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Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 196

By February 26, 2023Commentary

Well, in the big picture, I suppose it is good news that even the traditional media and some politicians are finally beginning to realize that lockdowns and associated suppression attempts were not just futile but did immense damage to the American public health, especially to children.  We see increasing evidence in the data that people missed substantial care during the epidemic and as a result their chronic diseases worsened.  The drug and alcohol abuse crisis accelerated.  We are a mess in this country, a real mess.  Will anyone have learned the right lessons from the response to the epidemic?  I doubt it.  Meanwhile a lot of interesting research is turning up.

As is often the case in these posts recently I start off with another piece of research completely debunking one of the favorite delusions/conspiracy theories/lies of the VSNs.  You will recall all the nonsense about athletes dying suddenly because they were vaxed.  As usual, when you look at the data, turns out nothing odd was occurring at all.  This paper tracks such deaths over the last several years and finds no increase.  Turns out that before the epidemic, around 6% of all out-of-hospital cardiac arrests involved sports and often involved young males.  Turns out that a widely circulated list of supposed sudden vax-associated deaths is completely full of holes.  Sorry VSNs, but I am sure you will come up with more fantasies to support your beliefs.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Vaccine mandates were wrong, for two reasons.  One is that we generally have a belief in this country that people control their own bodies, even if it means killing viable babies, or mutilating the sex organs of young children.  The second is that the evidence of efficacy was so low that there was no point in mandating the vax’ use.  But a lot of places did and a lot of discrimination on vax status ensued.  This study found that cities with vax mandates did not better job suppressing transmission than did those without one.  Not only that, but the mandates appeared not to increase vax uptake.  (Mercatus Study)

I am not sure how to take this.  Apparently one part of the US Government has now concluded that CV-19 did originate in a Chinese lab.  While completely believable, my hesitation is that the US Government has now dedicated itself to 100% incompetence.  Only your relatively immutable characteristics now matter–skin color, sex, ethnic background, sexual orientation–and your intelligence, knowledge, skills and experience are irrelevant.  So I am loathe to believe anything coming from this group of clowns, and even this group says it has a low level of confidence in its conclusion and other parts of the guberment disagree.  (WSJ Article)

And China is beginning to admit that when it finally lightened up on CV-19 suppression, it experienced a massive wave of Omicron infections, peaking in December 2022 and January 2023.  This study examined whether previous Omicron infection helped prevent a re-infection.  It found that among previously uninfected Chinese, the recent wave infected an astounding 90% or more.  People with a prior Omicron infection were less likely to be reinfected but the protection appeared to lapse over a few months.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This paper from Brazil examined non-CV-19 deaths in the country during the epidemic.  There were supposedly over 600,000 CV-19 deaths.  The researchers looked at trends in the country in 14 causes of death, by age.  They appear to use a sound method for establishing pre-epidemic trends.  In numbers, deaths from pregnancy and childbirth, diabetes, hypertension and mental health increased during the epidemic, with mental health reversing a prior decline.  Respiratory infection deaths changed their cyclical fluctations and heart and stroke deaths were down by 15,000 in 2020 and up by 15,000 in 2021.  In terms of rates, pregnancy and childbirth, obesity (a clear risk factor for serious CV-19 disease) mental health (especially among men and younger adults), diabetes and hypertension were higher; while digestive system, kidney, cancer, heart, stroke and respiratory disease rates were down.  It appears to me that the overall picture is one of either CV-19 actually displacing deaths among older persons from other causes, or death being attributed to CV-19 even though the person was likely in the terminal phases of another disease.   (Medrxiv Paper)

I am not a scientist or a physician.  I happen to know a fair amount about a lot of things related to health because of work in the business of health care and because that work has led me to keep up with a large variety of research related to health.  So there are a lot of things I understood about the immune system that I am astonished now when scientists and researchers are like “well, who would have known”.  So it is with this article on the functioning of T cells and their role in regard to attempted pathogen infections.  Long-time readers know that I have constantly explained that an immune response is not like an impenetrable shield that prevents exposure; it is more like a rapid-reaction force that quickly clears an attempted infection.   The authors refer to these as aborted infections, but the concept is the same and they note that T cells play a role in this quick reaction and clearance of the pathogen, including CV-19.  Of course they do, otherwise why would we have memory T cells sitting around in our body’s tissues, especially the respiratory system.  (IJMS Paper) 

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