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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Astroturf and think tanks manufacturing doubt about COVID-19 public health interventions

The embrace of antimask and antivaccine views by the right wing is due to more than just clever reaching out by antivaxxers. There’s a big money astroturf machine encompassing various “think tanks” behind it.

This particular topic serves as an excellent followup to my post from Monday about how the Republican Party has now gone completely over to the Dark Side and undeniably become the antivaccine party. I didn’t plan it this way. However, in a nice bit of timing, late Monday The BMJ published an op-ed by Gavin Yamey, Professor of Global Health and Public Policy, Duke University; Director, Center for Policy Impact in Global Health, Duke Global Health Institute, and a certain author who should be familiar to readers of this blog. It’s entitled Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt, and it’s about how certain right wing think tanks and astroturf groups have done their best to cast doubt on the science behind public health interventions being employed by governments to slow the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate the damage from it. Some readers might view it as shameless self-promotion for me to write about this op-ed, but what is a personal blog for, if not for the occasional lapse into shameless self-promotion, particularly when it fits in so well with a recent post on a related topic?

AstroTurf is, of course, a brand of artificial sod frequently used instead of real grass in sports stadiums, particularly indoor stadiums, where maintaining a real grass playing field would very challenging, if not impossible. Used in the context that I’m using it in now, astroturf refers to a fake grassroots campaign designed to promote a political idea. More specifically, astroturf “refers to apparently grassroots-based citizen groups or coalitions that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms” or, as Campaigns & Elections magazine defines it, a “grassroots program that involves the instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them.” These are campaigns designed to appear to be “grassroots” campaigns but in reality are funded and promoted by individuals, companies, and groups that try to remain in the shadows. In fairness, it is true that there are gray areas, in which real grassroots campaigns receive funding from such interests because their aims align, but in general astroturf groups try to make it difficult for anyone to determine who a political activist organizations real sponsors are.

Then there are the think tanks, a whole ecosystem of right wing think tanks. I’ve discussed a few of them before. Arguably, the most prominent and influential of them, at least in terms of influencing COVID-19 policy goes, has to be the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which was behind the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). You remember the GBD, don’t you? Almost a year ago now, the AIER gathered three academics, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, to write a “declaration” named after the town in which AIER is based. That declaration called for the US and the UK to end their lockdowns and promoted allowing the virus to spread among young people in order to build “natural herd immunity.” Of course, in October 2020 there were as yet no vaccines approved, either under an emergency use approval (EUA) or regular approval, which ties into the GBD’s advocacy of “focused protection” of the “vulnerable”; i.e, the elderly, those with chronic health conditions that made them susceptible to much more severe disease and even death from COVID-19.

As I characterized it at the time, the GBD was “magnified minority” and eugenics. The eugenics part is easy to explain. In essence the GBD advocated letting COVID-19 rip through the “healthy” population, and its “focused protection” was a sham. The reason is that, short of locking them away indefinitely (and even then it’s questionable) it’s impossible to protect the vulnerable from a virus when it’s widespread in the general “healthy” population, meaning that the GBD’s “focused protection” really meant, in practice, “let the old folks catch COVID-19 and die so that the young can continue about their business.” In this, the GBD was no different from antivax activist Del Bigtree’s exhortation to “catch that cold” and build “natural herd immunity,” even as he victim-shamed the obese, smokers, and others with lifestyle habits that lead to chronic disease. In addition, the GBD, as a declaration supposedly signed by thousands of scientists and doctors, the vast majority of whom had little or no relevant expertise in COVID-19, infectious disease, epidemiology, or public health, was an excellent example of “magnified minority,” in which a minority of cranks provide the appearance of a scientific basis for an ideological position, as they had done for climate science, evolution, tobacco science, and other denialist positions:

My term for it was also “scientific astroturf.”

Another way of looking at statements like the GBD is as “scientific astroturf,” in which ideological players fund and promote a policy position and use such declarations as a means of making it appear that it’s a grassroots campaign of scientists arguing that science supports that position. True, the GBD was only a little different than scientific astroturf of the past, but at its heart it was the same technique from the same old playbook, with that “little difference” being that COVID-19 was a new disease and the scientific consensus regarding it hadn’t yet solidified to anywhere near the degree as consensuses behind, for example, evolution, climate science, and vaccines. Even so, in response to criticism AIER, the “think tank” that orchestrated the GBD, played another card from the right wing science denial playbook, the appeal to persecution, likening itself to abolitionists, which makes those of us supporting public health interventions—you guessed it!—advocates of “slavery.” At the time, I was grateful that AIER had restrained itself from bringing up the Holocaust or the Nuremberg Code, but, again, there were no vaccines against COVID-19 yet available at the time.

But back to the op-ed, which describes how influential the GBD has been:

On 9 April 2021, Open Democracy reported that Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, a critic of public health measures to curb covid-19 and a proponent of “natural herd immunity,” had “received almost £90,000 from the Georg and Emily von Opel Foundation.” The foundation was named after its founder, Georg von Opel who is the great-grandson of Adam Opel, founder of the German car manufacturer. Georg von Opel is a Conservative party donor with a net worth of $2 billion. “Gupta’s arguments against lockdowns—and in favour of ‘herd immunity,’” the report further noted, “have found favour…in the British government.”

This is not the first time billionaires aligned with industry have funded proponents of “herd immunity.” Gupta, along with Harvard University’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which, in essence, argues that covid-19 should be allowed to spread unchecked through the young and healthy, while keeping those at high risk safe through “focused protection,” which is never clearly defined. This declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian, climate-denialist, free market think tank that receives “a large bulk of its funding from its own investment activities, not least in fossil fuels, energy utilities, tobacco, technology and consumer goods.” The AIER’s American Investment Services Inc. runs a private fund that is valued at $284,492,000, with holdings in a wide range of fossil fuel companies (e.g. Chevron, ExxonMobil) and in the tobacco giant Philip Morris International.  The AIER is also part of “a network of organizations funded by Charles Koch—a right-wing billionaire known for promoting climate change denial and opposing regulations on business” and who opposes public health measures to curb the spread of covid-19. 

You might ask why such groups would oppose mitigation strategies and public health interventions against COVID-19. It might even seem counterintuitive that they would, given that the unchecked spread of the coronavirus is bad for business. Think about it, though, and reasons will become apparent. First, “lockdowns” are bad for profits, and these interests think that “lockdowns” are worse for profits than just letting the virus rip through the population. True, some industries have profited immensely from the pandemic, such as Amazon and other companies that deliver goods to homes, tech companies behind videoconferencing software, and computer companies, which saw a boom in business as so many people worked from home, but overall the effect on industry profits has been very negative. Second, these interests oppose collective action in general, particularly government-directed collective action, and public health is nothing if not collective action that requires a large component of government intervention. As I pointed out late last year, the reason antivaxxers so rapidly made common cause with antimaskers and COVID-19 deniers and contrarians is because they are all opposed to public health interventions. Add to that opposition to programs designed to support workers left unemployed by the pandemic, and you get the idea.

Contrary to the “persecution” narrative promoted by astroturf think tanks like AIER and its ilk, in which supposedly those holding its position are “canceled” and “persecuted,” GBD “luminaries” and fellow travelers are actually very influential. It’s easy to laugh at AIER fellow Naomi Wolf for her antivaccine and wacky COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but it’s harder to laugh at someone like AIER contributor Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist with no expertise in infectious disease or epidemiology and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University (also known for promoting climate science denial), given that he was for a time the chief advisor to then-President Trump on the pandemic, and the advice he gave cribbed heavily from the GBD in his push for “natural herd immunity.”

Then there are the GBD signatories themselves:

In October 2020, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Bhattacharya met with two of US President Donald Trump’s senior health officials, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Scott Atlas. Atlas was at the time on leave from his fellowship at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank affiliated with Stanford University. The meeting reportedly led the administration to eagerly embrace the GBD. Nor did the GBD authors limit their efforts to national governments. For example, in March 2021 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hosted a video roundtable with Atlas, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Bhattacharya, where they expressed opposition to masks, testing and tracing, physical distancing, and mass vaccination. YouTube removed the video “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19.” GBD authors, predictably, cried, “Censorship!” Bhattacharya continues to advise Governor DeSantis on Florida’s covid-19 policies, including providing legal testimony in support of DeSantis’s ban on mask mandates in public schools. 

Then, in a move that surprised absolutely no one familiar with science denial movements, increasingly GBD signatories have begun to spread antivaccine disinformation. For example, a few days ago Bhattacharya was promoting a bad “dumpster dive” into the VAERS database whose incompetent analysis resulted in the suggestion that COVID-19 vaccinations were more dangerous in adolescents than the disease:

No, no, no, no. That paper was anything but a “model of how to analyze VAERS data.”

His utter cluelessness about the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting (VAERS) database aside, Bhattacharya is promoting “soft” antivaccinationism, first by claiming he’s “not antivaccine” but rather “anti-vaccine mandate”:

Predictably, his next move is to cast doubt on the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines and promote “natural herd immunity,” a play straight out of the antivaccine playbook, whether he realizes it or not:

And Bhattacharya even goes so far as to retweet antivax extremists:

Nice touch, there, appealing to “loving our neighbors as ourselves” in order to portray public health advocates as dogmatic and intolerant.

Then there’s Dr. Gupta, who has actually questioned the rationale for vaccinating frontline medical workers. No, I kid you not:

My response, after facepalming, was to point out that vaccines are very good at preventing those most at risk of large exposures to the coronavirus due to their jobs from ending up in the ICU or dead. This is not rocket science, after all, and it’s not a complicated concept to protect those most at risk from the virus from the worst effects of the virus. She’s also cherry picking. There is plenty of evidence that existing COVID-19 vaccines do prevent forward transmission of the virus. They’re just nowhere near 100% effective at it, even though they are very effective at preventing severe disease and death. You’d think someone who’s supposedly an infectious disease epidemiologist would understand that a vaccine doesn’t have to be 100% effective at preventing transmission to be very, very useful and that preventing severe disease and death is a highly desirable outcome, even if it turns out that immunity wanes and periodic boosters end up being required.

Then there’s Dr. Kulldorff joining the chorus touting “natural herd immunity”:

Besides noting Kulldorff’s falsehood that public health scientists don’t consider “natural immunity” in their herd immunity models (they do), let me just add: Whenever you see what I like to call an “appeal to ancient ways of knowing,” particularly coupled with a risible claim such as that ancients “understood immunology better than we do,” run. Run as fast as you can and as far as you can.

Kulldorff, along with Gupta, also downplays the usefulness of COVID-19 vaccines at every turn:

HE even parrots a favorite antivaccine and science denial trope, likening science that he doesn’t like to a “religion”:

The above statement would not have been out of place on the crankiest of crank antivaccine blogs and websites. I’ve seen variants of it many times going back two decades on sites as utterly bonkers as Mike Adams’ Natural News.

For example, let’s look at a post on Adams’ website that I saw yesterday. See if it doesn’t sound very similar to Kulldorff’s Tweet:

OnePoll asked 1,000 Americans to reveal their vaccination status along with any changes that occurred with regard to friendship over the past year and a half. It was discovered that one in seven Branch Covidians – meaning people who got jabbed because they buy into the plandemic deception – has axed at least three “unvaccinated” loved ones from their lives for refusing the injections.

Jennifer Aniston, some washed-up Hollywood nobody, told “The Morning Show” that she personally chose to end several friendships because of their unbelief in the Cult of Covidism.

Word to Dr. Kulldorff: When you sound almost exactly like Mike Adams, you might want to take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror and think very hard about what you’ve been saying and, if you truly aren’t antivaccine, not wonder about why some of us have started to wonder if you are antivaccine.

The question here, of course, is not whether any of the signatories of the GBD are antivaccine. I’d be willing to bet a decent sum of money that they don’t think that they are. The question, though, is why they are assisting an astroturf effort to spread antivaccine disinformation. It doesn’t matter to me whether they are actually antivaccine or whether they are simply useful idiots for the antivaccine movement (I favor the latter), they are lending the imprimatur of their scientific status to antiscience disinformation.

Sadly, all of this is depressingly familiar to certain others who have combatted science denial:

Jeremy Baskin at the Melbourne School of Government has noted an eerie familiarity: “‘Not again’ will be the first thought of many climate-change veterans. They will recognise in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) echoes of the dispiriting and distracting climate-science wars.” It was a very apt comparison. The GBD, AIER, and their corporate funders are using strategies straight out of the climate denial playbook. As described in Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the fossil fuel industry has long used conservative think tanks like the Heartland Institute to sow doubt about climate science while funding contrarian scientists who portray “inconvenient” science as “unsettled” or even corrupt, a tactic first pioneered by tobacco companies. Such interests, hostile to public health interventions and government endeavors to implement them, appear to have resurrected this strategy for the pandemic to sow doubt about (and give the appearance of grassroots support for their opposition to) public health interventions to slow the spread of covid-19. Their strategy has seen a band of scientists teaming up with conservative think-tanks and corporate interests and lending scientific authority to their efforts to downplay the severity of the pandemic and argue that evidence-based public health measures do not work.

I’ve frequently pointed out that, in the age of COVID-19, there is nothing new under the antivaccine sun. COVID-19 contrarians, minimizers, and deniers have teamed up with antivaxxers to recycle all the old antivaccine tropes about vaccines, science, disease, “natural immunity,” and “natural herd immunity.” The AIER’s GBD is no different. I should have been more general, though. There is nothing new under the science denial sun, as all the astroturf groups and think tanks providing them with “scientific” cover for astroturfing make all too depressingly clear.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

123 replies on “Astroturf and think tanks manufacturing doubt about COVID-19 public health interventions”

He does sound like Mike Adams!

–The garbage I survey includes many cites of “research” by “experts” that “…cast(s) doubt on the science behind public health interventions..”. EVERY DAY. The same names, the same BS that Orac reviews. These “experts” even appear on these shitshows. We’ve heard these “studies”/ “ideas” regurgitated here by trolls.

— ” .. some industries have profited immensely from the pandemic..* Right. Look at mutual funds invested in FANG/ FAAAN stocks. I know I have.

— ” catch that cold” : Del continues to misguide his thralls even at Monday’s NYC freedom rally ( see @ high wire talk video, towards the end of his speech)

— CNN/ MSN today: a new Pew poll shows that Americans believe that the cost of restrictions on the economy and lifestyle to control COVID are “worth* the health benefits.
62% vs 37%

— and speaking of rightist finagling, what happened in California yesterday? One view of the results map should inform you.

There was a troll on Twitter who got all offended by my comparing Kulldorff to Mike Adams, saying it was an ad hominem and that I should convince him that the “your science is a religion gambit” is intellectually dishonest and a favorite tool of antivaxxers. I got tired of sparring with him and blocked him, as he was clearly not being intellectually honest.

I venture that Mikey, Gary et al have a two-tiered approach to inciting questioning of SBM findings: they include contrarians/ naysayers like Kuldorff/ others with at least a shred of academic background which leads vaccine hesitant/ woo adjacent believers to listen to their material and perhaps agree. They list credentials and universities which show how they are in agreement with ( their concept) of science (although distorted and abbreviated).
.
But when you listen to their broadcasts/ read their diatribes, you find that as you continue, it gets worse and worse, more unreal, conspiracy mongering, BS artistry.
This is the foot-in-the-door technique: they get you to agree and then, unload their true positions to whomever remains and listens, either to a particular rant or to their channels over time, filtering out the more reality based.
Apprentice Scientologists do not hear about Xenu, volcanoes or the Space Opera until they are firmly entrenched in the system- they hear about stress, learning and human relations.

Similarly, NN and PRN first preach natural health/ clean country living and disgust at corrupt politicians, celebrities or businesses, where they can get a large audience to agree and then continue on with outlandish CTs and mythology. Recently, Mike has been ( later in the broadcast) discussing demons. pedophiles and the approaching End Times for vaccines have killed millions who are being hidden in mass graves in a Secret Holocaust. Null often supplements his health advice with glimpses into his “investigative reportage” which includes the truth about 9/11, who really killed MLK and how the Romanovs escaped execution by travelling to Malta.

Perhaps some of the less enraptured accept their health advice as meaningful and dismiss the rest although personally, I would question anyone on anything when they espouse such ridiculous tripe. It cancels out what they say otherwise because it signals poor judgment and/ or obvious manipulation of an audience.

Well. Speaking as a somewhat getting older person who uses much tobacco, they are some real bastards.

I read the BMJ piece this morning and the only two comments I saw were fast attacks from antivaxers. Boy, they are fast. Not all that good but fast.

Interesting, people won’t eat GMO’s which some have been tested for over 20 years, they won’t eat anything that isn’t organic and pesticide free (that have been test for safety for 30 or more years) or any fertilizer that might cause health issues 20-40 years in the future.
BUT
these same people are demanding that everyone take a vaccine that did not exist 2 years ago, hasn’t had long term testing (well 2 years) and in fact is still in the testing stage.

Dorit- well I eat self grown organic vegetables and am not anti GMO foods in principle and am certainly not antivax. Regardless of what pesticides are considered ‘safe after 30 years of ‘testing’ it would seem sensible to avoid, if possible and practical, substances in our food that may not have been part of our development during our long and varied evolution. This argument could extend to the food much processed by technology. It might be a better bet to eat baked potatoes than walkers crisps if it’s a binary choice.

Note that your position is considering the evidence, nuanced, and not absolute.

The positions of anti-vaccine people who are anti-GMO and eat organic are none of these. Not the same at all.

Some people have a healthy skepticism about the safety of new technologies, like genetic engineering. Considering how poorly DNA is understood, it makes sense to be wary of attempts to engineer it.

You are forgetting the history of both the anti vax movement and the anti GMO movement.
The anti GMO movement was largely pushed by progressives and embraced by them, against evil big corporations. Many big time people pushed the anti vax but also pushed the anti GMO.
‘Science’ promoted by progressives which planted seed of distrust in any altered vaccine/food. The article called it “Biotechnophobia”
The anti vaccine group was given ammunition by published ‘science’ in the wakefield study, 5 to 10 years of promotion that vaccines caused autism and good science is still having a hard time turning that ship around (everyone saw the wakefield study but hardly anyone saw the retraction 10 years later).
The modern science, of immediate publishing of research has lead to the ‘twitterization’ of science, not a good thing for science.
this is from the Daily Beast hardly a right wing site but does expand on what my two poster were about.

Sorry I forgot the link.

‘Too many of the people now saying “trust the science” spent years eroding trust in it and promoting biotechnophobia.’

thedailybeast.com/lefties-planted-the-anti-science-seed-fueling-vaccine-skepticism

they won’t eat anything that isn’t organic and pesticide free (that have been test for safety for 30 or more years) or any fertilizer that might cause health issues 20-40 years in the future

Well, I’m largely indifferent to organics (which aren’t pesticide free anyway), but I do draw the line at eating fertilizer.

I’m perfectly happy to eat GMO crops (I’m not going to eat someone’s insulin, that would be silly), I think that organic is mostly a meaningless label, and I’m fully vaccinated.

So, what was your point again, William?

Oh yeah, and I live in a region with a strong and earned reputation for being hippy-dippy (and very trippy), and it’s one of the most vaccinated regions in the country. Even the island that is terrible about getting their kids vaccinated is pushing 80% on the COVID vaccine.

Hey I have good news for once! A lady we shipped off to the big city for ECMO is doing better. We never thought we’d find a bed at a facility that does it, get them to accept the transfer, or that she would make the flight. Sometimes the stars align. Her spouse is still in our covid wing calling and texting everyone he knows telling them to get the vaccine.

I’m sorry they’re going through this, but I’m glad you found her a bed and that they’re working through it.

newsweek.com/israel-world-leader-vaccine-booster-shots-hit-surge-covid-cases-1629310

JHC how many fricken booster shots am I going to need? 5th fricken wave? WTF

Either the vaccine works or it doesn’t, looks like the only thing that is works on, is the profit line of the drug companies.

JHC how many fricken booster shots am I going to need? 5th fricken wave? WTF

Either the vaccine works or it doesn’t

I expect you’re one of those people who has never had a tetanus shot. Oh, wait, you have? Did you understand how that works?

FFS, some people are too stupid to live.

Tetanus shot is good for 10 years, this covid shot is only good for 6 months. Israel is on their 3rd vaccine and planning on a 4th by the middle of next year. Pfizer looses 6% effectiveness per month. Israel is at what 80-85% vaccinated and now has the highest infection rate ever and deaths approach highest, most have had 2 shots.

graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/israel/

Not anti vaccine just seems strange that we are talking about a 4th so soon and to lose its effectiveness so soon.

“Tetanus shot is good for 10 years”

Except the initial series when you were an infant was at least four doses. There are lots of vaccines where the initial series is two or three doses. Not a big deal.

Well, as a health care worker, I have to get a flu vaccine every year because the damn virus mutates every year. Really not a big deal at all. And COVID-19 is more contagious, more lethal, prone to long term disability, and the vaccine is much more effective. So sign me up as long as I need to and as often as I need to.

General consensus is that,as yet booster shots are not needed. But if new variants came in because pandemic are allowed to go on, vaccine effiiency may go down, Do not claim vaccines, claim ongoing epidemic.

“Either the vaccine works or it doesn’t, ”

Wrong. Either it works on a spectrum of effectiveness or it doesn’t. There are plenty of discussions to be had, by those in the know, about how poor the vaccine has to be before it isn’t viable. I ain’t medical so couldn’t say.

For now, the idea is to save lives. Anyone who advocates against the vaccine is saying that those lost lives are acceptable. It’s a viewpoint. It also takes no account of the possible future variants. Maybe one could develop that is deadly to children. I wonder how many will change their tune if the majority of the victims were no longer old or vulnerable?

COVID vaccine(s) do work, the data is pretty clear – you haven’t the expertise to convince me otherwise. Those who do get vaccinated don’t die from COVID nearly as frequently as those that don’t get vaccinated. If you can’t see that, hey, don’t get vaccinated. No skin off my back, and I think insurance companies are not going to get discounts for COVID treatment. So, not only do you increase your likelihood of getting really sick (and clogging up the healthcare infrastructure), but going bankrupt as well. Two free shots or COVID roulette. Personally, I believe businesses have a right to control costs if they subsidize your insurance (too a certain degree), so requiring, employees to be vaccinated. COVID vaccination is free. Choose what you will, but take the consequences for choices made.

Please also don’t go to the hospital when you do get the COVID.

Please also don’t try to convince people that a COVID vaccine is not a good public health option.

I like freedom too. I feel more virile, as well, now that I’ve had my shots!

Anyway — good blog topic.

“our patience has its limits”
goebbels, 1933

‘our patience is wearing thin”
Joe Biden 2021

“If I was in charge of this world I’d be telling people to get back into the @#£&ing sea and start evolution from scratch”

Me, today, after a frustrating day at work.

I think this is the same fool on Twitter who was making the same complaint about my comparing Martin Kulldorff to Mike Adams.

India and covid

September 14 2021…….. 431 deaths from Covid. (7 day moving average 398)

Vaccination

Total doses given 753 million
People fully vaccinated 184 million

Percent fully vaccinated 13.3%

USA

September 15 2021 ……1823 deaths from Covid (7 day moving average 1765)

Vaccination

People fully vaccinated 180 million

Percent fully vaccinated 54.75%

Why with only 13% of the population vaccinated India only has an average of 270 deaths per day
While the US has 54% of the population vaccinated US has and average of 1700 deaths per day
And India has 4-5 times the population of the US.

coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/us-states

Not taking sides (I’ve had both shots) it just seems strange, that the virus would effect/mortality in the US worse than India.

Probably because India is not getting clean figures. It is likely a lot of poor people get no medical treatment and never show up in official stats.

Plus some Indian state stats look as dodgy as some US states’ stats.

India has a much lower median age (28.4 vs 38.1 in the US), so death is not as likely an outcome from covid. But also what John said.

As far as I know, the people of India are not as anti-life as those of the US. They seem to be taking things more seriously after their recent surge. Also, that surge is no longer occurring in India, whereas we have yet to peak in the US. Not a good comparison.

India’s actual deaths from Covid-19 may be over 3 million.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260872v1

During the first viral wave, the median excess mortality compared to CRS baseline was 22% and 41%, respectively, in included states and cities, rising to 46% and 85% during the second wave. In settings with 10 or more months of data across the two waves, the median excess mortality was 32% and 37% for states and cities, respectively. Deaths in health facilities showed a 27% excess mortality from July 2020-May 2021, reaching 120% during April-May 2021. The national survey found 3.5% of adults reported a COVID death in their household in April-June 2021, approximately doubling the 3.2% expected overall deaths. The national survey showed 29-32% excess deaths from June 1, 2020 to June 27, 2021, most of which were likely to be COVID. This translates to 3.1-3.4 million COVID deaths (including 2.5-2.8 million during April-June 2021). National extrapolations from health facility and CRS data suggest 2.7-3.3 million deaths during the year.

They have a reporting problem (maybe) but based on their population vs the US they would have to have 10 to 15 THOUSAND people die in India every day to match the US (in normal times about 14,000 people die everyday in India) so they would have to double their daily deaths. Which I was guess someone would notice.

The second point about median age, not to dismiss but Indian has about 200 million people over the age of 65 (in the US we have 13 million), so a lot of old people should be making up for the median age in India.

If you don’t like India (3rd world, I got it) try a western country like Germany or France.
Mask are not really much different in those countries then in US.

Germany 65% vaccinated only 67 deaths (I know we are 4 times as big)
France 64% vaccinated only 16 deaths ( I know 5 times as big)

This is not making sense, these aren’t margin of error, and I am just asking as I don’t have an answer.

It is difficult to say but my bet is that most people in those countries are actually following government guidelines on preventative measures.

I live in Canada (Ontario) and I have not seen an unmasked person in a store or other indoor public area since March of 2020[1] . Hand sanitizer is available at the entry. The public library, after several months of curb pickup-only service is now open and is even supplying free masks if you have forgotten your own.

We have had some fairly strict lock-downs, not as strict as France or China, but a lot of people learned how to cut their own hair and took up bread baking as something to do.

The local university has gone back to in-person classes but all students must be vaccinated and must be masked when in a building.

We could be doing a lot better but these precautions have worked to a great extent.. We have never had anything like that Sturgis rally. Oh and in strict lockdowns various provincial governments, when their patience was exhausted, have arrested the crazier pastors who insisted on holding services in person and inside a building.

Restaurants have recently reopened with indoor but reduced seating capacity and one can remove one’s mask while seated.

Speaking of manufacturing doubt about the vaccine:

Philadelphia shortstop Didi Gregorius is blaming his crappy season on an attack of pseudogout in his elbow. This is the same elbow he once blew out and needed Tommy John surgery on, and injured it in a fall back in April. But it couldn’t be due to those things.

From the N.Y. Post:

“Some people say it’s from the vaccine. I will say it’s likely from that, too,” Gregorius said. “But when you say that, everyone looks at you like you’re stupid because the vaccine is not supposed to be like that or give you that reaction.”

“Experts are skeptical of his claims. Paul Offit, a vaccine specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told the paper that any pseudogout “has nothing to do with the vaccine.” He said it was possible the vaccine would cause the condition to flare up if he already had it and didn’t know about it, but it would only last a few days.”

“A months-long flare of pseudogout caused by the vaccine “doesn’t make any sense,” Offit said. Ravina Kullar, a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told the Inquirer she knew of two reports of rheumatoid arthritis flares after receiving the vaccine, but again, they didn’t last long.”

“Gregorius currently is recording career lows in batting average (.217) and on-base percentage (.275), and his OPS (.650) is the lowest mark since his rookie season. He has appeared in 89 games this season, having missed time due to the elbow injury.”

“Just asking,” of course.

SARS-CoV-2 does not affect the population of any country uniformly, so gross vaccination rate is somewhat meaningless in this case. In the US, it seems that it’s the vaccinated that are continuing to take precautions to reduce spread rather than the unvaccinated which exacerbates the issue. The unvaccinated, unprotected from serious illness and death, are experiencing the brunt of the deaths. Otherwise there are many contributing factors to the death rate – all cause or covid – of any specific country, region, city, whatever. Variation and discrepancy are facts of life. Don’t “just ask.” Be specific about what’s tripping you up about that.

Actually, someone has noticed. https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/three-new-estimates-indias-all-cause-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic.pdf

The problem for India is multi-fold. Reporting systems are poor and civil death reporting lags quite severely. Also, the second wave in particular significantly disrupted state and national data collection systems.

Estimates based on excess deaths for 2020/21 suggest that somewhere between 2 and 4.8 million people have died from COVID-19 to date in India.

India also has only 22% of the number of tests per capita compared to the US, meaning COVID-19 is less likely to be diagnosed and if people die those deaths are not reported as COVID-19 deaths.

Finally, a cautionary point about taking a snapshot of what is happening in one country at the moment and comparing it to other countries. All countries have seen COVID-19 occur in waves, even countries that have done little to curb its spread. This is not a disease that is spread evenly across the population, but a disease that is primarily spreading within social groups*. A country that has had an expanding wave due to the appearance of the disease among new social groups will have more cases and deaths than one where the last wave has dissipated. It is also the case that waves will be higher in countries that have large unvaccinated social groups compared to countries with a more even distribution of vaccination – even if the vaccination percentage is the same.

Germany currently has 63% of its population fully vaccinated compared to 55% fully vaccinated in the US. The current wave of infections in the US is nearly as large as the winter wave, where it is less than half the size in Germany. Vaccinations are extremely uneven in the US. Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts have more than 67% of their populations vaccinated, but Idaho, Wyoming, Alabama and West Virginia are all under 41%. The disparity is likely to be greater on a local level. In Germany, all of the Lander have >57% of their populations fully vaccinated.

*I am using social groups broadly here to include any situation where the same people get together for considerable periods of time on a regular basis, so that will include workplaces and some communities. The virus travels around that group, but is less likely to leak to others who have no or minimal contact with the group. Once the virus leaks into a new group, it then spreads rapidly around that group.

I’ve never been to India but I have been to Nepal several times. I can guarantee that there will be people who have died of covid without a test or even without ever seeing a doctor.

So the anti-vaxxers are backed by ideological think tanks and corporations. But pro-vaxxers, on the other hand, are purely scientific and non-ideological. The pharmaceutical companies have no interest in vaccinating the world., and, of course, they have no influence over governments or their policies.

We can feel perfectly safe and confident in our medical authorities, knowing their motivations are absolutely unbiased and altruistic.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/518826029796691968/-RLPqeaB.png

Did it ever occur to you how much more money drug companies could make if there were no vaccines? With preventable infectious diseases once again rampant, and tens of millions of patients miserably ill in the U.S. alone every year with many admitted to hospitals, pharma income from drugs and products for supportive care would skyrocket.

Sample case:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/unvaccinated-boy-almost-died-tetanus-hospital-bill-was-more-800-n981256

Did it ever occur to you how much more money drug companies could make if there were no vaccines?

Can we please, please, PLEASE stop using this argument? It’s based on a false premise about how corporations of any kind work, and just serves to continue the mystification of healthcare economics, specifically the idea that Big Pharma is a unified conspiratorial monolith in all aspects. For one thing, the pharmas not only compete against each other for market share, but also have different strengths in different product categories. So if Merck’s vaccine for X, say, was somehow outlawed, that doesn’t mean Merck would gain any profit from drugs and products for supportive care for X, which might all go instead to J&J. Similarly, Merck would be happy to create a vaccine for Y that would rob J&J of profits from the palliative care of Y.

We have actually seen the differing interests of different pharma firms in action in Florida, as Ron DeSantis is not just opposing vaccine mandates, but promoting treatment with Regeneron products as an alternative — to the likely benefit of one of his biggest campaign donors who is a Regeneron investor.

There are any number of other factors in business models and corporate practices that apply here as well. The bottom line, though, is that if it were true one of the pharmas could actually reap sustained windfall profits from withholding a vaccine, they’d probably do so. That’s how capitalism works. But it also works such that they can’t reap those profits from withholding, just as it works such that they can’t reap the sort of profits from making vaccines that might lead them to skullduggery in promoting vaccinations.

Where the pharmas do act in concert — both through their trade associations and individually — is indeed in their efforts to influence government policies that affect the sector as a whole. For example, they are now running misleading scare ads on TV opposing the Biden proposal to negotiate Rx prices for Medicare — recycling a variant of the old ‘death panel’ trope used against the ACA — that even have the VO announcer declaring “Paid for by Pharma” at the end.

I have no doubt that protecting the ‘market pricing’ of scrips is enough of a priority for the pharmas that they are making healthy financial donations to any number of anti-vax GOP federal legislators, as said pols oppose any kind of cost controls that might affect the bottom line.

“as Ron DeSantis” is a dickhole that I want to introduce some hot, florida-blown glassware into. But, don’t let me stop you at that.

@Sadmar Argument is actually like this: If there were a Big Pharma plot, that had totally captured regulatory agencies, they would first ban vaccines, because they are bad for.business.
It says nothing about real world, though it is inded a bit misleading

Ron DeSantis is not just opposing vaccine mandates, but promoting treatment with Regeneron products as an alternative — to the likely benefit of one of his biggest campaign donors who is a Regeneron investor.

If one is going to complain about weak arguments, this one rightfully belongs in the same bucket, although DeSantis’s foot-stamping response is pretty funny.

And I’m pretty sure that he’s going to be left smarting about the cruise business telling him exactly where to get off, grotty 11th Circuit notwithstanding. He’s been on a losing streak.

Actually those people (in Germany and France) are NOT following any guidelines. Have you forgot the CDC said we don’t need to sanitize everything and I am not going to make my own bread and god help you if I have to resort to cutting my own hair.

In some states 75% of the population (generally north east states) is/are vaccinated yet they have had the biggest increase in Covid cases( in some states 60% of the increase are people who have had 2 shots). South Dakota has the largest motorcycle rally (800,000 people) and only has had 3,500 new cases in the past two weeks and only 15 deaths. Even if you consider population difference that is a really low population to death rate and South Dakota vaccination rate is about 40%.

So the bottom line as to the discrepancies and what is perplexing me, why is the virus hitting some states or countries harder than others. You take the age group of US citizens against the age group of another country and factor in the vaccination rate (mostly similar as to age range) and the out come is much worse (in some case on the magnitude of 20 to 30 times) in the US (and Britain).

Saying that people in France and Germany are not, broadly, following guidelines would usually require some sort of link. Otherwise it’s just “yes it is, no it isnt”.

Secondly you said “even if you consider population differences”. If you don’t understand how population density effects the spread of viruses then this is a deceptive statement. Dense and/or highly mobile populations facilitate the spread of covid. Even taking into account a high vaccinated percentage, the spread in a high density area could be greater than an area where most people are spread out on farms or small towns and villages. Big cities are a case in point. Public transport, crowds. A massive state with high population but low density will present differently to a small state with a lower number of people but a high density.

Thirdly, the South Dakota motorcycle rally. How many of the people attending were actually from SD? Your case numbers are in SD. How many of the bikers went back home, out of state, and took covid with them? How much contact was there between the locals and the bikers? The rallies I’ve seen are usually quite separate. You’d be better off tracking the number of cases amongst the bikers.

Forthly, sanitisation. I believe that more recent data has shown the the virus doesnt survive well on many materials, so being told that you no longer have to obsessively clean keyboards or door handles might make perfect sense. It depends on tracing how people actually catch covid. A dead end statement like “the CDC said we don’t have to sanitize everything” is meaningless without the context.

Who did say that you should bake your own bread ot cut your own hair ? Just use mask and hand sanitizer,

In our first and second lockdowns barber shops and hair salons were closed. For some reason, at the start of the first lockdown grocery stores were selling out of four and yeast as people were at home more and suddenly embraced baking as a pastime.

Your rosy view of South Dakota’s Covid-19 picture after the Sturgis event is not borne out by reality.

“Two weeks after the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, reported Covid infections in the state have risen nearly sixfold.

South Dakota counted 3,819 new cases in the past two weeks, including seven deaths, up from 644 cases in the 14 days preceding it. That makes it the state with the largest percent increase in Covid cases in the past two weeks.

The state’s rate of Covid-19 infections per capita in the past two weeks is in the bottom half of the country, but it’s the sharp and sudden increase in case counts that sets it apart.

Meade County, home to Sturgis, has counted 330 new cases in the last two weeks, up from the 20 reported in the two weeks before the rally, according to Johns Hopkins University’s case count. The 1,550 percent increase comes after the motorcycle rally, which usually draws around half a million people, possibly had its biggest year ever, according to County Sheriff Ron Merwin.”

us-news/south-dakota-covid-cases-quintuple-after-sturgis-motorcycle-rally-n1277567

It is too premature to conclude that the 2021 Sturgis motorcycle rally is the “non-event” you are claiming. The 2020 Sturgis rally has been well studied and clearly was a super spreader event. See, e.g., the following 73-page study that includes cellphone data, inter alia: https://ftp.iza.org/dp13670.pdf

The 2021 rally is likely to be worse — all things are not equal, and the highly contagious nature of the delta variant is a game-changer.

In evaluating scientific/medical data, one needs to recognize that the situation is both complex and evolving. Randomly comparing two countries affected by COVID-19 must taking into account confounding variables. Facile comparisons are worthless and misleading.

AARNO I just quoted John Kane on this thread from 17 sept at 0918
“We have had some fairly strict lock-downs, not as strict as France or China, but a lot of people learned how to cut their own hair and took up bread baking as something to do.”

Number wang and dangerous bacon
you state that the bikers we’re from south dakota so they took the virus home with them (that’s why the low number) they claim south dakota has extremely high number

JH covid tracker
SD 12,258 new case in the last 30 days and 43 deaths…… vaccinated 51%
ND 11,185 new case in the last 30 days and 38 deaths……vaccinated 43%
Wyoming 14,114 new case in last 30 days and 109 deaths…..vaccinated 40%
Massachusetts 50,327 in the last 30 days and 281 deaths…….vaccinated 67%
Connecticut 19.451 …….. and 158 deaths….. vaccinated 67%
Rhode Island 9,430……… and 64 deaths….vaccinated 72%

The US has just been thru 3 weeks of college football and 2 weeks of professional football with millions of unmasked fans screaming and yelling at those ‘super spreader’ events yet for the past two weeks we actually have a decline in cases.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

80% of the population is fully vaccinated.yet their cases are about to hit an all time high.

At what granularity?

Singapore’s latest death rates, if the USA had the same, would be 791 deaths in the past month (as per Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center); instead the USA did in 46,849. 46,000 deaths we wouldn’t have if we were doing as “bad” as Singapore.

“All time high” needs context. The murder rate in Victoria, BC, quadrupled a few years back because a man killed his family. quadrupling the usual one per year.

^ I should have been more clear. “About to hit an all time high” implies a rate, unless William thinks the total might take it into its head to just up and start declining (details left as an exercise).

The past month shows 10,426 cases, with the garland going to May 2020, at 18,715. I don’t understand his cipherin’.

Cases Schmaces. Are vaccinated people being hospitalized? Dying? If not the latter two, then the vaccines are doing their job. What are you trying to prove here, dear William?

Case counts don’t mean anything, because it depends on how much testing is being done, and the rate of false positives. Hospitalization and death counts can’t be trusted either, because patients hospitalized or dying for other reasons are classified as covid if their covid test is positive.

And of course we always need context. For example, population size. And age demographics.

So much hysteria and confusion is generated, on all sides, by leaving out context.

@Indie Rebel
Aside from the first paragraph, that’s the first somewhat reasonable thing I’ve seen you post here. Good job.

Singapore’s death rate from Covid-19 is one of the lowest in the world.

Now they’re launching a vaccine booster program.

Poor fools, what do they know?

If you compare data from Malaysia to Singapore it should be obvious there are vivid and interesting differences.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/malaysia

Malaysia is neighbor to Singapore and is going through a surge of fatalities, probably due to a lower vaccination rate or maybe they just ran out of hospital beds.
Singapore is probably in a surge based on neighboring infection rates but appears to be weathering the worst outcomes — going out on a limb here — because of a high vaccination rate.
The entire area is up-ticking in COVID infections which ought to spur on another effort to get your neighbors and you vaccinated before that hotspot becomes Florida’s hotspot.
It’s been a bad month for Malaysia — 9700+ deaths (record), it’s been a manageable month for Singapore – 13 deaths (not record).
I wouldn’t plan any trips to that part of the world at this time.
Hope they get the vaccines they need into the arms that need it.

Something to be wary about regarding numbers from Singapore is who they count as their population. At the end of last year the government moved very quickly on getting their own citizens vaccinated, but almost completely ignored the large migrant workforce and left them to their own devices. Unsurprisingly the virus then ripped through these people (who tend to earn less than the average Singaporean and live in more crowded and less salubrious accommodation), putting hospitals under the strain that the authorities had hoped to avoid.

They did then fix this, er, unfortunate oversight, and it’s very unlikely they’ll repeat the mistake in any future programme but the event gives you an idea of how the very authoritarian Singaporean government thinks. Double-check whether any population percentage refers to citizens alone or to residents too.

In related news….

Three US states have the lowest rates of Covid, about 25-27 each per 100 000. California, Maryland and NJ. CBS, MSN
In Idaho, an emergency has been declared invoking a “crisis standard of care” where life saving treatment is now rationed. There were no mandates for vaccines or masks. Patients are sent ( or travel themselves) to Washington. CBS, Forbes, MSNBC.

One of these places is not like the others. Discuss.

Denice, you do realize that about 1/3 of Idaho it is only 50 miles from one side of the state to the other and due to the mountainous nature of Idaho it is a shorter drive, by hundreds of miles to Spokane then Boise . Most of the larger medical centers are located in the southern part near Boise.
It only makes sense, much the same as people of New Jersey (Newark 27 miles away) going to New York hospitals.
Only people who don’t know geography would bring this up.

Look at the rate of Covid in diverse states and compare Idaho and NJ ( at mayoclinic.org/ corona Covid 19/ map) by hovering your cursor over each state.

Certain states are coded as low- medium- high by which shade of red they are.
NJ, MD and CA have low rates per 100,000, Idaho is in the worst group.

The Mayo site also has a vaccine tracker map which similarly illustrates stark differences between the aforementioned states as shown through shades of green, light to dark with vaccination rates revealed by hovering.

The problem doesn’t just affect Couer d”Alene, which is near Spokane. It is affecting the entire state.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/idaho-declares-statewide-hospital-resource-crisis-covid-surge-rcna1997

Idaho hospitals are so overwhelmed with the surge in coronavirus cases that doctors and nurses have to contact dozens of regional hospitals across the West in hopes of finding places to transfer individual critical patients.

The situation has grown so bad that the Idaho Department of Health and Wellness announced Thursday that the entire state is in a hospital resource crisis, permitting medical facilities to ration health care and triage patients.

And beds in Washington may not be that easy to locate.

Now, he said, doctors are being forced to call 30 or more hospitals across multiple states to find a bed for a single patient in hospitals with which they have little to no relationship. Some doctors in Idaho have called as far south as Texas and as far east as Georgia.

“You’re taking seven to eight hours to call a bunch of hospitals to see if one will take your patient who might face a time-sensitive emergency,” Pate said. “Seven to eight hours might mean that patient won’t survive.”

Montana and Alaska are having similar problems.

Hospitalizations in Idaho are up 33% with 67 cases per 100K, Montana is up 38% with 80 cases per 100K, and Alaska is up 23% with 101 cases per 100K..

For comparison, Washington hospitalizations are up 8% with 43 per 100K, and Oregon is down 5% with 44 per 100K.

FWIW, New Mexico is down 9% with 33 per 100K, Texas is down 8% with 55 per 100K. Mississippi with a population fatality rate of 0.3% has hospitalizations down 30% with 63 per 100K. Their governor admitted on CNN that 89% of the hospital patients were unvaccinated (the state is only 42% fully vaccinated.) But he only suggested that people maybe talk to their doctor about possibly getting vaccinated. Otherwise he’s going to continue with BAU.

It is no exaggeration to say the greed of the pharmaceutical industry is killing people. The pharmaceutical industry has spent more than $4.5 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions of the past 20 years.
Who said that, an anti-vaxxer?

How much of that money went to killing people? I must have missed the news on that.

I think we’re all in agreement that lobbying the government for freedom from oversight and economic advantage is a bad thing. Have you written your representatives stating your position against the practice of lobbying?

Still doesn’t impugn the benefits of getting a COVID vaccine.

So, you recommend avoiding all Pharma drugs and would never take one yourself, right?

And here I would have thought Tony would be all in favor of the Citizens United decision. Free speech!

Still, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce looks to about quadruple PhRMA, with the National Association of Realtors, AMA, and AHA in between, from a glance at OpenSecrets. I would like to see Tony’s sourcing, though, as it seems all the easy roads lead to Bernie.

I’ve had the two shots so am not anti vaxx.

“Cases Schmaces. Are vaccinated people being hospitalized? Dying? If not the latter two, then the vaccines are doing their job.

So much hysteria and confusion is generated, on all sides, by leaving out context.’

I took those to quotes to show, that we don’t know what we don’t know. or the CDC isn’t telling us those things.

The CDC either thru incompetence or stupidity ( I hate to assign nefarious intent, as I believe most government is stupid or incompetent). quit recording breakthrough cases back in May and now only records deaths or hospitalization (and that’s only if the states label the deaths or hospitalization as breakthrough cases (most deaths with Covid are marked just that. Not with the additional information of breakthrough case).

How is anyone that are key to solving the problem not provided with the correct information. The FDA in declining to approve the Pfizer for a booster had to use data from the UK and Israel because our own CDC couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t or is just so incompetent that it failed to collect the data on effectiveness of the vaccine. It’s that what part of the job of the CDC is ……

“Still doesn’t impugn the benefits of getting a COVID vaccine.”

How would we know of the benefits of getting a vaccine if the CDC isn’t collecting that kind of information? Did i miss some context that a US government health agency that is suppose to collect health data, didn’t actually collect some important data about the effectiveness of a vaccine.

Tony
My search engine shows those are Bernie Sanders quotes, I see what you did there.

It’s a bit more complicated than that.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/25/cdc-pandemic-limited-data-breakthroughs-506823

The agency originally tried to track all infections in vaccinated people, from mild to severe. But in May it decided to focus on the most severe cases, saying that would allow it to better monitor overall conditions and make more informed, targeted policy decisions.

Forty-nine states are now regularly sending CDC information on hospitalized breakthrough patients. But more than a dozen told POLITICO that they do not have the capacity to match patients’ hospital admission data with their immunization records. Instead, those states rely on hospital administrators to report breakthrough infections. The resulting data is often aggregated, inaccurate and omits critical details for teasing out trends, such as which vaccine a person received and whether they have been fully vaccinated, a dozen state officials said.

If you can’t get consistent, useful data and the results don’t help inform your policy decisions, it’s better to focus on the important data that you can get and use.

And, while the vaccines are less effective against Delta than Alpha, they are still very helpful.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-how-well-covid-19-vaccines-work-against-the-delta-variant?slot_pos=article_4&utm_source=Sailthru%20Email&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=daily&utm_content=2021-09-17&apid=34481092&rvid=f9ba8fdef39d332f202f257efcaad0995515ea20fa23274f24809cbd3a5168af#Vaccines-vs.-Delta-variant

ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS OF MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE
Vaccine effectiveness was around 80 to 95 percent for all outcomes before Delta, but now it’s 50 to 72 percent effective against infection and over 80 percent effective against hospitalization.

ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS OF PFIZER-BIONTECH VACCINE
Vaccine effectiveness was 87 to 96 percent for all outcomes before Delta, but now it’s 39 to 84 percent effective against infection and 75 to 95 percent effective against hospitalization.

ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS OF J&J COVID-19 VACCINE
As with other vaccines, the J&J vaccine shows a slight dip in effectiveness against the Delta variant, but more comprehensive studies are needed to reach a definitive answer.

Yes – yes you did miss context, data analysis, plain fact, and some other things. Would say I believe health care professionals more than real crappy lawyers about the nature and treatment of COVID. Are you related to William?

Hmmm, how shall I choose … what you say because you think you know how to read, or what the incredible consensus says because they have the professional skills to observe, explain, and make recommendations to contain the pandemic (with data to prove it).

We do know the benefits of COVID vaccination. Those who get it are less likely to die than those who don’t get it. Pretty simple stuff. No one can convince you, and it doesn’t much matter to me.

The covid vaccines don’t immunize you against JAQing off and fact-free speculation. Taking them has nothing to do with whether or not you’re an antivaxxer.

“I’ve had the two shots so am not anti vaxx.”

Do you recommend that everyone in an eligible group who doesn’t have a medical contraindication be vaccinated against Covid-19? How about other vaccines?

So we are back to using consensus again as defense/offense?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/health/fda-advisers-booster-five-things/index.html

I thought the whole idea of a vaccine was to prevent the virus and keep it from spreading?
Again the CDC is NOT collecting data on ‘breakthrough’ cases which would have supported a booster shot.a study on hospitalization and deaths doesn’t show the need for a booster.

“There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated,” says Uri Shalit, a bioinformatician at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) who has consulted on COVID-19 for the government. “One of the big stories from Israel [is]: ‘Vaccines work, but not well enough.’”

science.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vaccination-blunts-does-not-defeat-delta

I suggest you read the trial protocols for the different vaccines.

They were tested and evaluated based on their ability to prevent symptomatic disease, as well as hospitalization and death. And, as the numbers I cited earlier today show, they are still doing fairly well at that, although not quite as well against the Delta variant. In particular, there is a large uncertainty ranger for protection against infection for the Pfizer vaccine.

They were not tested for ability to prevent infection. I would guess that is because the expense and overhead of doing weekly or even biweekly PCR tests would be unmanageable. Also, it would be much harder to get good compliance from the test subjects. That information can be gleaned from the 6 and 12 month serology results. But real world results like the study cited by Narad and a study of hospital employees have given much better information on infection prevention.

One factor that confuses the issue is the discussion on what percentage of the population we need to get vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. That number has gone up because of the greater replication rate of the delta variant and the lower protection rate.

And the large segment of the U.S. population that resists vaccination combined with a big age group (< 12 years old) that are not yet eligible will make it difficult to achieve anyway.

So, we’ll have to rely on a combination of vaccine protection to minimize serious disease, acquired immunity by those who survive the disease, and boosted immunity from breakthrough infections.

As for Israel, in the last 28 days (since your reference), they have had 234,908 cases and 736 deaths. That works out to 336 deaths per 100K cases. In the U.S. we have had 4,290,319 cases and 44,801 deaths or 1044 deaths per 100K cases. In Peru for instance, there have been 25,184 cases and 1158 deaths or 4598 deaths per 100K. (The actual ratio may be lower if Peru’s testing rate is also lower.)

So, the vaccinations are paying off for Israel, even if a lot of vaccinated individuals have to be hospitalized for what prove to be less severe cases.

“and boosted immunity from breakthrough infections”

So. I am ‘fully’ vaccinated. Are you suggesting that getting just a little bit of coronavirus is the same as a “booster” of vaccine for me?

There is a paper about vaccine effectiveness against Delta variant
Seppälä Elina, Veneti Lamprini, Starrfelt Jostein, Danielsen Anders Skyrud, Bragstad Karoline, Hungnes Olav, Taxt Arne Michael, Watle Sara Viksmoen, Meijerink Hinta. Vaccine effectiveness against infection with the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant, Norway, April to August 2021. Euro Surveill. 2021;26(35):pii=2100793. https://doi.org/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2021.26.35.2100793
You will notice that data is quite fresh, It seems that booster doses are indeed not needed.

There is another paper:
Lopez Bernal J, Andrews N, Gower C, Gallagher E, Simmons R, Thelwall S, Stowe J, Tessier E, Groves N, Dabrera G, Myers R, Campbell CNJ, Amirthalingam G, Edmunds M, Zambon M, Brown KE, Hopkins S, Chand M, Ramsay M. Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines against the B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant. N Engl J Med. 2021 Aug 12;385(7):585-594. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2108891. Epub 2021 Jul 21. PMID: 34289274; PMCID: PMC8314739.
You need not rely on big mouthed consultants.

Honeybunch, I never left the ‘consensus’ of good science invigorated to produce data simply to help people live better. Even you. It sure beats bumblers who have no interest but padding their own lobby check and getting some ‘likes’.

The point of the vaccine was to reduce death and suffering (always has). I do support efforts to make them better, maybe we can agree on that.

Yea, we are all sheeple, and don’t know the real story. Some dude or dudess has the truth or believes it real strong in their bones, fomenting on whatever platform they are allowed on. Been there, done that. CONSPIRACY! I KNOW IT’S TRUE — GET BACK TO YOU LATER. — SARCASM!

Anyway.

mr/mrs/miss narad or whatever pronoun you would like to use.

“I would like to see Tony’s sourcing, though, as it seems all the easy roads lead to Bernie.”

if you can post on this site your can cut and past those comments I posted and preform your own search, they come from Sanders website and his twitter account. (he is a very big anti big pharma person and believes that the drug companies are exploiting their power and influence in the US government health care system and using people to influence public opinion) If you don’t believe what I post is verbatim (and not the good floppy disc kind) do your own research.

But it does seem odd that you will believe what ever the CDC or NSA or NIH or DOJ or FBI or DOD or any other faceless, nameless government employee posts (as long as it is on an office government website) rather then rely on your own skills.

1000 links
‘Would say I believe health care professionals’
so ALL the health care professionals got together and made a decision……Its why its called a medical opinion, your biological unit is different then my biological unit, we are similar but unique and our biological systems react differently.
‘No one can convince you, and it doesn’t much matter to me.’ but it sure looks like it does matter to you.

From Bernie Sanders’ website:

“WASHINGTON – December 19 – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders received the COVID-19 vaccine from U.S. Capitol physician, Dr. Brian P. Monahan on Saturday.

Sanders said, “Following the advice of the Office of the Attending Physician, today I received the safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. As the vaccine is being distributed, we must all continue wearing masks and engage in social distancing. That is how we will beat this virus and end this terrible pandemic.”

Looks like Bernie, despite his opinions about pharma abuses, is able to recognize when drug companies produce valuable interventions.

Not sure where to put this but..

Mike Adams latest reporting about Black Ops/ DoD. CDC attacks ( Monday)

In his update, he explains how health freedom advocates have been targeted by the government : months ago, at a health freedom event** in Tulsa, he and many other presenters got very ill, including well-known anti-vaxxers, Tenpenny and Palevsky. Mike took his supplements and chlorine dioxide and improved rapidly. He believes that agents secretly spread nanoparticles/ spike proteins amongst participants causing illness. In fact, spraying viruses like this began by causing an outbreak of measles at Disneyland to force childhood vaccination and the initial US outbreak of Covid-19 in NYC was because they sprayed the city with spike proteins. Agents also spread bacteria at Chipotle shops causing illness because of the company’s clean food mission. ( first 20 minutes, all I could stand; today’s is even worse)
Thus all of these illnesses were not naturally occurring but planned to attack health enthusiasts and natural living advocates- and those bioweapons must have been very powerful to harm the healthiest people on the planet!

Mike caters to his audience’s deep need to be different, to be first and to ‘know more than experts’ by concocting bizarre, highly unlikely scenarios like these. They want to feel superior to those “ill educated” doctors and scientists who tell everyone what to do. I’ve speculated that both he and the other woo-meister need themselves to get an ego boost because they probably personally had dreams of greatness in medicine or science but couldn’t get accepted at even undergraduate programmes at decent universities ( see their bios/ CVs at their websites) and are forever railing against that “injustice”. They attack the Establishment because it didn’t accept them at all and pose as revolutionaries revealing its corruption.

** anti-vaccine and anti-mask of course

It must be tiring to live such a paranoid existence that every minor stomach upset is caused by the Illuminati, rather than being the result of eating the dodgy prawn canapes.

Mike better be careful when traveling to those Loon Confabs. If he’s carrying chlorine dioxide bleach onto the plane as part of his “emergency” first aid kit to counter CDC death squads, he’s liable to run afoul of the FAA (you’re not supposed to take bleach onto commercial flights).

There’s probably lots of interesting stuff in Mike’s carry-on bug-out bag.

Oh I know!

They probably wouldn’t eat prawns because they may be vegan or opposed to cruel harvesting techniques or products from China or another arcane problem. Maybe it was the bad tofu or kombucha

Mike does mention that it must have been a very powerful bioweapon because these are the healthiest people on earth!

From what I can ascertain, both Mikey and Gary no longer fly to events because of airlines’/ govermental fascistic rules. They drive to wherever they go or do virtual events. Null said that he drives around the country to film his ‘documentaries’ and to visit his estates and sleeps in a sleeping bag.

Because of my vaunted position in the Illuminati, I actually enjoy travelling by plane and staying in hotels: they give me special treats like biscotti or muffins, no weaponsied spike proteins at all.

They have estates (?!?) — guess they have to bring it down a couple notches with the sleeping bags and all. Such drama!

Yea, I didn’t think these goofballs were here to sell tofu. Who knows what they eat, but I’m putting some money down that what they say and what they do, most regularly, is not equal.

Can I be Illuminati too? 🙂

Thanks!

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