Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 195

I think I have mentioed my belief that at the end of the day the response to the epidemic will kill far more people than CV-19 actually killed.  Most tragic of these deaths are those among children and young adults, whose lives were totally disrupted for absolutely no good reason.  This paper describes an increase in excess suicide deaths among those 24 and under.  The absolute number is small, around 200, but it is likely an undercount.  Parents don’t want their children’s deaths to be called suicides or drug overdoses, so many of the suicides are called gun accidents or accidental poisonings.  Whatever the number it is clearly attributable to those who closed schools and ended children and young people’s social life.  (Suicide Article)

And more good news from the epidemic response for children, they spent more time staring at screens, which has been clearly linked to declines in both mental and physical health.  Average daily screen time rose from an already too high 4 hours a day, to 5.75 hours in the first part of the epidemic and 5.1 hours in the second part.  (JAMA Study)

Here is another great impact from the terror campaign, it lessened children’s adherence to asthma medications.  For those aged 5 and under it fell by 30%, and for those aged 6 to 12, by 12%. This reflects parents’ failure to make visits and get prescriptions filled.  (NBER Paper)

And why was it so bad to restrict children’s lives?  Because they had almost no risk from an infection.  This study from Serbia found that the immunity to children from one infection was highly protection, with only around 8% becoming reinfected.  The original infections were almost all mild, and the reinfections were even milder.  (JAMA Study)

This analysis of studies on the effectiveness of the immune response after an infection versus after vax has received a lot of attention, in my judgment for stating the obvious.  It would be unusual for any vaccine to do a better job of creating an immune response than the body will following infection.  It certainly would be surprising with a vax thar focused on only one part of the virus, and while the spike protein is important as it is used to gain entry into a cell, it is also likely the most mutation prone portion of the viral genome.  A vax that took segments from multiple viral proteins would more closely mimic the natural response.   But the publication of this research in a reputable medical journal like Lancet makes it hard to ignore and it is forcing some diehard public health officials to acknowledge that they may have been wrong when they kept dismissing the value of natural infection and discriminating against those that had been infected but not vaxed.  Overall, prior infection had about a 40% effectiveness against subsequent infection and an 80% effectiveness against serious disease.  The infection-derived response also held up much better than we see in regard to the vax.  (Lancet Article)

This is a large study of vaccine safety from Singapore, which was heavily vaxed.  The focus was on adverse events of special interest.  Three showed a signal, primarily in males, and for some in younger males.  The follow-up period was 42 days, or six weeks.  This was a self-controlled case series design, which has some value, but some issues, including one found in this study, too short a follow-up period.  As many studies have found, there was a high likelihood of an association with heart inflammation, but only in the period 1 to 7 days after the second dose,  an moderate association with CVT (brain blood clot) but at 22 to 42 days after dose two, and a very low finding of an association with appendicitis at 1 to 7 days after the first dose.  Booster doses were associated only with a potential risk of heart inflammation.  There was no signal of any association with heart attack or strokes or several other events.  The clinical course of almost all these events was mild.  (SSRN Paper)

And finally, you will recall that when it became apparent that CV-19 actually was a danger for older Americans in long-term care facilities, we completely isolated this already isolated group.  Little Timmy Walz was one of the proponents of this barbaric treatment.  These people are near death anyway, have little happiness in their lives other than seeing a relative or friend every now and then and Little Timmy took that away.  So what happened, well according to this paper, basically no deaths were saved due to CV-19, but there was a substantial increase in deaths from other causes.  How many times did I make this point, that we were creating this euphemistic syndrome called “failure to thrive” which means the residents basically gave up and died.  And they did, and they still are.  And this is a lot of the excess deaths which we continue to see.  (SSRN Paper)