Covid-19 Diary : Sunday 24 October, 2021

It is usually possible to create a study to prove any point at all.  Here are two examples of studies that seem to be valid, but which are probably totally meaningless.

The first study, offered as part of the pro-vaccine propaganda; well, I’ll interrupt and repeat yet again that I’ve been vaccinated against Covid and am not anti-vax; but I am anti-lies and I am increasingly curious about what the “pro-vax” people are doing or hiding with their increasingly shrill demands for more and more vaccinating.  The people doing this don’t seem to realize that the more theatrically they exaggerate, and they more they demand, the more concern and skepticism and push-back they generate.

This article further considers the issue of why the public health authorities are taking such a biased approach to propagandizing the vaccines, while doing all they can to pretend that downsides don’t exist.  OSHA – an organization which is totally data-driven and which lives for “safety problems” that it can wade into the middle of and “fix” – has suspended the reporting requirements for any vaccine adverse reactions.

This is in astonishing contrast to the detailed and onerous requirements OSHA has for just about any and every other type of health issue or potential issue/risk.

Why?

Now, for the two studies and their spurious conclusions.  The first article tries a new approach.  Rather than trying to struggle to ignore the “vaccines are dangerous” inconvenient truth, the study suggests that Covid vaccines are so miraculous that they’re vaguely curing all sorts of other medical problems, too.  People vaccinated against Covid are less likely to die of other causes, according to the CDC study the article is writing about.

This is a great example of the danger of confusing correlation with causation, with the danger of plucking two unrelated statistics and then “cluster-analyzing” them or in some other way forcing the data into groupings that seems to prove some sort of point.

I don’t deny the CDC study found that people who were vaccinated were dying less of other illnesses.  But was this because of their vaccination, or because of something else?  Actually, the study itself answers these questions (but don’t let that interfere with the great headline).  The article says

Part of this is probably because people who get vaccinated tend to be healthier than people who don’t the researchers noted.

“The lower mortality risk after COVID-19 vaccination suggests substantial healthy vaccinee effects (i.e., vaccinated persons tend to be healthier than unvaccinated persons), which will be explored in future analyses,” they wrote.

In other words, the study should really conclude “healthy people are less likely to die than unhealthy people”, which is a conclusion that probably didn’t require the analysis of 11 million people at great cost.

This is rubbish research and it makes me wonder, again, why is the CDC funding such nonsensical research and why is it then drawing the wrong conclusions from it?  Why not fund some research into vaccine dangers, or ivermectin benefits, instead?

The second study – although proudly described as a “gold standard study” (a meaningless appellation that anyone can say about anything) is also built upon a massive obscured truth, to create a “finding” that is trivial in nature.

The study is designed to support the new in-vogue concept of mixing and matching vaccines.  The study says that if a person swaps from two shots of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, and instead has one AZ shot and the second shot either a Pfizer or Moderna shot, the effectiveness rises :

Two shots of AZ = 50% effective

AZ + Pfizer = 67% effective

AZ + Moderna = 79% effective

So that is a fairly clear cut set of numbers, isn’t it (even though there are massive gaps and weaknesses in what was tested and how).  Hence the conclusion, mixing and matching shots works.

But do you see what is missing?  There are three more lines of data that would be necessary to complete this evaluation.

Pfizer + Moderna = ???

Two shots of Pfizer = ???

Two shots of Moderna = ???

Why doesn’t this “gold standard study” complete this analysis?  What are they hiding?

I have no idea what the result would be for one shot each of Pfizer and Moderna vaccinations in combination, but we know that two shots of Pfizer by itself, or two shots of Moderna by itself, are each something over 90% effective, sometimes claimed to be around 94% effective.

So, rather than telling us that mixing and matching vaccines is a good idea, what the study actually shows, but doesn’t tell us, is that if you substitute the second dose of either Pfizer or Moderna vaccines with a dose of AstraZeneca vaccine, the overall effectiveness plunges.  Two doses of Pfizer or Moderna mean 18 or 19 people out of 20 avoid infection.  Mixing the doses means 16 or 14 people avoid infection – that’s up to six times less protection.

And that is a conclusion which this “gold standard study” somehow omits to share with us all.  Why?

Current Numbers

Montenegro and Seychelles swapped places in the minor country table.  There were no changes in the major country table.

Romania continued to rush up the death rate table, displacing the US down one place in the process this week, and Mexico overtook Italy.

The case activity for last week table showed higher numbers for all listed countries.  At the top, Latvia had almost 1% of its entire country infected in a single week.

Europe as a whole showed a 22% increase in cases.  The Czech Republic risks going back to “the bad old days” with a 124% rise in cases for the week, Poland had a 94% rise, and Hungary an 88% rise.  Few countries had falling numbers – Finland was down 23%, Sweden down 15% and both Spain and Malta had 8% drops.  France rose 13%, Germany was up 30%, and both Italy and Greece were up 32%.

Things were much better in North America.  Canada dropped 27%, Mexico dropped 23%, and the US probably dropped about 22% (US statistics are now among the slowest in the world, so it is hard to be exact).

The world as a whole had a tiny 1% rise in cases.

Top Case Rates Minor (population under 10 million) Countries (cases per million)

Top Case Rates Major (population over 10 million) Countries (cases per million)

Top Death Rate Major Countries (deaths per million)

Top Rates in New Cases Reported in the Last Week (new cases per million) for Countries over one million population

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Items below include a political and an emotional argument that threatens the Fauci Supremacy, why are only expensive anti-viral treatments considered (out of a list of 28 different drugs), a new definition of “fully vaccinated”, a look at worldwide vaccination numbers, US case numbers compared to 2020, the US ignores rising risks in other countries, and the latest strange shortage.

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Please stay happy and healthy; all going well, I’ll be back again on Thursday.

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