I agree with your criticism of the skeptics. I could be classified as a skeptic because I challenge a lot of the mainstream narratives around Covid-19, but I've made those exact same criticisms of the "skeptic narrative".
You're not wrong for any of the false narratives of the mainstream medical community, but there are a few that needed to make the list:
1) Pandemic Management: The medical community threw out the pandemic playbooks of the WHO and CDC and made up all the pandemic measures out of thin air. Most egregious was the lack of any effort at balancing public health benefits and social costs. I covered it here: https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1317223302180593664?s=20
2) Acknowledgement of Risk Factors: This is a pandemic affecting people according to age, weight and general health. Somewhat accurate IFRs of age based risk were available as early as April 2020, but the medical community never factored these nuances into their policy recommendations. It's still happening today: it's absurd to encourage or mandate the vaccination of children.
What's pissed me off the most about how all this has been handled is how they threw out decades to centuries of science and just up and re-invented the wheel poorly.
Most of what we've "learned" about Covid in the last year is just basic common sense to anyone who knew even basic medical science. Yet, almost all of that was thrown out immediately and the powers that be did the opposite. We would have been WAY better off if we ACTUALLY followed the actual science.
Masks for example are uni-directional. They mainly (~95%) protect YOU from spreading YOUR diseases (if you have a disease). Your mask does almost nothing to prevent You from catching someone else's disease. Fabric type is exceptionally important. Even many medical grade masks do poorly to block viruses. Sterilization is important. Re-use a mask without proper cleaning, or touching it once on massively reduces its effectiveness. If you have a beard, your masks does nearly nothing.
Point is... when you shut down most businesses and force everyone into the same Walmart watering hole you create a superspreader location. If you tell everyone their nearly useless mask will protect them, you've just told high risk patients to go into high risk locations under a false sense of security.... leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The 1 thing that everyone misses is that the vaccines came about after a large percentage of people were already naturally immune. The only way to truly understand the efficacy of the vaccines is to know what percentage of the vaccinated were already naturally immune. All data for vaccine efficacy is bullshit without those numbers, which we will never have.
Hi Maxim - I really like what you're trying to do. A balanced and logical approach is what has been sorely missing over the last couple of years.
Two things I would challenge you on though - 1. 'but there are still the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines which use the old-fashioned method.'. I'm not sure you can say that the technology used in JNJ / AstraZeneca -recombinant adenoviral vector vaccines - is 'old fashioned'. As per this Nature article 'Like mRNA vaccines, Ad vaccines are a relatively new technology' (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-021-00356-x). Indeed according to wiki, pre covid there have only been two approved viral vector vaccines, both for Ebola, with relatively limited usage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine).
Thanks. On the first point, I've added: [Edit, 12/11/21: As multiple commenters have pointed out, the J&J/AstraZeneca method is also sort of new. It’s about a decade old when it comes to use in humans. It was approved for Ebola by EU+FDA's normal (not emergency) processes, pre-pandemic, and was used on 10s of thousands of people in Africa before the Covid pandemic. But it seems it hadn't been *widely* used in developed countries before the pandemic.]
Novavax is now approved, that could be seen as more similar to a conventional vaccine in as much as it's just injecting a protein, not a delivery mechanism for making that protein.
But, it turns out that Novavax also causes the myocarditis issue, just like the other vaccines. So the fear mongering about mRNA vaccines as "gene therapy" might all have been misleading. It might be that side effects came from some entirely different problem, perhaps an inherent reaction some people have to the covid spike protein.
I have no idea how Novavax compares to the other vaccines, in terms of side effects besides myocarditis. Also, in the US it's only available as a primary shot, not as a booster. And it hasn't been updated for currently circulating Omicron strains.
This article didn't address most of my skepticism.
1) No sources cited for cumulative excess deaths or how those stats were calculated. We can see from US total reported death statistics that the delta between the rise in deaths from previous years compared to pandemic years is negligible, so that automatically calls the US cumulative excess death data into question. US COVID data and vaccine injury data is of extremely poor quality. Looking at the total mortality data for a country by-passes any calculation bias and gives a much clear picture of what is going on. In Australia, the total deaths for 2020-21 are well above the 2015-19 range.
2) A major cause for my skepticism was never addressed. The behavior of the press and medical establishment to alternative treatments is completely unhinged. My doctor refused prescribe ivermectin off-label to me because he said the hospital administration would fire him and the state could possibly pull his medical license over it, despite it being a completely safe FDA approved drug with over 69 studies involving 50,000 patients authored by over 658 doctors showing it is effective as a treatment for COVID. Any reasonable response to a pandemic would look at all possible treatments, the fact that vaccines are being pushed as the only acceptable method of prevention raises massive alarm bells.
3) VAERS data is known to be massively under reported. It takes hospital staff a half hour per submission, and doctors are under administrative pressure not to report possible injuries as being vaccine related. Even with those severe limitations, reported deaths for the COVID vaccines are off the charts compared to other vaccines. Looking at all vaccine reported deaths for all vaccines in the VAERS database going back decades, we see 16,070 reported deaths of which 10,805 are COVID vaccine related. Billions upon billions of flu vaccines, polio vaccines, measles vaccines, etc.. given over decades of time have half the deaths reported of the COVID vaccines. This should raise major alarm bells.
4) According to Pfizer's own trial data, which they recently asked a court to keep hidden for 55 years, all cause mortality was HIGHER in the vaccinated group compared to the control group. We are seeing an uptick in young patients with cardiovascular problems post-vaccination. Young people face almost no risk from COVID. The risk of vaccine injury compared to COVID injury among young people shows a disproportionate risk from the vaccines compared to natural infection.
I could keep going on, but I don't have the time to write an essay about this. Take a look at the data on miscarriages in vaccinated women BY TRIMESTER. Women who get the vaccine in the first and second trimester have something like a 80 to 90% risk of spontaneous abortion. There's so much more.
Good points. To expand on #2: I find it astounding and practically criminal that the authorities have not pushed vitamin D as a preventative measure. It’s safe, cheap, and deficiency is strongly linked to severe and fatal cases of COVID.
Seamarsh, I'm curious about two things. First, who are the "extreme voices"? Second, is it possible to have the skills to diagnose a problem, describe the trade-offs, and propose possible solutions, but not have the ability to implement particular solutions in particular states because one does not have the power to do so?
One of the reasons I respect Bhattacharya is that he is not primarily political. He has been remarkably consistent and frank about how he analyzes the covid situation. His skills-stack is impressive: He holds an M.D., along with a Ph.D. in economics. Not only does he understand the public-health data, he also understands how to calculate risk-reward trade-offs in the economic sphere. I've never heard him claim that he knows more than he actually does -- he is careful in his reasoning and recommendations. This is in stark contrast to prominent medical experts in corporate media who push one-size-fits-all mandates, who don't understand trade-offs and don't care, who contradict themselves from one week to the next, and who are more interested in pushing a political agenda than in telling the truth.
Interesting I find he is long on criticism and very short on solutions. Watch his interview with unheard, came off as completely confused when pressed on details. He advised Gov in Florida and Florida has been a total disaster, not sure where he has been right yet?
Its fairly easy to criticize but if you can t offer solutions and explain how they would work its pretty useless.
As time has gone on he has been boosted by more and more extreme voices. at least that is my read from someone who thought highly of him back in 2020 .
also his seroprevalence study was a total gong show in hindsight!
For what it's worth, I now have a correction in the Florida section:
[Correction, 12/11/21: when Florida’s larger elderly population is considered, the state actually did better than average. Also, an earlier version of this post alleged that Florida fell behind due to vaccine hesitancy. That was wrong. Actually, Florida was vaccinated slightly higher than the national average, but still had more deaths this summer, probably due to a high elderly population that had been shielded the previous year. However, red states in general had significantly lower vaccine rates and significantly higher deaths this year.]
Have you read this? I found it pretty convincing that the market hypothesis is indeed correct. Your evidence seems much more circumstantial in comparison. Not that it refutes the overall point about censorship- but it is certainly not as clear as you make it out that the truth was censored.
Pretty good, but putting skeptics on the same plane as the medical establishment is a great big steamy pile of horse puckey. Skeptics aren't making totalitarian laws, nor censoring the media people are allowed to read, nor the science workers are allowed to publish. Of course that doesn't make skeptics right, and your assessment (or say Scott Alexanders) is closer to reality than the average Alex Berenson acolyte is, but they're far from equivalent sets of problems. We need skepticism, as the medical establishment, as you have pointed out, is not credible at this point.
The vaccines are mostly dangerous to young people, just as the virus is mostly dangerous to old and extremely unhealthy people, so these things should be factored into any such models of the utility of the vaccines. If you give something to kids that gives them a 1/5000 chance of damaging their tickers, when they have a 1/100,000 chance of ill effects from a respiratory ailment, you fucked up. That's more or less the case with current month public health doctrine as far as I can tell. Civilized countries have mostly banned Moderna on young people: they should probably ban them all on young people.
First, I agree with you about the need for skepticism. BUT I also see that the direct death toll caused via "skeptic" ideas is higher, as can be seen by the flip in how red-and-blue states did pre-and-post vaccines. https://twitter.com/maximlott/status/1457763065043243018
So I think your point, and that, balance out -- and they deserve to be on the same playing field.
The data on child deaths is something I plan to look at in a future post, and you might be right. (FYI, the FDA has done a cost-benefit finding it is worth it even for kids -- but of course they very well might be doing it wrong.)
That's nonsense. For one thing; "skeptics" aren't a monolithic opinion as the medical establishment is. You can't blame people raising issues about vaccine safety for unvaccinated covid deaths; they're not even allowed to post about it on facebook. Scientists who publish about it face having their careers ruined. It's also far from clear that vaccination actually does prevent deaths. Count the number of dead people in America for 2021 and 2020. Not "covid deaths" -just the dead people. You can do that pretty much anyplace else.
For another thing, covid deaths are mostly people who are a year or two out from natural death. Vaccine deaths thus far appear to be mostly young people. You kill a 10 year old, you've wiped out more years of life than 50 85 year olds dying. People used to intuitively understand this.
Those graphs do not address either the "vaccines don't actually work" nor the "vaccines might actually result in more years of life lost than covid if used on young people" points I raised. I encourage you to give these points a good think. The data is all on the CDC's website. There have also been a couple of papers written on the latter point.
A french study looked for changes in heart attack, stroke and lung blood clots in some 4 million medical records of those who had been vaccinated. They found a slightly lower rate than normal.
In an online seminar I asked when Delta was first detected in India. I was told Nov 2020. If true that is before vaccines were used anywhere other than trials.
Nice article. #8 gotta throw China data out. Why? See #5. It will be interesting to see if New Zealand, Australia see more waves after actually opening up. Also, Florida…do you account for average age per capita? I heard when you account for Florida dramatic age there numbers are low in terms of death.
Thanks. 21% of FL's population is over 65, compared to 16.6% of the US as a whole. So very simply, we might expect FL to have (21-16.6)/16.6= 26.5% more deaths.
The US per capita death rate is 2450 per 100k, whereas FL is 2887. So that's (2887-2450)/2450= 17.8% more...
So yes, it looks like when one accounts for age, FL does maybe even better than average... will add a note in the post.
[Correction, 12/11/21: when Florida’s larger elderly population is considered, the state actually did better than average. Also, an earlier version of this post alleged that Florida fell behind due to vaccine hesitancy. That was wrong. Actually, Florida was vaccinated slightly higher than the national average, but still had more deaths this summer, probably due to a high elderly population that had been shielded the previous year. However, red states in general had significantly lower vaccine rates and significantly higher deaths this year.]
"DISCLAIMER: Above is not medical advice, but rather my best attempt to lay out the most important data using my statistics knowledge. If you see any NEW important data, or anything I missed, or mistakes, please let me know in the comments."
I reached the part of your article where you linked to your older post suggesting that people who are seropositive should get the vaccine. This is what you wrote there:
"1. Getting vaccinated makes you 1.5 - 2.5 times less likely to get Covid again
Let’s take the best study design first: Pfizer’s clinical experiment. "
Do you believe that Pfizer's trial data shows what you say from their six month follow-up on safety and efficacy?
Specifically,
What's the efficacy for someone who is baseline SARS-COV-2 positive according to their own blinded trial data, do you know if it's positive or negative efficacy?
Is this figure corroborated by other data in other large studies that you know of?
If you want me to share what I've read I will, but once I know what you know.
Thanks! Yes, to be specific about Pfizer's 6-mo clinical trial data, I wrote:
After 6 months, 3 people in the recovered+vaccinated group contracted Covid again, while 8 people in the recovered+placebo group got Covid again.
This suggests:
3 / 626 = 0.48% chance of reinfection for recovered+vaccinated
8 / 666 = 1.2% chance of reinfection for recovered+placebo
Other ways of putting that: people who were double-vaccinated on top of having antibodies from prior infection were just 40% as likely to get Covid. Also: they were 2.5 times less likely to get it.
But this is not useful as two doses is conditional on surviving 1 dose. it's a conditional probability. For example: The chances of me cashing my winnings from a bet maybe 95% but placing my bet maybe 1% if my chances of winning is sufficiently low.
You cannot find useful information about 10 doses without finding out what happens with 1 dose, 2 doses, 3 doses etc.
Apologies for not using a better example, but I'll try a few different scenarios so that you may get a better perspective about how I am viewing the hazards:
Imagine I put into my prophylactic/treatment protocol this specific regimen:
(i) Anyone who can successfully perform a backflips completely naked on a marble/granite floor without helmet can receive the vaccine,
(i) they must perform the second backflip within a week of receiving the vaccine or it won't work.
(iii)If they can then they can return for the last dose of the vaccine that will be provided with low dose cyanide adjuvant to better prime the immune response.
You'd expect that the people who make it out of such a prophylactic regimen, to have gone through strong purifying selection that involves survivorship bias (not breaking your head, taking calculated risks, practicing, determination, motivation), healthy vaccinee bias (recovering from injury in a week if it happened accidentally, immunocompetent enough to tolerate literally cyanide) and immortal time bias (not recorded as treated until treatment is 'complete' despite facing multiplicative hazards)
If I gave this cohort a diphtheria vaccine they'd have a better outcome for Sars-CoV-2 than a Covid-19 vaccine. This is not the case for HIV because HIV and SARS-COV-2 are presumed to be different in that one is assuredly a agent that causes a chronic infectious disease (AIDS) while SARS-COV-2 is currently known to only cause acute infection and illness not persistent infection.
The Pfizer trial data suggests and increased risk of 10%, UK data 13%, Qatar 15% upon attempting this treatment protocol. You may get away with these increased risks for an infection like SARS-COV-2 as it's transient, but you won't get away it with for AIDS. No amount of adding filters to remove participants with ill-health will remove the hazard. This is my point.
Overall a great deep-dive!
I agree with your criticism of the skeptics. I could be classified as a skeptic because I challenge a lot of the mainstream narratives around Covid-19, but I've made those exact same criticisms of the "skeptic narrative".
You're not wrong for any of the false narratives of the mainstream medical community, but there are a few that needed to make the list:
1) Pandemic Management: The medical community threw out the pandemic playbooks of the WHO and CDC and made up all the pandemic measures out of thin air. Most egregious was the lack of any effort at balancing public health benefits and social costs. I covered it here: https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1317223302180593664?s=20
2) Acknowledgement of Risk Factors: This is a pandemic affecting people according to age, weight and general health. Somewhat accurate IFRs of age based risk were available as early as April 2020, but the medical community never factored these nuances into their policy recommendations. It's still happening today: it's absurd to encourage or mandate the vaccination of children.
Thanks. I think those are good points. May mention in a future post.
What's pissed me off the most about how all this has been handled is how they threw out decades to centuries of science and just up and re-invented the wheel poorly.
Most of what we've "learned" about Covid in the last year is just basic common sense to anyone who knew even basic medical science. Yet, almost all of that was thrown out immediately and the powers that be did the opposite. We would have been WAY better off if we ACTUALLY followed the actual science.
Masks for example are uni-directional. They mainly (~95%) protect YOU from spreading YOUR diseases (if you have a disease). Your mask does almost nothing to prevent You from catching someone else's disease. Fabric type is exceptionally important. Even many medical grade masks do poorly to block viruses. Sterilization is important. Re-use a mask without proper cleaning, or touching it once on massively reduces its effectiveness. If you have a beard, your masks does nearly nothing.
Point is... when you shut down most businesses and force everyone into the same Walmart watering hole you create a superspreader location. If you tell everyone their nearly useless mask will protect them, you've just told high risk patients to go into high risk locations under a false sense of security.... leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
In my first comment, I forgot to say thank you for a thought-provoking article, even if I disagree with the general drift.
There is another point I want to dispute thought.
You ask
" Has there ever been a vaccine that caused side effects that only kicked after more than a year? I can’t find any."
Well I ask,
"Has there ever been a vaccine that you had to take every 3 months? I can't find any."
And I think it's not unreasonable that my gut tells me that this repeated injection of a vaccine might not be good for me in the long term .
A lot of thoughtful comments here! I haven't had time yet to respond, but, I will as soon as I can
The 1 thing that everyone misses is that the vaccines came about after a large percentage of people were already naturally immune. The only way to truly understand the efficacy of the vaccines is to know what percentage of the vaccinated were already naturally immune. All data for vaccine efficacy is bullshit without those numbers, which we will never have.
Great article. Regarding lockdowns, we have never as a society quarantined healthy people. It should never happen again.
Hi Maxim - I really like what you're trying to do. A balanced and logical approach is what has been sorely missing over the last couple of years.
Two things I would challenge you on though - 1. 'but there are still the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines which use the old-fashioned method.'. I'm not sure you can say that the technology used in JNJ / AstraZeneca -recombinant adenoviral vector vaccines - is 'old fashioned'. As per this Nature article 'Like mRNA vaccines, Ad vaccines are a relatively new technology' (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-021-00356-x). Indeed according to wiki, pre covid there have only been two approved viral vector vaccines, both for Ebola, with relatively limited usage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine).
2. 'First, has there ever been a vaccine that caused side effects that only kicked after more than a year? I can’t find any.'. Here are some: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/coronavirus/four-times-history-vaccines-failed-lessons-coronavirus-vaccine-166116. Also in the UK, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/19/swine-flu-vaccine-narcolepsy-uk. Note that this was c. 4 years after the widespread roll out of this vaccine. Arguably the risk of the covid vaccines is more elevated given they all use relatively new technology - and they are also the first ever vaccines for a Coronavirus.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.
Thanks. On the first point, I've added: [Edit, 12/11/21: As multiple commenters have pointed out, the J&J/AstraZeneca method is also sort of new. It’s about a decade old when it comes to use in humans. It was approved for Ebola by EU+FDA's normal (not emergency) processes, pre-pandemic, and was used on 10s of thousands of people in Africa before the Covid pandemic. But it seems it hadn't been *widely* used in developed countries before the pandemic.]
On the second point, still looking into it.
Novavax is now approved, that could be seen as more similar to a conventional vaccine in as much as it's just injecting a protein, not a delivery mechanism for making that protein.
But, it turns out that Novavax also causes the myocarditis issue, just like the other vaccines. So the fear mongering about mRNA vaccines as "gene therapy" might all have been misleading. It might be that side effects came from some entirely different problem, perhaps an inherent reaction some people have to the covid spike protein.
I have no idea how Novavax compares to the other vaccines, in terms of side effects besides myocarditis. Also, in the US it's only available as a primary shot, not as a booster. And it hasn't been updated for currently circulating Omicron strains.
This article didn't address most of my skepticism.
1) No sources cited for cumulative excess deaths or how those stats were calculated. We can see from US total reported death statistics that the delta between the rise in deaths from previous years compared to pandemic years is negligible, so that automatically calls the US cumulative excess death data into question. US COVID data and vaccine injury data is of extremely poor quality. Looking at the total mortality data for a country by-passes any calculation bias and gives a much clear picture of what is going on. In Australia, the total deaths for 2020-21 are well above the 2015-19 range.
2) A major cause for my skepticism was never addressed. The behavior of the press and medical establishment to alternative treatments is completely unhinged. My doctor refused prescribe ivermectin off-label to me because he said the hospital administration would fire him and the state could possibly pull his medical license over it, despite it being a completely safe FDA approved drug with over 69 studies involving 50,000 patients authored by over 658 doctors showing it is effective as a treatment for COVID. Any reasonable response to a pandemic would look at all possible treatments, the fact that vaccines are being pushed as the only acceptable method of prevention raises massive alarm bells.
3) VAERS data is known to be massively under reported. It takes hospital staff a half hour per submission, and doctors are under administrative pressure not to report possible injuries as being vaccine related. Even with those severe limitations, reported deaths for the COVID vaccines are off the charts compared to other vaccines. Looking at all vaccine reported deaths for all vaccines in the VAERS database going back decades, we see 16,070 reported deaths of which 10,805 are COVID vaccine related. Billions upon billions of flu vaccines, polio vaccines, measles vaccines, etc.. given over decades of time have half the deaths reported of the COVID vaccines. This should raise major alarm bells.
4) According to Pfizer's own trial data, which they recently asked a court to keep hidden for 55 years, all cause mortality was HIGHER in the vaccinated group compared to the control group. We are seeing an uptick in young patients with cardiovascular problems post-vaccination. Young people face almost no risk from COVID. The risk of vaccine injury compared to COVID injury among young people shows a disproportionate risk from the vaccines compared to natural infection.
I could keep going on, but I don't have the time to write an essay about this. Take a look at the data on miscarriages in vaccinated women BY TRIMESTER. Women who get the vaccine in the first and second trimester have something like a 80 to 90% risk of spontaneous abortion. There's so much more.
Good points. To expand on #2: I find it astounding and practically criminal that the authorities have not pushed vitamin D as a preventative measure. It’s safe, cheap, and deficiency is strongly linked to severe and fatal cases of COVID.
Jay Bhattacharya has been right about a lot. His trade-off analysis of lockdowns versus economic normalcy is spot-on.
Thanks. I've seen some of his stuff and will start following him more closely.
Seamarsh, I'm curious about two things. First, who are the "extreme voices"? Second, is it possible to have the skills to diagnose a problem, describe the trade-offs, and propose possible solutions, but not have the ability to implement particular solutions in particular states because one does not have the power to do so?
One of the reasons I respect Bhattacharya is that he is not primarily political. He has been remarkably consistent and frank about how he analyzes the covid situation. His skills-stack is impressive: He holds an M.D., along with a Ph.D. in economics. Not only does he understand the public-health data, he also understands how to calculate risk-reward trade-offs in the economic sphere. I've never heard him claim that he knows more than he actually does -- he is careful in his reasoning and recommendations. This is in stark contrast to prominent medical experts in corporate media who push one-size-fits-all mandates, who don't understand trade-offs and don't care, who contradict themselves from one week to the next, and who are more interested in pushing a political agenda than in telling the truth.
he is the defense witness for gov desantis in forcing schools to not wear masks etc.. I would call him hyper political.
Can you provide a link to Jay's trade-off analysis?
Interesting I find he is long on criticism and very short on solutions. Watch his interview with unheard, came off as completely confused when pressed on details. He advised Gov in Florida and Florida has been a total disaster, not sure where he has been right yet?
Its fairly easy to criticize but if you can t offer solutions and explain how they would work its pretty useless.
As time has gone on he has been boosted by more and more extreme voices. at least that is my read from someone who thought highly of him back in 2020 .
also his seroprevalence study was a total gong show in hindsight!
For what it's worth, I now have a correction in the Florida section:
[Correction, 12/11/21: when Florida’s larger elderly population is considered, the state actually did better than average. Also, an earlier version of this post alleged that Florida fell behind due to vaccine hesitancy. That was wrong. Actually, Florida was vaccinated slightly higher than the national average, but still had more deaths this summer, probably due to a high elderly population that had been shielded the previous year. However, red states in general had significantly lower vaccine rates and significantly higher deaths this year.]
what do you consider elders and why would you cut them out of equation?
not cutting out; I'm saying that FL still had relatively few deaths proportional to its elderly population. https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/deep-dive-covid-myths/comment/3970505
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic
Have you read this? I found it pretty convincing that the market hypothesis is indeed correct. Your evidence seems much more circumstantial in comparison. Not that it refutes the overall point about censorship- but it is certainly not as clear as you make it out that the truth was censored.
Pretty good, but putting skeptics on the same plane as the medical establishment is a great big steamy pile of horse puckey. Skeptics aren't making totalitarian laws, nor censoring the media people are allowed to read, nor the science workers are allowed to publish. Of course that doesn't make skeptics right, and your assessment (or say Scott Alexanders) is closer to reality than the average Alex Berenson acolyte is, but they're far from equivalent sets of problems. We need skepticism, as the medical establishment, as you have pointed out, is not credible at this point.
The vaccines are mostly dangerous to young people, just as the virus is mostly dangerous to old and extremely unhealthy people, so these things should be factored into any such models of the utility of the vaccines. If you give something to kids that gives them a 1/5000 chance of damaging their tickers, when they have a 1/100,000 chance of ill effects from a respiratory ailment, you fucked up. That's more or less the case with current month public health doctrine as far as I can tell. Civilized countries have mostly banned Moderna on young people: they should probably ban them all on young people.
FWIIW my list as of August: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/things-the-establishment-got-wrong-about-wuhan-coof/
First, I agree with you about the need for skepticism. BUT I also see that the direct death toll caused via "skeptic" ideas is higher, as can be seen by the flip in how red-and-blue states did pre-and-post vaccines. https://twitter.com/maximlott/status/1457763065043243018
So I think your point, and that, balance out -- and they deserve to be on the same playing field.
The data on child deaths is something I plan to look at in a future post, and you might be right. (FYI, the FDA has done a cost-benefit finding it is worth it even for kids -- but of course they very well might be doing it wrong.)
That's nonsense. For one thing; "skeptics" aren't a monolithic opinion as the medical establishment is. You can't blame people raising issues about vaccine safety for unvaccinated covid deaths; they're not even allowed to post about it on facebook. Scientists who publish about it face having their careers ruined. It's also far from clear that vaccination actually does prevent deaths. Count the number of dead people in America for 2021 and 2020. Not "covid deaths" -just the dead people. You can do that pretty much anyplace else.
For another thing, covid deaths are mostly people who are a year or two out from natural death. Vaccine deaths thus far appear to be mostly young people. You kill a 10 year old, you've wiped out more years of life than 50 85 year olds dying. People used to intuitively understand this.
Obviously this isn’t saying every skeptic or establishment person is wrong.
Re the other points, the graphs in points 8 and 9 largely address those.
Those graphs do not address either the "vaccines don't actually work" nor the "vaccines might actually result in more years of life lost than covid if used on young people" points I raised. I encourage you to give these points a good think. The data is all on the CDC's website. There have also been a couple of papers written on the latter point.
A french study looked for changes in heart attack, stroke and lung blood clots in some 4 million medical records of those who had been vaccinated. They found a slightly lower rate than normal.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2786667
In an online seminar I asked when Delta was first detected in India. I was told Nov 2020. If true that is before vaccines were used anywhere other than trials.
Zvi Mowshowitz has also been very good.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/06/omicron-post-4/
good point thanks!
Lots of good info. I'd add #5.5 that Pharma knew they would need boosters, but didn't tell anyone back in early 2021. https://tomkom2.substack.com/p/boosters-whos-going-to-tell-92-million?r=qrie2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
Nice article. #8 gotta throw China data out. Why? See #5. It will be interesting to see if New Zealand, Australia see more waves after actually opening up. Also, Florida…do you account for average age per capita? I heard when you account for Florida dramatic age there numbers are low in terms of death.
Thanks. 21% of FL's population is over 65, compared to 16.6% of the US as a whole. So very simply, we might expect FL to have (21-16.6)/16.6= 26.5% more deaths.
The US per capita death rate is 2450 per 100k, whereas FL is 2887. So that's (2887-2450)/2450= 17.8% more...
So yes, it looks like when one accounts for age, FL does maybe even better than average... will add a note in the post.
Now in the main post:
[Correction, 12/11/21: when Florida’s larger elderly population is considered, the state actually did better than average. Also, an earlier version of this post alleged that Florida fell behind due to vaccine hesitancy. That was wrong. Actually, Florida was vaccinated slightly higher than the national average, but still had more deaths this summer, probably due to a high elderly population that had been shielded the previous year. However, red states in general had significantly lower vaccine rates and significantly higher deaths this year.]
"DISCLAIMER: Above is not medical advice, but rather my best attempt to lay out the most important data using my statistics knowledge. If you see any NEW important data, or anything I missed, or mistakes, please let me know in the comments."
Appreciate it.
I reached the part of your article where you linked to your older post suggesting that people who are seropositive should get the vaccine. This is what you wrote there:
"1. Getting vaccinated makes you 1.5 - 2.5 times less likely to get Covid again
Let’s take the best study design first: Pfizer’s clinical experiment. "
Do you believe that Pfizer's trial data shows what you say from their six month follow-up on safety and efficacy?
Specifically,
What's the efficacy for someone who is baseline SARS-COV-2 positive according to their own blinded trial data, do you know if it's positive or negative efficacy?
Is this figure corroborated by other data in other large studies that you know of?
If you want me to share what I've read I will, but once I know what you know.
Btw, subscribed! :)
Thanks! Yes, to be specific about Pfizer's 6-mo clinical trial data, I wrote:
After 6 months, 3 people in the recovered+vaccinated group contracted Covid again, while 8 people in the recovered+placebo group got Covid again.
This suggests:
3 / 626 = 0.48% chance of reinfection for recovered+vaccinated
8 / 666 = 1.2% chance of reinfection for recovered+placebo
Other ways of putting that: people who were double-vaccinated on top of having antibodies from prior infection were just 40% as likely to get Covid. Also: they were 2.5 times less likely to get it.
But this is not useful as two doses is conditional on surviving 1 dose. it's a conditional probability. For example: The chances of me cashing my winnings from a bet maybe 95% but placing my bet maybe 1% if my chances of winning is sufficiently low.
You cannot find useful information about 10 doses without finding out what happens with 1 dose, 2 doses, 3 doses etc.
Apologies for not using a better example, but I'll try a few different scenarios so that you may get a better perspective about how I am viewing the hazards:
Imagine I put into my prophylactic/treatment protocol this specific regimen:
(i) Anyone who can successfully perform a backflips completely naked on a marble/granite floor without helmet can receive the vaccine,
(i) they must perform the second backflip within a week of receiving the vaccine or it won't work.
(iii)If they can then they can return for the last dose of the vaccine that will be provided with low dose cyanide adjuvant to better prime the immune response.
You'd expect that the people who make it out of such a prophylactic regimen, to have gone through strong purifying selection that involves survivorship bias (not breaking your head, taking calculated risks, practicing, determination, motivation), healthy vaccinee bias (recovering from injury in a week if it happened accidentally, immunocompetent enough to tolerate literally cyanide) and immortal time bias (not recorded as treated until treatment is 'complete' despite facing multiplicative hazards)
If I gave this cohort a diphtheria vaccine they'd have a better outcome for Sars-CoV-2 than a Covid-19 vaccine. This is not the case for HIV because HIV and SARS-COV-2 are presumed to be different in that one is assuredly a agent that causes a chronic infectious disease (AIDS) while SARS-COV-2 is currently known to only cause acute infection and illness not persistent infection.
The Pfizer trial data suggests and increased risk of 10%, UK data 13%, Qatar 15% upon attempting this treatment protocol. You may get away with these increased risks for an infection like SARS-COV-2 as it's transient, but you won't get away it with for AIDS. No amount of adding filters to remove participants with ill-health will remove the hazard. This is my point.
Once again Israel considering everyone with infection within 7 days of getting booster not boosted.
"Very big mortality effect for Boosters for those over age 50.
Few caveats, on quick read:
1. All over 50
2. Excluded anyone with prior infection
3. Confounding exists for sure
4. I think some immortal time bias? (must survive 7 days after booster to be considered boosted)"
https://twitter.com/walidgellad/status/1468720340683694089?s=20
Does this not raise alarms?