News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After learning that the president had contracted the Coronavirus, Joe Biden quickly called up Barack Obama to wish him a speedy recovery.
“Hey, man, this is Pedo Peter. How you holdin’ up? I heard on the news you got COVID-19. Come on, man, you should’ve called me!” Biden reportedly told Obama’s personal assistant.
Biden continued speaking while waiting to be transferred to Obama. “I just want you to know that you’re my rock. I love you, man. Sending thoughts and pringles your way. Libbenshneblet. End of note.”
Sources familiar with the matter claim that by the time Obama picked up the phone, Biden had gotten most of his inappropriate racist comments out of the way. The pair had a friendly conversation in which Biden wished his friend good health and asked how the trip to Saudi Arabia went.
Dr. Jill Biden reportedly walked in on the conversation and then playfully shook her head in disbelief. “That’s our Joe!” she laughed to herself.
Go here to read the rest.
Has Dr Jill cured him? Thank goodness the Biden’s have a doctor in the family.
I note that Fauchi now refers to the vaccine as “lowering the severity” rather than a prevention of the disease. Nothing like having a good CYA to fall back on.
Bad week for Brandon.
He has cancer.
He has Wuhan flu.
He has the worst polls ever.
They’re prepping you for a flood of bad economic news.
“How bad can it get?”
“Don’t ask.”
Trump 2024.
DL is right, and so is Fauci. The vaccines are very effective at preventing COVID fatality, which is no small thing, but their efficacy in preventing infection (and therefore spread) is now understood to be dubious at best. Accordingly, while one’s own vaccination status is relevant to one’s own health, the vaccination status of others is probably not. For this reason while vaccination shaming was perhaps understandable when experts honestly thought the vaccines would be effective in containing contraction and spread, now that we know better it is just plain rude and ignorant.
There are parallels with masking. Studies do show that quality masking inhibits respiratory virus transmission, but the COVID virus is so unusually infectious that such masking is ineffective unless worn 24/7, which is impractical. Experts now believe this is why high mask compliant regions have fared no better than low mask compliant regions.
Tweddledum(b) and Tweddledum(ber) in that photo.
The vaccines are very effective at preventing COVID fatality
Easily said. impossible to prove
The vaccines are very effective at preventing COVID fatality, which is no small thing, but their efficacy in preventing infection (and therefore spread) is now understood to be dubious at best.
The word carrying water for the narrative in this statement is “now.”
All the problems that the vaccines are now admitted to have are things that were discussed in “unapproved” sources from the start of the vaccine rollout. In particular, it was known at that time that the vaccines would not and could not provide sterilizing immunity.
Now it is so apparent that they cannot prevent infection that health officials are forced to admit it, but they always do so with the suggestion that this is some new revelation that no one could have possibly seen coming. The truth is that they knew from day one and simply lied to you. The reason that they pretend otherwise is so that you don’t question how else they might have lied.
Easily said. impossible to prove
Not impossible to prove. The problem has been the lack of transparency. It could be proven or not, if that was the intention. But it’s not the intention. That’s the real issue.
What is clear however is the number of vaccines ordered by nations from Big Pharma who will soon throw them out because of the lifting of vaccine mandates along with low numbers receiving booster shots.
Don’t you just love the narcissistic Dr Birx? “Gee, I lied to the entire world before but you can really trust me—this time—so be sure & take this experimental anti-viral.”
https://1010wcsi.com/fox-news/dr-deborah-birx-says-she-knew-covid-vaccines-would-not-protect-against-infection/
Not impossible to prove. The problem has been the lack of transparency. It could be proven or not, if that was the intention. But it’s not the intention.
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Yes it is impossible to prove. What, ,type of control group would you set up that would allow proof for us as individuals? Correlation does not equal causation.
Rubbish it’s not. The elderly and immuno-compromised are your control group.
The vaccine has proven to be irrelevant to healthy individuals- anyone who has both vaccinated and non-vaccinated members within their family group could easily testify to this.
Like I said if the intention was to prove the effectiveness of Covid vaccine then this could be determined through ongoing studies. But It’s not.
You clearly don’t understand what a control group is, Ezabelle. Pfizer vaccinated their control group two months into trials, thereby eliminating their control group.
The white house says: “Biden would be much worse if not for the vaccine and boosters”.
… It is an unprovable statement without access to a parallel universe in which Biden was not vaccinated.
There was a news article a year or so ago where someone died from COVID (and not in a pleasant way!) and his family still said “but it would have been worse had he not been vaccinated.”
You clearly don’t understand what a control group is, Ezabelle.
*sigh *- read comments slowly. Elderly and immuno-compromised. Some get the vaccines and some don’t (the latter is your control group). Again, if they wanted to prove it was or was not effective they could easily do so. They don’t.
CAG: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-compare-covid-deaths-for-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-people/
This is not “proof” in the ontological sense, but it is pretty compelling evidence in the logical sense.
Rudolph:
The same people who, back then, said the vaccines were ineffective at preventing infection or transmission also said they were ineffective at preventing fatality or hospitalization. They had zero evidence for this, unlike those who asserted that the vaccines were efficacious against infection and transmission based on what proved to be lousy evidence. The latter didn’t lie but drew from evidence optimistic inferences that they arrogantly asserted to be proven facts which turned out to be false. The former also didn’t lie but simply yelled a lot about conspiracies.
Ezabelle said:
**sigh – read comments slowly … This is not “proof” in the ontological sense, but-
I’m Glad you’re coming around. It’s a shame you had to get condescending first. Evidence =/= proof. As someone said above, “Correlation does not equal causation.” You must have sped past that bit earlier. But the statement in question The vaccines are very effective at preventing COVID fatality is actually demonstrably false:
https://notthebee.com/article/okay-im-not-a-statistician-but-um-this-data-about-covid-deaths-by-vaccination-status-seemsa-little-big-significant-right
The best you could say is that there is a growing body of evidence that “The vaccines are very effective at postponing COVID fatality”
CAG –
I’m neither Ezabelle nor condescending. I’ll let others form their own opinions as to which is more convincing, the SA article or the NTB article.
Oh, sorry Mike … my bad. The comments were right next to each other and your robots are kind of similar.
I kinda think folks might want to judge an article by the (verifiable) data presented. Credentials can often be deceiving. The CDC used to be believable once too.
“You clearly don’t understand what a control group is”
“I’m Glad you’re coming around. It’s a shame you had to get condescending first. Evidence =/= proof.”
“ You must have sped past that bit earlier.”
You said this. I’ll leave that with you.
To make it clear- I was not condescending nor was it my intention. I don’t agree with your statement it can’t be proven. It can. If that was the intention.
The vaccines haven’t been tested long enough. Your links show trial so far. Ongoing clinical trials is what’s needed. It is “not impossible to prove” as you claim- if that was the intention.
If that was the intention.
That is not the intention.
To make it clear- I was not condescending
“sigh read slower”?? Really? Seems like textbook condescension to me, but charity demands I take your word for it.
The British government’s own published data demonstrate that the vaccinated are being fatally infected at a much greater rate than the unvaccinated. I’d like to say the U.S. data demonstrates the same thing, but they stopped publishing it last August. There was a big stink about that for a while, but the news cycle moved on to wars and January 6th.
There are a lot of factors which can’t be quantified with simple numbers of vaxed vs. unvaxed … Since the efficacy of the vaccines wanes over time, and since the most vulnerable were vaccinated first, that could help explain why the numbers are so high, but the Covid strains around today aren’t as lethal as the 2020 strain. That’s an argument against the vaccines providing protection.
See why that control group was important?
No I don’t see your point. And I don’t agree with you. I’ll leave it at that. Sorry for being condescending.
The latter didn’t lie but drew from evidence optimistic inferences that they arrogantly asserted to be proven facts which turned out to be false.
Also known as “lying, but with an official press release.”
But if that seems too flippant for you, let’s look at the topic of vaccine related side effects. We were assured that in addition to being effective, that the vaccines would be safe. When VAERS and other sources started showing fatality and other serious side effect rates far in excess of any other vaccines, we were given various explanations for why this couldn’t be accurate, since the vaccines were known to be safe, even in the long term.
But how would it be possible to know that using trials that only lasted a few months? The usual response is “the studies were better funded and done with more care” which is a bit like saying “if we triple the funding hospitals receive, then we can have women given birth three months after conception.” Long term side effects need the long term to reveal themselves.
If they were honest they would have said “We don’t know. Maybe they will have long term side effects maybe they don’t.” If the need for mass vaccination was really so urgent and the vaccines really were so effective then they could have convinced the public to take them despite the risk. But instead they lied and said that there definitely were no significant risks.
And if you look in the literature from before the vaccines were made you will find many expressing concern about the possibility of the (then unused on any significant scale) mRNA vaccines causing side effects like auto-immune issues. Not “conspiracy theories;” articles published in medical journals.
But even to do this day they are hesitant to admit any possibility of side effects, and rather than honestly address concerns they present the data in the most misleading way possible (ex. creating ratios of “adverse reaction to total doses administered” where adverse reactions only count if they were specifically investigated by the CDC, and again all of this being irrelevant to the question of long term effects since the long term has hardly happened yet.)
They are lying.
As for comparing death rates of course you do need to consider the relative populations, but you need either a pretty bad vaccine or a very high proportion of the population vaccinated before you get a majority of deaths from the vaccinated population.
For example, let’s say that you have 70% of the population vaccinated with a vaccine 95% effective at preventing deaths. Then we can model the proportion of unvaccinated deaths as follows: Suppose that you have 100 people who are randomly selected and “would” die without the vaccine. 30 of them would be unvaccinated and would die in this scenario. Of the remaining 70 95% are saved, so only 3.5 die (we’ll leave the fractional part.) Thus the majority of the population is vaccinated, but the unvaccinated dead still vastly outnumber the vaccinated dead (about 90% of the dead are unvaccinated.)
The British health data shows 94.2% of the deaths coming from the unvaccinated. Looking around, the first number I saw in a recent article for the UK was 92% with at least one dose… which is bad news because that’s less than their proportion of deaths. That’s only possible if the vaccines have negative effectiveness.
The British health data shows 94.2% of the deaths coming from the unvaccinated.
You mean “vaccinated”, right? 4,200 out of 4,900 deaths in a 2 month period were triple vaxed.
I’d like to say the U.S. data demonstrates the same thing, but they stopped publishing it last August. There was a big stink about that for a while, but the news cycle moved on to wars and January 6th.
Too many places got caught not testing folks who were vaccinated unless they came in with a bad case of COVID, while testing everyone who wasn’t vaccinated, and still had unfavorable to the vaccine results, with over 50% vaccination. Even when they got caught neglecting the medical care of those who were not vaccinated.
Know a guy who nearly died from COVID because they refused to admit a diabetic with pneumonia until he was an emergency case, and wouldn’t even do palliative care. Just told him to isolate.
He most likely got the pneumonia from masking.
(His user handle is Bugbear, over at Hoyt’s, mostly lurks; is wife is active in my writing group.)
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-britain/fact-check-uk-data-does-not-show-covid-19-vaccination-increases-chance-of-death-from-virus-idUSL2N2VK15E
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/scicheck-why-its-easy-to-misinterpret-numbers-of-deaths-among-the-vaccinated/
The vaccines were designed to deal with the initial variant. That was displaced in this country by Delta in the summer of 2021, Omicron in the late fall of 2021, and now by Omicron BA5. The vaccine hasn’t been updated. It fades anyway.
From the raw data reported by Worldometers, it would appear that the observed case fatality rate in the U.S. was 1.80% for the initial variant, 1.32% for Delta, 0.6% for Omicron I, and (tentatively) 0.38% for Omicron BA5. Peak to trough in 2021 extended from 13 January to 8 July in the (7 day moving average) of the daily death toll. We’ve seen an L-shaped decline in cases beginning around 30 January. As we speak, the length of time since the peak is similar to the peak-to-trough in 2021. Last year, there were 211,500 deaths recorded during that six month time span. This year, there have been 134,200 deaths recorded. That’s a 36.5% decline, year-over-year. Note, July 2021 to July 2022, 420,000 deaths from COVID were recorded. Seasonal flu deaths recorded during the period running from 2013 to 2019 averaged about 34,000 per year. If the death toll does decline by 36.5% annually, it could require five or six years for this country to get back to normal. Let’s hope the decline accelerates.
Yeah, I meant 94.2% coming from the vaccinated, as I hope the analysis makes clear.
But as for the deboonking articles the main claim by the Reuters article is that since the majority of people in the UK are vaccinated, it would naturally be the case that the majority of “incidents” (i.e. deaths, hospitalizations, etc.) would be from the vaccinated. I’ve already explained why this doesn’t work, but let’s try again.
The article is fact checking a claim about those with two shots. According to the UK government Coronavirus data, 87.5% of those in the UK have at least two shots. Let’s say that we see that 80% of the deaths come from the vaccinated with this proportion. Then if we take a random sample of 1000 people who would die without the vaccine, 125 won’t be vaccinated and will just die. To get 80% of the deaths from the vaccinated we need 500 of the 875 vaccinated to die. That’s about 57% of the vaccinated population, meaning an effectiveness of about 43%. Even though the vast majority are vaccinated, the only way to get such a majority of deaths from the vaccainted is to have a very low vaccine effectiveness.
But that was just a thought experiment, not the actual data. In the suveillance report linked by the reuters article we see 227 of deaths (within 28 days of a positive death) coming from the unvaccinated and 3,429 deaths from those with at least two shots. Thus a whopping 93.8% of the cases in these two groups come from those with at least two shots. But remember those are only 87.5% of the total population. There is 5.8% of the population with just one dose (so 6.2% completely unvaccinated.) The claims ignored this population, so we are really looking at a ratio of 87.5/93.7 = 93.4% in this population.
Now what do the numbers say about effectiveness? Well if we run our 1000 doomed man thought experiment again in the population of just those unvaxxed or with at least two shots, 62 would be unvaxxed and would die from the disease. Thus to get 93.8% of the deaths to come from the two shot group we need 938 to get sick (in a fluke 938+62 = 1000, making the math easy.) But there are only 934 people in the population who were vaccinated and would have died without the vaccine. Thus we can only get to that number if there are people who got the vaccine and died, despite the fact that they would not have died without it, i.e. negative vaccine effectiveness.
Of course with measurement error it is possible that the vaccine “merely” has a terrible effectiveness against death, such as 5% or something. But that must be weighed against the potential for side effects (and EVERY vaccine has the potential for side effects: the main difference with the COVID vaccines is that we don’t know what most of them are and we aren’t allowed to talk about the ones which are becoming apparent.)
Now let’s get to the second article, which deals with rates. I will first note something that the article glosses over, which is that even if we accept the UK’s calculations of the rates, the vaccines show a highly negative effectiveness against preventing disease. That is, not only do the vaccines not protect you against getting the disease, they make you more likely to get it. Let’s look at some rates (I’ve translated the rate per 100,000 to % rates to make things easier to parse.) I won’t combine age groups for the rate calculations, since to do that accurately I would need to know the relative proportions for each age group.
But for example, take the 80 or over group where the death rate effectiveness was touted the most. The surveillance report shows a 1.08% infection rate among the max vaxxed, and a .63% infection rate among the completely unvaccinated in this group. Vaccine effectiveness is defined by (V-U)/U*100 where V is the rate for the vaccinated crowd and U is the rate for the unvaccinated crowd which here leads to -71.4, i.e. there were 71.4% more infections in the max vaxxed group than the unvaccinated. This is castostrophically bad for a vaccine, but if we use the measures of the fact check article we must accept it: the vaccine is causing people to get sick with COVID.
The effectiveness in other age groups: 70-79: -154.7%, 60-69: -224.7%, 50-59: -215.9%, 40-49: -238.0%, 30-39: -224.5%, 18-29: -184.5%, 0-18: 31.6%. Thus in most age groups it is in fact far, far, worse than it was for the over 80 age group.
This is significant because the surveillance report is not calculating rates of death among the general population, but rather deaaths from people who previously tested positive. If you don’t get sick in the first place, then you won’t die from your illness. For example within the 18-29 age group the death rates were the same (and practically non-existant) for both groups: .0001% chance of death after getting sick. However the max vaxxed were 184.5% more likely to get sick in the first place, thus the vaccine effectively increases their chance of death by 184.5%.
An easy way to compare things is to simply take the death rate from the rate of cases to get the rate of catching COVID and then dying. For example doing this in the 30 to 39 group gives a rate of .294 among 100,000 people in the max vaxxed group and .363 among 100,000 people in the unvaxxed group. (Creating an effectiveness of 19%, once the FACT that the vaccines make you more likely to get sick are put into the equation.) Incidentally if we run the same calcualtions, but for hospitalizations instead we get an effectiveness of -164.6% against hospitalization, meaning that in this age group taking the vaccine means that you are more likely to get sick AND more likley to go to the hospital, but perhaps slighly less likely to die.
If we do this in the 80 and over age group, once we account for the higher likelihood of getting sick in the first place, we get an effectiveness against death of 10.9% and against hospitalization of 2.5%. Even in the population where the benefits are supposed to be the greatest, the higher chance of getting sick grinds the real effectiveness to almost nothing.
Of course this is all assuming that we can trust the way that the UK calcualted their rates out of 100,000. Even the UK surveillance report itself warns us that the rates could be in error (though of course they assure us that each and every error would probably benefit the vaccines. But there’s no agenda going here.)
The shots weren’t designed to deal with Delta or Omicron (or some of the older variants, like that from South Africa). No point wasting a lot of pixels on the question.
What was one of the big reservations about mRNA vaccines, beyond safety concerns? That they would not be good against variants (its boosters countered that new mRNA vaccines could be made quickly for each variant; but note that this hasn’t happened.) What are coronaviruses (and RNA viruses generally) infamous for? Mutating quickly and constantly pumping out new variants.
Thus the issues with Delta and Omicron were perfectly foreseeable. But the idea that mutated versions of the disease would bypass the vaccine was suppressed; if you search for health news relating to mutations from 2020 you’ll find plenty of articles claiming that COVID-19 mutates very slowly for a Coronavirus and that likely vaccines will be able to protect against new variants.
They lie until the lie no longer is plausible, and then they claim that their claims only became false because of things no one could have seen coming.
new mRNA vaccines could be made quickly for each variant; but note that this hasn’t happened.*
When the government is still buying original recipe as fast as you can make it, why fry up any extra crispy? 😉
But the idea that mutated versions of the disease would bypass the vaccine was suppressed
What was also suppressed was the issue of natural (infection-induced) immunity. People with natural immunity are still being fired from their jobs for not subjecting themselves to ineffective vaccines.