Statistics

Dreaded Delta; Noble Lies In The Name of Science; No Fly List With Mark of the Vex; More! — Coronavirus Update LXXXIII

MUCH MORE THAN WE CAN DO

There is so much material this week I can’t include it all in one update. It would grow far too long. If it can be summed up in one simple phrase, it’s this: Elites versus the rest of us.

HELP WITH A WORD

What is it called when a conspiracy theory (like vexxine passports once were) are revealed to be true? Surely the Germans have something.

Those police, like the ones soon by you, are just following orders.

HOW IS THIS GUY NOT CANCELED?

His opinion, which regular readers won’t be unfamiliar with, is that the coronadoom will be with us forever, and that most of the attempted “solutions” are making things worse or are useless.

Zero COVID, which countries like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and others is insane and will cause more harm than good, because since the bug can’t be eradicated, locking countries down until it goes away means lockdowns forever.

You know I don’t love videos, but do watch this one.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MESSAGING

Though they can’t always keep their story straight:

DREADED DELTA

Everywhere there are panicking headlines about the Dreaded Delta’s raging surges. Vexxine mandates are needed! Masks are needed! Save us from the Dreaded Delta.

Then comes this headline:

I can’t get over how hilarious this headline is, married to the breathless announcements: “Be careful! You might not even know you’re sick!”

Well, we wouldn’t want such a mild illness to spread the population, providing them with antibodies.

Then they might not want the vexxine.

Scientists are working on gain-of-function experiments right now to make the Delta variant more deadly, so as to encourage more people to get the vexxine.

From the article:

However, Kanter is seeing many patients present with symptoms that appear to be run-of-the-mill illnesses, like sinus congestion, runny nose and sore throat. These symptoms could be signs that patients have the delta variant, he told Audacy.

“You can present with relatively mild symptoms that you can easily confuse for allergies or something that you picked up from your kid who is in daycare, all of those things,” said Kanter. “If you have any symptoms, no matter how mild, even if it is a sore throat, even if it is a runny nose, even if it is sinus congestion, go get yourself tested and limit your contact with other people until you do so.”

I know you’re sick of me trotting out I-Told-You_Sos. But I told you so.

NOBLE LIES, I.E. BLATANT FALSEHOODS

“NIH director Francis Collins: ‘It may sound weird’ but parents should wear masks at home in front of their unvaccinated kids”.

Collins is so obviously full of horseshit about parents wearing masks with their own kids at home that even the Fabulous Fauci had to come out later and say he “misspoke.” Making two lies for one.

They told so many lies they don’t know how to do anything else but continue to lie.

Meanwhile, remember Sweden? No lockdown, no mask mandate, low vexxinated, let-the-virus-play-out to avoid the crushing effects of isolation and variants Sweden?

So the Path of Sanity was wisest after all. Strange so few places followed this advice. I won money bets on Sweden. I would have won more, but I find so few willing to take bets.

Here’s a full breakdown of the Sane approach: Sweden: Despite Variants, No Lockdowns, No Daily Covid Deaths.

Modelers desperately tried to scare Sweden into locking down. One predicted an incredible median of 96,000 deaths, with a maximum of 183,000. At Sweden’s Lund University an academic used the parameters in the now-infamous Neil Ferguson/Imperial College model to warn that it meant 85,000 deaths for Sweden. An Uppsala University team also found the nation paying a terrible price with 40,000 Covid-19 deaths by May 1, 2020 and almost 100,000 by June.

Total Swedish Covid deaths at this writing: 14,651.

What did I tell you—what am I telling you now—about models?

Alas, I am in charge of nothing.

JUST DIE ALREADY

Who would have guessed woke effeminate progressives would increase their shrill shivering demands for “Safety! Safety! Safety!” and demand the unvexxinated be put on no-fly lists?

The very no-fly lists created when woke effeminate progressives shrieked “Safety! Safety! Safety!” after 9/11.

I’ll tell you who: the author of the shriek: “About the author: Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Obama, is the faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.”

Thanks, TSA!

MARK OF THE VEX

Here’s the picture of coronadoom attributed deaths for the whole of New York, not just the city, on the day its evil ruler announced that no man may buy or sell without the Mark of the Vex.

It can’t be the Mark is needed to quell deaths. Unless one is so hersterical as to ask for zero doom deaths forevermore. That position is—and I do not use literary license here, but speak in earnestness—insane. It will never happen. Ever. Pursuing the impossible—not unlikely: impossible—is insane.

So our rulers are not only evil, but incompetent. Which is worse.

Now the Mark in NYC will be needed for most, but not yet all, things. Still, de Blasio the Incompetent wants more. He said “all options are on the table. I keep saying we’re climbing the ladder in terms of more and more mandates….If you’re not vaccinated, there’s going to be more and more things you can’t do.”

Not one of these Incompetents see that the hersterical effeminate shrieking and mandates about the vexxine is why many don’t trust and don’t want it.

I was arguing with a lawyer on Twitter about this and he brought up that driving requires insurance, so that coronadoom should require vexxination. This is an asinine, even evil, argument. For nobody needs to drive. But you can’t ban living.

If you want to truly follow that line of argument about insurance, just raise rates for those who have it using data from actuarial tables about who is really at risk and who isn’t.

I asked him this. Answer came there none.

“CASE” LAW

I shout myself hoarse with this, but cannot get anybody to listen.

This is why only liars and incompetents focus on “cases”—which are only positive tests amidst huge increases in testing. Let’s try attributed deaths.

It’s all I can do to restrain myself from raving profanity at the idiocy of our rulers and Experts.

EXPERTS

CULT OF THE MASK

AUSTRALIA FINES CITIZENS FOR CLAIMING MASKS WORK TO PROTECT AGAINST SARS-CoV-1

“Penalties can range from fines of up to $22,000 for an individual or $110,000 for a corporation,”

From 2003. Alas, times change.

“Those masks are only effective so long as they are dry,” said Professor Yvonne Cossart of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney.

“As soon as they become saturated with the moisture in your breath they stop doing their job and pass on the droplets.”

Professor Cossart said that could take as little as 15 or 20 minutes, after which the mask would need to be changed. But those warnings haven’t stopped people snapping up the masks, with retailers reporting they are having trouble keeping up with demand…

Mr Bell agreed with Professor Cossart’s assessment regarding the effectiveness of the masks.

“I think they’re of marginal benefit,” he said. “In a way they give some comfort to people who think they’re doing as much as they can do to prevent the infection.”

That seems to be the mentality of travellers to Asian destinations, who are buying and wearing the masks while overseas.

Rosemary Taylor, of Kirribilli, arrived in Sydney from Shanghai last week after a two-week holiday in China. Ms Taylor and travelling companion Joan Switzer had worn the masks during the trip home, even though they had been warned they were of little value.

“We were told you need 16 layers on your mask for it to offer 95per cent protection,” Ms Taylor said.

THE VEXXINE DOES WHAT EXACTLY?

Item: “Fully-vaccinated people who catch Delta Covid variant really may be JUST as infectious as the un-jabbed, Government figures suggest”

We have seen mask cultists in various spots say the “fully” vexxinated must re-mask up. Lest they become infected.

Which means, as we have seen all over the world now, that the vexxinated can indeed become infected. (No surprise to us, because we said this often.) Now an infected person can infect another person. Thus a “fully” vexxinated person can infect another “fully” vexxinated person.

So it’s masks forever, even in every single person is tied to a gurney and forcibly injected, since the coronadoom will never go away.

Not only masks forever, but booster shots, too: “Moderna says we’ll need COVID-19 booster shots this fall, predicting that protection from its vaccine will wane“.

Our Experts are idiots.

IVERMECTIN

New paper Abstract.

…Primary endpoint was reduction of viral-load on the 6th day (third day after termination of treatment) as reflected by Ct level>30 (non-infectious level)…

Eighty-nine patients were eligible (47 in ivermectin and 42 in placebo arm). Their median age was 35 years. Females accounted for 21.6%, and 16.8% were asymptomatic at recruitment. Median time from symptom onset was 4 days. There were no statistical differences in these parameters between the two groups.

On day 6, 34 out of 47 (72%) patients in the ivermectin arm reached the endpoint, compared to 21/ 42 (50%) in the placebo arm (OR 2·62; 95% CI: 1.09-6.31). In a multivariable logistic-regression model, the odds of a negative test at day 6 was 2.62 time higher in the ivermectin group (95% CI: 1.06–6.45). Cultures at days 2 to 6 were positive in 3/23 (13.0%) of ivermectin samples vs. 14/29 (48.2%) in the placebo group (p=0.008).

Hopeful and interesting, but not yet conclusive.

WHAT HAPPENED TO FLU?

It’s still gone the world over.

Here’s a take on a theory that’s going around: The Disappearance of Influenza.

Some months ago, I suggested that Corona’s victory over influenza could well represent a permanent change in the order of respiratory viruses – a revolution, perhaps a very rare one. The only conceivable historical precedent would be the Spanish Flu of 1918. While we have historical reports of influenza-like illness going back centuries, we don’t have any sequenced viruses predating the second wave of this great 1918 pandemic. Before 1918, we can’t be sure that seasonal flu-like illnesses were caused by influenza viruses at all. For all we know, coronaviruses were the dominant scourge prior to 1918, and their centuries-long reign was interrupted by the anomalous and highly destructive avian influenza that entered humans in that year. Perhaps the ensuing century of influenza was an unstable equilibrium, an anomaly, and Corona has restored a prior, more ordinary world.

Read it all.

BOOK

The Price of Panic.

Website of similar name: price of panic.

THE NUMBERS

Sources: CDC State data (source), CDC official toll number one, number two (the old weekly file, now suspect). Causes of death (source). Deaths by age. Covid & flu. WHO flu tracker. All current as of Monday.

Daily tests (from here from Johns Hopkins) have spiked again. Now almost 2 million a day. Last time we saw that was January.

Select state data.

You can see the Dreaded Delta blip for Texas and Florida. It’s there for the top three states, too. But smaller. My idea is because their lockdowns and other punishments killed more people early, fewer are available to die now.

The vex rate for Texas, Michigan, and Nebraska appears to be about the same, and Florida and Minnesota has higher than both, and California higher than all these. So this isn’t a strong vex signal.

All cause weekly deaths:

How about the weekly coronadoom deaths?

The DD blip is there. It will grow a bit, I’m guessing, the next two weeks.

Deaths by age:

Hard to tell where the new deaths are coming from until you squnit. Numbers are small. The media is saying “What about the children!” The media lies. It’s still the old. And it isn’t even close.

How ’bout that flu? Still gone.

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Categories: Statistics

158 replies »

  1. “HOW IS THE GUY NOT CANCELLED?”
    He’s not saying anything:
    Below, is the first thing the man said only to contradict straight away, claiming the Goldilocks amount of vaccine, which he happens to know.
     
    He said,

    One of the core problems is that you can’t vaccinate your way out of an ongoing pandemic and you shouldn’t really be doing that. You need to focus your strategy on protecting the people that are most vulnerable; providing alternative options for those that do get sick. ..”

    (Did he say something original there?)
     
    So he first says you can’t vaccinate your way out and then proceeds to say that you must provide protection for the most vulnerable and provide alternate options for those who are going to get sick.
    Talk about content free… Hand waving, then saying something about just the right amount of vaccine!
     
    What the man appears to be pointing out is the known arms race which is already being waged by man since antibiotics and the first pharmaceutical infection control began.
    Infection control is the most successful branch of medicine and is the reason for increased life expectancy. So the man’s claims of imaginary spin, just aren’t there. Yet it is being presented as if the spin is on the side of the virologists and scientists providing the solutions.
     
    It is sour grapes of a commentator who doesn’t trust anybody but himself. Little more than back seat driving. Or the person who watches while someone else mops the floor and says,
    “You missed a bit!!’
     
    It also makes heavy use as usual of the false dichotomy fallacy as if there’s only one solution to be thrown at the problem. As if anybody thinks there is! Belt and braces, seems to be a term lost when it comes to explaining multiple measures (particularly at times when the virus is getting traction).
     
    He’s right about one thing: it’s very basic biology

  2. Having tried to use the pandemic/vaccine passports to re-create the Trans-Pacific/Trans-Atlantic supranational governing body, they are now trying to use it to re-introduce Obamacare by the back door. Expect all vaccines to be fully approved by the FDA within weeks:

    Obamacare architect floated for top FDA job:

    https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/06/fda-commissioner-search-biden-admin-502718

    Also more skullduggery by Pfizer:

    “This is key to understanding “what the heck is going on”. Apparently in Israel, I am told by Israeli scientist, the agreement between Pfizer and the government is that no adverse events from the vax are to be disclosed for a minimum of 10 years.”

    https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1424374832628527112

  3. SSgt. Briggs – Your theory about the recent (small) spikes in TX and FL may well be true, but I’d like to offer an alternate, or supplemental, take:

    You have pointed out repeatedly that respiratory viruses have huge seasonal spikes in the winter as populations voluntarily lock down to avoid cold weather. Well, I happen to live in FL and I can tell that all of FL and much of TX are in the middle of our own voluntary lockdowns to avoid the heat.

    Semper Fi

  4. Re: Israel’s vaccination status:
    According to Ft vaccine tracker:
    Israel:
    129.3 = doses per hundred thousand residents
    64.2 = % vaccinated at least one does
    59.6 =% fully vaccinated
    11.7 million vaccines administered as of 8th August

    Here

    Just in case: here

  5. “What is it called when a conspiracy theory (like vexxine passports once were) are revealed to be true?” A typical day in the USA.

    “I can’t get over how hilarious this headline is, married to the breathless announcements: “Be careful! You might not even know you’re sick!”” How insane these people are…I told an Xray tech I had a cough, then realized what I had said and noted I’d had it over 20 years. She laughed and said she understood. If you so much as sneeze, people go insane.

    Tell the lawyer to start injecting microchips with insurance policies written on them. An insurance vaccination, if you will. He’ll love it.

    “It’s all I can do to restrain myself from raving profanity at the idiocy of our rulers and Experts.” Which is what gives these people power and maintains their position. They do LOVE people like yourself.

    Now they want KN95 masks on CHILDREN. Thankfully those are the cheap Chinese knockoffs that one might be able to breathe through for over 30 minutes. Only half the kids will suffocate.

    “My idea is because their lockdowns and other punishments killed more people early, fewer are available to die now.” Of course. But never look at more than ONE factor at a time. You can continue the lies for decades that way. Worked great with climate. Nothing but CO2 counts right now. All weather is determined entirely by CO2—not ocean currents, not winds, not the sun. That leaves a lot of things to switch to later if CO2 loses it’s punch.

    Rand Paul is trying to get people to act, saying they can’t put us all in jail. Problem is, I still do not see evidence that more than a handful of people care. Most love being treated like garbage and watching the elites lie. Think about your neighbors. I’d bet 90% are fine with the USA going to hell and even if they are not, will do nothing to stop it.

  6. Matt,

    This compilation of data on Israel and covid seems to be the clearest illustration of the counter-effectiveness of the vaccines being used against this really bad cold virus:

    https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination-israel-impact

    Note that it appears that Israel passed the 50% vaccinated population level on/about March 15.

    Then note the explosion in numbers of cases/deaths/hospitalizations/ICU admissions 90 days after that 50% fully vaccinated population achievement, beginning about June 15.

    Exponential growth in all the bad things, 90 days after 50% vaccination.

    It don’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows!

  7. “You have pointed out repeatedly that respiratory viruses have huge seasonal spikes in the winter as populations voluntarily lock down to avoid cold weather. Well, I happen to live in FL and I can tell that all of FL and much of TX are in the middle of our own voluntary lockdowns to avoid the heat.”
    Just as happened last summer in the south of the USA.
    This is not Briggs’ theory, it’s well known facts about respiratory virus spread. Indoors is far worse as close human contact is the way the virus spreads.
    Cold affects the virus by preserving it better than heat.
    Air con does this in the summer or in hot climates.
     
    The seasonality of the virus is not and never has been questioned except in the first few weeks of its emergence, when it was predicted/predictable but not known.
     
    Hence hospital and care settings are hotbeds for infection, not new or novel, that.
     
    Re:
    “bad cold” comment above:
    adult respiratory distress syndrome does not happen due to a bad cold. It does not resemble a cold in any way shape or form, no matter how many times, some skeptic says it is so.
    Multiple organ failure and sepsis. Permanent tissue damage which affects quality and duration of life does not emerge from a ‘common cold’.

  8. “…adult respiratory distress syndrome does not happen due to a bad cold. It does not resemble a cold in any way shape or form, no matter how many times, some skeptic says it is so.”

    Really? Gosh, medical knowledge pre-panic seems to be down the memory hole. Fear is a horrible mind-killer.

    Pre-panic, everyone knew that “adult respiratory distress” (a group of symptoms commonly caused by lung infections (pneumonia) was often preceded by colds (the majority of which were caused by COVID viruses), flu, and other respiratory ailments.

    Mayo Clinic:
    “This type of pneumonia can occur on its own or after you’ve had a cold or the flu…..Some of the viruses that cause colds and the flu can cause pneumonia. Viruses are the most common cause of pneumonia in children younger than 5 years. Viral pneumonia is usually mild. But in some cases it can become very serious. Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) may cause pneumonia, which can become severe.”

    https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pneumonia/symptoms-causes/syc-20354204

    While panic may have erased previously common knowledge from the minds of the easily panicked and their enablers, that previous knowledge is still available for calmer realists to access (at least for now):

    https://www.inogen.com/blog/12-signs-cold-may-pneumonia/

    “If you have an illness that started as a cold, but has progressed, you may be wondering, “What does pneumonia feel like?” It is a good idea to know the signs and symptoms of pneumonia in case you or someone you love develops it. Although coming down with a cold is usually no cause for alarm, it does weaken the immune system, which increases your risk for pneumonia. Additionally, infants, the elderly and people who have ongoing health conditions like COPD are at a higher risk for developing pneumonia.”

    “Influenza (flu) is a highly contagious viral infection that is one of the most severe illnesses of the winter season. Influenza is spread easily from person to person, usually when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Pneumonia is a serious infection or inflammation of the lungs. The air sacs fill with pus and other liquid, blocking oxygen from reaching the bloodstream. If there is too little oxygen in the blood, the body’s cells cannot work properly, which can lead to death. Influenza is a common cause of pneumonia, especially among younger children, the elderly, pregnant women, or those with certain chronic health conditions or who live in a nursing home. Most cases of flu never lead to pneumonia, but those that do tend to be more severe and deadly. In fact, flu and pneumonia were the eighth leading cause of death in the United States in 2016.”

    Don’t let fear rule you.

  9. To echo kopfjaeger’s sentiments, I am a Gulf Coast Texan, and can attest that, though I love to be outdoors, even in the heat, it’s so brutally hot (and humid) that I stay inside most of the time between July and September.

    Perhaps there’s a clue in previous year flu data for Southern states? I’ve never looked into it before, and flu season always tracked with the winter months like you would expect, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smaller spikes occurred in the hottest months too.

  10. The Ludington, MI/Manitowac WI SS Badger Ferry is shut or shutting down for a week because a crewman tested positive for Covid. I’d just booked a Wednesday passage for my wife yesterday

    This morning, I received an email

    Reservation ######
    Payment $$$.$$
    Refund $$$.$$
    This reservation has been cancelled

    My wife found out by trying to book a hotel in Ludington for Wednesday.
    The hotel told her the ferry was shutdown for a week

    c’est la vie

  11. The flu situation is a good example of the fallen state of our science. It may be that the Wuhan Flu and its “variants” have deposed influenza from its throne. But we’ll never know, since it will be years before anyone is even allowed to advance that the idea is possible in an “official” study. It’s already been decided that masks and lockdowns obliterated the flu, and that we should all panic about the possibility of the flu coming back in winter of 2020 since most places had let up on their mitigation efforts by then. Erm, I mean, winter of 2021.

    Of all explanations the idea that masking and lockdowns eliminated the flu was always the least plausible. It does not account for why the flu vanished everywhere, including places without restrictions. It does not account for why the flu has flatlined even when those measures are lightened or remove, especially when there are spikes in COVID blamed on the same activities that traditionally spread the flu. It does not explain why countries with high levels of masking during influenza season did not have lower rates of the flu previously. It also assumes that these measures are tremendously effective for slowing the spread of respiratory diseases generally, which has not been borne out by comparisons of the spread of COVID-19 in neighboring locales that did or did not have strict lockdown and masking measures.

    On top of everything, there has been no study or experiment to prove that masks and lockdowns actually did stop the flu. The role of doctors and scientists has been to assume the conclusion, and then make rationalizations for how the evidence led us there. Some of these sleights of hands are truly something to see. For example, the argument that the fact that the flu disappears while COVID did not is proof of how dramatically COVID can spread so that things like masking have almost no effect when compared to other diseases, while still saying that masking is essential to stop COVID. Or in response to the question of “why did countries that didn’t lockdown or have mask mandates still see the flu vanish?” it was answered in the early days “even though those countries did not lockdown, other countries did, which prevented international travel and with it prevented those countries from encountering new strains of the flu.” Obviously such an explanation would not work now, and I’m curious as to what the new explanation would be. Mostly it’s just not talked about today.

    I will admit that my leading explanation at first was “flu cases are being called COVID cases because of government and international health organization incentivization.” Certainly this has to be part of the issue since we did see things like the CDC combine influenza and COVID tracking. But even this does not explain how the trend could be worldwide for this length of time. So the “COVID displaced the flu” theory does look plausible.

  12. “Expect all vaccines to be fully approved by the FDA within weeks…”

    Yes, they will rush this change in nomenclature, despite the fact that the jabs are still technically in trial phase, and despite massive evidence of “vaccine” failure (ignoring new “case” in the vaxed and adverse events and deaths which dwarf those for any other vaccine since VAERS began – more deaths than all other vaxes combined) in order to attempt to give legal cover to the promotion vax mandates for jobs, schools, etc (even military says they will move up their “must vax by” date if FDA changes to “fully approved” from EUA sooner).

    4If people don’t resist now – mandates, vax passports, etc…then all is lost. Put a fork in this world and plan your exit. It won’t stop with Covid, and soon you’ll be allowed no life at all if you don’t sign up for an ever-increasing menagerie of new Big Pharma jabs, express non-regime-approved political or social thoughts, etc.

  13. “Really? Gosh, medical knowledge pre-panic seems to be down the memory hole. Fear is a horrible mind-killer.”
    What kind of remark is that? Loose the venom, stay positive.
    You are tacitly claiming that adult respiratory distress syndrome occurs with the common cold.
    Have to tell you that it occurred very rarely but not unheard of prior to covid 19 and as a feature of Sars 1.
    So I’m guessing you think that the term “adult respiratory distress syndrome” or ARDS
    is precisely the same thing as, any kind of “respiratory distress”?

    Hard to tell. Since I didn’t read the rest after the nastiness.
     
    What you claim in your opening intro, is just untrue but your have arrogated yourself into a position where you think you know more just because…?
    ~~~
    The argument in. general appears to be moving towards the “vaccines don’t work” as we move through the phase of opening up. In the US, there are a third to a half of the population without vaccination if FT is correct. Since the delta variant is making it’s way to the dominant one in the US as it has done elsewhere, if it hasn’t already, it means that spread will inevitably happen fast as it did in India where it began.
    ~~~
    When all. there is are conspiracies about each and every element of this epidemic and a lot of bitter hatred at individuals who refuse to agree with the cultish poetic of the conspiracy. ” Fair gaming” I believe it was once referred to.

  14. “When all. there is are conspiracies…”

    It’s not a conspiracy theory when the plan is open for all to see, aspects of it come true more every day (Non Covid-related, but remember when they called Alex Jones crazy and banned him everywhere for, inter alia, suggesting fetal organ harvesting was going on? See last week’s news about just such a program at the U of Pittsburgh), and the regime really is gunning for you.

    Even when the regime-approved Narrative is in tatters, they just double-down on the insanity and hope the sheeple remain brain-dead and compliant. In May-June, I thought the worst was over, and people were waking up, and wouldn’t put up with attempts to re-introduce muzzles, etc. No more. Very, very dark days ahead.

  15. Dennis,
    They are dark days indeed I’m sure I’m more tired of it than you are but hey.
    If you’re in a dark hole what do you do? I mean a really deep tunnel like one?
    I’m suggesting look for the light, not to wallow in the bad stuff.
    Also don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.
    Re vaccine efficacy, it would be more transparent to publish data on each vaccine separately but that’s another can of worms and I see it as quite separate from the discussion such as is had in the US about vaccines. It is also being used to push the agenda of public health in general, which is opportunism and it is wrong, since nobody voted for it in the US.
     
    Of course you shouldn’t be forced to have a vaccine but perspective on this is that all staff on healthcare in this country have to be up to date with their inoculations for recommended diseases.
    Military personnel have to have vaccines, the precise list of which I can’t give you but I worked in several settings and that was always a feature of appointments in the med centres. Especially prior to deployment. In one instance, there was a constant flow of patients reporting ‘gulf war syndrome’ or rather claiming the symptoms of it. I never got involved in the politics but simply treated them as I found them.
     
    Don’t know of any soldiers or health care staff prior to this, who have refused to have vaccines and still insisting on being on the payroll.
     
    No doubt that this current vaccine is going to see some of those kind of objections as it seems a number of staff working in care homes are calling unfair play because they’re being asked to vaccinate or leave. (According to the way the media puts it over)
     
    On the same principle of freedom of the businessman or proprietor to operate his business as they wish, I think it is fine for private care settings to insist on vaccination prior to employment.
    Just as I think it should be allowable for people to smoke in pubs or restaurants. I also believe that discrimination law has gone too far with regards to the freedom of an employer. Quoters, etc.
     
    Yet the freedom argument is also used by the staff who don’t want to lose their jobs over the vaccine. Haven’t heard directly or seen one saying this, but just talk of it, which is likely media stirring.
     
    Meanwhile it is freedom of speech in the UK which is being attacked and is a far greater worry for any parliamentary system. Foreign money is behind much of the BS. It’s modern warfare.
     
    So I’m looking for the signs of hope. Unlike you , I also think this is going to be over sooner rather than later. Masks here have already been discarded as far as I can tell. Someone accused me of wearing a mask but I don’t. I only started wearing one once they were mandated. A dimple dentist type blue and white one, after I lost the one with animals all over it. Mum made me laugh when we were out wearing out masks and she said I long ago decided I can either see or breather. (She wears glasses).

    Anyway, It’s all a war of attrition. You know now what it’s been like for years, living under the EU laws. There are factions around the world that wanted us to stay in our box but alas, no, we’re out out. Now we have the backlash and the revenge and on and on. Check Neil O’sullivan on GB news. Farrage is doing a Grand job.

  16. “Unlike you , I also think this is going to be over sooner rather than later.”

    Covid is just the beginning. Covid will seem like child’s play next to what’s coming in the years ahead. Humanity had a good run for a while at least…

  17. “Re:
    “bad cold” comment above:
    adult respiratory distress syndrome does not happen due to a bad cold. It does not resemble a cold in any way shape or form, no matter how many times, some skeptic says it is so.
    Multiple organ failure and sepsis. Permanent tissue damage which affects quality and duration of life does not emerge from a ‘common cold’.”

    Venom is a state of mind. Confusion is too. No venom here–just surveying the landscape of fear and confusion and sharing sources of real-world knowledge.

    Common knowledge, pre-pandemic, is reflected in the multiple sources (provided 3 online sources above, including the Mayo Clinic) that describe how pneumonia (the most common underlying CAUSE of lung distress) is commonly a result of the common cold (which used to be caused by Covid viruses), or flu infections.

    Covid-19 is a covid virus. It causes symptoms that are identical to the common cold or flu infections. It can cause immuno-compromised people, or others who have health problems–obesity, diabetes, others–to develop lung infections (pneumonia), which can lead to lung failure.

    Again, see the historical health references (pre-COVID 19 freakout) that document the direct connection between covid infections (common cold) and lung distress. Duck-Duck-Go is your friend! Hundreds, thousands of references explain the connection.

    You might not like reality, but it ain’t gonna go away:

    “A common cold can lead to other infections, including strep throat, pneumonia, and croup or bronchiolitis in children. These infections need to be treated by a doctor.”
    https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/common-cold/symptoms-causes/syc-20351605

    “Viral Pneumonia
    Viruses are the second most common cause of pneumonia. Many kinds cause the disease, including some of the same viruses that bring on colds and flu and the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.”
    https://www.webmd.com/lung/pneumonia-types

    “Causes of viral pneumonia include influenza (the flu virus), rhinovirus (the common cold), and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus, which is common in infants and children).
    “What is pneumonia, anyway?
    When cold and flu season strikes, pneumonia isn’t far behind. The same viruses that make you sneeze and spike a fever can also infect your lungs. And doctors say if you’re fighting a cold or the flu, you’re more susceptible to acquiring a bacterial form of pneumonia too.”

    https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/pneumonia-symptoms?slide=6f15fb11-4b52-4d88-b34b-e60b6e8711a1#6f15fb11-4b52-4d88-b34b-e60b6e8711a1

  18. Covid wrangling’s going to be strung out as long as the left thinks the right is reacting, to some degree…
    Until they find something else to wind you up about. The real actual value of the crisis itself doesn’t need measurement in order that it runs its course. i.e. whether you or me or anyone says about its true measure.
    There are bigger threats to the world but covid is used as a conduit and a cover up, a distraction, too. not for ever.
    America’s going right in 2024 if not before! What are the rules when the president has to give up and the person second in line is not fit for office? Forced general election?
    All of America is watching and so is the world watching Biden and his gang. People aren’t as daft as you think.

  19. No Kent, venom. Fear? No Kent, quite the opposite. Maybe you know a lot of frightened people…what’s coming over regarding ‘the landscape’ is a lot of sour and bitter, angry remarks, hopelessness and hatred without a cause, aimed at individuals who are, essentially, strangers.

    and Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt

    “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind”

  20. “America’s going right in 2024 if not before! What are the rules when the president has to give up and the person second in line is not fit for office? Forced general election?
    All of America is watching and so is the world watching Biden and his gang.”

    Forced “general election”? US not a parliamentary system with snap elections, etc. If Biden were to be removed for mental incapacity (his clear dementia is growing worse almost by day; and it’s clear he is not in charge – the question is, “Who is?”) under Amendment 25 (though his dereliction of duty with regard to enforcing border law, and his promotion of illegal and unconstitutional power-grabs by CDC with regard to usurping state and local landlord-tenant law are also impeachable offenses notwithstanding his mental incapacity), Harris would become Acting President until the next election (you ask “if second in line not fit..?” Well, yes in a general sense I agree she is an incompetent hack, unprepared, over-promoted, etc., a Deep State tool just like Biden, but is she “incompetent” or lacking mental capacity in a legal sense? A hard bar to reach). A GOP president displaying the obvious symptoms of incapacity and dementia that Biden does would, no doubt, have already been subjected to 25th amendment proceedings (and we’d have been hearing about nothing in the media for months except that the President is mentally incapacitated and a threat to humanity – whereas the mainstream media just fawns over Biden and pretends nothing is wrong). That video of him wandering lost in a cafe (how did he even end up there?) in Britain during the G7 farce would have been the end of most Presidents. He clearly had no idea where he was on this planet.

    But, given how little the GOP fought mass election fraud in 2020, no reason to suspect different result in 2022 or 2024. The regime is well-entrenched and will not let the GOP win another election (they might scrape by with Congress in 2022 – at least one house – but forget the White House from now on, unless it’s a milquetoast regime-compliant RINO like Romney or Liz Cheney – The Deep State will not let a Trump happen again). This is also why Biden is acting contrary to law by importing illegal aliens by the truckload, every day, who will be given amnesty and voting rights by the Left. America as a distinct historical people and nation of any kind is dead (as are some European countries engaged in similar population replacement by mass third world immigration).

  21. Re Farrage and Neil:

    https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/19486321.anger-scots-gb-newss-neil-oliver-says-cheerfully-risk-catching-covid-name-freedom/

    There’s the guy, not Neil Osullivan, remembered his name wrong, then remembered it after posting.
    Just thought you might like to see that everybody is not of one mind in the UK. On this, or anything else. We have been remarkable united in our acceptance of the infection and joining in with measures. Maybe that’s the thing that surprised everybody the most. Show what can be done in a small population. Nobody can say we didn’t do our best.
     
    Neil admits to being afraid, in last night’s or night before’s segment…of his own government!

  22. It’s as I suspected. Thanks for the explanation.
    …that you don’t have a system where in strange circumstances there can be an election…
    Didn’t see Biden wandering in a cafe, somehow missed almost all of the G7 thing? Blinked and missed it.
     
    You’re right about the dark forces which prevent certain people winning and control, call it deep state, call it dark forces. Even the Queen has mentioned them in the past.
     
    Call the deep state thing, the globalist agenda, they seem to have the same aims and objectives. It is communism in another guise. Someone from the Old Russian governmental regime said that when it goes wrong is when the media is too cosy with the secret service.
    ~~~
    2022, more votes for the Republicans.
    Especially if the Democrats keep up the madness. Perhaps not, if they import votes though and plant them round the country for votes.

    Don’t forget the media is losing traction very fast, as we know it. That is going to change, which is why the media is more and more desperate and crazy in how it goes about business of “journalism”. Without the media, the left are a gonna. More channels, more free speech, more Fox News, more open debate on all things so called woke.

  23. “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt”

    So, which is it: moving to Cairo, or recognizing that cold viruses (coronavirus, rhino, etc.), along with flu viruses, have always been a cause of pneumonia, which has always had the potential to cause lung dysfunction, which has always been a cause of deaths. Nothing “novel” about a really bad cold, or the flu.

    Reality is a short boat-ride away! Hop on! Cross the Nile or cross the River Styx?!

    Cold viruses cause pneumonia, Part 8:
    “Rhinovirus infections, although usually limited to the upper respiratory tract, can extend beyond the oropharynx and may cause complications in the lower respiratory tract, including pneumonia…”

    https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/30/3/611/602004

  24. We will see what 2022 and 2024 bring in the U.S. elections. Am thinking and hoping for an intervention of respite by God to bring the House of Representatives to a Republican majority, and for Donald K. Trump to be elected President again, with true vote counting. 2028, without genuine repentance, may be back to what we have now.

    It is possible that Trump will show signs of getting worn out by then after all he has been through, is going through, and will be going through in the way of constant media attacks. Why, even the fake news might well love to have Trump run in 2024, so as to bring up their news ratings. But maybe by then, most Americans will have learned the difference between fake news and the truth.

    At any rate, the United States of America, must needs get on hands and knees before God and ask and pray for His mercy and pardon and forgiveness for denying His Son, Jesus Christ, and for the daily 3,000 babies murdered here, every single day, and for all of the millions of babies murdered through abortion by the use of the monies given by the U.S. over time, and which monies have been most horrendously renewed through the present administration.

    Without repentance, there can be no lasting healing, no lasting peace. We are in the days of the formation of The One World Religion and of The One World Government, of the mark of the beast and of the persecution of those who belong to Jesus Christ. The decision to be made is, does one love this life so much that one denies Jesus Christ, so as to hang on to this life, or does one receive God our Father’s graces and strength to not partake of sinful means to keep this life and instead stand, no matter what, for Christ.

    I did not watch the whole video, but I remeber on the news that one or more of the men about to be beheaded under one of the foreign terror groups, cried out the Name of Jesus just before. That has stayed with me.

    Also, I remember that as a child, my Dad took us to see the movie Quo Vadis. I was seven at the time, and the only thing that stayed with me was how was it that the Christians all knew the same song that they were singing on their way to be slaughtered by the lions.

    Sort of the same thing. Trust in God no matter what. Such trust is not automatic, though it is given as a gift to some. In most of us, such trust grows by the use of Our Free Will to work with God our Father , to grow such trust in Him and in His Son, and in the Holy Spirit.

    God bless, C-Marie

  25. P.S. I read that at the time of Gorbachev and the apparent fall of the U.S.S.R. , etc. that actually, the Communists just switched from Stalinism to Leninism. Stalin was keen on huge borders, where as Lenin wanted no borders, just keep on foolin’ the people, of other countries to come over to believing the nation state is not a necessity and instead bring to life one big happy family which is now going on and has a big start via the European Union and more. As I understand, the “rules” of the E.U. top the members’ nation’s laws in many or maybe all cases.

    And I deeply apologize for the part that the Roman Catholic Church has through Francis and others, towards the establishment of the One World Religion. The three buildings side by side, (Abu-Dhabi), equal in size in all ways, promoted by Francis, is worse than heresy. It is putting up idols, to me. Not judging, just naming actions.

    See here: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2021-06/abu-dhabi-abrahamic-family-house-2022-human-fraternity.html

    God bless, C-Marie

  26. “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt”
    So, which is it: moving to Cairo, or recognizing that cold viruses (coronavirus, rhino, etc.), along with flu viruses, have always been a cause of pneumonia, which has always had the potential to cause lung dysfunction, which has always been a cause of deaths. Nothing “novel” about a really bad cold, or the flu.”

    Covid 19 is not a cold
    A cold is not the flu
    Pneumonia is not a cold, the flu or the same as ARDS.
    Respiratory distress can happen for many reasons unrelated to infection.
    Pneumonia has different causes, is of different types and is also something which cane vaccinated against, (is in this country. )
    Any infection can lead t)o serious disease and this is more likely with the unnamed compromised. That is quite besides the point where you imply that Covid is just a bad cold. As if that’s all this has been about.
    In case of pneumonia, inflammation without the initial infection can also cause or precede pneumonia..l.of various types.
    Nothing new or novel in any of that. The cold is not covid, though.
    Simply classifying it as a corona virus like the cold, or a different kind of respiratory virus, doesn’t tell you anything about the clinical features of infection until the clinical features are observed through time.

  27. The White House and Psaki are using QWERTY TikToker BennyDrama to get people vaccinated. Maybe Anal Swab Leader Levine suggested this?? See the NY Post article:
    https://nypost.com/2021/08/10/tiktok-star-parades-around-white-house-to-boost-vaccines/
    with the video (about a minute) right at the top. This stuff makes the old Weekly World News with BatBoy and Bigfoot look tame. In other news (good), the Covid Killer Cuomo resigned and won’t be turning nursing homes into Covid death camps any more.

  28. “Any infection can lead to serious disease and this is more likely with the immune compromised. That is quite… “

  29. Sorry, no venom, devil kissing. They are inseparable. You cave to evil, you kiss the devil. You’re kissing the devil.

  30. C. Marie, that is so uncanny, only a couple of days ago the film series Quo Vadis came to mind…We watched it in Latin classes!
    As for the videos of the terrorists, you are like me. It is still with me and it altered my course right there. We had already had the killing of one of ours soldiers and I can only say without irony or lie, that I was at Woolwich working a week or so before it happened. I could feel evil in the air, I stayed inside and had no lunch because the place was so awful. The lads were doing help for heroes, many of them. I have to stop there as I am bound by confidentiality. Yet it hasn’t left me even now.
    Back to the video you mentioned, what struck me was the absolute contrast between good and evil. Instead of destroying my faith it strengthened it. As you say, like the light from the Christians being sent to the lions.
    There are many historic examples of heroism and yet I believe people had become too complacent as if peace goes on forever.
    Rambling comment but I am stuck by how often something on my mind or in my thoughts is also in the mind or thoughts of others.

  31. Look up Hope-Simpson viral epidemic seasons. For coronaviruses, the epidemic season for the tropics and subtropics is the local summer, not winter. Thus, if true prevalence is increasing, for the southern tier of US states/border states, tropical/subtropical areas like Central America, Mexico, Hawaii, & etc., *now* is when you should see corona virus cases increase, tests or not.

    What happened to influenza? Several factors, in my opinion. 1. Viral competition, and thus, for a time, corona viruses did win out. (Recall that for zoonotic enveloped RNA viruses, influenza virus is the best known generally.) When more than one virus infects a cell at the same time, one wins over the others. In part, that’s due to innate interferons. Which one wins is a “crap shoot” and depends on both the host and the virus. 2. Influenza tests these days are mostly rt-PCR. Which virus got all the rt-PCR attention? It wasn’t influenza, so it got drowned out. 3. Politics, which says it all, in my opinion.

    @Rudolph Harrier,
    Nailed it.

    @Kent Clizbe,
    Considering all of your comments as a whole, nailed it.

  32. One additional thing to add about local summer or winter is, depending on location and virus, is local rainy season and/or dry season.

  33. This is what happens when you spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.

    A MUM, dad and brother who had refused to get the vaccine died of Covid within a week of each other after catching the virus at a family dinner.

    Francis Goncalves’s brother Shaul, 40, dad Basil, 73, and mum Charmagne, 65, fell ill on the weekend of July 10, after meeting for a meal. They all died within two weeks of their symptoms starting, with Francis believing they caught Covid from Basil after his dad picked it up in hospital a few days earlier. Francis, from Cardiff, said his family, who had moved to Portugal, hadn’t been jabbed as they had been scared by anti-vaxxer misinformation.

    He urged people to get vaccinated and not be put off by conspiracy theorists.

    https://www.the-sun.com/news/3438416/anti-vaxx-mum-dad-brother-die-covid/

  34. This virus cannot be eradicated like smallpox, nor will there be ‘herd immunity’. The only solution has been, from the beginning, learning to live with the disease. Hence the vaccination program is bordering on madness.

    Smallpox survived exclusively in humans; meaning that sufficient immunity by vaccination could eradicate it. SARS-COV-2 has it’s own clade and can survive within animal species reservoirs. Therefore it will simply escape any attempted vaccination by quasi-species swarming in either human or animal populations.

    SARS-COV-2 is, in my opinion, not a virus of mass lethality but a virus of mass incapacitation. One can argue whether it’s release from Wuhan was accidental or deliberate, but a consensus is forming that it was indeed the result of bio-engineering. We have yet to see the full impact of downstream neurological disorders that will arise due to prion development. There is no safe dosage of prions.

    The vaccination program introduces this same risk upon humanity as the virus itself . A large percentage (perhaps 30 percent or more) of the exposed population are going to be a affected. In the coming years, prion diseases will manifest as neurological pathologies ranging from impulse control disorders to Alzheimers, Parkinsons, or even CJD-like afflictions.

    The spike protein of the virus, present in both the disease and the vaccinations, is the source of prion genesis. This has been widely introduced into the world population by the vaccine industry, in my opinion, with reckless disregard and in total ignorance. It will prove to be the biggest scientific blunder in world history.

    The effects will be wide ranging. The entire world blood supply could be infected. There may be little chance to get a critical life-saving transfusion without prion contamination. It could effect animal food sources across the world.

    In my view, either a therapeutic prophylaxis regime or barring this, crushing it with therapeutics the moment symptoms appear, is the logical way forward. Kill it off as quickly and effectively as possible. But please don’t take it lightly.

  35. Scientists are working on gain-of-function experiments

    Dear Briggs. Dang, you had learnt ABS that should be gain-of-lethality and he stole that line the first day you used it.

    GREAT post

  36. “This is what happens when you spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

    And this is what happens when, like a hypnotized zombie, you do what Cuomo, Biden and your TV tell you to do:

    “A suburban Chicago family who lost their fully vaccinated father to COVID-19…”
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/after-fully-vaccinated-father-dies-of-covid-19-family-hopes-story-raises-awareness/ar-BB1gk8p4

    “A Fair Lawn woman has died after catching Covid-19, despite being fully vaccinated.” [Family blames unvexed….!]
    https://elcolectivodeuno.wordpress.com/2021/07/08/fully-vaccinated-woman-dies-of-covid-19-family-blames-anti-vaxxers-for-death/

    “Local man dies from COVID-19 despite being vaccinated…”
    https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/local-man-dies-covid-19-despite-being-vaccinated-daughter-says/BYUDQ7OVTVHPBPDYELKGUNT2BE/

    “Fully Vaccinated New Orleans Woman Dies of COVID Aged 33 in Rare Breakthrough Case”
    https://www.newsweek.com/fully-vaccinated-new-orleans-woman-dies-covid-aged-33-rare-breakthrough-case-1613379

    ‘She was starting to feel a little safer’: Vaccinated grandmother dies from COVID
    https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/news/coronavirus/2021/08/06/vaccinated-grandmother-lung-disease-dies-covid-volusia-florida-sandra-ruttles/5474249001/

    “6 fully vaccinated people who attended an outdoor wedding caught the Delta variant, but people with Pfizer and Moderna shots survived, study says”
    https://www.businessinsider.com/fully-vaccinated-people-got-covid-after-an-outdoor-wedding-2021-7?op=1

    “‘We are going to miss her’: NOLA business owner dies from COVID-19, family says she was vaccinated”
    https://www.wdsu.com/article/we-are-going-to-miss-her-nola-business-owner-dies-from-covid-19-family-says-she-was-vaccinated/37138394#

  37. The cold virus IS a coronavirus! is this actually your point?
    If so, we knew that when it first came along.
    It is not a cold though. It is a novel virus to the general population and has therefore caused an epidemic/pandemic. Until such time as it is no longer novel, it will continue to do the same in larger numbers.
    ~~~
    Someone above claimed that there was an attempt to reach “herd immunity”
    Tis is not and was not a policy aim. It IS an inevitable effect, (natural population inoculation). There is a subtle difference there which has been lost. It seems, since Trump started quoting it as being a policy aim in the UK. Which was yet more misinformation. “they call it the herd…they’re calling it the herd…” It was about that pint when I smelt a rat and knew he was being fed bad info. It has since been confirmed.
     
    The virus will become endemic, epidemiology 101 teaches that fact.
    ***
    Staff in hospital don’t care what [you] call it, incidentally, they treat as they find.
     
    One thing that makes a conspiracy more attractive to ordinary, sane, people, is when it looks like it’a based in truth. So small elements of factual information are at the basis of misinformation. Most misinformation comes about through incompetence or the Chinese whisper effect.(aka Twitter and gossiping), Some is deliberately put out and both sides have indulged in this. The world suffered because the US had an election…
    Mostly the left, but the right has done so at each step, with its default antipathy to anything said, as long as that individual is coming from the side taking covid 19 seriously

  38. swordfishtrombone,

    Stop spreading the misinformation that the vaccines make you immune to COVID. The manufacturers do not claim this, nor do the CDC, nor the WHO, nor has any experiment or study shown that vaccines grant sterilizing immunity. There have already been cases of people dying from COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated.

    By suggesting that people who were unvaccinated against COVID-19 would have been alive if they had been alive if they had been vaccinated, you are telling people who are vaccinated that they are immune to COVID. This will cause them to act less carefully and increase their chances of catching it as a breakthrough case and dying. Their blood is on your hands. Can you live with the knowledge that your misinformation is going to kill people?

  39. The more infectious strain covid 19, compared to ears (covid) 1
    has a way of entering the cell faster and avoiding the immune system’s initial response.
    This means that it out competes any other respiratory virus which CAN be captured and neutralised in endoscopes of the cell.
     
    There is nothing controversial even to see re cold and flu versus covid, but some think there is
    So the dominance of covid happens in those two man ways. Then there is the fact that many places don’t even test for influenza unless a patient is hospitalised, even then. They treat on spec. So data is not being collected avidly everywhere as it is for covid 19 and is never collected except for lab purposes on the cold.

  40. The more infectious strain covid 19, compared to ears (covid) 1
    has a way of entering the cell faster and avoiding the immune system’s initial response.
    This means that it out competes any other respiratory virus which CAN be captured and neutralised in endoscopes of the cell.
     
    There is nothing controversial even to see re cold and flu versus covid, but some think there is
    So the dominance of covid happens in those two man ways. Then there is the fact that many places don’t even test for influenza unless a patient is hospitalised, even then. They treat on spec. So data is not being collected avidly everywhere as it is for covid 19 and is never collected except for lab purposes on the cold.

  41. When looking up information related to breakthrough cases it was fascinating to see how much of the panic is just media spin. For example, the easiest stories you will find are those saying that there are breakthrough cases, but they are no big deal. For example you will see it frequently stated that there is little to worry about, because the case death rate for breakthrough cases is only 2%. The CDC statistics give a general case death rate of 1.7% for COVID-19 in the US, meaning that the risk of death is actually higher for vaccinated people who catch COVID-19, or at the very least basically the same within statistical noise. (Of course, the true infection fatality rate is lower in both cases.) But the 1.7% rate is considered a death sentence and the 2% is considered no big deal, purely because of media messaging. Similarly many stories say that we should not be worried about breakthrough cases, since most of the seriously ill had comorbidities. Again, the same is true without the vaccinations but it is spun differently.

    Or for another example, it was announced today that there have been 57 deaths of fully vaccinated individuals in MN. This was dismissed as “only being .002% of those fully vaccinated.” But another way to look at it the vaccines became widely available in MN in March, so people would not have been able to get fully vaccinated until about April. There have been 621 deaths from COVID-19 in MN since April 1 meaning that about 9.2% of COVID deaths since vaccinations have been from fully vaccinated people. And this number is still misleading since in the early months of vaccination most people still were unvaccinated.

  42. This was somehow chopped from above, hence the “two reasons”
     
    There are no hard and fast reasons given about why the flu has diminished or
    Why colds have anecdotally been absent from people’s lives, (although I know of people who have had them, children) but they are all spread and caught, transmitted, in the same pathway . So attempts to alter the course of one disease spread, WILL without doubt and by dint of logic, affect others in the same category of transmission. If anybody thinks it has gone for good they are mistaken.

    While I’m here, the drug companies do claim that vaccination prevents serious illness and death in. a high percentage of people. The real live data fro Public Health England shows the same thing. It is not one hundred percent effective but HIGHLY effective.
    Nobody here, has claimed that it means you cannot catch the disease. They HAVE complained bitterly that you CAN catch the disease.
    Nobody in the Uk is misinformed about the latter fact however it is human nature to think you’re immune totally.
    You certainly have a lot less to worry about if you ever are before by being vaccinated.
     
    Re Eric Clapton, his symptoms looked a lot like Guillain Bare Landre syndrome. It can and often does happen after a bout of visual infection such as a influenza or a bad cold. Cause is not entirely understood.

  43. “The cold virus IS a coronavirus! is this actually your point?”

    Sorry for my poor typing, my failure must have somehow addled reading comprehension. I’ll try to type slowly and clearly here:

    Here’s what was typed in that comment (evidently poorly): “…this really bad cold virus…”

    Corona viruses have always caused colds. Some cause mild symptoms, some cause severe symptoms. Always have. Always will. Previous King Canute attempts at stopping the unstoppable (corona virus vexxinations) have all been total failures. Science used to know that. Evidently Science forgot.

    Corona virus infections sweep through populations–always have, always will. “Bad colds” [corona virus infections–and rhino and others] can cause complications–including pneumonia, lung dysfunction, respiratory distress, and death–which lead to death, always have, always will. Especially in those with underlying complications–old age, obesity, diabetes, immuno-compromised, etc, etc.

    “If so, we knew that when it first came along.
    It is not a cold though. It is a novel virus to the general population and has therefore caused an epidemic/pandemic.”

    “Novel viruses” come along regularly! Before this panic, anyone remember the frequency with which “bad colds” passed through families, schools, institutions, colleges, and every other place that people gather? All the time!

    And those “bad colds” caused complications in many, many people. And caused deaths. Look at the old death statistics. Those who died of complications from bad colds (corona virus–and other cold virus–infections) were listed under “Pneumonia and Influenza” prior to the panic.

    “Pneumonia and Influenza Death Rates — United States, 1979-1994
    The combined cause-of-death category pneumonia and influenza (P&I) (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, codes 480-487) ranks as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States following heart disease, cancer, stroke, unintentional injuries, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease”
    https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00039389.htm

    And Science knew that it was impossible to stop the “novel” viruses sweeping through populations.

  44. “The spike protein of the virus, present in both the disease and the vaccinations, is the source of prion genesis. ”

    This is perhaps the most concerning thing about these mRNA jabs. Not only is it increasingly evident that they do little to prevent infection, or even serious illness – as Kent and Rudolph pointed out in response to swordfish’s latest cherry-picked cases (while again telling us nothing of the medical history, co-morbidities, or genetic predispositions of this whole family supposedly wiped out – a whole family dying indicates to me a unique family medial history and set of predispositions, not some universal truth we can draw about “vaccines” or covid itself) – but the devastating potential long-term effects are basically being ignored in order to rush these to market, and they will be far more disastrous than Covid itself. And I frankly thing it is deliberate, and part of the plan. The people who’ve been pushing for mRNA tech to be unleashed on humans are a deeply sinister bunch.

  45. Kent, loose the ‘tood
    Read what I said…
    You implied that this is just a really bad cold. Which it is not.
    According to the professor to whom I am taking classification lessons from
    Yet this back and forth is a distraction from the point that covid 19 is not an eery day ordinary, common or garden respiratory disease which I maintain that you did imply, or hope would be taken from what you wrote.

  46. Thanks for your advice–right back at you, in both spirit and substance.

    Read what I said–it was typed slowly and clearly. The first time as well: Corona viruses cause what used to be known as “the common cold.” A never-ending variety of corona viruses have swept through mankind every year–at least since Science identified viruses. Always have. Always will.

    This corona virus is different–as each season sees different varieties of viruses–so what? An infection with it causes symptoms/disease in a small minority of infected hosts. In those with disease/symptoms a tiny minority suffers severe complications, including pneumonia, and a fraction of those die.

    Like all pneumonia, the vast majority of those who suffer severe effects are elderly, or immuno-compromised in some way.

    Apologize again for the confusion.

    When was the last time the world was shut down when a bad cold swept through the population?

  47. Kent,

    Read what I said–it was typed slowly and clearly. The first time as well: Corona viruses cause what used to be known as “the common cold.” A never-ending variety of corona viruses have swept through mankind every year–at least since Science identified viruses. Always have. Always will.

    Not exactly a never ending variety, there are six: Of which, two are more deadly but not so infectious:

    Compare covid 19 with six other corona viruses which affect humans:
     
    There are many other Corona viruses in animals but in humans there are six:
    There are four, [*] which very commonly affect humans and have done for a very long period of time.
    *229E (alpha corona virus)
    *NL63 (alpha corona virus)
    *OC43 (beta corona virus)
    *HKU1 (beta corona virus)
    !MERS (corona virus)
    !SARS (corona virus)

    But These corona viruses are human corona viruses and they cause up to 15% of ordinary colds (which people have generally in the winter season.)
    Very occasionally these can cause more severe disease, pneumonia in adults or children but that is rare.

     
    By contrast, there are two other corona viruses that emerged over the last twenty years:
    !MERS: which is a disease that jumped the species barrier primarily from dromedaries. This had a case fatality rate, still does have a case fatality rate, of
    around 35%. So 35% of those who have a case of it, symptomatic case sadly die…
    And !SARS:Which had a case fatality rate of somewhere between 11% and 15%.
     
    So the current infection (covid 19) is somewhere between these two: The four [*[human corona viruses and these two: [!]which have recently jumped the species barrier.
     
    What causes problems is if you have an infection which causes both significant mortality and has very high transmission.
     
    So if you think about the corona viruses you have the current human corona viruses, they have high transmission there’s a lot of them around but they have incredibly low mortality…and therefore they have a relatively small impact in terms of their burden of disease.
     
    At the other extreme, are MERS and SARS both of these have a high fatality rate, if you catch them you have a high chance of dying, but actually the number of people infected was actually small in both cases, in the low thousands and in both cases, at least to date, the number of people who‘ve died from them, at least the number of people who’ve been recognised to have died from them is less than a thousand.
    Covid 19 has around a, 1% mortality, (case fatality rate is a bit higher than that, that’s people who have actually got symptoms) but it has very high transmissibility and if you multiply a very small chance of dying by a very large number of people, you can still have a very big impact on society.
     
    At an individual level the chance of anybody watching this dying of. Coronavirus are actually low. Over the whole epidemic, even if we have no vaccine, a high proportion f people will not get this. Of those who do get it, a very significant proportion, the exact amount is not yet clear, but it’s certainly a significant proportion have no symptoms at all. They get it without even realising it. Of those who do get symptoms the great majority probably around 80%, depends on a number of factors we’ll go on to , have a mild or moderate disease which is sufficient that they would want to go to bed and feel unwell in some cases. Some cases they can actually just carry on and do their normal activity although we ask them not to . But they don’t actually need to go to the Dr or medical services and they make a full recovery. A minority have to go to hospital but most of these, actually, the principle thing they need, is oxygen and the great majority of these will go on just to survive. And then a minority have very severe disease, may need ventilation and of those some sadly die with current treatment. But, Important to stress, even in the most high risk group, the majority of people who actually get this infection do not die.

    (Chris Whitty Gresham college lecture April 30th 2020:)
    *Note elsewhere in the lecture the fatality rate is predicted to be well below 1% as was recorded in early March, late February, from data from China and knowing that asymptomatic infection was underreported.)

  48. I went back and tried to calculate what percentage of MN “cases” are coming from the unvaccinated, since local news keeps saying that “the vast majority” are and then always gives the stat of “only .002% of vaccinated people have died of COVID-19” which of course has nothing to do with the percentage of cases coming from the vaccinated.

    Unfortunately, MN follows the CDC guidelines of only recording breakthrough cases when they lead to hospitalizations or deaths, and they have not counted breakthrough cases generally since May 1. This means that to have any sort of reasonable analysis we must confine ourselves to before May 1, 2021. You aren’t counted in the stats as “vaccinated” unless you are two weeks past your last dose, so we’ll use the figure of about 1.5 million Minnesotans vaccinated on April 17 as the number fully vaccinated at the end of this period. The population of MN is about 5.6 million, so we’ll take the number of unvaccinated at that point as being 4.1 million. It doesn’t make sense to compare case stats from before anyone was getting vaccinated. (Note that the MN department of health lists 35.7% as fully vaccinated on that day, implying a state population of about 4.7 million. I don’t know if they are excluding children or what, but I will use total population for my percentages.) I think it is more than fair to have the starting point of comparison be “when 1% of the population was considered fully vaccinated,” which would have been on February 1.

    From February 1 to April 30, there were 96,448 cases in the statistics. 5,559 were listed as breakthrough cases, leading to 5.8% of all cases being breakthrough cases. However, keep in mind that at this point most people were not vaccinated and thus could not have any possibility of a “breakthrough.” Something confounding this estimate is that February through May was the heaviest period of vaccination in MN, with only 1% vaccinated on February 1st, 4.9% vaccinated on March 1st, 14.9% vaccinated on April 1st, and 29.6% fully vaccinated on May 1. It would be much easier to do this analysis on data past May 1, but the state doesn’t list breakthrough cases from then. So let’s take the March 1st rate of 14.9% as a representative average. This is more than fair when you consider how low vaccinations were at the start of the period and the fact that it will take some time for a COVID infection to develop.

    The good news for vaccinations is that with 5.8% breakthroughs in 14.9% of the population the vaccines do seem to be doing some prevention of transmission. The bad news is that this is not nearly as good as we would expect, proportionally this is more like a 60% reduction of risk. Even worse the dreaded delta had not yet entered Minnesota, never mind Lambda and even scarier future variants. So this is measuring against only the form of the disease that the vaccines were intended to fight.

  49. In theory the state health department is still tracking breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths. However, to really compare to the unvaccinated rates we would need to restrict our analysis to only from June 1 or so onwards (where the vaccinated rate has stayed pretty constant at about 55% of the total population.) However, the breakthrough deaths and hospitalizations are not broken down by time, unlike total deaths and hospitalizations, so I cannot restrict my analysis to that time frame only. I can only look at the total amount of time since people have started to be vaccinated, which is absurd to analyze in any meaningful way since the first months saw both the highest increase in vaccinations as well as the highest case, death and hospitalization rates. I can only get something at all meaningful for cases since they stopped reporting them on May 1st, meaning that while the vaccinations also change a lot over that time period at least it is short period of time with a consistent pattern of increase rather than a long period of time with both a quick increase and a long plateau.

  50. Sounds to me like the CDC and US states are trying hard to set parameters that undercount vaccinated “cases” in order to obscure the truth about the jabs and to bolster their claim that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Other countries seem to be doing a better job than US in reporting and tracking “breakthrough” cases, and distinguishing between vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, without the same political agendas driving CDC policy that are muddying the waters in the US.

    A friend of mine whose son is a doctor in Florida claims his son told him their cases are now 97% unvaccinated. This simply doesn’t not square (by a very long way) with data from other countries (especially Israel, one of the highest vax% in the world) where vaccinated cases (including severe cases with hospitalizations) are a majority and increasingly outpacing unvaccinated even more.

    Given how hard the Left is going after DeSantis, I am especially skeptical of alleged numbers from Florida at this point. CDC last weekend claimed over 10k+ cases more in Florida than the state’s own data, for example.

  51. When I’ve seen stats in news stories about the proportion of breakthrough cases they’ve generally fallen into one of three categories:

    1.) Vague and unsourced, ex. “The overwhelming majority of cases are among the unvaccinated.”

    2.) Anecdotal, ex. A doctor saying “based on what I see in my ER, 99% of the cases are unvaccinated.”

    3.) Not actually measuring the proportion of breakthrough cases to total cases, ex. “Only .002% of those vaccinated have died of COVID-19.”

  52. Oh, I guess there is a fourth:

    4.) Shamelessly dishonest, ex. “If you take the number of breakthrough cases that the CDC tracked until May 1 (at which point it stopped tracking them, and ignoring the fact that many states never tracked breakthroughs at all), and divide by the total number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic (including those from long before any vaccine was available) then we get a vanishingly small percentage.”

  53. Decided to do a bit more crunching. A commonly cited stat is “99% of all deaths from COVID-19 are from the unvaccinated.” The CDC lists 1,507 breakthrough deaths, hence for this to be accurate they must be measuring over a period of time where 150,700 deaths occurred. If we total up COVID deaths on the CDC website, starting from today, we cross this threshold at the week of February 13th, where there were very few people who were “fully vaccinated.”

    Unfortunately while the CDC does provide weekly updates on total deaths, they do not provide weekly updates on breakthrough deaths, only a final total. Thus we cannot determine how many of the 1,507 deaths were from the early time period to get a more useful comparison. There is also the problem that the data is based on voluntary submissions to the CDC, and that 4 states have not submitted any data (with many of the remaining states surely not sending every death) so that all we can say for certain is that the true number of breakthrough deaths is something higher than 1,507

  54. Joy, darling, you are being very silly. You have no idea what you are talking about, and people are ignoring you as a result.

  55. No Philemon, you are a troll and I have just shown Kent that he is mistaken.
    So I don’t expect/want a response.
    As for being silly? no, that’s your take
    I’m being serious, today

  56. A few days ago:

    ‘Oh, Joy: “Genetic differences in how melanin is deposited will directly affect the colour of the eye.

    ‘“There is a spectrum of eye colour and this has to do with the amount of melanin.
    I was not making a case for no adults having blue eyes.
    The point I was making is that all eyes darken and it is governed by deposition of what is known as pigment but I called toxins. They are byproducts of metabolism.”

    ‘But, Joy, why would you call pigments “toxins”? Especially if you knew there were genetic factors as you claim you did, but did not seem to be aware of before. And “byproducts of metabolism” means what, exactly? Sorry, but I’m not taking any medical advice from you after you have shown yourself to be ignorant of the most basic genetic education.

    ‘In any case, “all eyes darken” is not true.’

    You seem to think albino humans have pink eyes? You are just ignorant. Your understanding of genetics is sub-par, your understanding of immunology is even weaker. No one should take you seriously.

  57. Rudolph: Didn’t CDC also announce they were lowering the cycle count for tests on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated? That, coupled with the spike in total tests (back up around 2 million a day again), could also help create a discrepancy between “cases” in vaxed v. unvaxed.

    I saw a report also (I forget where now, it as a couple weeks ago), that one state’s health department had advised testing sites to not even report positive tests in vaccinated people unless they were sick enough to require hospitalization.

    The whole thing is just a complete clusterbleep. What’s essential is to maintain the line against vax passports, vax mandates, and renewed lockdowns/muzzle mandates.

    PS. “Boosters” appears to be off to a promising start. Not. https://www.timesofisrael.com/tv-14-israelis-who-got-3rd-shot-later-infected-with-covid-19/

  58. Yeah, even if we had more data it would still be impossible to compare because of the differences in reporting. Different cycle thresholds were used in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated, back when they actually tracked breakthrough cases (28 versus 40 if I recall correctly.)

    Deaths are a bit more reliable with emphasis on “a bit.” There are definite reporting problems in that the CDC only reports what states send them, and they have said they only get data from 46 states (though I can’t find which 4 states specifically haven’t given them data.) Furthermore, they are keen to talk about when vaccinated deaths are from people who tested positive for COVID but who were admitted for something else, which were asymptotic, and which had comorbidities. For unvaccinated deaths, not so much. Now the CDC actually does separate this stuff out in their breakthrough stats, and I’ve been throwing the “deaths with not from” for consistency. But since the data is only from what states send them, I would be shocked if individual states aren’t holding back on many deaths that would have been counted if they were unvaccinated (with the ready explanation that they weren’t “really” caused by COVID, but by some other cause.)

    The CDC has a paper where it gives stats through April, but it doesn’t list numbers, only percentages. Furthermore the percentages listed have wide ranges (ex. 5-8%) which means that they are coming from statistical models, which of course are kept secret.

    The best you can do is say that they are overhyping the numbers even after all that manipulation. The data is so corrupted that nothing can be said about what is actually happening.

    Of course the stats don’t really matter. Take for example the lambda variant. It’s too new to know anything about it precisely, especially since there is no practical way to isolate it. But two things are already “known”:

    1.) It is so deadly and infectious that you must be scared.
    2.) The solution is definitely to take the vaccine (even though there is 0 evidence whether it is effective against it.)

  59. Kent Clizbe,

    Covid-19 is a covid virus. It causes symptoms that are identical to the common cold or flu infections.

    What are you talking about? Colds and flu aren’t even identical to each other!

    Reality is a short boat-ride away!

    Not from you it’s not – it’s about a million miles away. You’re inhabiting a parallel universe where 600,000 people have died from a cold. (And where Trump won the election, probably.)

  60. Kent Clizbe,

    And this is what happens when, like a hypnotized zombie, you do what Cuomo, Biden and your TV tell you to do:

    I don’t live in the USA, and almost never watch TV. But I have to say I love the idea that anyone who believes anything said on TV must be a hypnotized zombie. Yeah, sure. Is that also true of people who watch Christian TV?

    Anyway, regarding your cited cases where vaccinated people have died: No vaccine is 100% effective. The various COVID-19 vaccines are about 95% effective. According to one of your own sources:

    As of July 19, 2021, more than 161 million people in the U.S. had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and the CDC had received reports of 5,914 vaccine breakthrough cases. Of those, 1,141 fully vaccinated people had died from COVID-19, and 5,601 had been hospitalized.

    According to my calculator, that’s about a 0.0007% chance of dying if you’re fully vaccinated.

    What you’re doing is citing examples from the 0.0007% minority and ignoring the 99.9993% majority. In other words, the logical fallacy known as cherry picking. The fact remains that people who have been vaccinated are overwhelmingly more likely to survive COVID-19 than those who have not. By trying to create the opposite impression, you are actively contributing to misinformation which will ultimately result in people dying.

  61. swordfishtrombone,

    If you have such a strong aversion to “cherry picking,” why did post a sob story about a single family dying? Shouldn’t a cold emotionless vulcan like you have started with a statistical argument off the bat? It’s almost like you are a dishonest hack who is fine using dishonest emotional rhetoric for your purposes until you are called out on it.

    But beyond that, if your argument is that “only a small minority of the vaccinated have died” guess what? If we do similar analysis over the period that vaccinations were common in the US (since it would be ridiculous to compare deaths at times when no one was vaccinated) we get a similar “small minority” of deaths from COVID generally. For example, there was something like a .0002% chance of anyone (vaccinated or not) of dying from COVID in July.

    If your objection is “but that’s not looking over a long time period” then guess what, neither are the breakthrough stats! We only crossed the 25% fully vaccinated threshold a few months ago and we’re still barely past 50%. Furthermore the current warning about vaccination effectiveness are about whether they are effective in the 6-12 month range, and whether they are effective against variants such as Delta. It’s still too early to tell either of those things. A sane analysis of the data would wait until at least a year out from mass vaccination before drawing conclusions.

    But put that aside: you claimed in your first post that a family died because of conspiracy theories preventing them from getting vaccinated. You still have done nothing to prove that they would be alive if they had been vaccinated.

  62. Philemon,
    I thought as much. You are smarting from our previous discussion which is on another post so you really should go there to continue your discussion.
    1 the colour of baby first poo! (Green)
    2 eye colour being on a spectrum and being caused by the deposition of iron based pigment behind the iris, hours, days or months after birth.
    See the magazine article linked where the spectrum is described and exactly how blue eye colour comes about,, appears, not by pigment, but by light refraction, as with the blue butterfly.(if refraction is the right word, would hate to use the wrong one)
    3 ‘Tixin’ is a typo as I would have thought was obvious…iron was the substance I was referring to at the time.
    All came about because I suggested a a venn diagram showing the subset of individuals who are vaccinated who also become ill to demonstrate that 100% will be in the vaccinated group. Colour suggestions were playfully offered for the two main sets; vaccinated; unvaccinated.

    Iron is the key metal which linked the two concepts, with regards to new babies.
    See info on line such as:
    “Iron upregulates melanogenesis in cultured retinal pigment epithelial cells”
    With regards to the Iris, melanin contains iron in its various forms…evidently there are several kinds of melanocyte. Some sequester Iron and capture free radicals, some do the opposite, pro-oxidation.

  63. Philemon,
    “You seem to think albino humans have pink eyes? You are just ignorant. Your understanding of genetics is sub-par, your understanding of immunology is even weaker. No one should take you seriously.”
    I went to college with five with the condition, so had the chance to examine up close.
    Maybe they were “outliers”?

  64. “When was the last time the world was shut down when a bad cold swept through the population?”
    It is not a bad cold.
    15%of ordinary colds are caused by the four corona viruses on the list, alpha and beta types. The rest are caused by other things.

    Regarding the cause of pneumonia,
    Anything which is inflammatory or impedes of lung function can result in pneumonia by a variety of mechanisms.
    Whether it be liquid,
    Inflammatory disease
    Burns,
    Dust or or smoke particles,
    Secretions of all kinds from the lungs including build,
    Vomit,
    faeces,
    Saliva
    Immune suppression at a cellular level or due to physical compromise. *post anaesthetic or due to smoking’s effect on cilia; reduced lung exception due to physical restriction.
    The microbes themselves vary but the pneumonia which is the most common form is non viral.

  65. correction for clarification;
    Regarding the cause of pneumonia,?Anything which is inflammatory or impedes of lung function can result in pneumonia by a variety of mechanisms.?Whether it be liquid,?Inflammatory disease?Burns,?Dust or or smoke particles,?Secretions of all kinds from the lungs including liquid,?Vomit,?faeces,?Saliva (if swallowing reflex is absent)?Immune suppression at a cellular level or due to physical compromise. *post anaesthetic or due to smoking’s effect on cilia; reduced lung excursion due to physical restriction,.?The microbes themselves vary but the pneumonia which is the most common form is non viral

  66. Joy: ‘“You seem to think albino humans have pink eyes? You are just ignorant. Your understanding of genetics is sub-par, your understanding of immunology is even weaker. No one should take you seriously.”
    ‘I went to college with five with the condition, so had the chance to examine up close.
    ‘Maybe they were “outliers”?’

    Your English is failing you again. As for the albinos, I think they were rabbits, not humans. You and your buddy swordfishtrombone are manifestly fakes. I don’t know why you bother. Everyone knows.

  67. Oh, I think there is enough data now, with adverse events, to show that the “vaccines” aren’t safe, and there is enough data now, with re-infections, to show that the “vaccines” don’t provide immunity.

    They lied; people died.

  68. Rudolph Harrier,

    If you have such a strong aversion to “cherry picking,” why did post a sob story about a single family dying?

    Because it’s representative of the statistical facts. The cherry picking fallacy is choosing examples which are unrepresentative. Also, you describe three members of the same family dying as a “sob story”? Feel that Christian love and compassion!

    If we do similar analysis over the period that vaccinations were common in the US (since it would be ridiculous to compare deaths at times when no one was vaccinated) we get a similar “small minority” of deaths from COVID generally.

    Why would it be “ridiculous” to compare deaths before and after vaccination began? In the US, about 0.2% of people have died overall, which is *way* higher than the 0.0007% of vaccinated people.

    You still have done nothing to prove that they would be alive if they had been vaccinated.

    Nor have you proved otherwise, nor did Kent Clizbe prove that vaccinated people who died would have survived if they hadn’t been vaccinated. As his cited cases included lung transplant recipients and people with cancer, I doubt it.

  69. philemon,

    Oh, I think there is enough data now, with adverse events, to show that the “vaccines” aren’t safe, and there is enough data now, with re-infections, to show that the “vaccines” don’t provide immunity.

    Yeah, sure. 0.0007% of vaccinated people dying is really unsafe /sarc. Also, what do you mean by “immunity”? No vaccine ever provides 100% immunity, but 95% is better than 0%.

    You and your buddy swordfishtrombone are manifestly fakes.

    Fake in what sense? Incidentally, my kids don’t believe antivaxxers are real.

  70. Imagine being so dense as to think nearly a whole family allegedly dying of Covid is “representative of the statistical facts.” Words fail.

    This is about as “representative of statistical facts” as the poll I saw yesterday showing a majority of Americans still think their risk of dying if they get Covid is about 11% (overstating the real average risk across all demographics by a factor of about 50; 18 months of brainwashing and fearmongering works!). In the real world, not the fanciful world so many of the brainwashed masses live in these days, where they’re unable to make sane risk assessment based on actual facts, even in the most at risk category – men over 75 with at least 1 co-morbidity – the risk of dying if you get Covid is only about 5%.

  71. Covid-19 is a covid virus.

    Covid 19 was named by the WHO, to be anonymous, save face.
    [Co] for corona [V ]for virus and [ID:9] for 2019 They should have Calle dit Fred.
     There was no “Covid” before 2019
    It is a SARS type virus which underwent changes in twelve letter on its gene sequence which affect its spreadability. It is less virulent that SARS1
     

    “ It causes symptoms that are identical to the common cold or flu infections.’”

     
    Along with many other conditions unrelated to Covid 19
    However, not identical, the common cold does not impact other organs in the body and it does not cause clotting abnormalities. Covid 19 does, in more severe cases even in those who survive.
    Any long bout of viral illness can have long term effects and that includes severe flu, but those are not the magnitude and frequency of those being observed in this post viral syndrome.

  72. Because it’s representative of the statistical facts.

    But you did not supplement that story with those “statistical facts.” You went straight for the emotional appeals, because you are a dishonest hack.

    Why would it be “ridiculous” to compare deaths before and after vaccination began? In the US, about 0.2% of people have died overall, which is *way* higher than the 0.0007% of vaccinated people.

    1.) Because there are factors beyond just “vaccinated” or “unvaccinated.” Vaccinations have only become widespread around January or Feburary and a bulk of the population only became “fully vaccinated” around May. This is also exactly a time when COVID deaths have generally been low. Pretending like that is irrelevant would be the height of dishonesty for most people, but par for the course for you.

    2.) There is also just the factor of time generally. Suppose that everyone currently vaccinated had gotten vaccinated on the exact same day. At the end of that day likely very few of them would have gotten COVID-19 and died, simply because they had no chance to do so after their vaccination. It’s obvious to thinking people why it would be ridiculous to say “after one day practically everyone who took the vaccine didn’t die of COVID, while many people over the last year and half have. Therefore the vaccine saved their lives.” The only honest way to do things is to compare deaths over the same period of time, so that everyone has the same opportunity to get infected.

    Nor have you proved otherwise, nor did Kent Clizbe prove that vaccinated people who died would have survived if they hadn’t been vaccinated.

    You admit that you are a dishonest hack who has no evidence that vaccines would have saved their lives, but tried to imply otherwise for the purposes of dishonest rhetoric. Glad to find something that we can agree on at last.

  73. Just listened to Trump on Fox
    “huge vaccine fan”
    Not pro mandating vaccines, (obviously) but clearly not skeptical that they will be saving lives in their millions.

  74. “… plus plans to sue the unvexxed if they pass on the horror to a vexxed…”

    How could they ever prove such causation sufficiently to win in court? Since it’s clear from the mounting vax failure evidence worldwide that the jabs prevent neither infection by nor transmission of the virus (witness, among other examples, a fully-vaxed cruise ship which recently had a local “casedemic”), no one could ever be certain that any particular infection came from someone unvaccinated (unless you could also prove you had only ever been around unvaccinated people. Throw one casual vaxxed contact in the mix, and causality is unprovable).

    This threat to sue sounds like just more tyrannical overreach by the Covid Cultists against those who stand for the basic human right to freedom from coerced medical experimentation. And if we let them win on this one, they won’t stop with Covid. Your medical autonomy will forever be subject to the arbitrary whims of some power-mad “health” bureaucrat (“for your own good” of course!).

  75. Joy: No one ever said Trump was without many weaknesses and blind spots (and yet the illegitimate puppet occupying the White House now is still much worse by orders of magnitude!). His rabid shilling for Big Pharma and rushing these dangerous mRNA jabs to market is one of his many great failures (along with not ousting Fraudci and not promoting the “Swedish option” early on – he mostly fell in line with the Covid cult, and also didn’t do enough early on to prepare to fight the election fraud, which many saw coming from a long way out). Why he needs to step aside in 2024, for someone younger, more intelligent and educated on core issues, and more capable of real follow-through (Trump always talked big on any number of things, but achieved little).

  76. Anyone interested in the truth concerning President Trump’s achievements, do click on the following link:

    https://lc.org/Site%20Images/Trumps-Accomplishments-LC-Sept-2020.pdf

    SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE … RELIGIOUS LIBERTY … STIDENTS’ RELIGIOUS LIBERTY … ISRAEL …
    GOVERNMENT … ECONOMY … U.S. MILITARY … HEALTHCARE … HUMAN TRAFFICKING …

    Then come back and prove that he talked big but accomplished little, even with weaknesses and blindspots.

    Sounds like some used FAKE NEWS for their information. How FOX treats Trump now, I am not familiar with, but during his administration, overall, Fox was fair.

    God bless, C-Marie

  77. Evidence? Dear Dennis, they don’t need no stinkin’ evidence… They’ll just safely quarantine you in a safe place with 4 walls until your court date in a month’s time due to backlog, or whenever a judge bothers to hear it. Easy to infer anything from contact tracing. Only the guilty ones with something to hide will leave their tracking devices at home.

    But the real focus here is what the government is forcing all of their own employees to do… Now imagine what government could do once they own everything and you own nothing! Will we really be happy?

    Glory to Big Gov!

    Boo! to the non-compliers!
    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/08/tyler-durden/tyson-employees-walk-off-job-to-protest-vaccine-mandate/

  78. SEDITION! HOW DARE YOU PROTEST AGAINST AND DISOBEY THE DRAGHI!

    The government of Mario Draghi has taken the next step toward ideological Dictatorship, with the public charges against the Anti-Vaxx Passport protesters at Bergamo, for the crime of participating in a seditious assembly. The maximum penalty is 1 year in prison. Seditious assembly in Italian law is still defined by the Fascist code, where any meeting with more than 9 persons, which is convened for the purpose of expressing or planning rebellion, revolt or unwillingness to submit to the Government of the Republic is considered seditious. A definition which is so vague as to make any assembly in which disagreement with the Government is expressed capable of being so classified by the State Police or Carabinieri.

    https://www.fromrome.info/2021/08/11/protesters-against-vaxx-passport-at-bergamo-charged-with-seditious-assembly/

  79. Trump’s supreme court pick at work! Where are all her dogmas now?!

    Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday declined to block Indiana University’s (IU) COVID-19 vaccine requirement which takes full effect this fall, offering no explanation for her decision.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/amy-coney-barrett-refuses-block-indiana-universitys-vaccine-mandate

    Black people don’t trust the vexx! Forcing them to vexx is therefore an act of white supremacy! Biden and Fauci are racists!

    Many Americans who haven’t been paying close attention to the vaccine rollout could be forgiven for believing that those who are refusing the COVID vaccines are mostly uneducated (and, dare we say, ignorant) whites, often supporters of former President Trump. But while vaccination rates are, generally speaking, higher in a handful of big blue states, these numbers belie some important truths. As we reported earlier this week, one study showed that Americans with undergraduate and graduate degrees are intensely skeptical of the vaccine.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/theyre-experimenting-us-black-new-yorkers-tell-nyt-why-they-dont-trust-vaccine

  80. I never said he accomplished nothing at all (and he did do more than any president ever on the pro-life front), but much of it is also stuff that can (or already has) easily be overturned by Biden through simple executive orders, policy changes, etc, and will prove to be not long lasting (of several others you mention, how’re the economy, the military – i.e. the Woke Armed Forces of the Globhomo American Empire, more likely to be found flying under the rainbow flag than the US flag – and health care looking these days?). I’ve noticed basic grocery store prices rising steadily in recent weeks, and gas is up over 50% around me compared to this time last year (about $3.10/gallon vs. about $2.10 last year). We are heading for economic catastrophe and runaway inflation as congress writes multi-trillion dollar checks every 6 months or so that it won’t be able to cash. To say nothing of the healthcare crisis we’ll have when long term vax effects lead to mass prion diseases and ADE-related illness and death. So, however good the economy was under Trump, it was ephemeral and largely already meaningless and forgotten as disaster looms. Nor did he do anything real about health care when he had GOP control of Congress (Obamacare is still with us, and the orwellianly-named “affordable care act” means I still can’t afford the insurance I had before the Obamacare scam). Structurally, he made little difference in the economy or most other things long term (immigration reform? The wall? Forget it – already dead letters under Biden and his accelerated great replacement plan, as ”border control” simply ferries busloads across the border each day and unleashes them across the country).

    I think Angelo Codevilla has perhaps best analyzed the ultimate weaknesses and failures of Trump’s presidency: https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/06/what-is-trump-to-us/. As Codevilla indicates, Trump actually accelerated and catalyzed much of the Leftist psychopathy we see around us now. Maybe that will be his most lasting legacy – helping to accelerate the crisis we were headed for anyway, and hastening, one hopes, the end of the crumbling liberal project called the USA. Forget breaking up Big Tech; it’s the Big Leviathan of the US Federal Government that most needs breaking up.

    Let’s not overlook Trump’s errors and weaknesses just because Biden/Harris are a grotesque and unprecedented disaster.

    (Biggest among Trump’s errors from the start was giving his noxious son-in-law too much control of basically everything from the start, and utterly failing to “drain the swamp” and assert true executive control over the departments of the administrative state that were, in theory, technically under his control as head of the executive branch. The swamp creatures are now as entrenched and in control as ever, perhaps more so. Listen to Amanda Milius talk in interviews about how State Department would simply say “that’s not policy/how we do things” when Trump’s team wanted to do something – as if “policy” is not what the f-ing POTUS says it is! – yet Trump did nothing in the face of such insubordination. Same as how he didn’t fire generals who openly defied orders to withdraw troops from Syria and even gloated about it in media. Disgraceful).

  81. “Evidence? Dear Dennis, they don’t need no stinkin’ evidence… They’ll just safely quarantine you in a safe place with 4 walls…”

    Yes, the new Covid GULag will be scaling-up soon. I hope I’ll meet some cool people there. 🙂 Been reading Dostoevsky’s “Notes From a Dead House” (aka “House of the Dead” in English translation) and Solzhenitsyn in preparation for the future. The Covid Vax Resisters will be to the coming years what the Decembrists and their faithful wives were to mid-19th century Russians.

    Regarding that info about PhDs and those with only HS education being most vaccine “hesitant” (loaded and stupid term, but let it be for now): The “midwit meme” bell curve just never fails!

  82. Rudolph Harrier,

    But you did not supplement that story with those “statistical facts.” You went straight for the emotional appeals, because you are a dishonest hack.

    The statistical facts are well known, and there’s nothing dishonest about an emotional appeal. If we discount emotions, there’s no point in trying to save lives or do anything.

    Because there are factors beyond just “vaccinated” or “unvaccinated.”

    I agree. The whole subject of the pandemic is extremely complex and often counter-intuitive. Too bad you want to reduce it to politics, conspiracy theories, and name-calling.

    You admit that you are a dishonest hack who has no evidence that vaccines would have saved their lives, but tried to imply otherwise for the purposes of dishonest rhetoric.

    I admit no such thing, so you are being dishonest. There is overwhelming evidence that the vaccines are effective and safe. Having said that, I support your right not to be vaccinated.

  83. Dennis,

    men over 75 with at least 1 co-morbidity – the risk of dying if you get Covid is only about 5%.

    “Only” 1 in 20? That sounds pretty high to me. Also, your figure is suspect – according to the European Journal of Epidemiology, it’s about 5% *at* 75, not *over* 75. And that combines both sexes, so it’s higher for men.

  84. BwaHahahHaHAHA!!!

    We’ve reached a new low in the list of vexxine positive outcomes department!

    ‘He avoided double death?’ Man killed by Covid was spared ‘worse condition’ because he was fully vaxxed, reassuring report claims

    As experts extol the life-preserving qualities of Covid jabs, a news story has claimed that the condition of a man who died from the virus could have been worse had he not been vaxxed.

    Aside from being fully inoculated against Covid, Elizondo “rarely left the house, was always masked up, and even wore gloves,” Yvonne Rodriguez, the daughter of the deceased, told San Antonio news station KSAT. Although she said she couldn’t understand how her father caught the virus, Rodriguez stressed that she felt the vaccine had still been helpful.

    “I saw my dad, how sick as he was,” she said. “I can’t imagine how much more he would have suffered if he had not gotten the vaccine.”

    Others proposed that perhaps the elderly man would be “double dead” or “super dead” if he had not been fully vaccinated.

    https://www.rt.com/usa/531816-vaccine-worse-condition-death-texas-covid/

  85. A stiff breeze, a bad cold, or ordinary flu could be dangerous to people 75+ with co-morbiditites, swordfishe. The data comes from CDC’s own numbers reported a while back, but of course is based on assuming their “cases” and official “death“ tolls are not inflated – a dangerous assumption, but I was taking it at face value for argument’s sake, since the point was to contrast that data with the vastly inflated perception of risk that has been maliciously inculcated in people by media and politicians using the plandemic for their own malicious ends. Average IFR across all demographics is about .015-.02%%, yet polls show people still think their general risk of dying if they get Covid is about 11%. This insanity will never end when people are so willfully and dangerously mislead as to risk (and that’s the point – the politicians and media don’t want it to end, because they want more power and endless control of every aspect of people’s lives).

    When the hecatombs start filling with victims of mRNA “vaccine”-induced ADE and prion diseases, we vax resisters will have the last laugh. Until then, go toot your trombone at someone else.

  86. Presumably, if it was manufactured. someone knows. (Canada, U.S., China, although, my money’s on the U.S.)

    So far as I can tell from what data I see, the adverse events from the “vaccines” are eclipsing all other vaccines’ adverse events by at least ten times or more.

  87. “philemon,
    Oh, I think there is enough data now, with adverse events, to show that the “vaccines” aren’t safe, and there is enough data now, with re-infections, to show that the “vaccines” don’t provide immunity.

    Swordfishtrombone:
    “Yeah, sure. 0.0007% of vaccinated people dying is really unsafe /sarc. Also, what do you mean by “immunity”? No vaccine ever provides 100% immunity, “but 95% is better than 0%.
    “You and your buddy swordfishtrombone are manifestly fakes.
    “Fake in what sense? Incidentally, my kids don’t believe antivaxxers are real.”

    I just love this guy! He’s so transparent!

    Fake in the sense that you are not a real person. Yeah, yeah, supposedly you have kids. Why on earth would your children have any belief about “antivaxxers”? Do you have any idea how weird that is?

    “Yeah, sure. 0.0007% of vaccinated people dying is really unsafe /sarc.” I think you will find it higher now. Gosh, all those “breakthrough-cases”!

    Of course, you are one of those people who thought the original SARS-COV-2 would be deadly. I have to wonder why.

    “No vaccine ever provides 100% immunity, but 95% is better than 0%.” Unfortunately, the current batch of “vaccines” can’t even provide 50%.

    Not to mention the adverse events.

  88. Kamil Wegrecki –

    Technically the details surrounding the case are incorrect. The man won the case in the sense that his ticket was thrown out. The government didn’t testify about the existence of the virus, but only in the sense that the court decided it wasn’t relevant to hear from them, and the existence of lack of existence of the virus is not a factor when it comes to government violating your rights by ticketing you for BS. And Alberta was planning to roll back restrictions anyway.

    Alberta is the most open Canadian provinces, but is not completely free of miserable conditions – you still require a mask to ride public transit and cabs as far as I know, and they have pushed back a plan to remove restrictions by 6 weeks because of a bump in “cases”… they quoted something like a 50-60% increase, but with no context as that could just mean “cases” went up from 1 person to 2 people.

    Patrick King has been trending on twitter due to a viral video where it is claimed that the province of Alberta rolled back on their lockdown measures as a result of Patrick’s court proceedings and this is not true as Patrick states “I Wasn’t Successful, No I did Not Win The Court Case”. In this video Dan Dicks of Press For Truth speaks with Patrick King in order to clear up some discrepancies in regards to what is happening with his case.
    https://pressfortruth.ca/i-wasnt-successful-no-i-did-not-win-the-court-case-patrick-king-on-press-for-truth/

  89. Canada continuing to go full retard.

    Canada to mandate COVID-19 jabs for domestic travel as well as for all federal workers

    The Canadian federal government under Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Friday that starting in October Canada will be mandating COVID-19 jabs as a requirement to travel domestically by air, train, or boat.

    “As soon as possible in the fall and no later than the end of October, the government of Canada will require employees in the federally regulated air, rail and marine transportation sectors to be vaccinated. In addition the vaccination requirement will also extend to certain travelers. This includes all commercial air travelers, passengers on interprovincial trains and passengers on large marine vessels with overnight accommodations such as cruise ships,” Canada’s Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said Friday.

    Alghabra said in addition to mandating COVID-19 jabs for domestic travel for Canadians, all federal workers will be required to be jabbed by October as well.

    “Today, we are announcing that the government of Canada intends to require vaccinations across the federal public service. Following this example, we also expect that crown corporations and other employers in the federally regulated sector will also require vaccination for their employees,” said Alghabra.

    https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canada-to-mandate-covid-19-jabs-for-domestic-travel-as-well-as-for-all-federal-workers/

    This means that the Mark of the Vexx must have a system in place by September.

  90. What they don’t want you to know about India!

    India’s Ivermectin Blackout

    This data shows how Ivermectin knocked their COVID-19 cases and deaths – which we know were Delta Variant – down to almost zero within weeks. A population comparable to the US went from about 35,000 cases and 350 deaths per day to nearly ZERO within weeks of adding Ivermectin to their protocol.

    By comparison, the United States is the lower graph. On August 5, here in the good ol’ USA, blessed with the glorious vaccines, we have 127,108 new cases per day and 574 new deaths.

    Let us look at the August 5 numbers from Uttar Pradesh with 2/3 of our population. Uttar Pradesh, using Ivermectin, had a total of 26 new cases and exactly THREE deaths. The US without Ivermectin has precisely 4889 times as many daily cases and 191 times as many deaths as Uttar Pradesh with Ivermectin.

    It is not even close. Countries do orders of magnitude better WITH Ivermectin. It might be comparable to the difference in travel between using an automobile versus a horse and buggy.

    Uttar Pradesh on Ivermectin: Population 240 Million [4.9% fully vaccinated]

    COVID Daily Cases: 26

    COVID Daily Deaths: 3

    The United States off Ivermectin: Population 331 Million [50.5% fully vaccinated]

    COVID Daily Cases: 127,108

    COVID Daily Deaths: 574

    Let us look at other Ivermectin using areas of India with numbers from August 5, 2021, compiled by the JHU CSSE:

    Delhi on Ivermectin: Population 31 Million [15% fully vaccinated]

    COVID Daily Cases: 61

    COVID Daily Deaths: 2

    Uttarakhand on Ivermectin: Population 11.4 Million [15% fully vaccinated]

    COVID Daily Cases: 24

    COVID Daily Deaths: 0

    Now let us look at an area of India that rejected Ivermectin.

    https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/tn-drops-ivermectin-as-covid-19-drug/article34561235.ece

    Tamil Nadu announced they would reject Ivermectin and instead follow the dubious USA-style guidance of using Remdesivir. Knowing this, you might expect their numbers to be closer to the US, with more cases and more deaths. You would be correct. Tamil Nadu went on to lead India in COVID-19 cases.

    https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/tamil-nadu-leads-india-in-new-infections-denies-citizens-ivermectin/article_32634012-ba66-11eb-9211-ab378d521f9a.html

    Tamil Nadu continues to suffer for its choice to reject Ivermectin. As a result, the Delta variant continues to ravage their citizens while it was virtually wiped out in the Ivermectin-using states. Likewise, in the United States, without Ivermectin, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated continue to spread the Delta variant like wildfire.

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html

    Tamil Nadu off Ivermectin: Population 78.8 Million [6.9% fully vaccinated]

    COVID Daily Cases: 1,997

    COVID Daily Deaths: 33

    https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/indias-ivermectin-blackout/article_e3db8f46-f942-11eb-9eea-77d5e2519364.html

  91. Johnno:

    [puts on black shirt, slicks back hair, picks up guitar…]

    We fell in to a burning ring of fire,
    We fell down, down, down,
    And the flames went higher,
    And it burns, burns, burns,
    The ring of stupid,
    The ring of stupid.

    No burning stupid for me on this fine Sunday, dodging Sunday school and the mysteries of the Trinity here on the Burning Stupid 19 thread, dressed in my nomex suit, sipping a frosty glass of water, sitting on a smoking block of dry ice with fire extinguishers at hand. At some point this madness will burn itself out, but until it does things will likely get a bit warm. Brace yourselves.

  92. philemon,

    Fake in the sense that you are not a real person.

    What does that even mean? I’m an android?

    Why on earth would your children have any belief about “antivaxxers”?

    You seem confused. Maybe you hear “kids” and assume they’re 4, or something? They’re 15 and 21. But my point was, they didn’t know there were such people as antivaxxers until I told them about you, Dennis, Johnno, etc. When I told them, they thought I was joking.

    I think you will find it higher now.

    You’re right. I just checked and it’s gone up to 1579 out of 616 million, or from 0.0007% to 0.0009%.

    Of course, you are one of those people who thought the original SARS-COV-2 would be deadly. I have to wonder why.

    The 600,000 dead bodies in your country were a bit of a clue. (Fun fact: that’s 52,000 tons of dead fat Americans according to google.)

    Unfortunately, the current batch of “vaccines” can’t even provide 50%.

    False. And as you’ve provided no source, I can dismiss your (fake news) claim out of hand. But I can cite a source:

    “COVID-19 breakthrough infections in vaccinated health care workers” Bergwerk et al. NEJM (July 28, 2021).

    Key findings: Among 1,497 fully vaccinated healthcare workers in Israel who were tested for SARS-CoV-2 because of symptoms or known exposure over 14 weeks in early 2021, 39 (2.6%) had documented SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections.

  93. But my point was, they didn’t know there were such people as antivaxxers until I told them about you, Dennis, Johnno, etc. When I told them, they thought I was joking.

    Hey swishfood, did your overgrown pampered unknowledgable children also think you were “joking” when you told them you wished that your grandfather had sodomized your grandmother in her asshole because that would have been safer than getting pregnant and dying in childbirth?

    Do you hold the same contempt for your children as you do your grandmother?

    The 600,000 dead bodies in your country were a bit of a clue.

    You mean the 600,000 bodies given a PCR test? (Fun fact: both the WHO and the CDC have quietly withdrawn the PCR test as being completely incapable of being evidence of Covid, meaning there is now OFFICIALLY no basis or scientifuc data behind any of the mountains of dead ever having THE COVID ™) Please be a good dad for once in your life and pass that information on to your children who are there because I’m sure they are grateful you didn’t sodomize your wife in her ass. At least not those two occasions.

    Among 1,497 fully vaccinated healthcare workers in Israel who were tested for SARS-CoV-2 because of symptoms or known exposure over 14 weeks in early 2021, 39 (2.6%) had documented SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections.

    So in conclusion:
    – the vaccines don’t work.
    – the infection rate in the vaccinated (2.6%) is higher than is normal (1 – 1.5%)

    The study findings also revealed that among the vaccinated health care workers in the study, only 39 were infected despite being vaccinated. Of these patients, 19 percent developed symptoms that lasted for at least six weeks, also called long-COVID. The symptoms include fatigue, muscle pain, headache, and loss of smell and taste.

    The B.1.1.7 variant or Alpha variant was found in 85 percent of samples tested. Also, about 74 percent of patients had a high viral load at some point during the infection.

    https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210802/Study-examined-1497-full-vaccinated-healthcare-workers-for-breakthrough-infections.aspx

    US infection rates by state, where rates above 1% are considered high-risk.
    https://www.businessinsider.com/every-us-state-high-risk-covid-19-map-severe-2021-8?op=1

    But philemon is still more or less correct:

    The people who are not testing positive in the current outbreak are those who have had COVID-19 previously and recovered. These people account for 9% of Israel’s population but less than 1% of recent infections, according to Kovler’s analysis. This has brought new questions about whether natural infections are more protective against the delta variant than vaccinations — but the answer is not yet certain.

    In protecting against infection, Pfizer vaccines are 95% effective for the alpha variant but only 64% effective for the delta variant.

    In preventing symptomatic COVID-19 cases, Pfizer vaccines are 97% effective for the alpha variant but only 64% effective for the delta variant.

    In preventing hospitalization and serious disease, Pfizer vaccines are 97.5% effective for the alpha variant and still 93% effective for the delta variant.

    While the Pfizer vaccine is less effective against the delta variant, the vaccine’s effectiveness still far exceeds the 50% vaccine efficacy threshold required for WHO approval, according to the organization’s website.

    https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/7/20/22584134/whats-going-on-in-israels-outbreak-among-vaccinated-people

    So 60% is your best case scenario for coming up negative! Woooow! Such vaccine! Much bulletproof! Blood clotting must be worth the percentage risk!

  94. The efficacy of a vaccine is measured as the ratio of the percent sick in the control group to the percent sick in the control group, subtracted from one. So for example if 20% of a control group got sick and 1% of the vaccine group got sick the efficacy would be 95% (i.e. 1-1/20.)

    swordfishtrombone, because he is both stupid and a liar, thinks that the efficacy rate is one minus the ratio of those sick in the vaccine group to the total population of the vaccine group, or perhaps the one minus ratio of those sick in the vaccine group to those tested for disease in the vaccine group.

    The study that he cited does not give any information on how many among the unvaccinated were sick (not even in the supplementary appendix; I looked) and thus cannot be used by itself to calculate efficacy. But since he is talking about a positivity rate of vaccinated group, we can estimate the efficacy by comparing this to a more general positivity rate. The study he is using is here, by the way:

    https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109072

    It was published on July 28, but the tests must have been taken before that. It doesn’t actually say when the tests were taken, but presumably sometime earlier in July. This article by Israel’s Hamodia puts the general positivity rate at 1.87% on July 20:

    https://hamodia.com/2021/07/20/new-peak-israel-1372-new-covid-cases-reported-62-serious-condition/

    while this article by Israel’s I24 channel puts it at 2.08% just before the study was released:

    https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/1627292855-israel-s-covid-19-positive-test-result-rate-rises-to-2-08

    The positivity rate that swordfishtrombone is so proud of is 2.6%, which is higher than the general positivity rates at these times and thus would suggest a negative efficacy. Now obviously there is a lot of room for noise here since we are comparing data from different sources taken under different conditions. However, if the efficacy of the vaccines against the current strains really were in the range of 50%, then at this time period we should be seeing a positivity rate more in the range of .9-1.2%, where a 95% efficacy would suggest something more like .09-.11%.

  95. Although I suppose to be fair, the general positivity rate is going to include the vaccinated and I should be more careful in the calculations (though there is no situation in which vaccines could have positive efficacy and a higher positivity rate in vaccinated individuals than the general population.) About 65% of the population in Israel is fully vaccinated. So, assuming that the same proportions of vaccinated and unvaccinated get tested, the general positivity rate could be found like this:

    P = (.65N * v+.35N*u)/N = (.65v+.35u)

    where P is the positivity rate of the whole population, N is the number tested, v is the positivity rate among vaccinated and u is the positivity rate among unvaccinated. With P = .02 and if we assume that an efficacy rate of .95 (so that v = .05 u) we get

    .02 = (.65*.05 u+.35 u) = .3825 u, u = .0522…, v = .0026…

    meaning we’d expect to see a positivity rate among the vaccinated alone of about .26%. Similarly with an efficacy of 50%(i.e. v = .5u) we get

    .02 = (.65*.5u+.35u) = .675 u, u = .0296…, v = .0148…

    meaning we’d expect to see a positivity rate of about 1.5%. This means that even for 50% efficacy, we should be seeing a positivity rate something like 60% of what swordfishtrombone is bragging about.

  96. swordfishtrombone

    “What does that even mean? I’m an android?” I think you know perfectly well what I mean. You’re not here because you want to be here.

    “You seem confused. Maybe you hear ‘kids’ and assume they’re 4, or something? They’re 15 and 21. But my point was, they didn’t know there were such people as antivaxxers until I told them about you, Dennis, Johnno, etc. When I told them, they thought I was joking.” That’s weird. At their age, they should have heard about real anti-vaccine people like Jenny McCarthy by now.

    On the other hand, according to you, they’re young. Maybe, they’ve never heard of the Swine-Flu vaccine, or the Anthrax vaccine.

    Can’t speak for Dennis or Johnno, but I’m only anti-pseudo-“vaccines” touted by pharmaceutical companies with less than stellar records (or start-ups with no records) who stand to make big money from a drug that never made it out of animal trials before. Those poor ferrets. Not to mention the rabbits or the Golden Syrian hamsters.

    I sincerely hope that, if you do have kids, or whatever age, they are not getting the “Covid vaccine” just because you say so and they don’t know any better. I would hope you would know that the coronavirus in question is much less of a threat to their health than the “vaccines” in question.

    So, according to you, if you have kids, what would be a safe longitudinal study of a “novel vaccine” with no successful animal trials, no real double-blinded/placebo-controlled Phase I safety trial, no Phase II double-blinded/placebo-controlled efficacy trial. No prior probabilities for the bio-statisticians from the researchers on whether to curtail it or extend it. Obviously, no Phase III Clinical Trials, which would also be double-blinded/placebo-controlled, and possibly multi-institutional, in order catch any adverse events?

    Just curious, how long do you think it takes to approve a novel drug?

    “The 600,000 dead bodies in your country were a bit of a clue. (Fun fact: that’s 52,000 tons of dead fat Americans according to google.)” You are so sympathetic [/sarc].

    You do realize, I am sure you do, that people dying with Covid are a far cry from people dying from Covid. Are you familiar at all with intubation-induced pneumonia? Still have to wonder why you would have thought SARS-COV-2 would be deadly to those who didn’t have 4-5 co-morbidities or were over 80 years old. Actually, I was impressed at how many 90-100 year old people seemed to be immune. And, of course, children and young people were fine.

  97. Anti-Vaxxer Catholic Cardinal Currently on Ventilator After Catching COVID

    Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, one of the Catholic Church’s most embarrassing public figures for the past several years, is currently in the hospital with COVID after spending much of the past year downplaying the seriousness of the virus and rejecting the efficacy of the vaccines.

    Burke, a 73-year-old right-wing homophobe who was demoted in 2014, argued in March of 2020 that churches should remain open despite all the evidence (even then) that the virus could spread via large gatherings. In May of last year, he said any potential vaccine couldn’t be forced upon the public… in part because he fell for an insane conspiracy theory involving microchips

    https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/08/16/anti-vaxxer-catholic-cardinal-currently-on-ventilator-after-catching-covid/

    No comment.

  98. That’s weird. At their age, they should have heard about real anti-vaccine people like Jenny McCarthy by now.

    Are you serious? Jenny McCarthy the ex-Playboy model? Yeah, she’s a really serious scientist, I don’t think.

    McCarthy has written several books about parenting and has promoted research into environmental causes and alternative medical treatments for autism. She has promoted the disproven idea that vaccines cause autism, and she believes that chelation therapy, a quack remedy for autism, helped cure her son of autism. McCarthy’s outspoken views have attracted controversy and been considered “dangerous”, “reckless”, and “uninformed”. McCarthy has been described by journalists as “the nation’s most prominent purveyor of anti-vaxxer ideology” and “the face of the anti-vaxx movement”. Although she disputes the anti-vaccine label, saying instead that she prefers the term “pro-safe-vaccine-schedule”, this self-description has been met with strong criticism. [Wikipedia}

    The MMR-vaccine-causes-autism claim was based on a fraudulent and retracted paper by not-a-doctor-any-more Andrew Wakefield, who stood to make millions selling test kits. And speaking as someone with asperger’s myself, I reject the idea that autism is necessarily anything which needs “curing” in the first place.

    I would hope you would know that the coronavirus in question is much less of a threat to their health than the “vaccines” in question.

    Prove it. (That which is presented without evidence can be rejected without evidence.)

    So, according to you, if you have kids, what would be a safe longitudinal study of a “novel vaccine” […]?

    It’s not up to me to make those kinds of decisions. That’s what we have experts for. Earlier, you cited Jenny McCarthy as an authority, yet she has done no research, trials, “longitudinal studies” or anything else. You are a joke.

    <blockquote<You are so sympathetic [/sarc].

    You don’t even believe in those deaths, so what are you complaining about? Of course I’m sympathetic – my own uncle died! And let’s not forget the millions who survived but have suffered long-term health consequences. That’s why I’m trying to counter your fake news.

    You do realize, I am sure you do, that people dying with Covid are a far cry from people dying from Covid

    This is just a misunderstanding of the way deaths are recorded, and was arguably the very first piece of COVID-19 fake news. Shame on you for still repeating it over a year later.

  99. All thanks be to God for Cardinal Burke and his stand for God’s creation of human sexuality of man for woman and woman for man. That stand is according to the Word of God, also witnessed to by Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew.

    Cardinal Burke’s stand on the vaccine, with which I agree, that the USE of the product of murdered baby tissue, no matter how long ago the murder took place is morally wrong.

    And here is what Cardinal Burke said about microchips …. “In a May 2020 talk he delivered at the virtual Rome Life Forum, Burke spoke out against government imposing vaccination mandates. He also warned that some groups in modern society would suggest that “a kind of microchip needs to be placed under the skin of every person, so that at any moment he or she can be controlled by the state regarding health and about other matters which we can only imagine.”

    Also, we are in the beginning stages of the One World Government where when it is set, all needed for life will be subject to persons absolutely obeying the government in all things, including being microchipped.

    In a lengthy March 2020 statement he posted on his blog, Burke wrote, “In combating the evil of the coronavirus, our most effective weapon is, therefore, our relationship with Christ through prayer and penance, and devotions and sacred worship. We turn to Christ to deliver us from pestilence and from all harm, and He never fails to respond with pure and selfless love.”

    And, regarding his stand towards, Francis, Francis has done and said many things which are against Christianity.

    God bless, C-Marie

  100. swordfishtrombone fights for a moral vision where it is more important to keep liquor stores and gay bathhouses open than it is to give people access to the Holy Sacraments and the Divine Institution of Holy Mass.

    Can you imagine anyone fighting or dying for such a vision? No wonder people of his ilk can’t imagine any response to the modern world than cowering at home and consuming low quality Netflix entertainment, for all eternity.

  101. The Noblest Lie

    I just witnessed a PSA showing teens and young adults enjoying life

    Sure ’nuff

    The tagline was that “THE VEX” is HIGHLY effective against the DELTA VARIANT.

  102. My, you sound hysterical.

    “And speaking as someone with asperger’s myself, I reject the idea that autism is necessarily anything which needs ‘curing’ in the first place.” Are you sure it’s not “Assburgers”? I’ve known a number of people with actual autism.

    So, according to you, if you have kids, what would be a safe longitudinal study of a “novel vaccine” […]?

    “It’s not up to me to make those kinds of decisions. That’s what we have experts for.” Ah, I see! That’s how you think. And you can’t be bothered to check those experts for your “kids.”

    I would hope you would know that the coronavirus in question is much less of a threat to their health than the “vaccines” in question.

    “Prove it. (That which is presented without evidence can be rejected without evidence.)”

    You know the numbers, I hope, for your “kids’” sakes. They are not at risk from the disease itself. The “vaccines”, on the other hand, have not been thoroughly tested, and the adverse events are piling up. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that “sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.”

    “Earlier, you cited Jenny McCarthy as an authority…”

    No, I cited her as a prominent anti-vaccine personality. “You are a joke.” I think the joke is on you.

    How long do you think it takes to approve a novel drug?

    “The 600,000 dead bodies in your country were a bit of a clue. (Fun fact: that’s 52,000 tons of dead fat Americans according to google.)” Sorry about your uncle. And the deaths were real.

    Have you ever hear of intubation pneumonia? Do you know anything about PCR? Do you know anything about Clinical Trials?

  103. Sorry, last post was to swordfishtrombone.

    And I forgot to ask: have you, swordfishtrombone, ever heard of the Swine-Flu vaccine, or the Anthrax vaccine? Vioxx?

    As I said, I’m only anti-pseudo-“vaccines” touted by pharmaceutical companies with less than stellar records (or start-ups with no records) who stand to make big money from a drug that never made it out of animal trials before. Those poor ferrets.

  104. “Can’t speak for Dennis or Johnno, but I’m only anti-pseudo-“vaccines” touted by pharmaceutical companies with less than stellar records (or start-ups with no records) who stand to make big money from a drug that never made it out of animal trials before.”

    Yes, I concur. Trying my best to just ignore swordfish at this point; just not worth the time or energy. I didn’t look at a single bit of news or even think about Covid or check responses above from Saturday through yesterday. I need to take more of these news breaks!

  105. Swordfish,
    I see you’re still countering the nonsense with proper information. Keep it up.
    Pneumonia induced by ventilation?
    Ventilation causes trauma to the lungs, potentially when pressure is too great required to ventialte the lung. This happens in Adult respiratory distress when bronchospasm adds to the resistance and therefore force of the positive pressure required. Suction techniques remove secretions are also traumatic to the epithelial lining, hence the need for tracheostomy.

    The choice to intubate a patient who is in serious respiratory distress and is not able to maintain adequate oxygen saturation is very much a last resort. Their state of illness prior to intubation also affects their outcome. Ventilation itself carries it’s own risks. Each day on ventilation takes about week on average, of rehab.

    Swordfish you are right that there is much complexity in this and dodging the numbers as an indication of what’s happening without all of the information in each case is facile. What stage of epidemic, what numbers in the population, the level of knowledge of the population, behaviour of the population and on and on, all have an effect.
    Clinical decision making is never a purely numbers game. Some statisticians think it is, or talk as if it is. They just don’t know. When telling a patient or advising a family about a potential treatment of any kind, numbers are always nebulous and not specific to the patient. Briggs would normally point this out. The ‘chances’ are not real. They do not d3scribe cause, yet some here act as if it does.

    The physiology is not mysterious, nor the clinical management of this disease after over a year.
    It seems some want to have the argument without respect to what is known now and what was known a year ago.

    At least the staff tell the truth to patients. Very few are as obtuse in their understanding as the people on the internet who are behaving like back seat drivers. Angry, pointless, messenger shooting, projection artists.

  106. Johnno,

    (Forgot to reply to your earlier creepy comment. My apologies.)

    Hey swishfood, did your overgrown pampered unknowledgable children also think you were “joking” when you told them you wished that your grandfather had sodomized your grandmother in her asshole because that would have been safer than getting pregnant and dying in childbirth? Do you hold the same contempt for your children as you do your grandmother?

    What are you talking about, wierdo? I’m proud that my kids are smart enough to realise that antivaxxers are a joke.

    Fun fact: both the WHO and the CDC have quietly withdrawn the PCR test as being completely incapable of being evidence of Covid

    False. They’ve replaced the tests with more efficient tests:

    A CDC spokesperson told Full Fact that the PCR test in question—the CDC Novel Coronavirus (2019 nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR—is “a highly accurate test” and the decision to discontinue the request for emergency use authorisation was not due to performance issues. They explained that since this type of PCR test was introduced, more PCR tests have become available from commercial manufacturers. These are “faster, have higher throughput [quicker processing] and are designed to be more efficient” and mean demand for the CDC’s PCR test has “declined significantly”.

    The CDC said it is encouraging public health labs to adopt the CDC Influenza SARS-CoV-2 (Flu SC2) Multiplex assay, which allows simultaneous testing for both influenza and SARS-Cov-2 (the virus which causes Covid-19).

    the vaccines don’t work.

    False. You’re disagreeing with the authors of the paper and misinterpreting the results.

    But like I said, if you don’t want to be vaccinated, I fully, wholeheartedly, and even enthusiastically support your right not to.

  107. Rudolph Harrier,

    swordfishtrombone fights for a moral vision where it is more important to keep liquor stores and gay bathhouses open than it is to give people access to the Holy Sacraments and the Divine Institution of Holy Mass.

    I didn’t express any such opinion, so stop bearing false witness and breaking your commandments. Jesus never said it’s necesssary to go to church or have access to the “Holy Sacrements”, so I don’t know what you’re bleating about. And think of all the children saved from abuse by paedophile priests thanks to churches being closed!

  108. Protip: Appeals to Christian moral authority only work if you don’t make clear that you despise Christianity.

  109. That “CDC spokesperson” is spouting nonsense (just as swordfish does on a regular basis, with Joy’s endorsement). The CDC’s own site announcing the withdrawal of the PCR EUA (I think it was back in June) stated that among the reasons was its inability to distinguish between SARS-COV2 and flu. This renders invalid the entire data set of claimed “cases” for the past 18 months using that test, whether or not it is being replaced with a “more accurate test” (And where’s the proof that the new tests are in fact “more accurate”? Given how many lies we’ve been told by CDC and others over the past 18 months, I don’t believe ANY claim made by them on behalf of ANYTHING).

    Any claim that PCR tests are “highly accurate” for diagnostic purposes, as that spokes-shill claims (especially when used at the very high cycles rates most have been using for the past 18 months), is in utterly risible. Kary Mullis himself would laugh her out of town for making such a claim on behalf of the misuse of the test method he invented.

  110. Dennis,

    The CDC’s own site announcing the withdrawal of the PCR EUA (I think it was back in June) stated that among the reasons was its inability to distinguish between SARS-COV2 and flu.

    False.

    In fact, the CDC’s test was developed to look for the presence of a nucleic acid found only in the COVID virus, said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs at the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “It is not remotely accurate that the CDC test doesn’t differentiate between flu and SARS-CoV-2. It doesn’t detect influenza. It only detects SARS-CoV-2,” said Wroblewski. “If flu and COVID are both circulating, you would be able to detect only SARS-CoV-2 and not flu.” [Poynter, 18 August 2021]

    The claim appears to stem from a misunderstanding of part of the announcement where the agency stated laboratories and testing sites should use other FDA-authorized COVID-19 tests. It further said laboratories should “consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.” This means that the CDC recommends that laboratories use tests that can look for both viruses, as the CDC’s Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel can only detect SARS-Cov-2. [CheckYourFact 28 July 2021]

    But as Stevie Zhang, a research reporter at First Draft, explained on Twitter, the CDC announcement did not mean that PCR tests were unable to differentiate between COVID-19 and the flu. “As the US heads into flu season, they want to save time and resources by using a test that can detect multiple viruses,” Zhang said. “Currently the PCR nose swab *only* tests for COVID-19 and nothing else.” [ABC, 29 July 2020]

    Stop getting your news from Facebook.

  111. I don’t use Zuckerbook, you jackwagon. Stop believing govt shills lying to cover their tracks and engage in double-speak after being found out perpetrating a sham all along.

    PCR can’t even distinguish between live virus and dead fragments, and at high cycle rates has a large number of false positives to begin with, but you and other regime Narrative lickspittles continue to perpetrate the new lie – designed to cover for having let the cat out of the bag in their initial press release – that PCR is “highly accurate” for diagnostic purposes (a complete misuse of the test to begin with). GTFO.

  112. The CDC withdrawal of PCR tests is one where “fact checkers” talk around the story. Here are the bare bones facts:

    -The CDC has withdrawn emergency authorization of PCR tests as a means of detecting COVID-19.
    -The CDC suggests the use of “multiplexed methods that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.”

    That’s it. Both sides connect those facts in different ways. Skeptics of the CDC say that the relation is that the tests cannot distinguish the two viruses and thus are inaccurate. “Fact Checkers” say that the CDC wants to only use tests that can test for multiple viruses. But in fact the CDC says neither, it does not say “the PCR tests are being withdrawn because they are ineffective” or “because they do not test for multiple viruses.” The “fact checkers” point out that the original CDC test is only intended to test for COVID-19, and thus should not react to other diseases. But that doesn’t exclude the possibility of it accidentally reacting to other diseases.

    What is missed in both explanations, but more particularly the “fact checker” explanation is the “emergency use.” This wasn’t a random test that the CDC thought might be helpful, but then decided to stop using because it wasn’t as useful as other tests. It could not be used without emergency authorization, and it will not be used in the future because the emergency authorization was not renewed, nor was it granted FDA approval.

    Thus the natural place to go for answers would be the FDA. The FDA page on In Vitro diagnostics tests for COVID, including PCR tests, is located here:

    https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-emergency-use-authorizations-medical-devices/in-vitro-diagnostics-euas-molecular-diagnostic-tests-sars-cov-2

    One thing that will become immediately clear is that there is not just one PCR test but many (there’s 11 pages of authorizations!), and they are not interchangeable. In fact, the FDA has already revoked emergency use for the “Biofire” PCR test while allowing the use of others. If you go through the EUA summaries you will want to pay attention to the “Cross-reactivity” section, i.e. the section talking about whether the test can be active in the presence of other viruses. Some have quite solid statements that cross-reactivity for a variety of viruses was tested and none was seen, some say that the reaction was lower and “probably” won’t affect testing, some say hardly anything at all about cross-reactivity. The most likely thing with this variance in testing is that some PCR tests probably can test positive for the flu, while others will not.

    There is only one non-multiplex test for COVID-19 from the CDC (i.e., only one test that only tests for COVID-19.) But unlike the little guys, the CDC apparently doesn’t have to provide an EUA summary. They only list a document with information for doctors, a document with information for patients, and instructions for use. None of these list cross-reactivity information, and thus there is no way to know if the CDC test is one of those that can mistake the flu for COVID-19.

  113. swordfishtrombone:

    “But like I said, if you don’t want to be vaccinated, I fully, wholeheartedly, and even enthusiastically support your right not to.”

    So, you are fully, wholeheartedly, and even enthusiastically against vaccine mandates. That’s good.

    Of course, you seem to trust self-declared “experts” and anonymous “fact checkers” to a disturbing degree. Why don’t you go look up the studies yourself? There is quite of bit of money on the line for a lot of those people. They can lie just as easily as you can. Even more easily in some cases.

  114. swordfishtrombone:

    You do realize, I am sure you do, that people dying with Covid are a far cry from people dying from Covid. Especially when people dying “with Covid” had four or five co-morbidities on average and were well over 80 years old. (Life-expentancy and all that.)

    “This is just a misunderstanding of the way deaths are recorded, and was arguably the very first piece of COVID-19 fake news. Shame on you for still repeating it over a year later.”

    I am repeating it because it is true. There were financial inducements to record any death as a SARS-2-Covid-19 death. Up to $39,000 per case.

    Do you have any idea how hospital administration operates?

  115. Interesting stuff Rudolph. Thanks for clarifying (like most, I thought there was basically just one PCR test which was in use everywhere – all based on Drosten’s that was first to market – though cycles and other testing standards varied throughout the world), though I still think the press release by CDC is still unclear. Is there any data then on how many, and where, tests that might have been “cross-reactive” were used versus those that are not cross-reactive? If we don’t know that, then it still seems to me the entire data set of “cases” cannot be trusted. Even if only, say, 20% of tests were “cross-reactive” with other viruses, that’s far too many.

    And when one is tested, is one told precisely which test is used and what standards, cycle rate, etc., the test has (I’m probably one of the relatively few people left on earth who has never been tested for Sars-Cov2, so I don’t know how it actually works at ground level as far as what info they disclose to you in the testing process)?

    And at sufficiently high cycle rates isn’t it still true that PCR will often read “positive” even if there is nothing (whether SARS-Cov2 or any other virus) actually there? Using PCR tests of any kind, cross-reactive or not, being used on a mass scale for diagnostic purposes (especially when unaccompanied by any symptoms of an illness which are then corroborated by a proper medical diagnosis by a doctor) was a huge mistake (or a deliberate part of the plan rollout from the start, rather than merely a “mistake”), and the main reason this endless “casedemic” has been perpetuated for so long.

  116. Philemon you area girl.
     
    ~~~
    Swordfish,
    when the insults start, they’ve lost the argument.
    All they have is anger and insult. Maybe that means you’ll go away?
    This site used to be about over certainty, it was never about experts. It was also about discerning good argument from bad. There’s nothing like a good example of an argument to teach people how it’s done and their is nothing like a good argument!

  117. I’ve not seen any real arguments from the fearmongering, Covid Cultist, Rushed Jab Loving side, except repeating the mainstream media and politician-approved Narrative lies that have destroyed the world and our lives for the past 18 months.

  118. philemon,

    You do realize, I am sure you do, that people dying with Covid are a far cry from people dying from Covid. Especially when people dying “with Covid” had four or five co-morbidities on average and were well over 80 years old. (Life-expentancy and all that.)

    I know that you don’t care about old people that die, only foetuses. So much for pro-life. Regarding overcounting of deaths, you do realise, I am sure you do, that there is also significant undercounting, such as from people dying at home? It’s almost certain that overall, undercounting was more significant than overcounting.

  119. philemon,

    I am repeating it because it is true. There were financial inducements to record any death as a SARS-2-Covid-19 death. Up to $39,000 per case.

    Nothing you say is true as far as I can tell. The existence of “financial inducements” applies to many things, such as Christianity. If it weren’t for the faithful handing over their hard-earned cash, churches would soon go out of business. Does that fact alone mean religion isn’t true?

    “There’s an implication here that hospitals are over-reporting their COVID patients because they have an economic advantage of doing so, [which] is really an outrageous claim,” Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told us. And, he said, any suggestion that patients may be put on ventilators out of financial gain, not medical need, “is basically saying physicians are violating their Hippocratic Oath … it would be like providing heart surgery on someone who doesn’t need it.”

    Robert Berenson, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute, said the notion that hospitals are profiting off the pandemic — as some of the social media posts may imply — isn’t borne out by facts, either.

    Berenson said revenues appear to be down for hospitals this quarter because many have suspended elective procedures, which are key to their revenue, forcing some hospitals to cut staff. He surmised that potential instances of patients being wrongly “upcoded” — or classified as COVID-19 when they’re not — are “trivial compared to these other forces that are affecting hospital finances.”

    Berenson and others we spoke with also said that hospitals have profound disincentives for “upcoding,” which can result in criminal or civil liabilities, such as being susceptible to being kicked out of the Medicare program.

    https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-covid-19-death-count/

  120. The claim: Hospitals are reimbursed extra money if they report a patient as a COVID patient.

    The fact check: They are (The figures cited by Jensen generally square with estimated Medicare payments for COVID-19 hospitalizations, based on average Medicare payments for patients with similar diagnoses.It is true, however, that the government will pay more to hospitals for COVID-19 cases in two senses: By paying an additional 20% on top of traditional Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients during the public health emergency, and by reimbursing hospitals for treating the uninsured patients with the disease (at that enhanced Medicare rate).

    Both of those provisions stem from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act.A Kaiser Health News analysis found that the distribution of that initial $30 billion resulted in hospitals in states less affected by the pandemic — such as Minnesota, Nebraska and Montana — being given funding that worked out to be about “$300,000 per reported COVID-19 case.” In New York, which has the highest number of COVID-19 cases, the grant money amounted to “only $12,000 per case.”.)

    Verdict: It is a lie to say that hospitals are being reimbursed more per COVID case, because doctors are honest and swear that they’d never say anything inaccurate, not even in cases where a diagnosis is unclear and might be COVID. (I especially like the suggestion that a hospital would never suggest a patient take on an expensive but ultimately unneeded procedure. I don’t think I’ve ever went to the hospital for anything without having the doctor suggest an additional test or medication that “probably isn’t necessary, but might help.”)

    But in any case what is being debunked is not what is being claimed anyway. “Fact Checkers” exist for two reasons only: First, the large number of people who read the headlines only and don’t give a damn about the actual reasoning. Second, for midwits who are willing to accept any explanation given, even if it has nothing to do with the claim being made, because they can feel smart by copy and pasting it to try to end a conversation.

  121. swordfishtrombone,

    You do realize, I am sure you do, that people dying with Covid are a far cry from people dying from Covid. Especially when people dying “with Covid” had four or five co-morbidities on average and were well over 80 years old. (Life-expentancy and all that.) And, of course, there were false politives.

    “I know that you don’t care about old people that die, only foetuses. [So wrong and so stupid!] So much for pro-life. [So much for you!] Regarding overcounting of deaths, you do realise, I am sure you do, that there is also significant undercounting, such as from people dying at home? It’s almost certain that overall, undercounting was more significant than overcounting.”

    I doubt it. Deaths are real. There might have been undercounting in the number of deaths due to cardiac arrests, deaths due to medical treatment not being available, deaths due to people not being diagnosed early enough. But, the deaths were not undercounted; it was only “Deaths with Covid”, oh, those false positives. (Of course, the death rate wasn’t in excess of a bad flu season; and the most susceptible were the elderly with 4-5 co-morbidities. Fortunately, the young were immune.)

    Actually, I think the elderly patients dying in nursing homes was a flaming disgrace, especially after they’d been hastily discharged from hospitals, and I think the people responsible for it should be charged with manslaughter.

    https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/06/16/matt-hancock-i-tried/

  122. Joy
    August 19, 2021 at 7:00 am
    Philemon you area girl.

    Your English is failing you again!

  123. swordfishtrombone,

    You were told to comment here on the understanding that everyone here was “pro-life” and “anti-abortion” and possibly “anti-vaccine” (in a very broad sense). People who comment aren’t necessarily like that.

  124. philemon,

    Joy, Your English is failing you again!

    And, of course, there were false politives.

    HA

  125. philemon,

    But, the deaths were not undercounted

    The facts disagree with you.

    Of course, the death rate wasn’t in excess of a bad flu season

    Another lie.

    The raw death count helps give us a sense of scale: for example, the US suffered roughly 360,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 26 January and 3 October 2020, compared to 209,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period. [OurWorldInData]

    https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

    Actually, I think the elderly patients dying in nursing homes was a flaming disgrace, especially after they’d been hastily discharged from hospitals, and I think the people responsible for it should be charged with manslaughter.

    You’ve just claimed it was no worse than flu, now you’re claiming this was manslaughter? You can’t even get your claims to agree with each other!

    You were told to comment here on the understanding that everyone here was “pro-life” and “anti-abortion” and possibly “anti-vaccine” (in a very broad sense). People who comment aren’t necessarily like that.

    I’ve been commenting here for years – maybe even a full decade. I wasn’t “told” to comment here, that is just another conspiracy claim. If I’ve misrepresented your views such that you’re not pro-life or not antivaxx, then I apologise.

  126. swordfishtrombone:

    And, of course, there were false politives.
    “HA” Thank you for pointing out my typo. Yes, “positives”.

    But, the deaths were not undercounted.

    “The facts disagree with you.”

    No, the deaths qua deaths were deaths. The diagnoses of why they died might be questioned.

    Of course, the death rate wasn’t in excess of a bad flu season.

    “Another lie.” Why do you always assume everyone expect the CDC is lying?

    No, it’s true. There have been flu seasons where the mortality rate was higher than the SARS-Cov-2. They also affected more young people.

    Actually, I think the elderly patients dying in nursing homes was a flaming disgrace, especially after they’d been hastily discharged from hospitals, and I think the people responsible for it should be charged with manslaughter.

    “You’ve just claimed it was no worse than flu, now you’re claiming this was manslaughter? You can’t even get your claims to agree with each other!”

    No, I said the mortality rate from SARS-Cov-2 was comparable to a bad flu season. And my claims are not inconsistent. Discharging patients who were possibly infectious from hospitals back to nursing homes where there were vulnerable elderly people was unconscionable. Negligent manslaughter at least, especially with illegal “DNR’ notices. And the failure to update protocols in hospitals in re intubation is another malpractice suit waiting to happen. So, the actual mortality rate could have been inflated just be the measures taken.

    “If I’ve misrepresented your views such that you’re not pro-life or not antivaxx, then I apologise.”

    So gracious. Thank you.

    “I’ve been commenting here for years – maybe even a full decade. I wasn’t ‘told’ to comment here, that is just another conspiracy claim.”

    I have been reading this blog for over twenty years. I apologize that I haven’t noticed your comments before.

  127. “just be the measures taken” should be “just by the measures taken”!

    swordfishtrombone: Have you ever heard of the Swine-Flu vaccine, or the Anthrax vaccine? Vioxx?

    You seem remarkably credulous about people “in authority” assuring you that something is “safe” even when they stand to make big fat wads of cash off it, and thus have all the reason in the world to downplay any problems with it.

    I would suggest you read more, and comment less, but your reading comprehension leaves much to be desired. I think you might improve if you read critically and with a more open mind.

  128. Why do you always assume everyone, with the exception the CDC, is lying? The CDC can lie, too. And they do.

  129. philemon,

    But, the deaths were not undercounted.

    Prove it.

    There have been flu seasons where the mortality rate was higher than the SARS-Cov-2.

    Such as? I don’t think this is true of any flu season since the adoption of flu vaccines. The worst flu season in the last 10 years was 2017-2018, when there were 61,000 deaths, far lower than COVID-19. In any case, the existence of a previous worse pandemic wouldn’t mean we should do nothing about a different pandemic.

    Discharging patients who were possibly infectious from hospitals back to nursing homes where there were vulnerable elderly people was unconscionable.

    It was quite possibly a mistake, but the CDC didn’t order it, and I don’t know what point you’re trying to make by mentioning it. Have you never made a mistake?

    And the failure to update protocols in hospitals in re intubation is another malpractice suit waiting to happen.

    You mean, an alleged failure for which you’ve cited no source.

    So, the actual mortality rate could have been inflated just be the measures taken.

    “Could have” doesn’t mean actually was. Cite some evidence.

  130. philemon,

    swordfishtrombone: Have you ever heard of the Swine-Flu vaccine, or the Anthrax vaccine? Vioxx?

    In the US swine flu scare of 1976, President Gerald Ford was confronted with a potential swine flu pandemic. The vaccination program was rushed, yet plagued by delays and public relations problems. Meanwhile, maximum military containment efforts succeeded unexpectedly in confining the new strain to the single army base where it had originated. On that base, a number of soldiers fell severely ill, but only one died. The program was canceled after about 24% of the population had received vaccinations. An excess in deaths of twenty-five over normal annual levels as well as four hundred excess hospitalizations, both from Guillain–Barré syndrome, were estimated to have occurred from the vaccination program itself, demonstrating that the vaccine itself is not free of risks. The result can be cited to support lingering doubts about vaccination as well as to counter ungrounded claims about the safety of vaccination. In the end, however, even the maligned 1976 vaccine may have saved lives. A 2010 study found a significantly enhanced immune response against the 2009 pandemic H1N1 in study participants who had received vaccination against the swine flu in 1976. [Wikipedia]

    I’m not seeing any issue there, and you haven’t explained why you think I should.

    You seem remarkably credulous about people “in authority” assuring you that something is “safe” even when they stand to make big fat wads of cash off it, and thus have all the reason in the world to downplay any problems with it.

    1. The people who stand to make money off vaccines also stand to lose money, or even end up in prison, if the vaccines weren’t safe and they tried to conceal that. It’s not like you have a shortage of lawyers in the US.

    2. I’m not “credulous of people in authority” at all, I accept the scientific and medical consensus on COVID-19, which is based on evidence, not authority. (Incidentally, Christianity is entirely based on having faith in authorities.)

    3. The Catholic Church stands to gain financially by telling people that it is the only path to salvation. Does that fact in and of itself mean it cannot be trusted?

    I would suggest you read more, and comment less, but your reading comprehension leaves much to be desired. I think you might improve if you read critically and with a more open mind.

    This is pure projection on your part. You could start by reading the Bible critically. Apparently, I’m credulous for accepting the consensus of evidence-based scientific research, while you aren’t credulous for believing miraculous anonymous claims in an old book with no supporting evidence at all.

    Incidentally, I apologised “if” it was the case that I’d misrepresented your position, but it doesn’t seem like I have.

  131. swordfishtrombone:

    But, the deaths were not undercounted.

    “Prove it.”

    Deaths are deaths. The actual deaths were not undercounted. What they died of is another story.

    “The program was canceled after about 24% of the population had received vaccinations. An excess in deaths of twenty-five over normal annual levels as well as four hundred excess hospitalizations, both from Guillain–Barré syndrome, were estimated to have occurred from the vaccination program itself, demonstrating that the vaccine itself is not free of risks. ”

    “I’m not seeing any issue there, and you haven’t explained why you think I should.”

    A vaccine program was cancelled because it was “not free of risks.” May I suggest that the Covid “vaccine” (mRNA injection) program against a coronavirus that is completely innocuous in almost 99% of the population, against which many people had cross-immunity, and children, the young, and healthy adults shrugged off as a minor cold, should be cancelled because the Adverse Events are at least ten times those of any other vaccine. Not to mention that the novel “vaccine” efficacy seems to be plummeting to well under 50%. And the long-term effect are not known.

    “This is pure projection on your part. You could start by reading the Bible critically. Apparently, I’m credulous for accepting the consensus of evidence-based scientific research, while you aren’t credulous for believing miraculous anonymous claims in an old book with no supporting evidence at all.”

    Yes, you are credulous. You accept what self-proclaimed experts tell you; you accept consensus (ad populam and vericundiam). And you are quick with the ad hominem against anyone who might suggest that you should be more critical. Because you know you have not been as critical as you should have been. You have not read the studies yourself.

    I very much doubt that you have read the Bible at all, much less, critically. Do you know why Ulfilas did not translate Judges and Kings for the Goths?

    But somehow, you’ve got this weird idea that I’m some sort of Catholic/Bible literalist, which is a contradiction in terms, by the way.

    “Incidentally, I apologised ‘if’ it was the case that I’d misrepresented your position, but it doesn’t seem like I have.”

    Ah, so, you said “if”! Then, like Cinderella’s Stepmother, you’re okay.

    Do you want grandchildren?

  132. I do think it is odd that you jump to entirely unwarranted conclusions. What justification do you have for claiming to know my views on thaumaturgy in the Bible?

  133. What they died of is another story.

    So you keep saying, but you haven’t cited any evidence. On the other hand, the experts you’re quick to deride DO cite evidence. In fact, you haven’t cited any evidence for any of your claims, so I could just dismiss them all.

    A vaccine program was cancelled because it was “not free of risks.”

    False. It was cancelled because Swine Flu was contained, so vaccination against it became superfluous. If the entire US population had been vaccinated, it would have caused about 100 deaths, which would have been massively preferable to the 10’s or 100’s of thousands of deaths which would have occurred if Swine Flu had spread, but it clearly isn’t preferable to the 1 death that actually did occur. None of this provides any argument against COVID vaccines or vaccination in general.

    May I suggest that the Covid “vaccine” should be cancelled because the Adverse Events are at least ten times those of any other vaccine.

    The Swine Flu vaccine caused about 1 death in 2 million doses. Even if the COVID vaccine was 10X worse, that would still be only 1 death in 200,000 doses. But in fact, your claim seems to be false. According to the ONS in the UK, deaths attributed to the vaccine in March were zero:

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting

    Not to mention that the novel “vaccine” efficacy seems to be plummeting to well under 50%. And the long-term effect are not known.

    There are numerous COVID vaccines, not just one. The least effective vaccine is still more than 50% effective against the most infectious COVID variant, so this seems to be another false claim on your part.

    You accept what self-proclaimed experts tell you; you accept consensus (ad populam and vericundiam). And you are quick with the ad hominem against anyone who might suggest that you should be more critical. Because you know you have not been as critical as you should have been. You have not read the studies yourself.

    False. I don’t accept what “self-proclaimed” experts tell me, I accept what actual, qualified experts conclude based on scientific evidence. The concensus position of a scientific field is the strongest, most reliable position available to us. And, please DO NOT TELL ME WHAT I KNOW, as you’re not a mind reader.

    I very much doubt that you have read the Bible at all, much less, critically. Do you know why Ulfilas did not translate Judges and Kings for the Goths?

    My position is that the Bible is insufficient evidence to support the claims made in the Bible. How is your reply relevant to that?

    But somehow, you’ve got this weird idea that I’m some sort of Catholic/Bible literalist, which is a contradiction in terms, by the way.

    I didn’t say that you’re a biblical literalist, although you must believe some of the Bible is literally true otherwise you wouldn’t be a Christian at all. I note also that you’re playing games here by whining about having your beliefs misrepresented whilst not actually setting out your beliefs.

    Do you want grandchildren?

    ?

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