COVID-19 Experimental Vaccines: Much Stronger Responses and Side Effects Given to Those Who Already Had COVID

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”

Should you get a COVID vaccine? Probably, if you are at high risk—basic risk management. Lots of things in life are like that—place your bet based on a judgment call, weighing risks like hospitalization or death or Long-Haul COVID against vaccine side effects.

All the vaccines are experimental, needing special licensing approvals. Think on that a moment: this is one giant guinea pig experiment conducted on a scale never before seen in history. Of course, it’s not just the vaccine—governments are putting children’s physical and mental health on the line in an “all in” poker strategy where half of the “science” is bluffing.

What exactly does “permanent disability” after a COVID vaccination mean and why is no one clarifying?

If you are not at high risk it’s a tougher call. Particularly since the virus is mutating so fast. The smart move is is getting sun exposure for Vitamin D and other benefits of photobiomodulation, and by eating a nutrient-dense diet free of added sugars and excess carbohydrates, and considering magnesium supplementation. Make yourself stronger, so no matter what happens, you’ll come out of the gauntlet in better shape.

Big Pharma stands to gain $40 billion or more in profits with no financial liability*. The idea that they are doing totally objective science or that politics is not a part of it is pretty funny. But hopefully it is mostly right and will net-out as highly beneficial for all and the lack of any credible side-effect tracking / unintended consequences won’t be one massive train wreck a year from now.

* I’ve never been a fan of windfall profit taxes, but why isn’t some politician asking these companies to “give back” to those most hurt by COVID, say 50% of their profits?

Robust spike antibody responses and increased reactogenicity in seropositive individuals after a single dose of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine

Jan 29, 2021

...Should individuals who already had a SARS-CoV-2 infection receive one or two shots of the currently authorized mRNA vaccines. In this short report, we show that the antibody response to the first vaccine dose in individuals with pre-existing immunity is equal to or even exceeds the titers found in naïve individuals after the second dose. We also show that the reactogenicity is significantly higher in individuals who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the past. Changing the policy to give these individuals only one dose of vaccine would not negatively impact on their antibody titers, spare them from unnecessary pain and free up many urgently needed vaccine doses.

...individuals with pre-existing immunity also experience more severe reactogenicity after the first doses compared to naïve individuals. This begs the question if individuals with pre-existing immunity should even receive a second dose of vaccine.

...antibody titers of vaccinees with pre- existing immunity are not only 10-20 times higher than those of naïve vaccines at the same time points (p <0.0001, two tailed Mann Whitney test), but also exceed the median antibody titers measured in naïve individuals after the second vaccine dose by more than 10-fold...

These findings suggest that a single dose of mRNA vaccine elicits very rapid immune responses in seropositive individuals with post-vaccine antibody titers that are comparable to or exceed titers found in naïve individuals who received two vaccinations. We also noted that vaccine reactogenicity after the first dose is substantially more pronounced in individuals with pre-existing immunity akin to side-effects 2,3 reported for the second dose in the phase III vaccine trials vaccine dose serving as boost in naturally infected individuals providing a rationale for updating vaccine recommendations to considering a single vaccine dose to be sufficient to reach immunity.

Using quantitative serological assays that measure antibodies to the spike protein could be used to screen 4,5 expanding limited vaccine supply but also limit the reactogenicity experienced by COVID-19 survivors.

...

Conflict of interest statement

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has filed patent applications relating to SARS-CoV-2 serological assays and NDV-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines...

WIND: with a p-value of .0001, that is a very high confidence in the results. Too bad the group was not larger, but the truth is that the far larger vaccine studies hardly do better, in that they fail to include more than a tiny proportion of subjects that contracted COVID prior and/or after—and we’re basing public policy on those studies. The apparent conflict of interest is perhaps tolerable, because if you’re in the field you’re in the field and hopefully filing patents regularly. But why hasn’t the CDC funded independent studies a month ago? Incompetence as usual.

Why don’t we hear such issues explicitly addressed? These and many more:

• Is there scientific evidence with high statistical validity (p=0.0001) that the vaccine has any meaningful value for those who have already had COVID? Particularly when weighed against the side effects (which are not tracked worth a damn).
• What exactly does “permanent disability” after a COVID vaccination mean? Who pays for those acquiring a “permanent disability”? (Answer: they’re SOL).
• Is there a robust ethical arguments that the vaccine be offered to or required of those who have already had COVID?
• Is there any ethical and scientific justification for giving the vaccine for low-risk individuals?
• Is there any ethical and scientific justification for giving the vaccine to children?
• Is there independent scientific evidence with high statistical validity (p=0.0001) that the vaccine really does beat COVID out in the wild, inlcuding emerging mutations?

Is It a Human Rights Issue to Refuse the COVID-19 Vaccine Without Repercussions?

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”

There is talk of a “vaccine passport” being bandied about. Big tech companies are gettting involved. But where is the ethical/moral argument that should be a prerequisite to such an idea? And by which system of morality can this be justified? Because there isn’t just one philosophical system: we have collectivist ideology versus the individual rights on which this country was founded.

By refusing to take a COVID vaccine, one might become a 2nd-class citizen, deprived of the right to participate in the public sphere in various ways. That includes airlines and public transportation. It could move on to employment and other areas. And who is to say it might not end up at Walmart?

A world where the government can de facto take control of your own body, that is, coerce you into taking a vaccine or anything else seems dystopian . It should concern anyone who cares about individual rights. You should not have to rely upon a religious exemption, as if a reason based on dogma were a better reason than legitimate intellectual and personal-situation concerns. Nor should a doctor get to decide on your behalf.

Seat-of-the-pants science on the new vaccines

It is not “science” to  call something safe when no data exists. The fact is that all the advice we are getting is based on the logical fallacy “absence of proof is proof of absence” when it comes to side effects. If side effects are hardly tracked, we basically don’t and cannot know.

Assumptions based on “no data” clearly fall into the potential-harm category. Is doing risk assessment based on best guesses (“no data”) consistent with medical ethics of “first do no harm”? And if one is doing risk assessment, by what metric (or ethics) does it make any sense to vaccinate very low risk people?

The whole COVID vaccine thing seems to be a rush-to-judgment, scientifically speaking. Which isn’t science.

As someone with an auto-immune disease (Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis), my concerns about experimental COVID vaccines cannot be assuaged when I see that the FDA won’t even be tracking side effects and that only a small fraction of adverse events are reported.

Worse, the new vaccines are based on mRNA and are thus could be said to be unprecedented in their unknown risk profiles when used for hundreds of millions of people of varying genetic backgrounds, immunostatus, sex and pregnancy,etc. The WHO acknowledges that last group explicitly, and uses circular reasoning in allowing other unknown groups. There are dozens of “no data” blank spots in the knowledge about the vaccines for dozens of subgroups.

Most concerning issues: ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement), neurological issues

Neurological issues have a well documented history of popping up with various vaccines. And this is already happening with COVID vaccines and happened in trials as well. It seems to be low incidence, but what are the 106 permanent disabilities so far referring to, exactly?

Then there is antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)—severe reponse to in-the-wild COVID for vaccinated persons. This phenomenon is well documented in the literature for other vaccines, killing many hapless vaccinated people. When I see“studies” that seem to be mainly opinions on what “should” happen, I don’t feel better about it—I want to see scientific data, non theoretical opinions.

We cannot rule out a virus mutation that would turn neutralizing antibodies into non-neutralizing antibodies, possibly after tens of millions are vaccinated. Low odds on that presumably, but the consequences could be catastrophic. Has that been fed into a risk assessment model?

* All COVID vaccines are experimental aka “investigatory” as of early 2021. This is why they required special use authorization.

No Plans to Develop Database for Post-COVID-19 Experimental Vaccination Deaths: FDA

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”

VAERS is the government system for reporting adverse medical events. How competent is this system in tracking problems with drugs, vaccines, etc? Incompetent.

The COVID-19 vaccines are all (as a matter of public record as of Jan 2021) experimental.

No Plans to Develop Database for Post-COVID-19 Vaccination Deaths: FDA

Federal health officials have no plans to develop a database for adverse events to people who receive a COVID-19 vaccine, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told The Epoch Times.
“At this time there are no specific plans to develop a public database of deaths and adverse events associated with vaccination,” a spokesperson said via email.

If a link between an adverse event or death to a vaccination were verified, the health officials would communicate the findings and consider if additional regulatory actions were warranted, such as product labeling.

The number of deaths post-vaccination submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is up to 288 as of Jan. 29. The system is passive and anyone can submit reports. Health professionals are encouraged by public health officials to use the system.

Over 3,000 patients have suffered adverse effects after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, including 106 who have suffered a permanent disability, according to VAERS reports.

...

WIND: note the logical fallacy at work (circular reasoning): no tracking to be done, but if a link is “verified” , then they’ll consider tracking it.

What does this mean for anyone suffering from a permanent disability after vaccination (as per above)? Does that mean the vaccine is involved, or not? Since data is not going to be collected in a meaningful way, there will be no basis to make a claim that one was harmed—because of lack of evidence. Given the lack of evidence, no basis for a claim exists.

What a tidy solution for the $40 billion or more windfall profit being pipelined to the vaccine manufacturers.

As far as I can tell, “safe and effective” means if the initial studies run by those profiting from vaccines say so, then the vaccine is safe and effective.

COVID-19:  Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine: “Masking lack of evidence with politics”

re: Do Restrictive Lockdowns Actually Work? Or might they actually kill more people than they claim to save?
re: Masking lack of evidence with politics

Masks seemed to make sense back in April/May/June 2020. On a risk management basis, it made sense to use masks. Had we seen inflections in the infection curves across geographic areas across the world with the onset of mask mandates, who would argue against it just on a risk management basis?

In my view, science starts with skepticism, and it is the burden of science to prove something holds in the face of all attempts to falsify the hypothesis. There are too many things out there that falsify the masking hypothesis. And a strong bias among public health officials to not falsify it. In other words, politics and poor science.

The stunningly variable science on masks (and the flip-flop of “experts”) suggests that masks are more about social conformity than a useful tool—COVID theatre. Why didn’t infection curves slump when mask mandates came online everywhere? Why can’t we quickly ramp down infections with masks... perhaps because they can’t achieve that effect?

But most of all: how could infection rates soar when hardly anyone is without one? I am open to a “masks work but people screw up in other ways” hypothesis, but then what is that hypothesis? And if so, what is the point of masks?

Personally, I’d wear an N95/N100 mask if someone is visibly sick, and especially coughing or sneezing. I am much more skeptical outside those parameters. Even so, I am OK with wearing a mask in close quarters. But mandates everywhere, including the idiots bicycling and walking and driving alone? What I see is a populace trained in mindless irrational conformity, which has chillingly dangerous implications for freedom.

There are of course studies that show that masks work. There are also studies that refute that claim. Science has a long history of false claims that cannot be substantiated. A long history of using unpersuasives statistical p-values of 5% to claim “statistical significance. A long history fo data trawling and a long history of all sorts of biases. Mix in politics...!

Add in the low baseline rate + false positive rate of PCR tests, and I wonder whether studies have any defensible mathematical rigor to them.

This article below is now 7 months old, but I am not aware of any credible evidence that would oppose the conclusions here, or allay my concerns about the extremely sloppy state of modern medical “science”.

The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine: “Masking lack of evidence with politics”

The increasing polarised and politicised views  on whether to wear masks in public during the current COVID-19 crisis hides a bitter truth on the state of contemporary research and the value we pose on clinical evidence to guide our decisions.

In 2010, at the end of the last influenza pandemic, there were six published randomised controlled trials with 4,147 participants focusing on the benefits of different types of masks. 2 Two were done in healthcare workers and four in family or student clusters.  The face mask trials for influenza-like illness (ILI) reported poor compliance, rarely reported harms and revealed the pressing need for future trials.

Despite the clear requirement to carry out further large, pragmatic trials a decade later, only six had been published: five in healthcare workers and one in pilgrims. This recent crop of trials added 9,112 participants to the total randomised denominator of 13,259 and showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers. 

...Many countries have gone onto mandate masks for the public in various settings. Several others  – Denmark, and Norway – generally do not.  Norway’s Institute for Public Health reported that if masks did work then any difference in infection rates would be small when infection rates are low: assuming 20% asymptomatics and a risk reduction of 40% for wearing masks, 200 000 people would need to wear one to prevent one new infection per week. 6

...

The small number of trials and lateness in the pandemic cycle is unlikely to give us reasonably clear answers and guide decision-makers. This abandonment of the scientific modus operandi and lack of foresight has left the field wide open for the play of opinions, radical views and political influence.  

WIND: if masks had any meaningful benefit, there would be a mean influence showing up across every geographic location and across time (e.g., at the onset of mask mandates). But no such proofs exist.

Where are the ten double-blind studies in 10 countries proving that masks work? Where are the studies that use a p-value of 1% all agree?

OTOH, I stand by my hypothesis that a population supplied with N95 masks properly fitted could have stomped-out this pandemic early. But even that might be wishful thinking, as it is unrealistic even if enough N95 masks could be found. So it too might be false.

See also:

COVID-19 evidence

The ethics of COVID-19 treatment studies: too many are open, too few are double-masked

Face coverings, self-surveillance and social conformity in a time of Covid-19

COVID-19: Might the USA Be Entering the Early Stages of Herd Immunity?

re: Do Restrictive Lockdowns Actually Work? Or might they actually kill more people than they claim to save?
re: Masking lack of evidence with politics

No, not from the vaccines—far too few people have gotten it.

The United States is now seeing declines in COVID cases just about everywhere. Here in California, that is implicit in Governor Newsom lifting the lockdowns right in the middle of the winter, just when the perennially-wrong “experts” predicted a massive surge of infections.

As a bonus, influenza has largely disappeared, the flu and some other respiratory diseases seemingly shunted aside by COVID.

Why isn’t this good news at the top of the news?

The economic carpet-bombing of lockdowns has done this country and others enormous damage. None of the government measures can be shown scientifically to have been of any meaningful effect. It’s all about politics and fear-mongering rather than objective scientific inquiry.

Beginnings of herd immunity?

A valid hypothesis is that the USA might now be acquiring significant herd immunity on top of prior immunity. How else to explain dropping infections and hospitalizations, when masks have never worked and lockdowns have failed miserably for the past year?

There could be some other explanation, and it’s easy enough to falsify that hypothesis by the scientific method. But here in the USA, we seem to be incompetent at basic science, which in Sweden shows compelling evidence that here immunity is quite far along. Instead, we prefer to do things now seen to have been totally useless or nearly so (masks and lockdowns).

The next month or two should be able to validate the herd immunity hypothesis. But will the good news be suppressed for months to come instead of being celebrated? So far, the practice of stomping on all competing views along with character assassination has intimidated all but a brave few. And what public health officials have their act together enough to engage in real science?

You do not find what you are not looking for. And you don’t find your car keys under the street light because the light is best there. Both of those are not far off from modern “science” on COVID.

See also: Will the Truth on COVID Restrictions Really Prevail?

COVID-19: WHO Recommends Against Vaccinating Pregnant Women, Admits “no data” for some groups

Always take Vitamin D along with magnesium and Vitamin K2.

See my comments from back in December, where I spoke of the tyranny that will coerce you to inject a vaccine into your body, one that is untested (no data exists) for a variety of special subgroups. My core premise was the lack of safety and efficacy data across a broad population.

Now the WHO is explicitly acknowledging the legitimacy of my concerns by calling out pregnant women explicitly, and acknowledging that no data exists for some groups of possible concern. It seems to me that “try it and see what happens” is both anti-scientific and callous.

The COVID-19 vaccines are all (as a matter of public record as of Jan 2021) experimental/investigational. If they were not experimental, they would not require an emergency use authorization.

WHO: Interim recommendations for use of the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine against COVID-19

Pregnant women

...WHO recommends not to use mRNA-1273 in pregnancy, unless the benefit of vaccinating a pregnant woman outweighs the potential vaccine risks, such as in health workers at high risk of exposure and pregnant women with comorbidities placing them in a high-risk group for severe COVID-19. Information and, if possible, counselling on the lack of safety and efficacy data for pregnant women should be provided...

Persons with autoimmune conditions

No data are currently available on the safety and efficacy of mRNA-1273 in persons with autoimmune conditions, although these persons were eligible for enrolment in the clinical trials. Persons with autoimmune conditions who have no contraindications to vaccination may be vaccinated.

...

WIND: I’m not a woman, but I have 3 daughters. And the question of an immune system response to placental tissue that coulder render a woman infertile has NOT been addressed to my knowledge.

As someone diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis (an auto-immune disease), I fall into an area where no data exists. Ditto for my daughter. Ditto for millions of people.

Is it “science” to in effect call something safe when no data exists? Or more like magical thinking? WHO’s implicit use of the logical fallacy “absence of proof is proof of absence” is not science and definitely not good medicine. Ditto for the circular argument!

It’s one big guinea-pig experiment in my view, because the data on adverse effects is grossly underreported. Let alone tracking any longer-term effects. Business as usual in medicine.

Odds are you’ll be just fine with the vaccine. But if you’re not, it’s your problem. Each person has to weigh the benefits (how?) of vaccine risk versus getting COVID and then chronic viral sequelae. For most, the vaccine is the clear winner, as far as we know. But there will be “losers” in this equation. I don’t plan on being one of them.

COVID-19, Sebastian Rushworth MD: “Sweden’s oddly controversial 'herd immunity' strategy worked”

re: Do Restrictive Lockdowns Actually Work? Or might they actually kill more people than they claim to save?
re: Masking lack of evidence with politics
re Might the USA Be Entering the Early Stages of Herd Immunity?

See also How to understand scientific studies (in health and medicine).

Sebastian Rushworth MD: “Here’s a graph they don’t want you to see”

Here’s a graph that doesn’t get shown in the mass media, and that I’m sure all those who want you to stay fearful of COVID don’t want you to see. It shows the share of the tested population with antibodies to COVID in Sweden week by week, beginning in the 28th week of 2020 (the first week for which the Swedish Public Health Authority provides data on the share of tests coming back positive).

There is so much that is interesting about this graph. Like I said, it begins in week 28, in other words in early July, which is around the time the first Swedish COVID wave was bottoming out. At the time, I personally thought this was due to enough of the population having developed immunity to COVID, but we now know that was wrong. Rather, it was due to seasonality – in other words, summer caused COVID to disappear.

The proportion testing positive for antibodies was 15% in early July. It remained stable for a few weeks, and then started to drop, as we would expect, given that the rate of new infections was very low at the time. Your body generally doesn’t keep producing antibodies forever after an infection, rather they wane. Of course, this doesn’t mean immunity is waning, as I discussed on this blog a while back. Although the actively antibody producing cells disappear, memory cells remain, ready to be activated at short notice if you get re-exposed to the pathogen.

After an initial reduction, the proportion with antibodies stabilized at around 10% in August, and stayed that way until October, when it started to rise, in line with the beginning of the second wave. And it’s literally kept rising by a percentage point or two, every week, all autumn and winter so far. In the second week of January 2021, 40% of those tested in Sweden had antibodies to COVID.

Funnily enough, mainstream media has so far shown relatively little interest in publicizing this astounding fact. I’ve been getting most of my statistics from SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster. They had been providing data on the share with antibodies in Stockholm up to a month or two back, when that information discretely disappeared from their website. I wonder why.

I know some of you will respond that 40% doesn’t mean anything, because the data isn’t taken from a random sample. If all we had was one number, then that would be a valid point. But we don’t just have one number. We have the number for every week stretching back six months. Any bias due to people preferentially getting tested after a respiratory infection that applies now, when 40% are testing positive, also applied three months ago, when 10% were testing positive. The trend is real, and cannot be denied.

Apart from that, there is another form of bias that will tend to make the proportion with antibodies seem lower than it really is. This is the fact that people who already know they’ve had COVID generally don’t keep re-testing themselves to confirm it. This group gets bigger and bigger as more and more people get COVID, and this will eventually make the proportion with antibodies seem lower than it really is. So at some point, there is an inflection point. In the early pandemic, a larger share of those being tested will have antibodies than you would get from a random sample. In the late stages of the pandemic, a smaller share of those being tested will have antibodies than you would see in a random sample.

In the last few weeks the number of people being treated for COVID in hospitals in Sweden has been dropping rapidly, as has the share of PCR-tests that are coming back positive. There is much discussion in the media about what the cause might be. Everyone seems to be very surprised. Is it because people are better at working from home? Or because people aren’t traveling as much? Or because more people are wearing face masks?

No-one is discussing the obvious explanation – that so many people have now had COVID, and have developed immunity, that the virus is having difficulty finding new hosts. In other words, Sweden’s oddly controversial “herd immunity” strategy worked.

So, 40% of those tested have antibodies. And that likely underestimates the proportion of the population that is immune to COVID, because antibody production wanes much faster than immunity wanes, and because not everyone produces antibodies after infection, and because not everyone is susceptible to the virus in the first place.

At the end of the second week of January, 10,323 people had died of/with COVID in Sweden. In fact, the real number is probably much lower. A recent study carried out here in Stockholm found that only 17% of those who supposedly died of COVID in care homes actually had COVID as the primary cause of death.

But let’s assume 10,323 is correct, for the sake of argument. If 40% of Swedes have had COVID, that gives an infection fatality rate of 0,25%. It’s a little higher than the global infection fatality rate determined by professor John Ioannidis, which is likely due to the fact that Sweden’s population is older than the global average. But it’s not much higher, and certainly not high enough to motivate the large scale harm imposed on us by the powers that be. That’s why the fear mongers don’t want you to see that graph. And that’s why I hope you will help me spread it far and wide.

...

WIND: why don’t we have such data here in the USA?

How many “COVID deaths” are “fake science” that by design of the absurd metrics for categorizing a death as due to COVID would flunk-out a high-school student?

Here in California, Governor Newsom is de facto acknowledging the same sea change in COVID by relaxing controls—while keeping the reasons and data secret. Why is that?

With mask mandates of little or no value and the economic carpet-bombing of lockdowns the country has done itself enormous damage. None of the government measures can be shown scientifically to have been of any meaningful effect. It’s all about politics and fearmongering rather than objective scientific inquiry. See Will the Truth on COVID Restrictions Really Prevail?

Infrared Therapy with LED Lights: Photobiomodulation for Cardiac and Brain and Much More

The human body has 6 or 7 types of photosensitive cells from what I understand, but all cells respond to infrared at the mitochondrial level, at the least.

I haven’t had time to detail my findings yet, but I will say that after some usage, there are definitely benefits to infrared therapy aka one form of photobiomodulation.

My feeling is that sunlight is still the best form of photobiomodulation for both UV-B (for Vitamin D) and wide-band infrared, but in the winter, there isn’t much sunlight in temperatures warm enough to make it pleasant to go half-naked. Besides, the infrared light feels great to me, and it works at night too.

• My chest and lungs respond within minutes to infrared therapy by relaxing noticeably.
• I can weight-lift longer and harder if I mix in infrared exposure during the workout. My joints and muscles feel smoother, more limber.
• A multi-year ache in the side of my left chest wall* has disappeared; my presumption is that the 850nm infrared penetrated and helped heal whatever has been nagging me there.
• My wife tells me that my skin looks very healthy, though I think that started some months ago with the RnAReset Pico Silver @AMAZON and RnaReset ReMag @AMAZON (magnesium). But heck, the body needs needs nutrients and irradiation to be fully healthy IMO.

* Possibly an injury from my 2018 bike crashes and also a July 2020 MTB crash which did a nice job on my ribs too.

Photobiomodulation

Cardiac photobiomodulation and cranial photobiomodulation show promise, as do benefits for all sorts of injuries, and possibly some diseases.

A Role for Photobiomodulation in the Prevention of Myocardial Ischemic Reperfusion Injury: A Systematic Review and Potential Molecular Mechanisms

...PBM may have a role as a cardioprotective agent against MIR injury and could protect against the initial cardiac ischemic event and the ongoing damage caused by reperfusion. PBM has been shown to affect a variety of signal transduction pathways that are critical to switching from the deleterious redox stress reactions that occur as a result of reperfusion, towards the more protective redox conditions that can limit injury and promote repair. This could ultimately lead to improved tissue responses, including reduced infarct size and lower rates of restenosis...

Brain Photobiomodulation Therapy: a Narrative Review

Brain photobiomodulation (PBM) therapy using red to near-infrared (NIR) light is an innovative treatment for a wide range of neurological and psychological conditions.

Red/NIR light is able to stimulate complex IV of the mitochondrial respiratory chain (cytochrome c oxidase) and increase ATP synthesis. Moreover, light absorption by ion channels results in release of Ca2+ and leads to activation of transcription factors and gene expression.

Brain PBM therapy enhances the metabolic capacity of neurons and stimulates anti-inflammatory, anti-apoptotic, and antioxidant responses, as well as neurogenesis and synaptogenesis. Its therapeutic role in disorders such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease, as well as to treat stroke, brain trauma, and depression has gained increasing interest...

...The authors conclude that clinic or home-based PBM therapy using laser or LED devices will become one of the most promising strategies for neurorehabilitation in upcoming years

A powerful enough LED light is critical to having a chance at getting the 850nm light deep enough into body tissues; see what I am using below.

Resources

This book is a terrific introduction to infrared therapy, and a no-brainer at about $3:

The Ultimate Guide To Red Light Therapy: How to Use Red and Near-Infrared Light Therapy for Anti-Aging, Fat Loss, Muscle Gain, Performance Enhancement, and Brain Optimization @AMAZON

Multi-watt near-infrared light therapy as a neuroregenerative treatment for traumatic brain injury

As this interview (I prefer the transcript myself, but some like video):

The Science On Red Light Therapy Benefits with Dr. Michael Hamblin

More detailed books:

• Photobiomodulation in the Brain: Low-Level Laser (Light) Therapy in Neurology and Neuroscience @AMAZON
• Handbook of Photomedicine @AMAZON
• Photobiomodulation @AMAZON

The infrared lights I am using are from Hooga Health; I have both the HG1500 and HG500. Please use discount code DIGLLOYD10 for 10% off—I get a commission if you use that code, so I thank you. I bought and paid for both the HG1500 and the HG500 for my own use.

Hooga Health infrared LED lights, 660nm + 850nm wavelengths

The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Loserthink in Modern Medicine: Goal-Oriented instead of Systems-Oriented eg ‘One Symptom, One Diagnosis, One Drug'

Previously I had learned that at least two studies found that 75% of adverse medical events went unreported. But this publication referenced via VAERS makes the claim that the situation is far worse.

Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)

....

Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed.

...

WIND: whether it’s 99% or 87% or 75% unreported, this should give anyone pause, pegging the bullshit meter at redline any time a drug is claimed to be “safe”. What exactly is the argument against this being anything but a gross ethical violation within the medical establishment? Evaluating safety depends on good data, and if that data is not collected, what then?

As a rule of life, whenever there is huge financial incentive and little downside, corruption is guaranteed to happen.

Now read that 2nd paragraph about vaccines... feel good? You’re taking 3 or 4 prescription drugs... feel good? Good luck with that.

The unholy trinity of Big Pharma profits, medical guidelines, and the FDA and its revolving door to Big Pharma are surely harming the public via their data-gathering incompetence (which might be one of the smaller issues). My Metronidazole experience is only one such case.

What do the statistics above say about doctors who accept the safety profile of a drug approved based on dubious scientific merit, then internalize that acceptance, going on to prescribe it for years as per guidelines? Seems like a cognitive committment based on a logical fallacy (absence of proof is not proof of absence) perhaps in every case.

Which raises the question (and I understand the practical challenges, which are difficult): are doctors who accept safety claims on faith violating their oath of practice (“first, do no harm”). Because if the claims are based on a logical fallacy, then doctors have a huge burden to spend more time than they have trying to figure out the truth. Let alone fill in the gaping hole of (lack of) nutritional knowledge.

The mantra of “trust the experts” and “trust the data” is fodder for the gullible.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: Do vitamin D supplements protect against respiratory infections?

Always take Vitamin D along with magnesium and Vitamin K2.

Risk management says that failure to fix a Vitamin D deficiency (almost everyone in the winter) is a serious risk. But the government and medical establishment are silent about it during the pandemic—WTF?

Sebastian Rushworth MD: Do vitamin D supplements protect against respiratory infections?

...among people with a Vitamin D deficiency at the start of the studies, the percentage getting a respiratory infection during the study periods dropped from 55% to 41% with a vitamin D supplement. That is a big effect (14% absolute reduction) and it was statistically significant. Any medication that achieved an effect size that big would be a blockbuster and make billions of dollars for the company that invented it. However, among individuals with normal vitamin D levels to begin with, no benefit was found to taking a supplement...

...daily and weekly dosing was protective against infection, but that more infrequent bolus dosing (monthly or quarterly) was not protective. What this means is that there is a clear advantage to taking smaller doses of vitamin D frequently rather than large doses occasionally. When the ineffectiveness of bolus-dosing was accounted for, it was found that the decreased risk of infection was significantly bigger than it had initially appeared. Among people with a Vitamin D deficiency who took Vitamin D daily or weekly, the proportion that got an infection dropped from 60% to 32% . That is an absolute risk reduction of 28 percent! Among people without deficiency, the absolute risk reduction was 6%.

...Conclusions: Vitamin D isn’t going to magically make you immune to respiratory infections, but it will likely decrease the frequency with which you get them by a bit if you are not deficient, and by a lot if you are deficient. People who are likely to be deficient are those who don’t get a lot of sun (the elderly frequently fall in to this category), those with darker skin living in northern latitudes, those covering large amounts of skin whenever they are outside (a lot of muslim females fall in to this category). If you belong to any of these categories, you should definitely be taking a vitamin D supplement. If you don’t, it’s unlikely to hurt, and it might help.

...

WIND: and here we are with COVID and our leadership saying there is nothing we can do to change the course of the pandemic—tragic.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: How to understand scientific studies (in health and medicine)

Excellent overview of why scientific studies may be far less than objective, and should only be trusted when key metrics are met.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: How to understand scientific studies (in health and medicine)

...
Publication bias

...most big, high quality studies are carried out by pharmaceutical companies. Obviously, this is a problem, because the companies have a vested interest in making their products look good. And when companies carry out studies that don’t show their drugs in the best light, they will usually try to bury the data...

This contributes to a problem known as publication bias... studies you can find on a topic often aren’t all the studies. You are most likely to find the studies that show the strongest effect. The effect of an intervention in the published literature is pretty much always bigger than the effect subsequently seen in the real world. This is one reason why I am skeptical to drugs, like statins, that show an extremely small benefit even in the studies produced by the drug companies themselves.

...Most serious journals have now committed to only publish studies that have been listed on clinicaltrials.gov prior to starting recruitment of participants, which gives the pharmaceutical companies a strong incentive to post their studies there. This is a hugely positive development, since it makes it a little bit harder for the pharmaceutical companies to hide studies that didn’t go as planned.

Peer review

Peer-review provides a sort of stamp of approval, although it is questionable how much that stamp is worth...

Generally the position of peer-reviewer is an unpaid position, and the person engaging in peer-review does it in his or her spare time. He or she might spend an hour or so going through the article before deciding whether it deserves to be published or not. Clearly, this is not a very high bar. Even the most respected journals have published plenty of bad studies containing manipulated and fake data because they didn’t put much effort in to making sure the data was correct. As an example, the early part of the covid pandemic saw a ton of bad studies which had to be retracted just a few weeks or months after publication because the data wasn’t properly fact checked before publication.

...The guiding principle is the idea that bad studies will be caught out over the long term, because when other people try to replicate the results, they won’t be able to.

There are two big problems with this line of thinking. The first is that scientific studies are expensive, so they often don’t get replicated... And if the drug company has done one study which shows a good effect, it won’t want to risk doing a second study that might show a weaker effect. The second problem is that follow-up studies aren’t exciting... No-one cares about the people who re-did a study and determined that the results actually held up to scrutiny.

Different types of evidence

In medical science, there are a number of “tiers” of data. The higher tier generally trumps the lower tier, because it is by its nature of higher quality. This means that one good quality randomized controlled trial trumps a hundred observational studies.

The lowest quality type of evidence is anecdote... Anecdotal evidence can generate hypotheses for further research, but it can never say anything about causation...

After anecdote, we have observational studies. These are studies which take a population and follow it to see what happens to it over time. Usually, this type of study is referred to as a “cohort study”, and often, there will be two cohorts that differ in some significant way... observational studies can never answer the question of causation... This is extremely important to be aware of, because observational studies are constantly being touted in the media as showing that this causes that...

The highest tier of evidence is the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). In a RCT, you take a group of people, and you randomly select who goes in the intervention group, and who goes in the control group.

...

There are those who would say that there is another, higher quality form of evidence, above the randomized controlled trial, and that is the systematic review and meta-analysis... meta-analysis is a systematic review that has gone a step further, and tried to combine the results of several studies in to a single “meta”-study, in order to get a higher amount of statistical power... The reason I say it’s both true and not true that this final tier is higher quality than the RCT is that the quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses depends entirely on the quality of the studies that are included...

Statistical significance

One very important concept when analyzing studies is the idea of statistical significance. In medicine, a result is considered “statistically significant” if the ”p-value” is less than 0,05 (p stands for probability)... 5% is an entirely arbitrary cut-off... Personally, I think a p-value of 0,05 is a bit too generous. I would much have preferred if the standard cut-off had been set at 0,01, and I am sceptical of results that show a p-value greater than 0,01...

The 0,05 limit is only really supposed to apply when you’re looking at a single relationship. If you look at twenty different relationships at the same time, then just by pure chance one of those relationships will show statistical significance. Is that relationship real? Almost certainly not... The reason researchers are supposed to post the primary endpoint at clinicaltrials.gov before starting a trial is that they can otherwise choose the endpoint that ends up being most statistically significant just by chance, after they have all the results... That is of course a form of statistical cheating. But it has happened, many times. 

Absolute risk vs relative risk

Let’s say we have a drug that decreases your five year risk of having a heart attack from 0,2% to 0,1% . We’ll invent a random name for the drug, say, “spatin”. Now, the absolute risk reduction when you take a spatin is 0,1% over five years (0,2 – 0,1 = 0,1). Not very impressive, right? Would you think it was worth taking that drug? Probably not...

How can a spatin only decrease risk by 0,1% and yet at the same time decrease risk by 50%? Now you’d definitely want to take the drug, right? ... When you look at an advertisement for a drug, always look at the fine print. Are they talking about absolute risk or relative risk?

How a journal article is organized

Introduction... mostly fluff...

Method... important section and you should always read it carefully...

There are a few methodological tricks that are very common in scientific studies. One is choosing surrogate end points and another is choosing combined end points. I will use statins to exemplify each, since there has been so much methodological trickery in the statin research.

Surrogate end points are alternate endpoints that “stand in” for the thing that actually matters to patients... By using a surrogate end point, researchers can claim that the drug is successful when they have in fact showed no such thing. As we’ve discussed previously, the cholesterol hypothesis is nonsense, so showing that a drug lowers LDL cholesterol does not say anything about whether it does anything clinically useful.

Another example of a surrogate endpoint is looking at cardiovascular mortality instead of overall mortality. People don’t usually care about which cause of death is listed on their death certificate. What they care about is whether they are alive or dead...

...example of a combined end point is looking at the combination of overall mortality and frequency of cardiac stenting. Basically, when you have a combined end point, you add two or more end points together to get a bigger total amount of events...

...Another trick is choosing which specific adverse events to follow, or not following any adverse events at all. Adverse events is just another word for side effects. Obviously, if you don’t look for side effects, you won’t find them.

Yet another trick is doing a “per-protocol analysis”... anyone who dropped out of the study because the treatment wasn’t having any effect or because they had side effects, doesn’t get included in the results... The alternative to a per-protocol analysis is an “intention to treat” analysis. In this analysis, everyone who started the study is included in the final results, regardless of whether they dropped out or not...

The third section of a scientific article is the results section, and this is the section that everyone cares most about. This is just a pure tabulation of what results were achieved, and as such it is the least open to manipulation, assuming the researchers haven’t faked the numbers... I think most researchers are honest...

There is however one blatant manipulation of the results that happens frequently. I am talking about cherry picking of the time point at which a scientific study is ended... If the results are promising, they will often choose to stop the study at that point, and claim that the results were “so good that it would have been unethical to go on”. The problem is that the results become garbage from a statistical standpoint... . Never trust the results of a study that stopped early.

...The fourth section of a scientific article is the discussion section, and like the introduction section it can mostly be skipped through. Considering how competitive the scientific research field is, and how much money is often at stake, researchers will use the discussion section to try to sell the importance of their research, and if they are selling a drug, to make the drug sound as good as possible.

In conclusion, focus on the method section and the results section...

Final words

My main take-home is that you should always be skeptical. Never trust a result just because it comes from a scientific study. Most scientific studies are low quality and contribute nothing to the advancement of human knowledge. Always look at the method used. Always look at who funded the study and what conflicts of interest there were.

WIND: scientific studies around medicine and human health are so dangerous to health and the economy (e.g., statins) that a legal framework should be established that requires full disclosure of data*, independent confirmatory analysis, and severe penalties (jail time) for undisclosed conflicts of interest or business relationships. The stringency should be no less tight than for financial companies.

But since Congress and the “news” and the FDA are in the pockets of Big Pharma, don’t expect any integrity to emerge anytime soon.

* In some cases, even the researchers are denied access to the data by Big Pharma. That should be flat-out illegal. Furthermore, data used to justify any drug or treatment FDA approval should be required to be fully disclosed in the public domain to any part interested in it.

COVID 19: Big Tech Censorship of COVID-19 Discussion (Glenn Greenwald)

Credit Glenn Greenwald with questioning the stifling of debate on the COVID front, though the problem is far more serious than just that topic.

“It’s Kafkaesque... to call it that is almost to minimize how repressive it is...”

“...as to ...it was pure brute censorship of the most toxic kind...”

 

COVID 19: Can vitamin D cure Covid-19?

re: Give the Gift of Life to Yourself and Others: Vitamin D + Vitamin K2 + Magnesium + Vitamin C + Zinc
re: Vitamin D

Trivial risk management strongly says everyone should be taking Vitamin D as a prophylactic.

The government could be handing out free 'D' to the entire population (and for that matter, magnesium chloride).

Instead, we are treated to feckless defeatism in being told that nothing can alter the trajectory of COVID over the next few months. That’s far worse than the feckless inaction in the previous administration—ceding to hopelessness on top of inaction. So tens of thousands more people will suffer and die, needlessly. Meanwhile, the medical leadership remains incompetent beyond belief. There is no leadership; a monkey could do less harm.

Moreover, Vitamin D deficiency was already thought to be a serious public health issue long before COVID.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: Can vitamin D cure Covid-19?

by Sebastian Rushworth M.D, Sept 11 2020

A new article has just been published in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology looking to see if an oral vitamin D supplement can be used to cure covid-19. Considering that vitamin D is cheap, widely available, and safe, it would be pretty miraculous if that turned out to be the case.

...The results of this study are promising. In fact, they are very promising, and they are in line with earlier evidence that people who are vitamin D deficient get protection from respiratory infections if they take a daily vitamin D supplement... However, this study reminds me a little too much of the first published trial of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19. That trial also had significant flaws, and also showed significant benefit, but the results were not borne out by the bigger, higher quality trials that followed

...In spite of my reservations, I do think it is reasonable for everyone to take a daily vitamin D supplement based on the results of this study. Vitamin D is after all safe, cheap, and widely available, so the potential benefits far outweigh the potential harms.

You might also be interested in my article about whether vitamin D protects against depression or my interview with Sky News about covid-19.

WIND: class risk management. The case for taking Vitamin D is overhwelmingly positive.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: Is the cholesterol hypothesis dead?

See my previous posts on statins and cholesterol.

The modern medical establishment continues to do massive harm to a large segment of the population at enormous cost.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: Is the cholesterol hypothesis dead?

by Sebastian Rushworth M.D, Sept 8 2020

Is there any life left in the cholesterol hypothesis (a.k.a. the lipid hypothesis)? Is there anything left for serious scientists to cling to or is time for its mouldering corpse to end up on the trash heap of medical history, alongside lobotomy, bloodletting and the theory of the four humors? I was asked this question by a reader of this blog recently, and as it happens, a systematic review was recently published in Evidence Based Medicine (my favorite medical journal, mainly because it is edited by the brilliant Dr. Carl Heneghan) that definitively answers this question, so I thought it would be interesting to go through what the evidence says together.

As many readers will be aware, the cholesterol hypothesis is the idea that cardiovascular disease is caused by high levels of cholesterol in the blood stream. The hypothesis harks back to the early part of the twentieth century, when a Russian researcher named Nikolai Anitschkow fed a cholesterol rich diet to rabbits and found that they developed atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, the process which in the long run leads to cardiovascular disease)[WIND: rancid cholesteral, with damaged molecules]. Of course, rabbits and humans are very different species, with very different dietary preferences. Rabbits, being herbivores, normally have very little cholesterol in their diets, while humans, being omnivores, generally consume quite a bit of cholesterol. Regardless, the data was suggestive, and led to the hypothesis being formulated.

...Clearly, if the cholesterol hypothesis is true, then the amount of benefit seen from lowering LDL should stand in direct proportion to the amount by which LDL is lowered, right? Anything else would be illogical.

...

...the cholesterol hypothesis is dead, dead, dead. There is no correlation between effect on LDL and effect on mortality. Anyone who still chooses to cling to the cholesterol hypothesis in spite of this is consciously refusing to see what a vast amount of high quality scientific evidence is putting right in front of their eyes.

Secondly, as an interesting aside, only 5 out of 35 trials found a mortality benefit, which means that 30 out of 35 did not find any benefit. And yet somehow statins are one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world...

So what are the practical implications for you as a patient? As I mentioned in an earlier article, there is no point getting your cholesterol levels tested, because they tell you nothing about your risk of cardiovascular disease. If you are already on a cholesterol lowering drug, and intend to continue for whatever reason, there is no point doing annual check-ups of your cholesterol levels, because there is no correlation between how much the drug lowers those levels and your risk of future cardiovascular events. And there is certainly no point in trying to reach a “target” LDL level.

WIND: R.I.P statins and cholesterol.

COVID 19: Sebastian Rushworth MD: Do Lockdowns Prevent COVID Deaths?

I really like astute critique of allegedly scientific studies.

Sebastian Rushworth M.D lists his web site as “grounded in science”. And I accept that totally after reading his scatching critique of a Lancet article. It shows just how poorly The Lancet reviews studies, because the numerous flaws are outrageous vs real science.

Select excerpts, with emphasis.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: Does lockdown prevent COVID deaths?

by Sebastian Rushworth M.D, Nov 9 2020

A very interesting article was recently published in Lancet that sought to understand which factors correlate, on a country level, with covid related outcomes. The study was observational, so it can only show correlation, not causation, but it can still give pretty strong hints as to which factors protect people from covid, and which factors increase the risk of being harmed.

The most interesting thing about the study, from my perspective, was that it sought to understand what effect lockdowns, border closures, and widespread testing have in terms of decreasing the number of covid deaths. Although correlation does not automatically imply causation, if there is a lack of correlation, then that strongly suggests a lack of causation, or at least, that any causative relationship that does exist is extremely weak. And considering the amount of money, effort, and resources that have been poured in to lockdowns this year, and that continue to be poured in to them right now, it would be pretty disappointing if lockdowns had such a minimal effect that there was no noticeable impact on mortality whatsoever. Am I right?

...First of all, as mentioned, all the data in this study is observational, so no conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect.

Second, May was relatively early in the pandemic, and it’s now November, so we’re missing about half a year’s worth of covid data...

Third, the analysis builds on publicly available data, often provided by different governments themselves, with widely varying levels of trustworthiness, and with different ways of classifying things. As an example, data from Sweden is infinitely more reliable than data from China...

Fourth, the reseachers who put this study together gathered an enormous amount of data, pretty much everything they could think of under the sun that might in some way correlate with covid statistics. That means that this study amounts to “data trawling”, in other words, going through every relationship imaginable without any a priori hypothesis in order to see which relationships end up being statistically significant. When you do this, you’re supposed to set stricter limits than you normally would for what you consider to be statistically significant results. They didn’t do this.

...The results are presented as relative risks (not absolute risks), which tends to make results look more impressive than they really are...

...

Ok, let’s get to the most important thing, which the authors seem to have tried to hide, because they make so little mention of it. Lockdown and COVID deaths. The authors found no correlation whatsoever between severity of lockdown and number of COVID deaths. And they didn’t find any correlation between border closures and covid deaths either. And there was no correlation between mass testing and covid deaths either, for that matter. Basically, nothing that various world governments have done to combat covid seems to have had any effect whatsoever on the number of deaths.

...the researchers didn’t correct for the fact that they were looking at a ton of different relationships, rather than just one single relationship between two variables. As I have discussed previously in my article on scientific method, the more relationships you look at, the more strictly you have to set the cut-off for statistical significance, since you will otherwise just by chance get a lot of relationships that seem significant but aren’t.

...The authors who performed this study used a 95% confidence interval, as though they were only looking at one relationship between two variables. But they were in fact looking at a ton of variables (they never even specify how many) and a huge number of relationships, so they should have set their confidence interval much more widely.

They did have some results that they claimed were statistically significant, which I haven’t bothered to mention yet, because they’re certainly not significant after statistical correction.

...
First of all, lockdowns do not seem to reduce the number of COVID deaths in a country. Oops. Based on this data, if you want to decrease the number of COVID deaths, you should encourage more people to start smoking, and possibly also start a communist revolution, to equalize wealth as far as possible. Just kidding. As I’ve mentioned, the data is observational, so we can’t say anything about causality. What we can say from this is that lockdowns don’t seem to work – if they have any effect at all, it is too weak to be noticeable at a population level.

...obesity is the strongest covid risk factor that we can do something about. And even if it isn’t the obesity itself that kills people, when we fix the obesity, we also fix the many derangements in metabolism and immune function that go along with it.

You might also be interested in my article about whether vitamin D can be used to treat covid, or my article about whether a low fat or low carb diet is more effective for weight loss.

WIND: wow! This is the sort of critical analysis that is so badly lacking in public discourse and other medical matters. A breath of fresh air.

COVID 19: Relative Mortality Across History, Across Countries, and Over the Past Year? Follow the data, follow the science... is NOT What Governments are Doing

re: BMG: Covid-19: Do many people have pre-existing immunity?
re: Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence
re: observational study The Lancet: A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes — “in our analysis, full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality”. See analysis and debunking in Does lockdown prevent COVID deaths? — “nothing that various world governments have done to combat COVID seems to have had any effect whatsoever on the number of deaths” and New evidence on the effectiveness of lockdown.

I can’t evaluate all the graphs, direct references to studies, etc.
I cannot easily determine if the things being compared are being compared correctly.
I cannot go verify even a fraction of what is shown.

The presentation is highly data-centric and the tenor is matter-of-fact analytical, which makes it ring true to me.

Context matters: it is also the first time I have seen an intelligent discussion of life-years-lost and quality life-years-lost instead of the painfully inappropriate metric of deaths (of any age)—see the graphs and be sure to watch the video for more insight.

Nothing in the fear-mongering press remotely approaches this kind of analysis, nor do our faux experts like Fauci ever bother to present an analysis like this.

Video

Jan 4, 2021, Ivor Cummins.

Notes and quotes

I did my best here—please refer directly to the video in case I did not get it exactly right.

“We have dumped all of our science on everything, to copy China”.

“Amazing thing: in Japan, a controlled group 50% developed antibodies to SARS-COV2, it spread like wildfire. High metabolic health and prior immunity explain the low death rate”.

• Lockdowns and masks “don’t move the needle”. A mathematical fact according to all the graphs presented.
• Experts have been 90% wrong on just about everything.
• Prior immunity exists to varying levels in different countries.
• Life years lost per million from COVID-19 isn’t even a blip compared to historical flu outbreaks.
• Influenza A/B drop off the map with the arrival of SARS-COVID2. Ditto for other coronaviruses, but rhinoviruses not affected by COVID virus.
• Hospitalizations should lag positive tests, but instead they move in lockstep. This needs an explanation.
• Seasonal difference in excess mortality year to year is modest at best.
• Deaths in Europe per million are around 50X higher vs Japan, in spite of the masking and severe lockdowns in Europe.
• Deaths from COVID “badged with a positive PCR test” make the data suspicious. And PCR tests are notoriously inaccurate with a low baseline rate and too-high false positive rate.
• Vitamin D levels in Japan are strikingly good, and Japan has very low mortality. Vitamin D levels in hard-hit areas like are abysmal (“poor metabolic health”).
• There so far has been no real epidemic in 14 of 25 countries versus 2018 using the traditional definition of epidemics.
• COVID-19 mortality could have been predicted even before the pandemic hit by looking at longitudinal variability of previous.
• Mortality may be worsened by measures that suppress community immunity.
• Ireland lockdown madness: ordinary mortality year. Heating up in the winter for COVID-19, but where has the flu gone? There is NO FLU in 2020 there. What is going on there? When a dominant virus takes over, other viruses disappear—and this is a known behavior.
• Ireland has NO SIGNAL for mortality in 2020 vs prior four years!

Screen captures

From Jan 4 2021 video by Ivor Cummins.

The only rationally defensible metric for assessing the impact of an epidemic is quality life-years-lost, or at least life-years-lost.

Quarantine recommendations from WHO

Does this WHO recommendation match what governments are engaging in today?

Why is the 2019 viewpoint exactly opposite of 2020?

WHO quarantine recommendation for exposed individuals from 2019

Monthly deaths per million, historically

Why exactly is COVID-19 considered such a serious issue? It barely exceeds repeated instances of influenza and cannot begin to compare to bad influenza years. And the data is completely bogus, with people badged as COVID-19 deaths in spite of the actual cause, whether it is a motorcycle accident or all sorts of other factors involved.

COVID-19 deaths are GIGO that mangles the truth, and even so it’s not significant with respect to recent past history.

Monthly deaths per million, historically

Life Years Lost

Estimates are the quality life years lost are on the order of 1 year or less for COVID-19.

“Anyone who comparesCOVID-19 in any way shape or form even in no-lockdown Sweden to Spanish flu is lying to you on an epic scale”.

Peak life years lost from COVID-19 vs Spanish Flu — 1000X worse for Spanish Flu

Lockdowns scatterplot

Stringency of lockdown vs mortality has NO IMPACT on mortality across countries—no association. 25 studies showing that lockdowns have little or no impact.

The Lancet (Chaudry): “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and widespread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people”. And such studies are dubious at best as per Does lockdown prevent COVID deaths?

Lockdowns have NO IMPACT on mortality

“No real epidemic” for the whole of 2020 in 14/25 countries

“mortality due to COVID-19 in a given country could have been largely predicted even before the pandemic hit Europe, simply by looking at longitudinal variability of all-cause mortality rates in the years preceding the current outbreak”.

— https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.25.20248853v1

Why exactly is COVID-19 considered such a serious issue? It barely exceeds repeated instances of influenza and cannot begin to compare to bad influenza years. And the data is completely bogus, with people badged as COVID-19 deaths in spite of the actual cause, whether it is a motorcycle accident or all sorts of other factors involved.

COVID-19 deaths are GIGO that mangles the truth, and even so it’s not significant with respect to recent past history.

 

“No real epidemic” for the whole of 2020 in 14/25 countries

Lockdowns in Ireland

Why don’t lockdowns change the curve at all? And why do hospital cases track in sync with positive rates—they should lag by at least a few days. The explanation is unclear, but GIGO data is one explanation—or infections of people already in hospitals or any other number of things. The sudden uptick in late December is as yet unexplained.

Lockdowns do not correlate with positivity rates or hospitalizations

Quick—which year is COVID-19?

Which year is COVID-19—A, B, C, or D? There is NO DIFFERENCE in death rate over 4 years. For this, the entire society has been severely damaged.

Lockdowns do not correlate with positivity rates or hospitalizations

ZERO impact of COVID-19 on total deaths in Ireland 2020

Did COVID-19 happen in 2015, 2016, 2018 in Ireland? Because the death rate was higher in those years than 2020! What was the Level 5 lockdown for? UK very similar.

Lockdowns do not correlate with positivity rates or hospitalizations

Mortality rates

Look at the striking difference in mortality rate between Europe vs Asia—50X difference!

“Anyone who think that lockdowns or masks, given the scientific literature, could allow for a 98% reduction in mortality is either (1) evil, (2) biased or has conflict of interest, (3) cognitive bias or (4) just plain stupid, or perhaps a mixture of all four [such as Neil Ferguson].

Clearly, something is FUBAR. Fraudulent data (GIGO or perhaps by design?), but maybe something else, like Vitamin D levels or prior immunity. But a 50X difference seems more likely to be intellectual fraud on one side, or both.

Alleged COVID-19 deaths from COVID-19, Europe vs Asia

Antibodies in Japan, the Vitamin D factor

COVID-19 spread like wildfire in Japan, hitting 50% of a control group, whose antibodies steadily rose as a group. And yet Japan has excellent high Vitamin D levels (one likely factor, other other likely prior immunity), and very low mortality.

It is sheer insanity that public health policy does not include helicopter drops (so to speak) of Vitamin D supplementation.

Alleged COVID-19 deaths from COVID-19, Europe vs Asia

Masks have NO IMPACT on mortality

Hundreds of examples show NO IMPACT of masks on mortality.

Alleged COVID-19 deaths from COVID-19, Europe vs Asia

BMJ: Covid-19: Do many people have pre-existing immunity?

Do some populations have some degree of immunity from COVID-19 already? That question is answered with T-Cells, which “remember” past pathogens. It is poorly answered by antibodies, which rapidly decline over the years.

The implications of 20% to 50% prior immunity has major implications for public health policies, particularly in some countries with prior exposure to similar viruses.

BMJ: Covid-19: Do many people have pre-existing immunity?

It seemed a truth universally acknowledged that the human population had no pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2, but is that actually the case? Peter Doshi explores the emerging research on immunological responses

Even in local areas that have experienced some of the greatest rises in excess deaths during the covid-19 pandemic, serological surveys since the peak indicate that at most only around a fifth of people have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2: 23% in New York, 18% in London, 11% in Madrid.123 Among the general population the numbers are substantially lower, with many national surveys reporting in single digits.

...Yet a stream of studies that have documented SARS-CoV-2 reactive T cells in people without exposure to the virus are raising questions about just how new the pandemic virus really is, with many implications... At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus.

...

T cell studies have received scant media attention, in contrast to research on antibodies, which seem to dominate the news (probably, says Buggert, because antibodies are easier, faster, and cheaper to study than T cells). Two recent studies reported that naturally acquired antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 begin to wane after just 2-3 months, fuelling speculation in the lay press about repeat infections.

...

Could pre-existing immunity be more protective than future vaccines? Without studying the question, we won’t know.

WIND: why is there so little interest from politicians and the fear-mongering press about pressing for studies to explore this subject?

Why isn’t the science being followed, as so many “experts” insist? The policy stampede based on ignorance continues.

COVID 19 Incompetence: Why Don't We Know How Many Vaccine Doses Are Being Thrown Away?

Aren’t you looking forward to a government-run healthcare system?

The COVID-19 vaccines are all (as a matter of public record as of Jan 2021) experimental.

Why Don't We Know How Many Vaccine Doses Are Being Thrown Away?

With health care providers running out of doses in droves and hustling to cancel thousands of appointments, many face an additional problem: Hobbled by strict guidelines for who can and cannot receive vaccines right now, and fines for flouting the rules, perfectly good doses are being thrown in [sic] the garbage. "I have personally heard stories like this from dozens of physician friends in a variety of different states. Hundreds, if not thousands, of doses are getting tossed across the country every day," Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told NBC News.

It's an entirely predictable outcome. When vials of doses are thawed to prepare them for use, they cannot be refrozen. Vials that have been punctured must be used within just a few hours. Combine those factors with tight state-imposed parameters for which people can currently receive the vaccine and waste is practically unavoidable—when people cancel appointments with little notice, it can be hard for health care workers to find new recipients off the street who qualify under the state's current phase. They're left either breaking the law or throwing doses in the garbage.

To make matters worse, state departments of health are struggling to tell how often it's happeningor how many precious doses have been squandered. Although many states mandate reporting of vaccine waste, providers have little incentive to comply: If New York's system is any indication, they might end up fined or under investigation.

...

WIND: of course no one in government had the insight to foresee this guaranteed idiotic outcome. The least efficient system possible is invariably government-run.

COVID-19 is the Headline, but Has Influenza Largely Disappeared?

I always acccepted that the flu was a serious threat, especially having having had two very serious pulmonary infections in my lifetime. Accordingly, I dutifully took my flu vaccine most of my life as per the fearmongering tradition each and every year (I’ve skipped it several years in the past decade, to no ill effect).

But has the flu been a real threat substantiated by hard science?

Have you ever thought you had influenza and been tested for it? Not me, and not anyone I know. I’ve never even heard of such testing. It exists as per the CDC site, but it’s strangely absent from public discussion and seemingly rarely used except in severe cases.

Death from flu?

Each year we’ve been told that “influenza kills 40K to 60K Americans”. In truth, flu deaths are based on models based on assumptions. AFAIK there isn’t any solid scientific data to support the claims, just computer models based on assumptions. Models are for persuasion and have no scientific validity. At best, they can be the basis of a hypothesis to be tested.

If someone is hospitalized and dies, tests positive for COVID, what other factors might have been involved such as influenze and/or viral/bacterial pneumonia? And if more than one factor, what is the cause of death? The presumptive cause of death will surely be COVID, which does not qualify as science. And hospitals get paid more for COVID patients.

Video at 26:00 or so.

Where has the flu gone?

Ad-hoc influenza data

As for influenza data, ad-hoc testing and self-selection do not qualify flu data as science. Yet this is what recommendations and policies are based upon.

Outpatient Illness Surveillance

Please note, the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet) monitors outpatient visits for influenza-like illness (ILI), not laboratory-confirmed influenza, and as such, will capture visits due to other respiratory pathogens, such as SARS-CoV-2, that present with similar symptoms. In addition, healthcare-seeking behaviors have changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people are accessing the healthcare system in alternative settings, which may or may not be captured as a part of ILINet. Therefore, ILI data, including ILI activity levels, should be interpreted with extreme caution. It is particularly important at this time to evaluate syndromic surveillance data, including that from ILINet, in the context of other sources of surveillance data to obtain a complete and accurate picture of both influenza and COVID-19 activity. CDC is tracking the COVID-19 pandemic in a weekly publication called COVIDView.

Why have a website with swiss-cheese data, and fail to provide a direct link to the “complete and accurate picture”?

Why so little influenza this year?

Flu is not in the news, not even a topic of discussion in the public sphere. Yet here we are in a raging COVID pandemic (allegedly), and influenza is being very kind to us this year. Why?

From what I can tell, the influenze test data is highly suspect—3 positives out of 14937 tests is so low (0.02%) that all of them could be false positives. No baseline rate or false postitive rate is given in the summary ("Public Health Laboratories"), which further degrades credibility. What kind of test for anything can be so good that a 0.02% positive rate could be deemed anything but junk data?

Suppose you were infected with the flu. How is this distinguished from a false positive COVID test, which is probable given the false positive rate and low baseline rate.

Perhaps masking and lockdowns and social distancing are effective for influenza as a bonus? I would accept that idea fairly easily, but maybe it is not enough—how could COVID be raging yet influenza at such a low level if those mitigating behavioral factors are in play for both?

Could it be that masks, social distancing and lockdowns work for influenza but not for COVID? Is that even a credible hypothesis? Or maybe influenza is wimpy this year, by lucky happenstance. Or maybe something fishy is going on.

The fact is that masks and lockdowns do NOT explain the lack of the flu. COVID-19 has displaced the flu!

See video around 27:30.

Masks and lockdowns do NOT explain influenza disappearing

• Flu View
• FluView Interactive
• CDC: Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report

Seasonal influenza activity in the United States remains lower than usual for this time of year

COVID 19: Moderna finds its COVID-19 vaccine less effective against variant found in South Africa

In late December,I wrote:

The COVID vaccines are not only totally unproven “in the wild”, having ZERO scientific validity as yet as to efficacy out in the real world (or with respect to viral mutations),... 

Less than a month later, I am proven right on at least part of my “outrageous” statement (the viral mutations part). And the virus is showing multiple mutations now, with more surely to come*.

The “in the wild efficacy” portion of my claim remains to be proven false or not when it can be objectively evaluated six to nine months from now. No scientist can claim efficacy before the experiment! Which was my point of saying “unproven”.

Assumptions about efficacy mean at the least: immune system response to the vaccine and actual efficacy vs an in-the-wild viral infection in a large highly-variable human population. All of those. Together and millions of times over. Not some theoretical efficacy based on lab tests counting assumed-effective antibodies against a year-old strain**. We don’t actually know how the population will respond as a whole, and we won’t for months to come. And we cannot safely assume that some new mutation won’t render the whole exercise fruitless.

* The virus now has far more hosts worldwide. Possibly, the dual-dose vaccine regimen could give the virus further evolutionary pressure to mutate in persons with only partial immune system response (2nd dose not yet taken).
** This flaw permeates medicine and medical practice: a dubious study is done (numerous issues), and everyone takes it as gospel and it be. Later, the study cannot be replicated, or does not work in the Real World.

Moderna finds its COVID-19 vaccine less effective against variant found in South Africa

Moderna says tests show its COVID-19 vaccine offers protection against new variants of the coronavirus, but that the drug is more effective against the variant first identified in the U.K. than one found in South Africa. As a result, Moderna will test booster doses of its vaccine — including one that would be tailored to fight strains that have recently emerged.

The newly identified strains have caused alarm, as health officials in the U.K. and South Africa say the strains appear to spread more easily than older versions of the coronavirus. They emerged in recent months, even as vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech raised hopes in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moderna says that at current dosage levels, its COVID-19 vaccine regimen "is expected to be protective against emerging strains detected to date." But the company also says that when its vaccine was used against the variant initially found in South Africa, known as B.1.351, the vaccine produced levels of virus-fighting antibody titers that were around six-fold less than when it's used against other variants.

WIND: more mutations are coming.

There is a significant probability that all the vaccines currently in use may be only partially effective (or not effective at all) by the time the incompetent government-controlled rollout is done 6-9 months from now*. Still, partial protection might moderate the severity, so not all is lost—yet.

* If a glacially-slow rollout along with throwing out unused vaccine doses due to government regulations is not the epitome of government incompetence, I don’t know what is.

COVID 19 is Mutating, Becoming More Transmissible and Possibly More Deadly

Maybe the schmucks in charge should have let people work, protected those at risk, and let the more benign variants run their course over the summer months, instead of letting it hit much less healthy people jammed together inside in the winter? My post from way back in April: Kicking the Can Down the Road?.

And maybe we had better figure out if Ivermectin works as the #1 national priority. Ditto for intravenous Vitamin C.

The authorities do not want to panic people, and so much of what you hear about the mutated forms of COVID might tend to minimize concerns. Which makes explicit admission of concern all the more disturbing:

Updates on CCP Virus: NIH Director Warns South African Variant More Concerning Than UK

The United States is closely watching the more infectious UK variant of COVID-19 after British officials warned that it may also be more deadly, U.S. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said on Saturday.

But U.S. health officials are somewhat more worried about a separate variant from South Africa, although that one has not yet been identified among U.S. cases of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, a disease that causes COVID-19.

Two more more-infectious mutated virus strains are predicted to be dominant by March. And with the rising infection rates, more mutations are likely. Maybe one of them will kill half of humanity? It’s not impossible.

On the loserthink front, President Biden says that “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months,,...”. That’s defeatism bordering on nihilism. I can think of, just for starters, making sure that everyone has free Vitamin D and Zinc and Vitamin C and getting people outside for sunlight, fixing magnesium deficiency, etc. Nothing can be done? At the least, a positive attitude is possible. And that’s not nothing.

And whether Ivermectin can save people should be a national priority, along with whether intravenous Vitamin C can defeat COVID infections and whether magnesium can help the pulmonary issues (it did for me, repeatedly). But don’t expect the ossified modern medical establishment to get a clue about any of this except for a few brave souls.

COVID 19: Ivermection Appears to be a Life-Saving Drug that the Government is Intent on Discouraging

re: Is Ivermectin Effective?

The “experts” recommend against Ivermectin for the treatmeant of COVID-19, except in a clinical trial because... it’s “not approved”, not because it doesn’t work. The FDA warns against it in generalities, not because it doesn’t work.

NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines
FDA FAQ: COVID-19 and Ivermectin Intended for Animals
There's a New Magic Bullet for COVID-19 and Some People Are Not Getting It at the Pharmacy

So does Ivermection save people, or not? Dr. Pierre Kory is emphatic that it is a life-saving miracle drug, as per the video and transcript below.

So why don’t we know here in January 2021 when this testimony below is from way back in August 2020? Another 200K dead people while the US government sits around with its collective thumb up its ass.

People are dying in droves, and the best these incompetent parasites at NIH can do is say (in effect) “we’re thinking about working on it”. Now we have a defeatist President saying nothing can be done to change the course of the pandemic. What is the truth here? Why don’t we know? The whole thing reeks of incompetence.

January 14, 2021, NIH.gov: The COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel’s Statement on the Use of Ivermectin for the Treatment of COVID-19

Since the last revision of the Ivermectin section of the Guidelines, results from several randomized clinical trials and retrospective cohort studies of ivermectin use in patients with COVID-19 have been published in peer-reviewed journals or made available as non-peer-reviewed manuscripts. Updates to the Ivermectin section that are underway will include discussion of these studies.

Because many of these studies had significant methodological limitations and incomplete information, the Panel cannot draw definitive conclusions about the clinical efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.

As such, the Panel has determined that there are insufficient data to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19. Results from adequately powered, well-designed, and well-conducted clinical trials are needed to provide further guidance on the role of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19.

Pierre Kory, M.D testimony to Senate

When a doctor who is part of a research group and frontline treatment team gets in front of a Senate committe and begs for something to be done, it really makes me wonder just how incompetent and downright evil Big Pharma and the FDA and the NIH are.

If Dr Kory’s statements have even moderate validity, then the government’s inaction is killing people by the tens of thousands.

Pierre Kory, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at St. Luke's Aurora Medical Center, delivers passionate testimony during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on "Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution, Part II."

Partial transcript

"All I ask is for the NIH to review our data that we've compiled of all of the emerging data -- we have almost 30 studies. Every one is reliably and reproducibly positive showing the dramatic impacts of Ivermectin. Please, I'm just asking that they review our manuscript.”

And when I say miracle, I do not use that term lightly, and I don't want to be sensationalized when I say that. That is a scientific recommendation based on mountains of data that has emerged in the last three months.

When I am told...that we are touting things that are not FDA or NIH-recommended, let me be clear. The NIH, their recommendation on Ivermectin, which is to not use it outside of controlled trials, is from August 27th -- we are now in December. This is three to four months later.

Mountains of data have emerged from many centers and countries around the world, showing the miraculous effectiveness of Ivermection. It basically obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick.

“In early outpatient treatment, we have three randomized control trials and multiple observation as well as case series showing if you take Ivermectin, the need for hospitalization and death will decrease.

"The most profound evidence we have is in the hospitalized patients.  We have four randomized control trials there, multiple observation trials, all showing the same thing, you will not die, or you will die at much, much, much lower rates...It is proving to be a wonder drug.”

Dr. Kory noted that two researchers won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 for their studies on Ivermectin's efficacy in eradicating parasitic diseases, and now "it is proving to be an immensely powerful anti-viral and anti-inflammatory agent."

We have 100,000 patients in the hospital right now, dying. I'm a lung specialist. I'm an ICU specialist. I've cared for more dying COVID patients than anyone can imagine. They're dying because they can't breathe. They can't breathe...And I watch them every day. They die.

By the time they get to me in ICU, they're already dying, they're almost impossible to recover. Early treatment is key. We need to offload the hospitals. We are tired. I can't keep doing this. If you look at my manuscript, and if I have to go back to work next week, any further deaths are going to be needless deaths, and I cannot be traumatized by that.

I cannot keep caring for patients when I know that they could have been saved with earlier treatment and that drug that will treat them and prevent the hospitalization is Ivermectin.

[elder and minorities] "It's the most -- the most severe discrepancy I have seen in my medical career, and we are responsible to protect those disadvantaged members. We have a special duty to provide counter-measures. The amount of evidence to show that Ivermectin is life-saving and protective is so immense and the drug is so safe...it must be instituted and implemented."

COVID-19: WHO Changes Guidance to Address False Positives PCR Tests with Absurdly High Ct Cutoff Value, and no Baseline Rate Metric

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Is the PCR test used by Germany and the USA a Medical Fraud?
re: Is the Cycle Cutoff Value (Ct value) for PCR Tests Way Too High? False Positives Used to Destroy Lives
re: Belgian Medical Doctors on PCR Tests for COVID-19

How much have COVID-19 infection rates actually risen? That is, if you have a test whose false positive rate is anywhere close to the baseline rate, you’re just producing garbage data (GIGO). A point lost on the public and the news and seemingly even medical experts addressing the public.

Even the WHO now questions the data — false positive PCR tests stemming from an absurd cutoff value (cycle threshold value aka Ct value). And an unknown baseline rate. In other words, a well-recognized logical fallacy is driving public policy.

COVID positive tests are GIGO (junk) data and have been for a long time. Ditto for COVID death statistics.

They are moving-the-goalposts right before your eyes. Is the timing of the change political? Maybe, maybe not, but at least it seems to be more sensible.

WHO Changes CCP Virus Test Criteria in Attempt to Reduce False Positives

The new guidance could result in significantly fewer daily cases... It’s unclear why the health agency waited over a year to release the new directive...

Scientists and physicians have raised concerns for many months of an over-reliance on and a misuse of the PCR test as a diagnostic tool since it can’t differentiate between a live infectious virus from an inactivated virus fragment that is not infectious.

Additionally, the high cycle threshold values of most PCR tests—at 40 cycles or higher—increases the risk of false positives.

...But many medical experts consider a threshold value cutoff of 40 cycles to only return false positives since samples that go through many amplification cycles will pick up negligible RNA sequences regardless if the virus is inactivate or the viral load is exceedingly low to pose any problem.

...to be counted as a CCP virus case, only a positive PCR test is required. And no matter how many times an individual is tested, each positive test is counted as a separate case...

...This advice may also help lower CCP virus cases in hospitals as it more clearly defines who is considered a hospitalized case.

...

WIND: OMG. OMG. OMG.

In other words, it’s all GIGO. No one knows what the real infections are or the real deaths. Is it off by 90%, 50%, 25%, 10%, what? No one knows, and no one can say. This isn’t science.

• COVID infections are garbage data with no statistical validity.
• COVID death data are garbage data with no statistical validity.
• 4 tests on the same day of the same person are.... 4 cases! WTF?

The math

First, the PCR Ct value for many tests is 40, meaning that viral bits are multiplied by 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 (about a trillion). A much more reasonably number would be 2^30 = 1,073,741,824, or about a billion, 1024 times less. And you only do the test where clinical symptoms manifest, in order to reduce the false positive problem.

MITMedical: Was my PCR test result a false positive? [argues for low false positive rate for one test]

Second, no test has any validity without establishing the baseline rate. Any test lacking a baseline rate is committing a logical fallacy. But that is exactly what we see with COVID infection data. It’s not clear to me that even most doctors 'get' that.

For example, suppose you test 1000 people, 1 of which is actually infected. If the false positive rate is 1% (it’s probably much higher), then you get 11 positives (assuming no false negative for the infected person). That’s an error of 1000% (one thousand percent). And that is what public policy has been based on. Within rising infections, maybe the error rate is now down to 100%?

Corruption in science

Scientific hooliganism is at work here. No honest clinician could accept these pathetically weak metrics for data characterizing the pandemic.

I am not doubting a large number of infections, but the infection rate data and COVID death statistics are garbage data (GIGO) that wouldn’t pass peer review by any honest clinician.

We are witnessing the most grotesque corruption of science I have seen in my lifetime. We have “experts” like wet-noodle Dr Fauci now saying how they “feel”, as if reality changes because of who the boss is. Good luck with science based on feelings.

The chances of the gullible public understanding the logical fallacy of the baseline rate versus the false positive rate is a logical fallacy never mentioned in the news. So politicians and “experts” craving power and influence can inflict any amount of harm on the populace, all based “on the data” and “on science”. We just have to “listen to the experts”, who over and over have been shown to be full of shit on almost every important question about COVID.

The number of quoted casualties from COVID is another GIGO number, one lacking any rigorous scientific basis, with no proof of any kind required. Indeed, patients can be admitted to hospitals with a false positive for COVID and become yet another COVID statistic.

COVID-19 Policies: Do Restrictive Lockdowns Actually Work? Or might they actually kill more people than they claim to save?

RE: The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas And The Efficacy Of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, And Closings.
RE: Martin Kulldorff, professor, Harvard Medical School: Letter to the editor: Scott Atlas and lockdowns
RE: COVID-19: Great Barrington Declaration by Medical Professionals and Epidemiologists
RE: The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation
RE: Time to Steepen the Curve and Accelerate Infection of Low-Risk People
RE: AIER: “The Pandemic that Killed Debate”
re: THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 UNEMPLOYMENT SHOCK ON LIFE EXPECTANCY AND MORTALITY RATES

Lockdowns would seem to have merit on an intuitive basis. So why have infection rates soared even as lockdowns continue along with widespread mask use? (universal in my neck of the woods!)

At best, these measures have allowed the infections to accelerate. Could it be that policies claimed to reduce spread are actually increasing it? Probably not, but the junk science so far cannot explain reality.

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
— Lloyd Chambers

European Journal of Clinical Investigate: “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19”

The most restrictive non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID‐19 are mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs).

...we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. 

While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.

WIND: read that again: strict lockdowns DO NOT WORK.

Now ask: where is the rigorous scientific proof that lockdowns of any kind have benefits? That is, without straw-man comparisons, but comparisons to far less destructive alternatives.

The real question is whether lockdowns work at all, and whether they might be making things worse, at least in some implementations and/or in some areas.

Call me stupid for not understanding a basic question: if lockdowns and masks depress infections, why have infections soared?

Only a fool keeps doubling down on things that fail. Ask China, which is now suffering from uncontrollable outbreaks in spite of totalitarian lockdowns where people have to shit in a bucket inside their own dwellings (shared facilities).

How about re-opening the economy with no lockdowns at all and using risk assessment and risk mitigation strategies so as not to kill many more people via vicious government policies than COVID ever will?

Are lockdowns making things WORSE?

Is it out of the realm of possibility that lockdowns might actually be increasing infections by forcing people into close quarters for extended periods?

Here in my area, the highest infection rates are precisely where many people live in close proximity in apartments (e.g., working class people with no other option but ten people to a small apartment). When you force that group to stay together for long periods, that guarantees all of them will be infected. Where is what passes for science today on that sort of hypothesis?

For that matter, how is forcing people indoors anything but guaranteed havoc, versus encouraging outdoor activities?

Could Sunscreen Ingredient Benzophenone-3 Promote Breast Cancer?

Sunlight has many health benefits. The human body has 6 or 7 types of photosensitive cells, presumably evolved to benefit from irradiation (photobiomodulation) and particularily infrared light, plus UV-B for Vitamin D production. Our sleep is governed by photo-sensitive cells for the day/night cycle, and jet lag can be fixed by exposure to daylight. Infrared can heal wounds and sunlight can heal some diseases, mitochondria in the eye benefit, etcetera.

Ironically, with the preponderance of evidence showing that Vitamin D has a major role to play for COVID-19, I see most people shrouded in clothing so as to almost entirely avoid sun exposure. Risk assessment is apparently not a thing for these people. Nor for most dermatologists in my experience, whose tunnel-vision skin-centric practice offers a lopsided view of total health vs human body as a whole—an anti-scientific anti risk-assessment approach.

Sun exposure (moderate, no burning) sure seems like the smart move, rather than slathering on a potential cancer-promoting chemical goo (sunscreen). The amount of exposure should vary by skin tone to avoid burning.

Benzophenone-3 promotion of mammary tumorigenesis is diet-dependent

Benzophenone-3 is a putative endocrine disrupting chemical and common ingredient in sunscreens. The potential of endocrine disrupting chemicals to act as agonists or antagonists in critical hormonally regulated processes, such as mammary gland development and mammary tumorigenesis, demands evaluation of its potential in promoting breast cancer...

...we found that BP-3 elicits both promotional and protective effects on mammary tumorigenesis dependent upon dietary regimen and tumor histopathology. However, even in instances where this analysis shows an ostensibly protective effect, other parameters suggest the potential for greater risk. For example, while BP-3 treatment enhances tumor-free survival in mice fed LFD, the spindle cell tumors that do occur display a higher level of proliferation and a lower level of apoptosis, properties associated with a poorer prognosis in human cancers. We also found that pubertal exposure to HFD was sufficient to counter the ostensibly protective effect of BP-3 in mice fed LFD. Thus, our studies contribute to an existing literature suggesting that puberty is a critical window of susceptibility for later mammary tumorigenesis.

Taken together, these findings suggest that BP-3 exposure may have adverse consequences in mammary tumorigenesis. They point to a need for further studies of BP-3 in both animal models and humans as a potential risk factor in breast cancer. They also point to the more general need to evaluate endocrine disrupting chemicals in the context of varying diets. Future studies are needed to identify the mechanistic basis for BP-3 effects on mammary tumorigenesis and how dietary fat interacts with BP-3 to alter outcomes.

WIND: one study should never be taken as definitive of anything.

Using sunscreen on children prior to puberty might be a bad idea from a risk assessment viewpoint. That is, trading off the risk of skin cancer versus the risk of breast cancer.

The idea that than slathering on a potential cancer-promoting chemical goo (sunscreen) beats out a million years of human evolution is a bit far fetched.

I studiously avoid sunscreen except for multi-hour or all-day efforts. My dermatogists (several over the past decade) all say my skins is quite good for my age—and it has had a great deal of sunlight exposure.

It is my personal belief that a nutritionally dense diet will largely forestall most cancers, including skin cancer. However, the modern diet cannot come close to meeting magnesium requirements, magnesium being critically important to up to 1000 physiological processes. Accordingly, magnesium supplementation and possibly a few other things might be required to give the body what it needs to be healthy.

COVID-19 USA Government Policies: “Staggering 0.89 and 1.37 million excess deaths over the next 15 and 20 years, respectively”

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

RE: The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas And The Efficacy Of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, And Closings.
RE: Martin Kulldorff, professor, Harvard Medical School: Letter to the editor: Scott Atlas and lockdowns
RE: COVID-19: Great Barrington Declaration by Medical Professionals and Epidemiologists
RE: The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation
RE: Time to Steepen the Curve and Accelerate Infection of Low-Risk People
RE: AIER: “The Pandemic that Killed Debate”
re: THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 UNEMPLOYMENT SHOCK ON LIFE EXPECTANCY AND MORTALITY RATES

As I wrote about all last year, COVID policies will kill many more people than COVID itself.

Making this truly beyond-the-pale evil, anyone raising such issues get vilified; see links above. The failure to rationally assess this issue is the greatest moral failure of our time.

Politicians and the media are choosing (intentionally or through incompetence) to kill many more and far younger people with much longer lifespans later, than far fewer geriatric people with very short expected lifespans now, many of whom would have died within a year from some other cause anyway.

Putting it into relative terms: trading 30 life-years (younger person) for 2-3 life-years (geriatric person) is a gross violation of both medical ethics, and public policy ethics.

THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 UNEMPLOYMENT SHOCK ON LIFE EXPECTANCY AND MORTALITY RATES

We estimate that this unprecedented unemployment shock will result in a 3.01% increase in mortality rates and a 0.50% drop in life expectancy over the next 15 years. Compared to the typical unemployment shock, we find that women (both African-American and White) are disproportionately affected relative to men. Particularly for White women, the COVID-19 unemployment shock is about 4.72 standard deviation larger (about 2.74% in magnitude) than their typical shock to the unemployment rate, by far the largest in relative magnitude with respect to the typical shock. However, African-American men still suffer the largest shock in absolute terms (3.65%, 2.13 standard deviations). As a result, the impact of the COVID-19 unemployment shock on the death rate is large for all groups, but visibly larger for African-Americans and White women.

... the increase in the death rate following the COVID-19 pandemic implies a staggering 0.89 and 1.37 million excess deaths over the next 15 and 20 years, respectively.

...We interpret these results as a strong indication that policymakers should take into consideration the severe, long-run implications of such a large economic recession on people’s lives when deliberating on COVID-19 recovery and containment measures. Without any doubt, lockdowns save lives, but they also contribute to the decline in real activity that can have severe consequences on health.

Conclusion

...the toll of lives claimed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus far exceeds those immediately related to the acute COVID-19 critical illness and that the recession caused by the pandemic can jeopardize population health for the next two decades.

Based on our findings, African American citizens and women will be suffering more profoundly from the coronavirus-driven recession, adding on to their disproportionate adverse outcome in the setting of acute SARS-CoV-2 infection...

WIND: if you value life, then you must set aside “death” in favors of “life years”—there is no other objective metric that can be applied to populations. Thus, a weakness of this study is not using life years explicitly.

The death of a 40-year-old versus the death of an 80-year-old is at least a 5X greater loss.

Giant corporations like Walmart and Amazon have consolidated market share and made out like bandits, the well-to-do have made massive profits in the stock market, Big Pharma is raking in record profits... and the under-privileged are dying with more to die prematurely. All because of government policies.

Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”

VAERS is the government system for reporting adverse medical events. How competent is this system in tracking problems with drugs, vaccines, etc?

A study found on an offical website of the US Department of Health and Human Services in essence states that it is incompetent at revealing problems with drugs or vaccines.

The COVID-19 vaccines are all (as a matter of public record as of Jan 2021) experimental.

Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)

Results

Preliminary data were collected from June 2006 through October 2009 on 715,000 patients, and 1.4 million doses (of 45 different vaccines) were given to 376,452 individuals. Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions (2.6 percent of vaccinations) were identified. This is an average of 890 possible events, an average of 1.3 events per clinician, per month. These data were presented at the 2009 AMIA conference.

In addition, ESP:VAERS investigators participated on a panel to explore the perspective of clinicians, electronic health record (EHR) vendors, the pharmaceutical industry, and the FDA towards systems that use proactive, automated adverse event reporting.

Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed.

Barriers to reporting include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative. Proactive, spontaneous, automated adverse event reporting imbedded within EHRs and other information systems has the potential to speed the identification of problems with new drugs and more careful quantification of the risks of older drugs.

Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.

...

WIND: the FDA is asleep at the wheel.

This study emphatically supports my claim which I’ve had for years that the Metronidazole antibiotic which gave me peripheral neuropathy is in fact very dangerous. Yet it is deemed “safe” because problems are just not reported—as I explicitly stated both in my own case, and as a general claim. Emails from frightened readers suffering the same horrible neurological effects confirm that I am not alone.

The statin scourge comes to mind—massive underreporting of very serious side effects as well as degrading quality of life. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—there is nothing new here, except for fools and a cadre of trained medical doctors who actually believe this dangerously inaccurate shit (99% missing data!), and quote it to patients (as one did to me for Metronidazole).

And we’re supposed to believe that the COVID-19 vaccine is “safe and effective”? Before any long-term effects can even be reported, let alone studied?

COVID-19: US Government Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Did China Create the CCP Virus (COVID-19)?

Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.

The CCP’s deadly obsession with secrecy and control comes at the expense of public health in China and around the world. The previously undisclosed information in this fact sheet, combined with open-source reporting, highlights three elements about COVID-19’s origin that deserve greater scrutiny:

1. Illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):

• The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
• Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.
• The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.

2. Research at the WIV:

• Starting in at least 2016 – and with no indication of a stop prior to the COVID-19 outbreak – WIV researchers conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar). The WIV became a focal point for international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins.
• The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including “RaTG13,” which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.
• WHO investigators must have access to the records of the WIV’s work on bat and other coronaviruses before the COVID-19 outbreak. As part of a thorough inquiry, they must have a full accounting of why the WIV altered and then removed online records of its work with RaTG13 and other viruses.

3. Secret military activity at the WIV:

• Secrecy and non-disclosure are standard practice for Beijing. For many years the United States has publicly raised concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.
• Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.
• The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.

...

WIND: the idea that COVID-19 arose spontaneously is pretty incredible. It’s possible of course, but it just happened to arise near a Chinese military biological weapons facility?

The Chinese Communist Party has had a year to wipe out all records and silence all people who might show its guilt. And to this day, the farcicial WHO team has been denied free access.

COVID-19: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

Scientists are human beings. Human beings have agendas and biases. Science is a long, slow process full of false premises and false findings that eventually gets close to the truth.

“Trust the science” is a mantra for the gullible promulgated by the dishonest. Quoted when the science is unsupported by evidence, it is a red flag that tells you the science is bullshit. No one uses such twaddle when the evidence is robust.

US Scientist That Condemned Wuhan Lab Leak Theory Admits He Was Shielding Chinese Scientists

U.S. scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, led an endeavor in February 2020 to stop ideas that the CCP virus might have spread due to an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Daszak had written an article published in The Lancet medical journal, castigating ideas or suspicions that the novel virus might not be of natural origin.

The article was written before any rigorous research on the origins of the virus was conducted.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” reads the article.

... But last Friday, his spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that his widely cited statement, which was used to trample over differing points of view, was utilized to protect Chinese scientists from online criticism.

WIND: what kind of “science” condemns an idea as a conspiracy theory before meaningful research is done? The kind when a scientist becomes a propaganda orifice—and the motivation is irrelevant.

And once again, The Lancet is a forum legitimizing anti-science. Opinions are not science, assertions are not science. See the quote at top.