GD's Political Animal: Center for Disease Control

Showing posts with label Center for Disease Control. Show all posts

Friday, February 9, 2024

US CDC rejects experts' advice on facemasks

After reportedly voting to approve new recommendations on masking made by a hand-picked panel of experts, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reversed itself and told the experts to change their advice.

INVESTIGATION: CDC Upset Their Own Expert Advisers Not Recommending Masks, Demands They Recommend Masks | The Disinformation Chronicle, Substack | Paul D. Thacker:

February 6, 2024 - "Two years back, the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)] picked a bunch of science experts and asked them to update the agency’s scientific guidance to hospitals on how to control infections. Hospitals and government agencies use CDC guidance to set their own policies, but the guidance for controlling infections has not been updated since 2007. Last November, the experts sent the CDC a 20-page document, with 4 pages of scientific references, updating the government’s advice for controlling infections. But the process took an odd turn, last week, when the CDC sent a letter back to these experts — again, experts that the CDC picked themselves — that asked the experts to redo their expert advice....

CDE sign with discarded facemasks, Fresno, CA, 2020.

Photo by Neobaffreak. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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"Last summer one of the CDC’s own scientists gave a presentation at one of the meetings the experts held. She told the experts that she examined whether N95 respirators work better at stopping viruses than masks. Despite people waving around studies and essays saying that N95s respirators work better at stopping viruses than surgical masks, CDC’s scientist reported that the evidence 'suggests no difference' in their effectiveness.'

"The CDC then posted on the agency’s website a 'systematic review' that CDC researcher[s] did to examine whether N95s work better than masks. For those who don’t understand systematic reviews, they are highly structured analyses that rely on the best available evidence, to provide the best available answers.... The CDC’s researchers found there is no difference, meaning respirators don’t seem to work any better than masks..... Complaining about the experts’ guidance in a blog post last week, the CDC warned them they had gotten the science wrong....

"Prior to 2020, hardly anybody recommended masks to stop viruses, because there’s no evidence they do so.... Even the CDC’s own guidance on virus control advised mask[s] only be worn by sick people to prevent them from infecting others, which is known as 'source control.' The masks are important for someone who’s infected, to prevent them from infecting someone else…...But for some reason, a 'masks work' political movement began to grow....

"Four years after the pandemic’s beginning, the CDC now openly cheerleads for masks, despite research the agency has published showing that masks don’t really protect people from catching viruses. And this is why the experts advising the CDC are getting all this pushback: they didn’t tell the CDC what the CDC wanted to hear.... They want the experts to write guidelines that recommends healthy people wear masks, even though research shows masks won’t really stop healthy people from getting sick....

"The CDC’s request for expert to redo their work raises obvious questions: Why does the CDC gather outside experts to provide advice, if the CDC then demands advice they already want? Even more important, Why is the CDC pushing masks after the CDC published a May 2020 policy review in the CDC’s very own journal /Emerging Infectious Diseases/ that did not find a 'substantial effect' for masks stopping transmission of respiratory viruses?...

"Politico first reported that the CDC’s advisors released and voted to approve their draft guidance last November, updating the agency’s 16-year old recommendations on controlling infectious diseases in healthcare settings. 'But some health workers aren’t happy about this,' Politico noted. "During the meeting’s public comment period, patients and providers called for masks to be worn in health care settings.' Following federal rules, the experts’ guidance then went through a CDC review, followed by 60 days of public comment. Under pressure from the nurse lobby, the CDC pivoted last week and demanded the experts make changes and promote masks....

"I’m not really sure what happened or what we do next. But something weird took place in America where liberal elites began messaging among themselves 'masks work.' They then grew this into a crusade. Again, I don’t know why. The future everyone should fear is that the fanatics chanting 'masks work' are going to get someone killed. When a new pandemic happens — and one will — they’ve taught people that a super deadly virus ... worse than COVID, doesn’t really mater. Just put on a mask and go about your business, because 'masks work.' What a horror story that will be."

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Mystery pneumonia epidemic reported in China

Deja vu all over again: the Chinese government is accused of trying to cover up an epidemic of unknown pneumonia that is reportedly overwhelming hospitals and closing schools.

CCP Deploys Cover-Up for Mysterious Pneumonia Outbreak in Children | Epoch Times | Eva Fu:

December 5, 2023 - "The sense of helplessness that has gripped the Chinese people on and off since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic three years ago is again returning as the country grapples with an unidentified pneumonia outbreak that's infecting children and overwhelming hospitals.... [S]ick children have been filling hospital waiting rooms and hallways and spilling outside the main gates..... From north to south, the spike in children’s respiratory hospitalizations is shutting classrooms and pushing health authorities to issue a flurry of announcements telling teachers and students who feel unwell to stay home....

"Just like three years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears dismissive of the disease’s risk, telling a concerned World Health Organization that there are no 'unusual or new pathogens' or clinical symptoms. The regime partially attributed the uptick to a mid-October upgrade in a respiratory surveillance mechanism.... Beijing’s explanation, which the international health agency as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have quoted verbatim, has convinced few in China or abroad....

"Sean Lin, microbiologist and former lab director at the viral diseases branch of Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, expressed frustration over the WHO’s reliance on China’s regime for information.... After whistleblower doctors sounded the alarm on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan during the final days of 2019, it took nearly three weeks before the Chinese regime acknowledged that the virus can spread from human to human. During that time and afterward, authorities reprimanded the medics who spoke out, arrested citizen journalists, and muzzled reporters while orchestrating an internet cleanup on any mention of the outbreak deemed undesirable to its image. Many lawmakers in Washington, especially Republicans, see the same thing happening in China now....

"Even by the numbers from Chinese authorities, who have a persistent record of playing down unflattering data, the image is dire: Beijing alone reported more than 72,000 infections in the week that ended on Nov. 26.... The statistics released by the Beijing Municipal Health Commission are so far the only data point to gauge the severity of the current outbreak.... Chinese state media have spent the past month attempting to reassure the public that the outbreak is just a routine winter spike of common respiratory pathogens and that there’s little need to panic. The Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, People’s Daily, carried an article saying that mycoplasma pneumonia is 'preventable and controllable,' phrases that the regime used in January 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak in China began to draw international anxiety.

"But the focus on mycoplasma might be a deliberate step to mislead and detract, according to Mr. Lin.... Unlike COVID-19, mycoplasma doesn’t lead to the 'white lung syndrome' — characterized by lung areas' showing up white on chest X-rays because of fluid buildup — that has been plaguing Chinese children recently, according to Dong Yuhong, an infectious disease analyst with 12 years of experience at Swiss multinational pharmaceutical Novartis. Nor has any past respiratory disease season reached the scale China is now grappling with.... Conventional treatment methods for mycoplasma pneumonia haven’t worked either....

"COVID-19 is probably still the driving force behind the current wave, according to Mr. Lin, the microbiologist.... '[Most likely,] some of the other respiratory pathogens destroyed their upper respiratory defense mechanism, so now COVID just goes straight in,' he said. Children may be the first group to take the hit, Mr. Lin said, but infections have also spread to adults.... As Xi Jinping prepared for his recent visit to San Francisco to sell China as a friendly market for foreign investors, he personally ordered officials to gloss over the gravity of the outbreak and make the case that a COVID-19 mutation isn’t the cause so that international visitors wouldn’t be scared away, a whistleblower close to the central Party leadership in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai and the Chinese military told The Epoch Times....

"In the northeastern province of Jilin, a woman whose son displayed white lung symptoms and was diagnosed with mycoplasma pneumonia said a doctor she was acquainted with told her that COVID-19 was the main cause..... Ms. Jin, of central China’s Xi’an City, heard the same from her hospitalized nephew: The doctor told him that he had COVID-19. 'They just called it by a different name,' she told The Epoch Times, relaying the doctor’s words. It’s the same playbook that the regime followed a year ago at the height of the devastating COVID-19 wave in December 2022. Beijing tweaked the criteria for classifying COVID-19 deaths, ... excluding anyone with underlying conditions. People involved in issuing death certificates, including multiple doctors, told The Epoch Times that they were ordered to not mention COVID-19.

"In some areas, even a public mention of sickness is taboo. At least two parents from Beijing and Tianjin told The Epoch Times that teachers have instructed parents to not mention their children’s sickness in the school chat groups for fear of 'negatively impacting others.' 'Everything is a national secret,' Mr. Wei, from Beijing, told The Epoch Times.

China Pneumonia Outbreak: Amid Surge, Classrooms in Hebei Disinfected | Vantage with Palki Sharma | Firstpost | December 1, 2023:

Monday, May 8, 2023

Walensky leaves behind a more authoritarian CDC

Rochelle Walensky leaves behind a more powerful and more authoritarian Centers for Disease Control than the one she joined.

Rochelle Walensky Leaves a CDC That's Far More Powerful Than When She Entered It | Reason - Robby Soave:

May 5, 2023 - "Rochelle Walensky is resigning from her post as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She has overseen the agency since the beginning of President Joe Biden's term and greatly expanded the CDC's authority.

"Walensky's reign was chiefly characterized by her extreme reluctance to reverse the CDC's support for ongoing pandemic restrictions. When she took the helm in January 2021, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was just getting underway, and there was good reason to believe that the most vulnerable people would soon enjoy robust protection from severe disease and death. Walensky, however, was not inclined to let the CDC's influence wane. For instance, she repeatedly extended the CDC's eviction moratorium, a policy that made it extremely difficult for landlords to collect rent; the Supreme Court finally struck down the illegal order in August 2021.

"Walensky firmly believed that CDC guidance on COVID-19 policies should reflect the up-to-date scientific consensus — that is, unless the science had arrived at a conclusion that vexed her. Walensky's CDC put incredible faith in junk studies that purported to prove the importance of mask mandates in schools. When the legitimacy of these studies came into question, she declined to reverse course and admit that ritualistically masking schoolchildren was unnecessary....

"When challenged on her policies, Walensky would demur and claim that CDC guidance on masks was just that — guidance. She sounded a similar note as COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, who cloaked his enthusiasm for shutting down all of society under the guise of mere suggestion. The fact of the matter is that government policy makers at the local, state, and federal level routinely outsourced their COVID-19 decision making to Walensky and Fauci. They put their thumbs on the scales of lockdowns and mask mandates, and thus the U.S. continued these policies far longer than did our peer countries. The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, never recommended masks for children under 6 at all, and many Nordic countries were unwilling to mask kids up to age 11....

"Walensky wasn't necessarily looking to European peer countries.... She was far more inclined to celebrate the alleged success of China's 'really strict lockdowns,' which involved the country's authoritarian government starving some people via mandatory quarantine detention centers and trapping others inside burning buildings. (China eventually succumbed to the inevitable, gave up on its draconian lockdowns, and implicitly admitted that the 'zero-COVID' policy was a fantasy.)

"Walensky's CDC also pursued the questionable strategy of purging so-called misinformation about COVID-19 from social media. Throughout her time in charge, the CDC became the de facto internet speech police. Emails obtained by Reason show that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, routinely deferred moderation decisions to government health authorities. Meta might have thought it had little choice but to seek the CDC's input, as Biden had publicly declared that the social media platform's failure to suppress allegedly misleading content was 'killing people.' In any case, this is a dangerous precedent....

"Walensky's exit from the CDC comes just a few days before the official end of the national COVID-19 pandemic on May 11. Whoever takes over the agency should concentrate on rebalancing its decidedly unhealthy approach to individual liberty."

Inside the CDC’s Changes After Pandemic Missteps | Bloomberg, January 13, 2023:

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

US CDC set Facebook speech policy in pandemic

Internal Facebook emails indicate the Centers for Disease Control dictated the platform's Covid speech policy during the pandemic.

Inside the Facebook Files: Emails Reveal the CDC's Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent | Reason - Robby Soave:

January 19, 2023 - "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) played a direct role in policing permissible speech on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Confidential emails obtained by Reason show that Facebook moderators were in constant contact with the CDC, and routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines. For a broader analysis of the federal government's pandemic-era efforts to suppress free speech — and whether they violated the First Amendment — see Reason's March 2023 cover story on the ramifications of these emails....

"The Facebook Files, which were obtained by Reason as a result of the state of Missouri's lawsuit against the Biden administration, reveal that the CDC had substantial influence over what users were allowed to discuss on Meta's platforms: Facebook and Instagram. The messages reveal an environment where the CDC kept tabs on Meta's moderation practices and regularly told the company what the agency wanted it to do.

"For instance, in May 2021, CDC officials began routinely vetting claims about COVID-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook. The platform left it up to the federal government to determine which assertions were accurate. Facebook's moderator notes that some of the above claims 'would already be violating'—an implicit admission that the CDC's opinion on the other claims would be a deciding factor in whether the platform would restrict such content. Facebook was clearly a willing participant in this process; moderators repeatedly thanked the CDC for its 'help in debunking'....

"For months, it was Meta policy to prohibit users from asserting that the pandemic may have originated from a lab leak. The platform revised this policy around the same time that the above email exchange took place. By July 2021, the CDC wasn't just evaluating which claims it thought were false, but whether they could 'cause harm.'

"Then, in November, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for children to receive Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. Meta proudly informed the CDC that it would remove false claims — 'i.e. the COVID vaccine is not safe for kids' — from Facebook and Instagram. Meta also provided the CDC with a list of new claims about vaccines and asked whether the government thought they could 'contribute to vaccine refusals.' The CDC determined that this label applied to all such claims.

"Meta frequently gave the CDC lists of pandemic-related topics that had gone viral, seeking guidance on how to handle them. And the CDC informed Meta 'to be on the lookout' for misinformation stemming from specific alleged misconceptions. Meta also kept the CDC apprised of criticism of Anthony Fauci, the White House's COVID-19 advisor and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). One email warned the CDC that Facebook users were mocking Fauci for changing his mind about masking and double-masking. The CDC replied that this information was 'very helpful.'"

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

U.S. CDC overhauls Covid-19 guidelines

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have drastically revised their COVID19 guidelines, dropping quarantine, mass testing, and "Test to stay" in schools, and no longer discriminating between vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans.

CDC ends recommendations for social distancing and quarantine for Covid-19 control, no longer recommends test-to-stay in school | CNN - Brenda Goodman & Elizabeth Cohen:

August 11, 2022- "The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] says the nation should move away from restrictive measures such as quarantines and social distancing and focus on reducing severe disease from Covid-19. In new guidelines released Thursday, the agency no longer recommends staying at least 6 feet away from other people to reduce the risk of exposure -- a shift from guidance that had been in place since the early days of the pandemic....

"'The current conditions of this pandemic are very different from those of the last two years,' Greta Massetti, who leads the Field Epidemiology and Prevention Branch at the CDC, said Thursday. 'High levels of population immunity due to vaccination and previous infection and the many available tools to protect the general population, and protect people at higher risk, allow us to focus on protecting people from serious illness from Covid-19.'

"The new CDC guidelines say contact tracing, another hallmark during the pandemic, should be limited to hospitals and certain high-risk group-living situations such as nursing homes, and the guidelines de-emphasize the use of regular testing to screen for Covid-19.... The new guidance also does not advise quarantining people who've been exposed to Covid-19 but are not infected....

"The changes are an acknowledgment that SARS-CoV-2 may be with us for the long haul. They aim to help people live their lives around Covid-19 with minimal disruptions to work and school. They are also more risk-based, advising people who are at higher risk for severe illness to take more personal precautions than others. 'I think they just overall come into alignment with what people are doing anyway,' says Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco.... He sees it as a move by the CDC to try to regain the public's trust. A recent survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center shows that most Americans (54%) are no longer masking indoors, and about 4 in 10 say they've fully returned to their pre-pandemic routines -- up from 16% in January....

"The agency also puts more emphasis on improving ventilation. Aerosol scientists have long complained that the 6-foot social distancing guidance was arbitrary and unhelpful because the virus that causes Covid-19 can float through the air for greater distances.... In addition to vaccination, the CDC urges additional measures for people with suppressed immune function, including the use of Evusheld, a kind of passive immunity that's given before a person gets sick. It's especially helpful for people who can't mount an immune response, and experts say it has been underutilized in this country....

"The agency removed the recommendation that kids in different classrooms avoid mixing, a practice known as cohorting. It also removed advice that kids who are contacts of someone who tested positive for Covid-19 take regular tests – and test negative – to remain in the classroom, which was known as test-to-stay.... Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation's largest teachers unions, said the new guidelines were welcome news for schools."
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/11/health/cdc-covid-guidance-update/index.html

CDC Quietly Ends Differentiation on Covid Vaccination Status | Brownstone Institute - Michael Senger:

August 12, 2002 - Today, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quietly ended its policy of differentiating within COVID-19 prevention guidance between those who have received Covid vaccines and those who have not.... As explained by the CDC’s Greta Massetti, lead author of the new guidance: "Both prior infection and vaccination confer some protection against severe illness, and so it really makes the most sense to not differentiate with our guidance or our recommendations based on vaccination status at this time.'"
Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/cdc-quietly-ends-differentiation-on-covid-vaccination-status/

Sunday, August 7, 2022

Canadian legacy media question Covid mandates (2)

COVID-19 vaccine mandates have worked in Canada — but they're harder than ever to justify | CBC News - Adam Miller:

February 12, 2022 - "COVID-19 vaccine mandates have worked extraordinarily well at getting more Canadians vaccinated, but they are increasingly hard to justify....

"'There's now obvious evidence that they work,' Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said during a press conference Friday. 'We saw a plateau in the uptake of vaccines after a really tremendous effort by Canadians, and then after the introduction of vaccine mandates by the various provinces and territories and jurisdictions, we did see an uptick.' Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos added that mandates worked to get 99 per cent of federal public servants vaccinated, and that over the last six months as many as three million Canadians chose to get vaccinated sooner because of them....

"But as the massive Omicron-driven fifth wave subsides across Canada and public health restrictions are set to lift, infectious disease experts and epidemiologists say two-dose mandates are no longer sufficient — and mandating boosters is not a realistic approach....

"[W]hile two doses are still effective at preventing severe illness, the highly transmissible Omicron variant has rendered them less protective against infection and transmission to others than with previous coronavirus strains....

"A recently updated Ontario study ... found that while vaccines were just 36 per cent effective against symptomatic Omicron infection seven to 59 days after two doses, with no protection after six months, that increased to 61 per cent a week after a booster.... If we were to keep the definition of 'fully vaccinated' as having had two doses, vaccine mandates will accomplish 'very little,' Dr. Isaac Bogoch,* an infectious diseases physician and member of Ontario's COVID-19 vaccine task force, said on The Current Wednesday. 'So you either say we're doing this as a three-dose vaccine series to be considered fully vaccinated — or you scrap it'....

"One key unanswered question with regard to whether we should expand or abolish vaccine mandates in Canada is how long the protection from a third dose lasts.... New data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday found booster protection waned after about four months....

"The analysis of 241,204 emergency department and urgent care centre visits in 10 states found vaccine effectiveness dropped from 69 per cent within two months of a second dose to just 37 per cent after five months. That protection increased to 87 per cent with a booster, but dropped down to 66 per cent between four and five months and fell to just 31 per cent after five or more months. The researchers stressed that the data is limited.... Still, the data shows booster effectiveness can drop in the mere months after a third dose. This calls into question the role that vaccine mandates and passports will play in the future."

* signatory of the John Snow Memorandum

Sunday, May 29, 2022

Counting deaths 'with Covid' inflated mortality rate, B.C. data indicates

by George J. Dance

New data from British Columbia sheds light on one of the most contentious social media arguments that raged throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the dispute over 'deaths with Covid' versus 'deaths from Covid'. During the pandemic, many countries used the 'deaths with' standard: fatalities were reported as Covid deaths if they occurred within a reasonable time (usually a month) after a positive PCR test. The U.S., Sweden, and the U.K. all reported 'deaths with' Covid figures; not coincidentally, all have higher Covid mortality rates. Other countries, such as China, counted only 'deaths from': the only deaths included in the Covid count were those verified, by an investigation (a postmortem or even an autopsy), to be caused by the virus; again not coincidentally, China has one of the world's lowest reported Covid death rates.

A big deal? Not to me. My main interest was in comparing countries, and so long as most most of them used 'deaths with', I could happily compare apples to apples. However, social media witnessed many bitter battles waged over it. Whichever standard one uses will affect the reported figures. Counting all 'deaths with' will give a higher figure, artificially high if it miscounts clearly non-Covid deaths (such as poisoning or accident wounds), and using it exaggerates or inflates the virus's impact. But how much higher?

Some Covid libertarians (opponents of Covid mandates) argued that public health authorities were using the 'deaths with' standard to deliberately exaggerate the death toll. In turn, the pro-mandate crowd argued that counting 'deaths from' would give an artificially low figure (by excluding uninvestigated deaths), and accused Covid libertarians of trying to trying to minimize the toll. The ongoing debate generated much heat, with one side accusing the other of alarmism, and the other accusing it in turn of denialism. However, for me it generated little light; whatever actual information emerged was merely drowned out in the tide of mutual recriminations. Many others also appeared to get little from the debate, as they argued in turn that it was a debate about nothing – that the distinction made no difference, as the differences between the two counts would end up being insignificant..

Which is why I found recent news out of British Columbia worthy of comment. As per a May 26 story on CTV News, B.C.'s Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) "changed the way it counted COVID-19 deaths back in early April". The province had previously reported mortality using a 'death from' standard: "Before April 2, B.C.'s health authorities manually updated the pandemic death toll after investigating each death to determine if COVID-19 was a factor." After that date, the reporting standard became 'deaths with': "anyone who dies within 30 days of a COVID-19 diagnosis has been automatically flagged and reported as a death possibly caused by the disease."

"The province's Vital Statistics agency reviews each possible COVID-19 death and determines what the underlying cause was, a process that can take as long as eight weeks," CTV reporter Ian Holliday notes. Before April 2, then, it could take as long as eight weeks before a death was added to the provincial total. Switching to 'deaths with' makes for more immediate reporting, which is probably the reason most countries use it. The agency still investigates all deaths, though, and the data for those verified as being caused by Covid are released later. That gives a reader the chance to compare the two figures, and see how much higher (if any) the 'deaths with' figure is.

Holliday reports:

According to the BCCDC's weekly "situation report" released Thursday, there were 424 deaths between April 2 and May 14 that were flagged as potentially caused by COVID-19 because the person who died had tested positive within 30 days of their death.
Of those, more than half (218) were still pending review by Vital Statistics to determine the underlying cause of death.
Of the 206 deaths for which an underlying cause had been determined, 94 were considered to be caused by COVID-19, while the remaining 112 had some other underlying cause.

As Holliday notes, that 94/206 ratio "works out to slightly less than 46 per cent of reported deaths between April 2 and May 14 for which an underlying cause has been determined." Or, as summed up in the headline: "Fewer than half of COVID-19 deaths reported since B.C. changed counting methods were caused by the disease."

These preliminary statistics (which may be the only ones that do get reported) allow us to compare the two counting methods: counting 'deaths with Covid' will give a figure at least twice as high as counting 'deaths from Covid'. That in turn allows one to compare reported deaths between jurisdictions which use different methods.

Of course, these findings are preliminary. One should ideally look at all the data, from as many jurisdictions as possible. B.C.'s figures are only one data set, still incomplete, and possibly an anomaly. So this report's findings are hardly the last word on the subject. They are, though, an important first word, one which we have sorely lacked throughout the pandemic.

Source:

Ian Holliday, "Fewer than half of COVID-19 deaths reported since B.C. changed counting methods were caused by the disease," CTV News, May 26, 2022. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/fewer-than-half-of-covid-19-deaths-reported-since-b-c-changed-counting-methods-were-caused-by-the-disease-1.5920782

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

U.S. CDC travel mask mandate no longer in force

USA ditches mask mandate on aircraft and in airports | FlightGlobal - Pilar Wolfsteller:

April 18, 2022 - "The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will no longer enforce the federal face mask mandate, in place since January 2021, after a US judge struck down the order. The mandate had been imposed by the US public health agency Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to mitigate the spread of highly-contagious Covid-19 before vaccines were widely available. TSA had had a similar order in place for airports and on board aircraft, upon CDC’s recommendation.

"'The agencies are reviewing the decision and assessing potential next steps,' a US government official says on 18 April in response to the court ruling. 'In the meantime, today’s court decision means that the CDC’s public transportation masking order is not in effect at this time. Therefore TSA will not enforce its security directives requiring mask use on public transportation and transportation hubs at this time.... CDC recommends that people continue to wear masks in indoor public transportation settings,' the official adds."
Read more: https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/usa-ditches-mask-mandate-on-aircraft-and-in-airports/148302.article

Major U.S. Airlines Announce Masks Policies Are Lifted, Effective as of April 18, 2022 | Just Jared:

April 18, 2022 - "All of the major airlines in the United States have announced that masks are no longer required to be worn during flights, effective immediately.

"The mask mandate on public transportation will no longer be enforced after a federal judge in Florida, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, ruled that the White House’s 14-month-old directive was unlawful. Reuters reports that the judge 'said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had exceeded its authority with the mandate, had not sought public comment and did not adequately explain its decisions.'

"United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, American Airlines, and Delta Air Lines have all lifted their mask requirements. Amtrak, the national train line, did the same.

"Read what each airline announced" at https://www.justjared.com/2022/04/18/major-u-s-airlines-announce-masks-policies-are-lifted-effective-as-of-april-18-2022/.

Saturday, April 2, 2022

US CDC burying data on natural immunity

How the CDC Buries the Truth about Natural Immunity | Brownstone Institute - Joe Wang:

March 30, 2022 - "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is one of the U.S. government’s major operating components, an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC’s mission statement reads, 'CDC increases the health security of our nation. … CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats.' The agency also pledges to the American people that it will 'base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data that is derived openly and objectively.'

"Well, COVID-19 has been the nation’s largest health threat for the past two years. It has had a huge impact on the lives of every American. During those two years, thousands of scientists and health-care researchers have studied COVID and accumulated a huge amount of information on the disease. We’ve now gradually come to realize that the most effective force that would eventually end the pandemic is natural immunity. Even Bill Gates has admitted that 'the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is a type of vaccine.' With the rapid spread of Omicron and with many asymptomatic infections, millions of people have developed natural immunity, which is driving COVID-19 out of its pandemic stage and into endemicity....

"The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published on Jan. 28 presented some very interesting information from California and New York comparing immunity against COVID-19 from four groups of people, indicating natural immunity alone provides the best protection. Since then, I have been anxiously waiting for more data, as there are 48 other states, and even for California and New York, important data like this should be updated monthly, if not weekly. To my surprise and disappointment, I have not been able to find any more data on natural immunity from the MMWR since Jan. 28. I am sure they have the data — they just don’t want to share it with us. I’m beginning to wonder if CDC stands for Center for Data Control....

"The CDC’s Jan. 28 report included the following chart but neglected to provide a summary comparing protection between vaccinated people without natural immunity and unvaccinated people who recovered from COVID and now have natural immunity. It seems that it’s necessary to dive a little deeper into the data to elaborate my point, as the authors of the report did not conclude the very obvious. Please bear with me.

"The above CDC chart shows data from California on protection against COVID-19 collected from four groups of people between May 30, 2021, and Nov. 20, 2021:

The unvaccinated, with no previous COVID-19 diagnosis (top solid line)
The vaccinated, with no previous COVID-19 diagnosis ([blue] broken line below the solid line)
The unvaccinated, with previous diagnosis [black broken line]
The vaccinated, with previous diagnosis [blue dotted line]

"It is obvious that the lines representing 3) and 4) are superimposing on one another, indicating that vaccination had virtually no impact on protection when a person has recovered from COVID-19 infection, meaning natural immunity dominates protection over vaccination to a level that made vaccination irrelevant.

"Although the biggest difference lies between the unvaccinated with no previous infection and everyone else, the second biggest difference, however, is between the 'Vaccinated, no previous COVID-19 diagnosis' line (vaccine immunity) and the 'Unvaccinated, previous COVID-19 diagnosis' line (natural immunity), with the natural immunity line having a much lower hazard rate, meaning better protection. The report also revealed similar findings for New York state.

"The CDC’s MMWR is a weekly report. The chart above is part of the report for the last week of January, and it was for only two of the 50 states, California and New York. When I was writing my Feb. 5 article, I thought that maybe it was a benign omission that the CDC did not conclude the obvious. For sure, more data would be coming from the CDC in February and March, I thought, as it would teach us so much more about natural immunity.

"However, it hasn’t materialized. Since Jan. 28, there have been 10 MMWR reports published on the CDC website, totaling 29 articles in all. They cover topics ranging from vaccination by geographic locations, to vaccine confidence by sexual orientation, to isolation strategy for fully vaccinated NFL players, and so on. So far, the Jan. 28 report was the only one that included 'unvaccinated, with previous diagnosis' in the data, and that’s unfortunate. All the other reports were to re-enforce the conclusion that vaccines are effective, with almost nothing about natural immunity....

"According to the CDC’s own information, the United States has had about 80 million COVID-19 cases. The vast majority of patients recovered from the disease. This huge part of the U.S. population now enjoys natural immunity. This is also true for Canada and many other parts of the world.

"It seems that the CDC is avoiding anything and everything related to natural immunity. But why?"

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sunday, February 27, 2022

U.S. CDC radically changing Covid messaging

The CDC Discovers Actual Public Health, Just in Time | Brownstone Institute - Jeffrey A. Tucker:

February 26, 2022 - "One day I’m reading an internal memo commissioned by the Democratic Party to provide advice to dealing with Covid policy. The next day I’m reading headlines about how the CDC has drastically altered its advice on how to deal with Covid. Is there a relationship?...

Let’s look at the memo produced by Impact Research. Some excerpts:

Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to claim an incredible, historic success – they vaccinated hundreds of millions of people, prevented the economy from going into freefall, kept small businesses from going under, and got people back to work safely. Because of President Biden and Democrats, we CAN safely return to life feeling much more normal – and they should claim that proudly.
Six in ten Americans describe themselves as “worn out” by the pandemic. The more we talk about the threat of COVID and onerously restrict people’s lives because of it, the more we turn them against us and show them we’re out of touch with their daily realities.
[I]t means recognizing that the threat of COVID is no longer what it was even a year ago and therefore should not be treated as such – shutdowns, masks, and lockdowns were meant to save lives when there was not yet a vaccine that could do that. Voters know we now have the tools in the toolkit to be responsible in combatting and living with COVID – vaccines and boosters to minimize illness, and masks and social distancing around vulnerable groups.
They think the virus is here to stay, and 83% say the pandemic will be over when it’s a mild illness like the flu rather than COVID being completely gone, and 55% prefer that COVID should be treated as an endemic disease. And that’s what most Americans are dealing with—a disease with fatality rates like the flu—because most of us took the personal responsibility to protect ourselves and our families by getting vaccinated.
Stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead. If we focus on how bad things still are and how much worse they could get, we set Democrats up as failures unable to navigate us through this. When 99% of Americans can get vaccinated, we cause more harm than we prevent with voters by going into our third year talking about restrictions. And, if Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November.

"A few points. There is no strong evidence that 'shutdowns, masks, and lockdowns' saved lives which is perhaps why the memo backs away slightly from the claim with the words 'meant to'.... This memo is not epidemiology but politics, most strongly illustrated by the idea that polling should make the difference as to whether a pathogen is pandemic or endemic.... From a policy point of view, there are two main features that stand out: Covid is here to stay and 'most people in the US will eventually get COVID-19' (thereby hinting at the reality that vaccines are not effective in the way that Biden/Fauci/Walensky promised) and therefore the focus should be on protecting the vulnerable. There is nothing new about this.... You can shout “Omicron” all day but it was also true with Alpha and Delta as well. The virus should have been treated rationally the entire time and policies that have wrecked public health should have been off the table from 2020....

"As for how the Democrats somehow prevented an economic freefall, the worst economic outcomes are very clearly in Democratic-controlled states that retained restrictions for nearly two years in some places, including keeping schools closed. There is a reason for the mass migration that this has inspired. If we are looking for thriving economies, look to the states that never closed up or opened earliest: South Dakota, Florida, Texas, Georgia, and so on. So none of this is remotely true but, hey, this is politics, right?, so it doesn’t have to be true.

"Now, let us consider the dramatic turnaround at the CDC that came out the very next day. The full PDF is embedded below. Here are the talking points handed to the director.

"It’s not just about masking, which is being relaxed. The CDC says there needs to be a dramatic shift away from endless monitoring of cases that are overwhelmingly mild and instead focus only on actual sickness that lands people in the hospital and threatens life. We need to stop obsessing about cases and start looking mainly at 'medically significant disease.' The focus should be on 'protecting the most vulnerable'....

"In order to justify this change, the CDC posts four sets of charts on Covid prevalence during episodes of the pandemic. The last chart illustrates the point that an exclusive focus on controlling the spread is utterly preposterous at this point. Under the old protocols, the whole country should be back in lockdown. It’s unimaginable what attempting this now would cause.

"To be sure, all of this is enormously frustrating for those of us engaged in this battle for two years. Instead of focusing on getting sick people well, the CDC experimented with wild guidelines that imagined some kind of society-wide solution that seemed designed to crush the virus while vast amounts of social and economic activity were shut down by law. This necessitated a crushing of freedoms, including of travel, association, commerce, religion, and, eventually even speech. The CDC nowhere admits this much less apologizes for it.

"Two years in, the CDC seems to have rediscovered the traditional practice of public health, and has justified this new wisdom based on changed conditions, while never even bothering to claim that its previous measures and guidelines achieved anything along the way. We’ve seen a massive collapse in public health, economic vitality, and essential rights, while closing schools and wrecking education and so much more, all in the name of virus control, even as the evidence is now overwhelming that the entire enterprise was not only a distraction from what should have happened (therapeutics and protecting the vulnerable) but also an astonishing failure. Why the change? It had to happen at some point. The entire machinery of lockdowns and mandates were destined to fail. As to the timing of the reversal, it’s hard to resist the speculation that it is entirely political. See the memo above.

"Still, there is a worrisome aspect to the CDC’s announcement. They reserve the right to do it all over again. 'We want to give people a break from things like mask-wearing, when these metrics are better, and then have the ability to reach for them again should things worsen,' she said. No one should be satisfied with a politically motivated change in the messaging. We need fundamental regime change so make sure that nothing like this can ever happen again."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

US states adding 3rd shot to Covid-vax mandates

New Mexico adds boosters to COVID-19 vaccine mandates | Las Cruces Sun-News - Algernon D'Ammassa:

December 2, 2021 - "Workers covered by existing COVID-19 vaccine mandates in New Mexico will be required to get booster shots as well, beginning in January. The state Department of Health on Thursday amended its public health order requiring workers at schools, hospitals and congregate care facilities and the governor's office to be vaccinated, adding the additional dose to existing requirements. The new order states that those workers must document full vaccination plus booster by Jan. 17 or within four weeks of being eligible for the booster, which comes six months after completing a primary course of vaccine.

"If primary and booster vaccinations are not documented with their employer, the workers must present a negative COVID-19 test weekly and wear a mask indoors at all times except when eating or drinking. The health order allows for medical or religious exemptions, but still requires weekly testing and masking requirements in those cases.

"On Nov. 29, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 'strengthened' its recommendation that all adults receive a boost to their COVID-19 vaccinations, six months after receiving Moderna or Pfizer's vaccines or two months after Johnson and Johnson. The booster doses were approved for adults last month by the Food and Drug Administration."
Read more: https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/local/new-mexico/2021/12/02/new-mexico-covid-19-booster-shots-vaccine-mandate-omicron-variant/8844338002/

New York mandating COVID booster shot for health care workers. What to know | Journal News - David Robinson:

January 2, 2022 - "Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday announced a COVID-19 booster shot mandate for health care workers in New York, citing the rising numbers of vaccine breakthrough infections caused by the omicron variant. The mandate, which is pending approval by a state Health Department panel on Tuesday, would require workers at hospitals, nursing homes and other health care settings to get the booster shot within two weeks of becoming eligible, Hochul said.... New York would become the first state in the country to mandate a booster shot for health care workers. There would be a medical exemption allowed, but religious exemptions would be barred, according to Hochul's media briefing in Manhattan.

"The booster mandate comes after New York implemented one of the nation's first vaccine mandates for health care workers on Sept. 27. New York's initial vaccine mandate led to about 34,000 health workers losing jobs or being placed on leave, reflecting a reduction of 3.5% of the workforce. The vaccine mandate worker losses intensified long-standing staffing shortages at many hospitals and nursing homes, a situation that has only gotten worse as the omicron variant surge shattered records for daily infections, including 82,000 cases on Thursday alone....

"Hochul asserted that mandating a booster shot for health care workers would have a limited impact on staffing shortages, citing how 92% of the health workforce complied with the initial vaccine mandate.... But the uptake of boosters among some health care workers has lagged behind the national averages for getting the additional doses in arms."
Read more: https://www.lohud.com/story/news/coronavirus/2022/01/07/new-york-mandate-covid-booster-shot-health-care-workers/9131244002/

Hawaii to require travelers have COVID booster shot to be 'fully vaccinated' | ABC News - Mary Kekatos:

January 17, 2022 - "Hawaii will require visitors to the state to have received a COVID-19 vaccine booster if they want to skip quarantine. Currently, under the rules of the state's 'Safe Travels' program, travelers who don't want to quarantine for five days must either be fully vaccinated -- meaning two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine or one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine -- or have a negative COVID-19 test within one day of travel. [The change] means fully vaccinated travelers who haven't received a booster shot will have to quarantine in Hawaii for five days.

"Ige said changes to the program will not occur for at least two weeks so people traveling to Hawaii can adjust their plans accordingly.... Ige also said he was speaking with mayors and other local leaders about requiring booster shots to dine in restaurants and participate in other activities and events. However, he said he will leave that decision up to individual counties.

"Last month, Maui Mayor Michael Victorino revealed booster shots would be required for locals to be considered fully vaccinated. The rule was supposed to go into effect on Jan. 8 but was delayed until Jan. 24 so people have time to schedule booster shots, reported KHON 2.

"This move comes as the Hawaii Tourism Authority announced the Safe Travels program would be undergoing several changes, including reducing the mandatory quarantine period for unvaccinated travelers without a negative COVID-19 test from 10 days to five days, in accordance with updated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Additionally, visitors will no longer be required to fill out an online questionnaire 24 hours before arrival to receive a QR code."
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hawaii-require-travelers-covid-booster-shot-fully-vaccinated/story?id=82307999

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Vietnam, Australia, NZ tighten failing lockdowns

The governments of Australia, New Zealand, and Vietnam have responded to the failure of their lockdown measures to contain the Delta variant of the coronavirus with more lockdown measures.

Vietnam tightens virus lockdown ahead of Harris visit | ABC News - Hau Dinh, Associated Press:

August 23, 2021 - "Vietnam’s largest metropolis, Ho Chi Minh City, went into a tightened lockdown Monday to battle its worst outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, just a day ahead of the arrival of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.... The city has mobilized police and army troops to enforce the lockdown and to deliver food as well as necessities to each household, city authorities announced. Under the stricter measures imposed for at least two weeks, people in 'high risk' districts are not allowed to leave their homes.

"'People must absolutely stay put, isolate from each other, from house to house, from community to community,' Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said when the new restrictions were announced last week. On Sunday evening, just hours before the intensified lockdown went into effect, the ministry reported 737 virus deaths, its highest single-day total, increasing the death toll since the pandemic began to 8,277.... Hanoi, which is more than 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) north of Ho Chi Minh City ... is also under lockdown....

"By asking people to remain in their homes, authorities expect to flatten the current surge of cases. Ho Chi Minh City and the entire southern region of Vietnam had already been in lockdown since July when the delta variant started to spread rapidly. Public gatherings were banned, non-essential businesses closed and people were asked to leave their homes only to buy food or for urgent matters. It is hoped the new severe restrictions in Ho Chi Minh City will bring down the infection rate among its 10 million residents and ease the pressure on its overloaded hospitals....

"Harris is scheduled to attend the inauguration in Hanoi of an office of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC. It will also serve as the CDC’s regional office for Southeast Asia to deal with issues involving infectious diseases."
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/vietnam-tightens-virus-lockdown-ahead-harris-visit-79596430

New Zealand extended its COVID-19 lockdown until at least Friday | CP24 - Nick Perry & Rod Mcguirk, Associated Press:

August 23, 2021 - "New Zealand's government on Monday said it will extend a strict nationwide lockdown until at least Friday as it tries to extinguish a growing coronavirus outbreak.... First discovered last week, the outbreak has grown to 107 cases. But health authorities say they've found links among most of those cases, giving them hope they can quash the outbreak....

"Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the lockdown will continue until at least the end of the month in Auckland, where most of the cases have been found.... Ardern said modeling suggested the outbreak should peak in a few days' time, and then decline.... Ardern also announced that the government has decided to suspend regular Parliament sessions for a week, a move that drew criticism from opposition lawmakers....

"While New Zealand was maintaining its strategy of trying to wipe out the virus completely through lockdowns, neighboring Australia appeared to have conceded that lockdowns would not be able to eliminate the delta variant entirely and could only slow its spread. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said lockdowns are were 'not a sustainable way to live in this country.' He said states must open their borders once vaccination rates reach 80% of the population aged 16 years and older.

"His remarks came as an outbreak in Sydney grew by more than 800 cases, near record levels. Health authorities said an outbreak centered in Melbourne also grew by 71 cases and another in the capital, Canberra, grew by 16 cases. All three cities remained in lockdown."
Read more: https://www.cp24.com/world/new-zealand-extends-national-covid-19-lockdown-for-five-more-days-1.5557434

Friday, August 13, 2021

CDC not reporting most breakthrough infections

What Is the True Vaccine Breakthrough Rate? The CDC Doesn't Want You to Know | Foundation for Economic Education - Jon Miltimore:

August 13, 2021 - "Over a recent 12-day period the Milwaukee Brewers had nine players test positive for COVID-19.... [T]he team disclosed that most of the players were vaccinated for COVID-19, including former MVP Christian Yelich.... The Brewers are not an isolated example of Major League Baseball teams experiencing a rash of vaccination breakthroughs. Teams across the league have experienced similar problems, including the New York Yankees, who saw nine vaccinated players sidelined in May with COVID-19....

"[B]reakthrough cases also appear to be more common than the CDC, media, and public health officials suggest.... A recent outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for example found that the vast majority of COVID cases involved vaccinated individuals.... But that wasn’t all. The CDC’s study also found, the Washington Post noted, individuals 'carried as much virus in their noses as unvaccinated individuals.' 'High viral loads suggest an increased risk of transmission and raised concern that, unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus,' [CDC Director Rochelle] Walensky said.... [T]his data suggests two important things. First, COVID cases among vaccinated individuals appear to be higher than the 'less than 1 percent' many claim. Two, vaccinated individuals appear quite capable of transmitting the virus to others, as Walensky states. Indeed, viral loads in nasal passages suggest they could transmit the virus at rates similar to unvaccinated carriers....

"'As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause,' a statement says.... Does this mean the CDC isn't tracking breakthrough cases anymore unless someone is hospitalized or dies? I asked the CDC for clarification. I didn’t hear back from them. But if one goes to the CDC site, you’ll find information on vaccine breakthroughs that includes only hospitalizations and deaths. The figure — as of August 2 — stands at 7,525, which is below the 9,245 breakthrough infections the CDC had documented as of April 26....

"[T]he media are left guessing what the breakthrough rate is. CNN points out that roughly half of US states report data on breakthroughs, and in those states official statistics put the COVID infection rate of vaccinated people at less than 1 percent, 'ranging from 0.01% in Connecticut to 0.9% in Oklahoma.' A highly cited Kaiser report similarly puts the breakthrough rate at 'well below' 1 percent. An NBC News analysis covering 38 states, meanwhile, found 125,682 breakthrough cases, which represents about 0.08 percent of the 164 million vaccinated Americans....

"A thorough review of the evidence strongly suggests breakthrough cases are far likelier than the claims in headlines. A New York Times story published Wednesday exploring the Delta variant noted that the CDC 'does not tally national figures on breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalization or death,' so the precise incidence 'is unknown' even though the CDC says breakthroughs are 'extremely rare'.... But infectious disease experts hinted that breakthrough cases are more likely than the current data suggest. 'I think that if we started to test people just randomly on the street, we would find a lot more people who test positive,' Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases fellow at Stanford, told the newspaper.

"On Thursday, New York magazine published an article under the headline 'Don’t Panic, But Breakthrough Cases May Be a Bigger Problem Than You’ve Been Told.' Journalist David Wallace-Wells, who spoke to scientists at Harvard and Scripps’s, said public health officials may be 'overstating the vaccine effect on transmission and understating the scale and risk of breakthrough infections.' 'The message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,' Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina told Wallace-Wells. Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and author, was more blunt, saying he estimated the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic transmission had fallen to roughly 60 percent for the Delta variant....

"Wallace-Wells notes it’s impossible to estimate the true breakthrough rate because the CDC stopped tracking and reporting most breakthroughs in May, but the data he assembled paint a much different picture. 'In Delaware, between July 1 and July 22, ‘breakthrough’ cases were 13.8 percent of the total,' he writes. 'In Michigan, between June 15 and July 30, the figure was 19.1 percent. In this period, there were 2,369 breakthrough cases and 12,409 in total. In Utah, 8 percent of new cases were breakthroughs in early June, but by late July, as Delta grew, the share grew, too, to 20 percent (even while the total number of cases almost doubled)'....

"By only tracking breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization and death, the CDC is depriving the public of crucial information on the efficacy of vaccines and fueling the vaccine wars. Increasingly, these wars are a bipartisan chorus of vaccinated voices who paint the unvaccinated as either crazy people ... or filthy creatures who are prolonging the pandemic because of their selfishness.... This chorus has had its desired effect. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found that 80 percent of Americans blame the unvaccinated for rising cases — even though the US has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world — which has fueled efforts to force Americans to get vaccinated by requiring 'vaccine passports' to travel or do business.

"Blaming the unvaccinated for the drawn out pandemic may be popular and politically convenient, but .. breakthrough transmissions appear to be more common than the CDC has let on — which is undoubtedly why they stopped tracking most breakthrough cases. The CDC’s effort to hide breakthrough cases not involving death or hospitalization from the public eye might serve its presumed goal — getting more Americans vaccinated — but it undermines the truth and further erodes public trust in government, which is already at historic lows. The silver lining in the story is that a full analysis of the science of vaccination makes an even stronger case that the decision of whether to vaccinate or not should be made by one person: the individual getting the vaccine."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Mask mandates return to America

Local officials across U.S. are starting to reimpose Covid mask rules as delta variant takes hold | CNBC - Robert Towey:

July 21, 2021 - "From Los Angeles to Massachusetts, local officials across the country are pleading with Americans to once again wear masks inside as the delta variant rips through the U.S. Several counties across California and Nevada are now advising all residents to wear masks in public indoor settings — whether they are vaccinated or not. Local leaders in at least three more states have reinstated mask mandates, issued facial covering recommendations or threatened the return of strict public health limits for all residents....

"On Friday, seven counties in California’s Bay Area recommended using masks indoors, stopping short of a full mandate. The city of Berkeley, California, similarly called for the continued use of masks. Further south, Los Angeles County restored its mask mandate for public indoor places on Saturday. The county initially eliminated the mandate on Thursday....

"In Massachusetts, officials in Provincetown advised all individuals Monday to resume wearing masks indoors.... New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell authorized an indoor mask advisory on Wednesday.... And New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday that he wanted to avoid reinstating a mask mandate.... 'For the time being, I hope we don’t have to do that,' Murphy said. 'If we have to, we will.'"

The Mask-Mandate Debate Is Back. Here’s What to Know | The Intelligencer, New York magazine - Chas Danner:

July 29, 2021 - "The CDC on Tuesday advised all Americans, including people who are fully vaccinated, to mask up indoors in public places again, anywhere in the country that is seeing significant spread of COVID-19. In addition, the agency also wound back its guidance on face masks in schools, and is now advising all students and staff to wear masks during in-person learning, regardless of their vaccination status....

"Following the CDC announcement on Tuesday, Nevada quickly announced that it would once again require everyone in the state to wear face masks indoors in public. The House, too, announced that masks would be required for any work indoors on their side of the Capitol. And Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., announced Thursday that masks will be required indoors for everyone over the age of 2 by the start of the weekend....

"Boston, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, have all announced that they will require public-school students and staff to wear masks regardless of vaccination status. California is requiring face masks in schools, but deferring enforcement to local school officials. And in light of the CDC’s new guidelines, it’s now likely that many more state and local officials will follow suit, if they haven’t already."

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Is disinfectant mania finally ending?

Has the Era of Overzealous Cleaning Finally Come to an End? New York Times - Emily Anthes:

April 8, 2021 - "When the coronavirus began to spread in the United States last spring, many experts warned of the danger posed by surfaces. Researchers reported that the virus could survive for days on plastic or stainless steel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [C.D.C.] advised that if someone touched one of these contaminated surfaces — and then touched their eyes, nose or mouth — they could become infected. Americans responded in kind, wiping down groceries, quarantining mail and clearing drugstore shelves of Clorox wipes. Facebook closed two of its offices for a 'deep cleaning.' New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority began disinfecting subway cars every night.

"But the era of 'hygiene theater' may have come to an unofficial end this week, when the C.D.C. updated its surface cleaning guidelines and noted that the risk of contracting the virus from touching a contaminated surface was less than 1 in 10,000. 'People can be affected with the virus that causes Covid-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,' Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said at a White House briefing on Monday. 'However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.'

"'Finally,' said Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne viruses at Virginia Tech. 'We’ve known this for a long time and yet people are still focusing so much on surface cleaning.' She added, 'There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface'....

"'The scientific basis for all this concern about surfaces is very slim — slim to none,' said Emanuel Goldman, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, who wrote last summer that the risk of surface transmission had been overblown. 'This is a virus you get by breathing. It’s not a virus you get by touching'....

"'The most important part of this update is that they’re clearly communicating to the public the correct, low risk from surfaces, which is not a message that has been clearly communicated for the past year,' said Joseph Allen, a building safety expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Catching the virus from surfaces ... requires many things to go wrong: a lot of fresh, infectious viral particles to be deposited on a surface, and then for a relatively large quantity of them to be quickly transferred to someone’s hand and then to their face. 'Presence on a surface does not equal risk,' Dr. Allen said.

"In most cases, cleaning with simple soap and water — in addition to hand-washing and mask-wearing — is enough to keep the odds of surface transmission low, the C.D.C.’s updated cleaning guidelines say. In most everyday scenarios and environments, people do not need to use chemical disinfectants, the agency notes.... 'Disinfection is only recommended in indoor settings — schools and homes — where there has been a suspected or confirmed case of Covid-19 within the last 24 hours,' Dr. Walensky said during the White House briefing. 'Also, in most cases, fogging, fumigation and wide-area or electrostatic spraying is not recommended as a primary method of disinfection and has several safety risks to consider'... [T]he new cleaning guidelines do not apply to health care facilities, which may require more intensive cleaning and disinfection....

"'This should be the end of deep cleaning,” Dr. Allen said, noting that the misplaced focus on surfaces has had real costs. 'It has led to closed playgrounds, it has led to taking nets off basketball courts, it has led to quarantining books in the library. It has led to entire missed school days for deep cleaning. It has led to not being able to share a pencil. So that’s all that hygiene theater, and it’s a direct result of not properly classifying surface transmission as low risk.'"

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Children left behind in USA's return to normal

Will COVID hysterics ever let our children live normal lives? | New York Post - Karol Markowicz

April 11, 2021 - "The end of the pandemic is nigh. Americans continue to get vaccinated at a rapid clip. Life will be moving on. Except, it seems, for children. For more than a year, they have suffered from irrational, unscientific and downright superstitious policies inflicted upon them by adults — and there is no end in sight.

"In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance that three-foot social distancing suffices in schools, instead of the usual six. Yet in many localities where teachers unions wield power, schools still didn’t fully reopen. In New York City, schools have reopened on a (very) part-time basis in large part owing to the debunked six-foot rule. United Federation of Teachers boss Michael Mulgrew immediately balked at the guidance, calling it 'strange' and saying the union would consult with its own experts. But the real question is: Why do kids even need to socially distance at all?

"Many places in Europe, including Britain, as well as some schools across America, long ago scrapped social-distancing requirements for kids. They opened their schools and kept them open. That’s because research has repeatedly showed that children are at minuscule risk from the disease and also transmit it a much lower rate than do adults.

"We also need to cut it out with the masking of kids. Let’s notice that every video of a 2-year-old being escorted off an airplane for not wearing a mask is set in America. On European flights, masks are required for ages 6 and up.... And while masking 6-year-olds still seems unnecessary and should hopefully end soon, it’s saner than sticking one on a toddler.

"In November, Maria van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging-diseases unit, clarified that 'for children under 6 years old, we don’t recommend the use of masks.' This, she said, was 'for many reasons — because of the way children are developing' and because enforcing adherence is a fool’s errand. She added: 'Between 6 [and] 11, we recommend taking a risk-based approach depending on where the children are, the types of activities they are doing.'

"Yet last week, YouTube removed a video of scientists from places like Stanford saying much the same to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Google-owned video service called it 'medical misinformation.' This, even though last April, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcocki said her site would interdict 'anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations.' In this case, it’s YouTube itself that was contradicting WHO....

"There is a specific reason other developed nations treat children differently than adults, and it seems hard for the coronavirus hysterics to accept: Again, COVID-19 largely doesn’t affect children.

"Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), caused a stir when he said last August that 'seasonal flu is actually, in many cases, a deadlier virus if [kids] contract that' — a claim that Politifact was forced to rate 'mostly true.' It’s actually completely true, and if this is surprising news, it’s because the CDC, virus guru Dr. Anthony Fauci and the media at large have failed to tell the truth about COVID’s risks to children and the risks of children spreading it to adults."

Friday, March 26, 2021

Redfield backs lab origin theory of coronavirus

Former CDC director Robert Redfield says he believes COVID-19 'escaped' from a lab in Wuhan and started spreading as early as September 2019 | Daily Mail - Emily Crane:

March 26, 2021 - "The former director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, says he believes COVID-19 'escaped' from [a] Wuhan lab in China and may have been circling as early as September 2019. Redfield made the admission in a CNN interview on Friday but stressed it was his 'opinion'. It is the first time Redfield, who was appointed CDC director by President Trump, has stated publicly that he believes COVID-19 originated in a lab....

"I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory ... escaped. Other people don't believe that, that's fine. Science will eventually figure it out,' he said. 'It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in laboratories to infect the laboratory worker. That's not implying any intentionality. It's my opinion, right? But I am a virologist. I have spent my life in virology.'

"Researchers have said the global pandemic is believed to have started when COVID-19 jumped from a bat to a human or through an intermediary species at a wet market in Wuhan. Redfield, however, says that explanation doesn't make 'biological sense' to him.

"'I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human and at that moment in time ... became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission,' he said. 'Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonot to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient.' He believes it started in a lab that was already studying the virus, which would mean COVID-19 was being exposed to human cell cultures....

"The debate about the origins [of] COVID-19 has been ongoing for the past year and has resulted in rising tensions between the US and China. US investigators have been blocked from going to China in a bid to investigate the virus and its origins. China has long resisted pressure for a full investigation and has touted theories that the virus might not have originated in Wuhan. The World Health Organization has previously said the lab theory was 'extremely unlikely' but a team of its scientists that were finally allowed into Wuhan have still not been able to determine the origin of the virus more than a year into the pandemic."

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Denmark halts mass killing of 17 million mink

Denmark drops plans for mass mink cull after Covid mutation fears | The Guardian - Sophie Kevany & Tom Carstensen:

November 9, 2020 - "Last Wednesday the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said all the country’s mink would be culled due to fears that a Covid-19 mutation moving from mink to humans could jeopardise future vaccines.

"But opposition to the move swiftly emerged. 'Massive doubts over whether this cull is properly scientifically based [have] come to light now,' said Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, the leader of Denmark’s largest opposition party, Venstre. 'At the same time the government is taking away the livelihood of a large number of people without actually having the legal rights to do so.' Frederik Waage, law professor at the University of Southern Denmark, told Danish national paper Berlingske the cull order was 'illegal'.

"Opposition to the cull focuses on the fact that Denmark’s’ public health agency, the Statens Serum Institut (SSI), had not found evidence of the mutated strain for more than a month, while a number of Danish and international experts questioned whether the mutation was dangerous.

"In neighbouring Sweden, 10 mink farms have been identified as having Covid-19 outbreaks. .. but Benny Andersson, CEO of Swedish animal rights organisation, Djurens Rätt,... is not expecting any cull in Sweden. 'That’s mainly because the ongoing pelting season means most animals, other than breeding stock, are already being killed,' he said.... Poland and Finland are reported to be free of Covid-19 on mink farms, while in the Netherlands fur farming will effectively end this year. In Ireland, a tiny player in the mink sector, testing at the country’s three farms is reported to have begun....

"In the US, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presentation last week said 11 mink farms had Covid-19 outbreaks.... US veterinary NGO the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association said the apparent rapid mutation of the virus in mink, and the lack of a cull, was both a public health and a welfare risk.... Joanna Swabe, a policy adviser for Humane Society International, agreed.... Swabe said that not carrying out culls on farms where Covid-19 has been detected in the mink meant the continued existence of 'a pool of non-essential animals that could pose a risk to public health'."

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

PCR tests exaggerating COVID-19 case counts

Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be | New York Times - By Apoorva Mandavilli:

Sept. 8, 2020 - "Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time....

"The most widely used diagnostic test for the new coronavirus, called a PCR test, provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.... The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious. This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

"In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found. On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases.... If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

"One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. [Michael] Mina [an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health] said.

"Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside.... A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result .... The C.D.C.’s own calculations suggest that it is extremely difficult to detect any live virus in a sample above a threshold of 33 cycles....

"Officials at the Wadsworth Center, New York’s state lab, [have] identified 872 positive tests, based on a threshold of 40 cycles. With a cutoff of 35, about 43 percent of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 63 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30. In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. 'I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,' he said....

"The F.D.A. noted that people may have a low viral load when they are newly infected. A test with less sensitivity would miss these infections. But that problem is easily solved, Dr. Mina said: 'Test them again, six hours later or 15 hours later or whatever,' he said. A rapid test would find these patients quickly, even if it were less sensitive, because their viral loads would quickly rise....

"Highly sensitive PCR tests seemed like the best option for tracking the coronavirus at the start of the pandemic. But for the outbreaks raging now, he said, what’s needed are coronavirus tests that are fast, cheap and abundant enough to frequently test everyone who needs it — even if the tests are less sensitive. 'It might not catch every last one of the transmitting people, but it sure will catch the most transmissible people, including the superspreaders,' Dr. Mina said. 'That alone would drive epidemics practically to zero.'"

Saturday, August 22, 2020

USA Today: US COVID-19 mortality rate is 3.1%

by George J. Dance

Today, thanks to the internet, it is not hard to find information on COVID-19. However, given that anyone can post there, it is hard to find accurate information (or even information one can confidently believe); much of what one encounters is either unfactual, or while based on accurate data spun to imply inaccurate conclusions. To combat that, many websites have begun fact checking each others' stories; but in many cases, that has only served to further spread misinformation.

A case in point concerns a "Fact check" I read Friday in USA Today, "COVID-19 is deadlier than the 1918 Spanish flu and seasonal influenza." The article deals with a Facebook meme that makes what author Courtney Cox thinks is a misleading "comparison with the H1N1 pandemic of 1918 (the Spanish flu) and the seasonal flu." She accuses the meme creator of exaggerating the Spanish flu's death rate: while the meme claims a mortality rate of 5.6%, she writes, "an article in 2006 in the health journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the CDC, cites a 2.5% global mortality rate." Meanwhile, the CDC (U.S. Center for Disease Control) has " reported that the annual mortality rate for the seasonal flu is about 0.01%,." In contrast, says Cox, "The COVID-19 mortality rate in the USA was 3.1% as of Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University." (stress added)

A disease's mortality rate, or death rate (per Wikipedia), is "a measure of the number of deaths in a particular population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit of time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1,000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 (out of 1,000) in a population of 1,000 would mean 9.5 deaths per year in that entire population, or 0.95% out of the total." The population of the United States as of today, according to Worldometer, is 331,272,237. So a mortality rate of 3.1% would mean 10,269,439 dead Americans during the pandemic.

As of Friday, Worldometer is reporting 179,200 COVID-19 deaths in the USA, for a current mortality rate of just over 0.05%. Of course, that will not the be last word; the number of deaths, which has been increasing by over 1,000 per day, will keep rising in the future, and the mortality rate will rise along with it. All we can say right now, in the middle of the pandemic, is that the mortality rate over the pandemic's course will be higher than 0.05% – a point Cox marshalls in support of her 3.1% figure:

Though the number of people dead from COVID-19 as a percentage of world population at one point in time may be an accurate number, it is not reflective of the mortality rate of the virus. The mortality rate is not 1%, as the meme claims, but 3.1% in the USA, according to the latest data. That is far higher than seasonal flu and worse than the 1918 pandemic.

Yet the fact that more deaths are sure to come is no reason to believe that the COVID-19 mortality rate will ever reach 3.1%. COVID-19 deaths are rising, for sure; but at the current rate of increase (10,000 every nine days) it would take over 9,000 days – almost 25 years – for them to reach 3.1% of the population (and most likely not even by then, as the U.S. population likely would also have increased).

To support her claim, Cox cites a page on the Johns Hopkins University website, "Mortality analyses." That page gives a figure for current "deaths per 100,000" for the USA of 53.27 per 100,000 (again, just over 0.05%), but it also gives an "observed case fatality ratio" (CFR) for the country of 3.1 deaths per hundred, or 3.1%. That seems to be the only source for Ms. Cox's mortality rate claim. If everyone in the country becomes an observed case, and if the CFR stays at 3.1%, that would indeed equate to 10,269,000 or so deaths. However, there is no reason to think either of those ifs is going to happen.

First, Cox ignores the concept of herd immunity. There is currently no scientific data on whether or not getting COVID-19 confers any immunity; nor can there be, given that the disease is so new. However, assuming that the disease is like every other known viral disease, one can expect those to recover to have at least short-term immunity. Given that assumption, calculating herd immunity is as easy as calculating the disease's initial reproduction number, or Ro. (The herd immunity threshhold is equal to (Ro-1)/Ro ).

Imperial College's infamous Report 9, the March report that frightened Britain and the USA into lockdowns, estimated an Ro of 2.4. Imperial's Report 12, issued in May, revised that number up substantially to 3.8. Using the higher number gives a herd immunity threshhold of 74% of the population, which alone would reduce the hypothetical mortality rate to 2.3% and possible deaths to 7,600,000.

Second, there is no reason to think the CFR really measures the disease's lethality. There are many more people infected with COVID-19 than the number of observed cases. How many? According to Cox's own publication, "The real number of coronavirus cases is much higher than the recorded infections, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control. The research, published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, looked at antibodies in blood samples taken from 10 geographic regions. Researchers found a range from six to 24 times the number of documented cases, but most sites likely have 10 times more infections than reported."

Calculating the mortality rate means multiplying not by the CFR – the ratio of observed cases who die – but by the infection fatality ratio (IFR): the ratio of people who get the disease who die. Fortunately, we do not have to look up the currently estimated IFR, since the number appears in Cox's own article: "According to the latest data available from the CDC, COVID-19 has an overall infection mortality ratio of 0.0065." Using that figure instead gives a mortality rate of 0.65% and a death toll of 2,153,270 (assuming no herd immunity) or, respectively, 0.48% and 1,593,420 (assuming herd immunity). Those figures still look shockingly high (by a factor of 2 to 4), but nowhere near as shocking as Cox's 3%+ estimate.

Back on March 3, the world media reported, citing the World Health organization (WHO), that "the mortality rate for COVID-19 is 3.4% globally" – an alarmist claim that set off worldwide panic, with consequences we will have to deal with for years. That figure has been repeatedly debunked, and today even the WHO no longer stands by it. I was saddened to see the same type of alarmist claim coming back into circulation, especially in a "Fact check." COVID-19's alleged "3.1% mortality rate" is not a fact.

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