The CV-19 and Vax Lies Continue

Conspiracy theorists have a hard time letting go.  And unfortunately, as I have shown in recent posts about fake science, they can always find some publicity seeking, incompetent, or outright fraudulent researchers whose work gives some support to their views.  Let me give you some recent examples.  And honestly, understanding why this is flawed work requires only a little common sense and logical ability.

Readers of the blog know that I have been critical of death attribution methods in regard to CV-19, and that I think the data suggests very low risk to younger people.  But the virus did cause serious disease in some young people, particularly if they had other serious health issues.  People, however, are misconstruing a recent release by Israeli health officials.  Here is an example, from what is actually one of my favorite websites, ZeroHedge.  The headline says “Zero Healthy Young Individuals Died From Covid-19, Israeli Data Shows”.  No it doesn’t show that.  The story contradicts the headline in the first paragraph.  It says that the data is limited to a few cases where an epidemiologic study was conducted.  Read a little further, it says comorbidities were based on what the family told investigators.  Now there is a rigorous method.  Finally, there isn’t a person in the US, or Israel, I suspect, who doesn’t have a “comorbidity” under current medical guidelines–high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high lipid levels, anxiety, etc, etc, etc.  So no one is “healthy”.  So the headline and the story are bullshit, which isn’t surprising since it is based on the Epoch Times, which really is worse than the mainstream media.  (ZH Story)

Here is the next misleading, sensation-seeking research, supposedly peer-reviewed, which means nothing any more, doesn’t tell you a thing about study quality.  Peer-review is largely buddy-review; scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.  Or as long as your conclusions fits my agenda, the study must be fine.  In any event, the study appears to be an extensive examination of deaths, including stillborn deaths, in Germany over the last few years.   The methods initially appear solid, especially since the authors note the limitations of any method to determine what would have happened in any situation, much less during an epidemic.  They segregate deaths by age, but there is absolutely zero analysis by cause, none whatsoever, other than a cursory comparison to reported CV-19 deaths.  Notwithstanding this, they clearly try to link the excess deaths to vaccines, which is pure bullshit, when you do no causal analysis.  And to make it worse, they fail to do any analysis of the infection status of those who died; which clearly would have an impact on potential causes of death.  There own data shows that up until recently, the supposed excess deaths tracked CV-19 reported deaths closely.  Finally and really despicably, while acknowledging that there are too few stillborn deaths to do any legitimate analysis, they try to pimp the same link to vax.  I continue to be puzzled why people can’t be a little more skeptical about this stuff, but confirmation bias is powerful. (Cureus Paper)

Finally, another example of people just selectively picking things out of research.  To show you how dense people are or just determined to believe what they want, I repeatedly try to show people the flaws on Twitter, particularly by pointing to Table 2 of the study, and they refused to accept that the actual data in the study said what it clearly did.  This study compared the genetic variation among CV-19 virions found in infected persons during different variant dominant periods and among vaxed and unvaxed persons.  Since one potential mechanism for the emergence of new variants is replication in infected human hosts, understanding how often mutations occur can be important.  And the more mutations there are, the more likely one emerges that increases transmissibility.  So far so good.  (Cell Paper)

As the authors note, vaccination could encourage mutations that evade an effective immune response, as vax theoretically increases the immune system response during an infection.  On the other hand, if the vax help clear an infection faster, there are obviously fewer replication opportunities during which a mutation could occur.  And, as will become important further on in the discussion, whatever impact the vax have, prior infection will have the same or greater impact on selection of mutations.  The research was done in Qatar and the authors evaluated CV-19 genome diversity among non-hospitalized, but CV-19 infected persons.  379 patients were included, 213 of whom were vaxed.  A relatively small number of variations were reported per person, around 14 on average.  The number of persons sequenced for each primary variant is small, so a low=power study.

Omicron-infected persons had much more diversity than did Delta, Alpha or Beta infectees.  Vaccinated persons had more diversity than did unvaxed ones, except not in Omicron-infected persons.  Given that the standard deviations are huge and overlap between groups, which is a reflection of study power, this isn’t a particularly strong finding.   Another finding which should raise red flags is that for one variant Pfizer-vaxed persons had more diversity and for another variant Moderna-vaxed ones did. Again, a pretty clear sign that the study has low power.

But here is the critical thing missing from the study, which is consistent with no difference in diversity among Omicron infectees–what is the role of prior infection.  By the time Omicron rolled around, many people had not only been vaxed, but also infected.  And many people had multiple Omicron infections.  So this is a clear confounder to any examination of a potential link between being vaxed and having more mutations.  In fact, the Omicron finding makes it highly likely that there is no difference, or perhaps even that unvaxed persons have higher rates of diversity.  But you have to use some logic and thinking to understand this, so please read research critically.