Unlike other aspects of "lockdowns," banning visitors to nursing home residents was seeded in a mysterious 2016 revision to federal regulations. (Nursing homes, 2020: pt. 2)
It always bothered me greatly! All resident rights and patient rights were blatantly disregarded without anyone batting an eye. Yes visitors have been restricted for many years but family was always allowed. How everyone was ok with this I will never understand. Grateful I wasn’t working in a facility during Covid or I’d have lost my job pretty quick, for many reasons I guess!
Well, that is fine, but have there been any negative tests? These are normal in testing software.
Ie, when we definitely know that there is no SARS-CoV-2 mRNA there does it give a negative result in the presence of confounding bits of RNA and DNA that the primers might match.
There is no one PCR test, so each one is case by case. But typically when you look into how a given assay is validated, it includes feeding multiple verified samples of coronavirus and flu and verifying that the test comes up negative. Example Abbot, which was highly used, negative on all validation samples here. All of them are clinical samples so they are full of human genes too https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7395853/
All negative real life samples have human genes. They still come up negative. When PCR is used in places where there are no infections, there are virtually no positives - the selectivity of PCRs being used in these areas is by definition a rounding error from 100%. I don't really get what is animating the PCR skeptics at this point. They are wrong.
Interesting discussions about what can go wrong, but also that the CDC-defined tests contain primers for making sure the test came from a human and not a banana :-)
But also to calibrate quantitative PCR so it’s relative to how “concentrated” a sample is, which is good for individual viral load accuracy. There are several studies involving the NBA because of aggressive testing, you can see the same thing in every person, low “load” (high cycle count) going up to a peak and coming back down. This can’t happen if the test is inaccurate - everyone’s counts would just fly around from day to day.
In aggregate it doesn’t matter much. Example Alpha having higher loads vs wild / B.1 samples taken at same time - this can’t be meaningless because both Alpha and background are getting the same random spread of swab concentration. This signal is clear as long as the noise is truly random.
Useless “as a diagnostic” often is asserted as proving inaccuracy. My phone’s gyroscope can’t diagnose anything but it still knows when I rotate the screen. What matters as far as there being 1000-fold differences in concentration of swabs is you choose between false negatives (low ct threshold so diluted swabs don’t score positive) and false positives (high ct threshold so concentrated swabs with relatively low virus gene amps count positive). It won’t be both. In practice the Ct thresholds used worked fine.
Thanks for the research and breakdown of that catastrophe. Geronticide anyone?
Not sure I understand the swerve here though. "The whole point of conservatism is you do not suddenly change the world overnight because you are scared; rather, you assume the status quo has unperceived benefits." Maybe an elaboration/connection is in order for that jaunt.
Most conservatives don't fear change and the informed do not believe the status quo has some unforeseen benefits. Although there are pilot fish for both the left and the right, pilot fish do not properly represent the drivers (shark's in this example) of either side.
Conservatives simply understand that change is often pushed by Godless radicals who, without a foundation, believe they can remake the world into their (current/this-iteration-anyway) utopian dream. Conservatives, obversely, believe in the inherent fallibilities of humans and human nature. Thus, the synonymous term reactionary.
Conservatives typically only react in an attempt to keep culture/society from lurching leftward into the radical utopian abyss. See 1984, Brave New World, the movie Brazil, and Genesis 19:1-28.
In terms of the last three years, there were objections from both sides of the isle, but I dare say that the contingent from the right was far larger and sacrificed more as a result. But, maybe I read wrongly into your sentence. Thanks,
It was the end of a very compressed writing process, so the phrasing I went with is extremely poor on context and nuance, haha.
Basically just referring to original, Burkean meaning of conservatism - "approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements." So the lockdown was a revolution based on rationalized conclusions that had no experiential basis.
Though, I don't see a lot of disagreement between that and what you wrote, except the part about "do not believe the status quo has some unforeseen benefits." Assuming the status quo has unforeseen benefits is just a rephrasing of Chesterton's fence. If your point is that this strain of thought has been semi-forgotten, that's fair - but it's exactly the problem that led to accepting lockdowns on the right.
Oh! If similar to Chesterton's Fence, then absolutely agree.
I think what happened, concerning this, is that most Americans were in a never before seen situation with the politicians (and scientists, maybe if all this was not planned) in cover-the-rear mode. I know I wasn't sure until I saw the numbers out of Italy sometime in late Feb/early Mar. At that point, I think most of us who understood the actual landscape sat back in horror as the hospital and nursing home catastrophe unfolded...to be followed by the other mandates.
My wife got a religious exemption at her hospital which was accepted at the 11th hour. My son in the Army National Guard also filed a religious exemption which was promptly put into a holding pattern (never accepted) until it became moot from the Jan 7, 2023 walk back of the military mandate.
My keyboard was on fire from all the emails I sent to my representatives during that time. So, I don't think we really "accepted" the lockdowns as much as we had to tolerate them in varying degrees by job and locality. But, we didn't see it as the final straw yet either (e.g. The Patriot).
After all this, I think Libertarians found themselves leaning more right, conservatives found themselves more libertarian (or Liberal in the classical sense), and both found the current Republican Party politicians and leadership (on the whole) untenable.
I think a tectonic, Reagan revolution-like shift is in the offing...
For whatever reason, Ontario nursing homes immediately adopted the same rules on March 9 2020 even though there was no such 2016 revision to guide our public health regulations. When the gene jabs became available, Ontario nursing homes extorted 'consent' from every worker for two jabs to stay employed, and on civilian family members and visitors to be allowed to visit - but inexplicably, residents could refuse without punishment. Nursing homes lied to the public and their workers and called jab requirement a legal provincial mandate, despite the fact that the Ontario government had never imposed a gene jab mandate on publicly funded health care facility staff or civilians. As a result of this lie, I was forbidden to care for my elderly mother for almost three years while their neglect and stupidity caused her incalculable suffering and preventable infections and deterioration.
I am sorry to hear that they kept you from your mother. If the LTCF visitor ban alone had been rolled out as the lockdown / "hostage taking" strategy that would have been enough to force many people to get injected.
Excellent article. Our society is paying and will continue to pay a heavy price for its failure to pay attention to the needs of our older people, our children and the most basic important aspects of our lives.
Premeditated geronticide sounds plausible. They did know that pensions would have to be paid otherwise.
Excellent article. Very thoroughly researched. Thank you.
I tried finding the CDC definition of unvaccinated the other day, searched high and low, but it seems there is none. Both partially vaccinated who get sick or die within 14 days and never vaccinated individuals can be called unvaccinated. Do you know anything about that?
Any given CDC report or study can have its own approach. But in all cases when it comes to vaccination status they are depending on networked records that might themselves be incomplete.
For reports, i.e. dashboards etc., that's usually going to intentionally count partially injected as unvaccinated IIRC. It isn't that important because the data is incredibly low quality to begin with, and the denominators for the unvaccinated are probably wrong (i.e. none of the state networks went out and counted how many unvaccinated people there are).
For studies, it's usually test negative or the like, this is a garbage type of study design to begin with, but there are cases where they just exclude partially vaccinated outcomes (i.e., if someone gets an infection between first dose and dose 2 +14 days, it's not included in outcomes) so you are getting a comparison between truly unvaccinated and fully vaccinated. It depends. Generally it doesn't make a big difference.
Thank you for the explanation. So yeah, the word unvaccinated has no legal definition, hence the term "pandemic of the unvaccinated" is not entirely incorrect under the assumption that the increased susceptibility of freshly partially vaccinatinated individuals created the growth advantage that was needed for delta to cause another pandemic.
There is no support for that assumption. As in, in two years, I have never encountered a single bit of supporting evidence for this widely worshiped theory that secret partially vaccinated people are going around dying without anyone noticing IRL. Plenty of people noticed unvaccinated people dying in the Delta wave, including among the skeptic community that was immersed in this myth of the 'worry window' https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-american-unvaccinated-holocaust
The narrative was in fact correct in summer 2021. Then the unvaxxed had immunity and the vaxxed didn't, so the vaxxed have been catching up. Anything else is so complicated it verges on insanity.
What gave Delta the growth advantage it needed to cause epidemics, after it had been maintaining a level of less than 1% variance prevalence for over a year?
There needs to be an explanation.
Also, why do most sources (even peer-reviewed articles) claim B.1.617.2 was first identified in India in October 2020? Where are these rumors coming from? It was around for more than a year.
Still researching this episode. There will be a very elaborate article on it, but it's not finished.
The term "pandemic of the unvaccinated" was used by Walensky on July 15th, right when the correlation between new vaccinations and new cases was passing 0.4. It kept increasing until the peak of the wave.
I have since run various multi-factor regressions and plotted the weights as a side chart, similar to the ones you see on that page. Vaccinations older than a few weeks inhibit both cases and deaths (so they did help against transmission, anything else would be absurd), but
new vaccinations promote cases.
We can see this in the beginning of every wave, but nowhere as clearly as during Delta, simply because Delta stood alone and imprinting affects the growth factors of each variant differently. Delta cases approximated total cases, so the situation during the B.1.617.2 (+AY.3) wave was pretty simple. For other waves it's harder to see, since the CDC are not releasing state-level variant data.
BA.2 is pretty clear also, but the dynamics are completely different from Delta. Boosting children boosted BA.2's growth advantage.
I dare say you are not appreciating the complexity of the situation, but I understand we won't be getting very far in terms of discussing this when the first thing you can think of is calling other people insane...
If you ased me, I'd say it would be insane to assume vaccinations had no impact on variant prevalence. Vaccinations will always affect variant-specific growth advantages. What needs to be determined is how exactly these growth advantages changed with each campaign, defined by age group and dose series.
There are multiple reasons why I do not find the summer 2021 US waves even potentially illustrative of vaccine enhancement.
1 Rates of first-vax in summer are just downstream of rates of unvaxxed in summer. You have more unvaxxed, you have more first-vaxxers, ie late adopters.
In the context of a product just being made available months before, this is an inevitable and inextricable linkage that requires rational, logical assessment to contextualize. You cannot point at the "association" and ignore the context; this only accomplishes the feat of mathematically rediscovering what everyone already knows about summer 2021 to begin with. If what everyone already knows doesn't reveal anything about a fifth column of secret partially vaccinated getting sick, infecting others, and dying - i.e. if we were all there and didn't see it happen - then neither can mathematically rediscovering what everyone already knows demonstrate the same. You do not "appreciate complexity" by ignoring context and confounding and just cramming things into math formulas.
2 Additionally, it's just cherry-picking. When you are using "associations" as evidence you cannot just use one place and one time. Every other place and time that fails to replicate your "association" is evidence that it is in fact just a coincidence from random chance and/or contextual factors (in this case, the latter).
3 When partially vaxxed case rates are actually tracked and compared to the unvaxxed, what do they show? This has only been done in a few contexts, and rarely with a reliable denominator for the unvaccinated. The trials do not show any elevation in cases in just-vaxxed vs. placebo, and they had no reason to fraud-ify this period because it wasn't even counted for efficacy. I never did the point-by-point on Craig's worry window study list but basically the evidence doesn't point toward any particular conclusion.
4 "Vaccinations will always affect variant-specific growth advantages" This is an assumption. It's widely understood as an axiom of epidemiology, but there are no axioms in epidemiology, and whether coronavirus evolution involves immune escape was never demonstrated at any point before 2020. Additionally, the 2020 VOCs are not really immune escape variants. No one got reinfected; and the vaccinated only got infected when their antibodies wore off (which meant the antibodies worked when they were high), and then not if they were boosted. So nothing about Delta would prove anything about immune escape.
Sum: These are all reasons to construct different approaches to investigating the question of vaccine enhancement than torturing the US summer 2021 wave for secret realities that no one experienced at the time.
No variable I found had any impact even close to the impact new vaccinations had on new cases. They're all dominated by new vaccine doses during the initial phase of exponential growth and only regain their impact after the peak of the waves.
And btw, I never wanted to find this. I hate having found this, because nobody wants to hear it. Everyone would rather talk about cardiac issues.
Alas I'm afraid new vaccinations did drive the Q3 wave. Then old vaccinations inhibit transmission.
Long term care facilities are chronically understaffed and have trouble getting meds to the patients on time, meals on time, patient care on time. Only an advocate that shows up regularly can help. But I'm also pretty sure the staff was fearful of everyone walking in the front door - thanks to the overwhelming fear campaign. In Florida in spring of 2021 I was able to visit my cousin in a long term care facility - outside on the patio - AFTER I took a "training class" prior to the visit to teach me how to behave.
“Then on 11 April the facility’s nurse practitioner called to tell them that Pop was failing; when they asked if he had Covid, she said no, heart failure”
Normally if a resident is suffering unstable heart failure they get sent to ER. They seem to have stopped doing this, and may also have curtailed services relating to feeding and hydration.
One of the purposes of restricting visitors is so they cant see the culling that occurred in some care homes. This was also done in other countries like UK. Remarkable coordination.
Fed money offered as incentives to states that went along
imagine how many 'deaths' this caused? The elderly giving up due to loneliness?
“Americans themselves responsible for lockdowns to begin with. We complied with this disaster; and by doing so, empowered it.”
Yes! This is my long held unpopular belief.
It always bothered me greatly! All resident rights and patient rights were blatantly disregarded without anyone batting an eye. Yes visitors have been restricted for many years but family was always allowed. How everyone was ok with this I will never understand. Grateful I wasn’t working in a facility during Covid or I’d have lost my job pretty quick, for many reasons I guess!
Casting doubt on the PCR tests:
https://usmortality.substack.com/p/how-accurate-is-the-covid-19-pcr
I’ve made the case for PCR accuracy, and I believe it is unanswerable https://unglossed.substack.com/i/100769096/why-pcr-is-accurate
Well, that is fine, but have there been any negative tests? These are normal in testing software.
Ie, when we definitely know that there is no SARS-CoV-2 mRNA there does it give a negative result in the presence of confounding bits of RNA and DNA that the primers might match.
Also, why were there two irrelevant primers?
There is no one PCR test, so each one is case by case. But typically when you look into how a given assay is validated, it includes feeding multiple verified samples of coronavirus and flu and verifying that the test comes up negative. Example Abbot, which was highly used, negative on all validation samples here. All of them are clinical samples so they are full of human genes too https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7395853/
All negative real life samples have human genes. They still come up negative. When PCR is used in places where there are no infections, there are virtually no positives - the selectivity of PCRs being used in these areas is by definition a rounding error from 100%. I don't really get what is animating the PCR skeptics at this point. They are wrong.
I found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=feWzKpaFuDA
Interesting discussions about what can go wrong, but also that the CDC-defined tests contain primers for making sure the test came from a human and not a banana :-)
But also to calibrate quantitative PCR so it’s relative to how “concentrated” a sample is, which is good for individual viral load accuracy. There are several studies involving the NBA because of aggressive testing, you can see the same thing in every person, low “load” (high cycle count) going up to a peak and coming back down. This can’t happen if the test is inaccurate - everyone’s counts would just fly around from day to day.
In aggregate it doesn’t matter much. Example Alpha having higher loads vs wild / B.1 samples taken at same time - this can’t be meaningless because both Alpha and background are getting the same random spread of swab concentration. This signal is clear as long as the noise is truly random.
Useless “as a diagnostic” often is asserted as proving inaccuracy. My phone’s gyroscope can’t diagnose anything but it still knows when I rotate the screen. What matters as far as there being 1000-fold differences in concentration of swabs is you choose between false negatives (low ct threshold so diluted swabs don’t score positive) and false positives (high ct threshold so concentrated swabs with relatively low virus gene amps count positive). It won’t be both. In practice the Ct thresholds used worked fine.
Do the primers even have to bind to a complete mRNA for the S-protein or could they bind to broken pieces of the mRNA for the S-protein?
Thanks for the research and breakdown of that catastrophe. Geronticide anyone?
Not sure I understand the swerve here though. "The whole point of conservatism is you do not suddenly change the world overnight because you are scared; rather, you assume the status quo has unperceived benefits." Maybe an elaboration/connection is in order for that jaunt.
Most conservatives don't fear change and the informed do not believe the status quo has some unforeseen benefits. Although there are pilot fish for both the left and the right, pilot fish do not properly represent the drivers (shark's in this example) of either side.
Conservatives simply understand that change is often pushed by Godless radicals who, without a foundation, believe they can remake the world into their (current/this-iteration-anyway) utopian dream. Conservatives, obversely, believe in the inherent fallibilities of humans and human nature. Thus, the synonymous term reactionary.
Conservatives typically only react in an attempt to keep culture/society from lurching leftward into the radical utopian abyss. See 1984, Brave New World, the movie Brazil, and Genesis 19:1-28.
In terms of the last three years, there were objections from both sides of the isle, but I dare say that the contingent from the right was far larger and sacrificed more as a result. But, maybe I read wrongly into your sentence. Thanks,
It was the end of a very compressed writing process, so the phrasing I went with is extremely poor on context and nuance, haha.
Basically just referring to original, Burkean meaning of conservatism - "approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements." So the lockdown was a revolution based on rationalized conclusions that had no experiential basis.
Though, I don't see a lot of disagreement between that and what you wrote, except the part about "do not believe the status quo has some unforeseen benefits." Assuming the status quo has unforeseen benefits is just a rephrasing of Chesterton's fence. If your point is that this strain of thought has been semi-forgotten, that's fair - but it's exactly the problem that led to accepting lockdowns on the right.
Haha.
Oh! If similar to Chesterton's Fence, then absolutely agree.
I think what happened, concerning this, is that most Americans were in a never before seen situation with the politicians (and scientists, maybe if all this was not planned) in cover-the-rear mode. I know I wasn't sure until I saw the numbers out of Italy sometime in late Feb/early Mar. At that point, I think most of us who understood the actual landscape sat back in horror as the hospital and nursing home catastrophe unfolded...to be followed by the other mandates.
My wife got a religious exemption at her hospital which was accepted at the 11th hour. My son in the Army National Guard also filed a religious exemption which was promptly put into a holding pattern (never accepted) until it became moot from the Jan 7, 2023 walk back of the military mandate.
My keyboard was on fire from all the emails I sent to my representatives during that time. So, I don't think we really "accepted" the lockdowns as much as we had to tolerate them in varying degrees by job and locality. But, we didn't see it as the final straw yet either (e.g. The Patriot).
After all this, I think Libertarians found themselves leaning more right, conservatives found themselves more libertarian (or Liberal in the classical sense), and both found the current Republican Party politicians and leadership (on the whole) untenable.
I think a tectonic, Reagan revolution-like shift is in the offing...
For whatever reason, Ontario nursing homes immediately adopted the same rules on March 9 2020 even though there was no such 2016 revision to guide our public health regulations. When the gene jabs became available, Ontario nursing homes extorted 'consent' from every worker for two jabs to stay employed, and on civilian family members and visitors to be allowed to visit - but inexplicably, residents could refuse without punishment. Nursing homes lied to the public and their workers and called jab requirement a legal provincial mandate, despite the fact that the Ontario government had never imposed a gene jab mandate on publicly funded health care facility staff or civilians. As a result of this lie, I was forbidden to care for my elderly mother for almost three years while their neglect and stupidity caused her incalculable suffering and preventable infections and deterioration.
I am sorry to hear that they kept you from your mother. If the LTCF visitor ban alone had been rolled out as the lockdown / "hostage taking" strategy that would have been enough to force many people to get injected.
Excellent article. Our society is paying and will continue to pay a heavy price for its failure to pay attention to the needs of our older people, our children and the most basic important aspects of our lives.
Thank you - agreed
Premeditated geronticide sounds plausible. They did know that pensions would have to be paid otherwise.
Excellent article. Very thoroughly researched. Thank you.
I tried finding the CDC definition of unvaccinated the other day, searched high and low, but it seems there is none. Both partially vaccinated who get sick or die within 14 days and never vaccinated individuals can be called unvaccinated. Do you know anything about that?
Thank you -
Any given CDC report or study can have its own approach. But in all cases when it comes to vaccination status they are depending on networked records that might themselves be incomplete.
For reports, i.e. dashboards etc., that's usually going to intentionally count partially injected as unvaccinated IIRC. It isn't that important because the data is incredibly low quality to begin with, and the denominators for the unvaccinated are probably wrong (i.e. none of the state networks went out and counted how many unvaccinated people there are).
For studies, it's usually test negative or the like, this is a garbage type of study design to begin with, but there are cases where they just exclude partially vaccinated outcomes (i.e., if someone gets an infection between first dose and dose 2 +14 days, it's not included in outcomes) so you are getting a comparison between truly unvaccinated and fully vaccinated. It depends. Generally it doesn't make a big difference.
Thank you for the explanation. So yeah, the word unvaccinated has no legal definition, hence the term "pandemic of the unvaccinated" is not entirely incorrect under the assumption that the increased susceptibility of freshly partially vaccinatinated individuals created the growth advantage that was needed for delta to cause another pandemic.
There is no support for that assumption. As in, in two years, I have never encountered a single bit of supporting evidence for this widely worshiped theory that secret partially vaccinated people are going around dying without anyone noticing IRL. Plenty of people noticed unvaccinated people dying in the Delta wave, including among the skeptic community that was immersed in this myth of the 'worry window' https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-american-unvaccinated-holocaust
The narrative was in fact correct in summer 2021. Then the unvaxxed had immunity and the vaxxed didn't, so the vaxxed have been catching up. Anything else is so complicated it verges on insanity.
I think I should clarify one thing:
I was not talking about partially vaccinated people dying when I used the term "susceptibility".
I was talking about partially vaccinated individuals acting as hosts. Superspreaders I guess.
The term pandemic of the unvaccinated is quite versatile.
The dying was done by the unvaccinated.
I am not disagreeing with you on this.
If you are convinced I am incorrect, please answer this:
Why would Delta gain 100% predominance in July 2021 after it had already been around since one week after the clinical trials began in mid-March 2020?
Source for this claim:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/data-virus-variants-covid-19-eueea
What gave Delta the growth advantage it needed to cause epidemics, after it had been maintaining a level of less than 1% variance prevalence for over a year?
There needs to be an explanation.
Also, why do most sources (even peer-reviewed articles) claim B.1.617.2 was first identified in India in October 2020? Where are these rumors coming from? It was around for more than a year.
One representative video without fancy variables:
https://q3deathwave.pervaers.com/video/3a;78-95;Cases_Accu_PerUninfected_Perc;D1_18-64_Accu_Perc;20sec.mp4
Some more: https://q3deathwave.pervaers.com/
Still researching this episode. There will be a very elaborate article on it, but it's not finished.
The term "pandemic of the unvaccinated" was used by Walensky on July 15th, right when the correlation between new vaccinations and new cases was passing 0.4. It kept increasing until the peak of the wave.
I have since run various multi-factor regressions and plotted the weights as a side chart, similar to the ones you see on that page. Vaccinations older than a few weeks inhibit both cases and deaths (so they did help against transmission, anything else would be absurd), but
new vaccinations promote cases.
We can see this in the beginning of every wave, but nowhere as clearly as during Delta, simply because Delta stood alone and imprinting affects the growth factors of each variant differently. Delta cases approximated total cases, so the situation during the B.1.617.2 (+AY.3) wave was pretty simple. For other waves it's harder to see, since the CDC are not releasing state-level variant data.
BA.2 is pretty clear also, but the dynamics are completely different from Delta. Boosting children boosted BA.2's growth advantage.
I dare say you are not appreciating the complexity of the situation, but I understand we won't be getting very far in terms of discussing this when the first thing you can think of is calling other people insane...
If you ased me, I'd say it would be insane to assume vaccinations had no impact on variant prevalence. Vaccinations will always affect variant-specific growth advantages. What needs to be determined is how exactly these growth advantages changed with each campaign, defined by age group and dose series.
There are multiple reasons why I do not find the summer 2021 US waves even potentially illustrative of vaccine enhancement.
1 Rates of first-vax in summer are just downstream of rates of unvaxxed in summer. You have more unvaxxed, you have more first-vaxxers, ie late adopters.
In the context of a product just being made available months before, this is an inevitable and inextricable linkage that requires rational, logical assessment to contextualize. You cannot point at the "association" and ignore the context; this only accomplishes the feat of mathematically rediscovering what everyone already knows about summer 2021 to begin with. If what everyone already knows doesn't reveal anything about a fifth column of secret partially vaccinated getting sick, infecting others, and dying - i.e. if we were all there and didn't see it happen - then neither can mathematically rediscovering what everyone already knows demonstrate the same. You do not "appreciate complexity" by ignoring context and confounding and just cramming things into math formulas.
2 Additionally, it's just cherry-picking. When you are using "associations" as evidence you cannot just use one place and one time. Every other place and time that fails to replicate your "association" is evidence that it is in fact just a coincidence from random chance and/or contextual factors (in this case, the latter).
3 When partially vaxxed case rates are actually tracked and compared to the unvaxxed, what do they show? This has only been done in a few contexts, and rarely with a reliable denominator for the unvaccinated. The trials do not show any elevation in cases in just-vaxxed vs. placebo, and they had no reason to fraud-ify this period because it wasn't even counted for efficacy. I never did the point-by-point on Craig's worry window study list but basically the evidence doesn't point toward any particular conclusion.
4 "Vaccinations will always affect variant-specific growth advantages" This is an assumption. It's widely understood as an axiom of epidemiology, but there are no axioms in epidemiology, and whether coronavirus evolution involves immune escape was never demonstrated at any point before 2020. Additionally, the 2020 VOCs are not really immune escape variants. No one got reinfected; and the vaccinated only got infected when their antibodies wore off (which meant the antibodies worked when they were high), and then not if they were boosted. So nothing about Delta would prove anything about immune escape.
Sum: These are all reasons to construct different approaches to investigating the question of vaccine enhancement than torturing the US summer 2021 wave for secret realities that no one experienced at the time.
Okay understood. You are apparently not interested in expanding on your understanding of the situation, but in promoting your own beliefs.
I won't bother to counter-argue at this point. Seen too many discussions on this in the past years. They are never going anywhere.
I should've stopped bothering as soon as I saw you call people who disagree with you "insane".
No variable I found had any impact even close to the impact new vaccinations had on new cases. They're all dominated by new vaccine doses during the initial phase of exponential growth and only regain their impact after the peak of the waves.
And btw, I never wanted to find this. I hate having found this, because nobody wants to hear it. Everyone would rather talk about cardiac issues.
Alas I'm afraid new vaccinations did drive the Q3 wave. Then old vaccinations inhibit transmission.
Premeditated murder for sure
Long term care facilities are chronically understaffed and have trouble getting meds to the patients on time, meals on time, patient care on time. Only an advocate that shows up regularly can help. But I'm also pretty sure the staff was fearful of everyone walking in the front door - thanks to the overwhelming fear campaign. In Florida in spring of 2021 I was able to visit my cousin in a long term care facility - outside on the patio - AFTER I took a "training class" prior to the visit to teach me how to behave.
“Then on 11 April the facility’s nurse practitioner called to tell them that Pop was failing; when they asked if he had Covid, she said no, heart failure”
Normally if a resident is suffering unstable heart failure they get sent to ER. They seem to have stopped doing this, and may also have curtailed services relating to feeding and hydration.
One of the purposes of restricting visitors is so they cant see the culling that occurred in some care homes. This was also done in other countries like UK. Remarkable coordination.
Fed money offered as incentives to states that went along
Same thing happened here in Australia but they don’t even need the states to agree. Aged care is the responsibility of the Federal Government.