance or wilful refusal to acknowledge the truth about respiratory virus epidemics.  There is no population immunity that “stops” such an epidemic.  How people supposedly doing research can be so ignorant of the basics is beyond my ken.  Being infected or vaxed does not stop exposure; it does not stop subsequent infection.  This is particularly true when we use excessively broad PCR tests to determine a case.  The best we can hope for is the prior infection or vax creates an immune response that quickly clears the infection.  This might limit transmission to some extent, but it won’t stop it.  Nothing will.  For the 1000th time, this is going to be the fifth commonly circulating seasonal coronavirus.  The paper exaggerates vax efficacy and is written by one author with a dubious association.  It will never be published.   (Medrxiv Paper)

Another study, this one from England using a long-running survey, that looks at the effect of the epidemic on the mental health of elderly persons, in this case the cognitively impaired.  While there was little change among those with actual dementia, who probably were generally unaware of what was going on, for those with mild cognitive impairment, mental health worsened.  (Medrxiv Study)

I have been dubious about the effectiveness of all kinds of treatments promoted for CV-19, usually at a high price.  Research usually eventually shows they were pretty worthless.  This study looked at an antiviral which Pfizer has pimped and I believe even gottent the government to pre-buy doses of.  It supposedly would help limit hospitalizations and deaths.  The study population was heavily vaxed.  The antiviral had no effect in preventing either CV-19 related hospitalizations or deaths.  (Lancet Article)

This is another treatment study assessing whether early outpatient treatment with ivermectin, metformin (a diabetes drug) or fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant) would prevent development of long-CV-19 symptoms.  Ivermectin and fluvoxamine did nothing, metformin supposedly reduced the risk of long-CV-19 by a substantial amount.  I am very dubious, in part because the supposed symptoms of long CV were self-reported, but it is plausible that metformin could have a positive impact on clearing CV-19.  (Medrxiv Paper)

And here is another study which I believe is misunderstood and being misused.  It involved identifying the types of antibodies being created by mRNA vaccines.  It is a very technical study.  It describes the evolution of the immune response to mRNA vax from one sub-class of a type of antibody to a different class, particularly after a third dose.  The first sub-type is actually linked to inflammation, while the second is not, so that is potentially a good thing, but the switch also potentially reduced the ability of antibodies to help direct the killing of cells infected with the virus.  Breakthrough infections also contributed to this class switch.  Only because some vax safety nuts can’t read research, while promoting this study as evidence of impaired immune response following a third vax dose, they ignored the real findings, which were that overall neutralizing capability was actually increased.  So while the ability of the immune response to kill infected cells (not always a good thing) was lowered, the overall ability to neutralize the virus was substantially improved and in a non-inflammatory manner.  A lot of the damage in severe respiratory virus infections is done by an over-aggressive immune response.  There was no indication in this study that the class switch led to more serious infections.  (Science Article)

There continues to be debate about when CV-19 actually was spreading among humans, with some evidence that it may even have been in the summer of 2019.  Researchers from Italy who did measles testing went back and looked at some samples, and they found 13 that were positive for CV-19, with 11 coming from the period August 2019 to February 2020.  The earliest sample with CV-19 RNA was in September of 2019.  I think there is fairly convincing evidence that the virus was in at least limited circulation in the fall of 2019.  If that is true and if the origin was in China, that would suggest that the virus was present there in the summer of 2019 and the Chinese government must have had some awareness that a new virus was circulating.  (ES Article)