A claim that Ivermectin works in an even simpler manner than I thought. That is, it's main effect is not that it prevents the virus from replicating (due to binding to 3CLpro and/or the N-protein) but that it prevents the formation of syncytia in the lungs because it binds to the S-protein. Those syncytia can be either erythrocytes (ie, RBCs leading to blood clots) or epithelial cells in the lungs, etc.
That action would probably prevent invasion by pneumonia causing bacteria and allow the victims lungs to function properly:
That mechanism is more compelling to me. But it's also why, for myself, I wondered if it would diminish how much my immune system reacts to spike. So it might be a tradeoff depending on age. Maybe best to fight without gloves while you still can.
Although this isn't an ideal debate method (there are much better ways), I still appreciate the back-and-forth. And, I hope you continue to respond to criticism and contention —particularly in the composed manner that you do. Thanks, Brian
What about "bad" explains why purple deviates positively from blue in the Delta era *only* in southern and midwestern states? What was different about their "bad" during only that time?
These states had surges of infection-associated deaths in the Delta era due to failures / suppression of treatment. The datasets have shown it. The "insurance working age deaths" were a reflection of this medical crime from the start. Other smart people than me refuse to point this out, so the reader needs to use their own eyes.
Thanks for compiling all of this data Brian. It does help put into perspective how each state differed in their trends. It's interesting a few had a spike in mortality right after the EUA or booster, but of course the booster's coinciding with Delta makes the data more difficult to parse due to that variable.
I am curious about the EUA timepoints for places such as California, as I believe they were one of the hardest locked-down states. So I'm curious if the removal of lockdowns due to these "highly protective" vaccines may have allowed vulnerable people to become infected. There's a ton of heterogeneity in the data so I understand why it's so difficult in getting accurate information.
Right, whether because of lockdowns or just insulation from B.1 (which hit New York via Europe), California had a light 2020. So there was more fuel for the virus. But importantly it still only killed in certain demographics, primarily LA County and inland elderly Hispanics. So "California deaths" aren't really about what "California" as a whole went through. Either way you end up with the *best* visual case for an inflection with the EUA and booster approval even though the people who are dying weren't the ones being injected, a morbidly funny accident.
Do you think we might be seeing excess deaths level off in places like NY and NJ, after November 2022, and deviate in trend from the case count, because booster uptake is dropped off? In other words covid cases rise in number but once the boosters have done their job and people who were going to die from them are dead, the deaths flatten?
So, remembering that this is just the 45-64 group (which I forgot in my other reply below), and that these are cumulative excess so they will be flat whenever weekly deaths are back to trend, I think the main thing that is happening is that the deaths flatten because Omicron is not deadly to the middle-aged. Beyond that you would need to cross-reference with cause of death codes by age to see what is happening in individual states. Are boosters actually still "preventing" (postponing) the rare middle-aged "Covid death" in northeastern states vs. low-uptake states? A lot could be going on.
Thanks. There's so much to keep track of. I didn't think of what you ask here: could boosters still be preventing the few omicron deaths in this age group, in these states.
What mess. Anyone could carelessly/unethically use the data to put forth almost any claim and then wait to be challenged. Like sunspots or the waning magnetic field of the Earth being behind the excess deaths.
Wondering how the court case from the 1/2 dozen US universities affects these graphs. I.e. They all tested the same 1500 positive PCR tests all influenza A and a lesser % B. No convid detected. That only leaves medical malpractice, failure to treat flu with antibiotics and the jib jabs.
I believe this would have to depend on the PCR test and what genes are amplified. There's a ton of crossover between different viruses and so examining one gene would not be able to differentiate between other viruses. I think if PCR is being done on only the nucleocapsid gene, for example, then that is really not a smart decision since that's one of the most conserved antigens across many viruses.
I found this interesting regarding PCR. I don't understand the technical details but the high false positive rate doesn't seem like a good thing to have in something used as the basis for society-wide suspension of civil liberties unless you are just looking for an excuse. Of course that would also taint immense amounts of follow-on data that relied on it as well.
Lack of disobedience was more the basis for suspension of civil liberties, as far as I see it. If people are going to let the news tell them the law says they can't go outside, then they won't be free.
If false positives were a big problem, you could track a group of people who were previously PCR+ and you would see they get PCR+ again at the same rate as everyone else. Instead, they are PCR+ hardly at all. Here both the Cleveland Clinic studies decisively have demonstrated that PCR works, because the people who are PCR+ the least are always the ones who were (spring 2021) previously or (summer 2022) most recently PCR+. This would be a strange phenomenon to explain if it wasn't due to infection + immunity.
False positives only "fabricate" cases when the virus isn't around, ie between waves. But in these times there is just a trickle of anyone being positive at all. Conversely, when you do get the rare PCR positive in someone who has immunity, it is more likely to be false. So both these things are base rate fallacy problems that mean you do want to be careful with results that call PCR+ in these two conditions "cases."
It is incorrect that PCR led to mistaking other things for SARS-CoV-2 infection. From the beginning, there was aggressive screening for coinfections, it was a big worry, but it turned out hardly anyone had any co-infections, or at most there was one study that might report bacteria and another rhinovirus. But either way, everyone was screening.
"Despite frequent prescription of broad-spectrum empirical antimicrobials in patients with coronavirus-associated respiratory infections, there is a paucity of data to support the association with respiratory bacterial/fungal coinfection."
I get the intellectual argument against PCR, but at this point many people are just holding on to a 3 year-old assumption that the evidence contradicts resoundingly. So the argument against lockdowns needs to be based on other things.
What's interesting is where there's a fairly sharp 'elbow' in the waves of cases between Delta and Omicron showing a cleaner changeover, but in the flattish period before, the excess deaths are outpacing cases. California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Virginia, Washington are examples.
Alabama, Texas, Florida and Georgia are pretty good counter examples, though some show a similar though more muted effect between Alpha and Delta.
The rest are a bit 'meh', maybe seasonal effects and possibly population spread caused the different variant waves to merge together.
This is just repeating an old error of not understanding that true 1st and 2nd dose >21 days ago rates include everyone in the 3rd dose group. So you need to add the buckets back together. egm is over a year behind in showing these artifacts as news.
Is there a way to get information on the average amount of time after the booster people have died? Also,is there a larger increase in death with every booster? Is there a shorter amount of time from booster until heart issues for each additional shot? I guess have to read a book on compiling statistics.
The lab studies are important just to show that early claims about zero difference in "immune response" haven't been replicated.
The Israel severe outcomes study is silly. You get survivorship bias by default. In other words, if someone is thinking about a booster and then gets an infection / PCR+, by definition, they can't get a post-booster infection. So the people getting boosters have already sailed through a lot of risk and that is why there are fewer infections in that group (though infections aren't reported, unlike in the Bar-On booster series). Only a few hundred really get the booster at the beginning of the time period and it's impossible to sort out how they fared.
👏👏👏👏💯👍. I'm very sure it is going to continue to trend up. I hope to hell it doesn't, but I think it will.
We are not at the peak effect yet. In the present and future, separating it out is going to be the hard part, and powers that be, are banking on keeping the data muddied. If we spend all our time chasing "clear data", we won't have time to pay attention to things that should not be happening- like the WHO pandemic response amendments, being voted in secret this week. See James Roguski's Substack.
*Edit: Ok so I wrote a reply last night forgetting two important things. New reply: All-age aggregate mortality would be expected to go down as the "vulnerable" who were depleted in the spike can not die again, so you get a pull-forward. 45-64, you wouldn't expect such a reversion per se.
However, it is important to keep in mind that a rolling mortality deficit has been seen in a lot of other countries, just not in most US states. Unz's whole point was to point this out - and he speculates that it is from changed behaviors resulting in fewer everyday accidents that drive deaths in the working age groups. So that is probably what is happening in those few east coast sates in 2022. They are having fewer "every day" deaths on a rolling basis.
Original reply: "It will go down when deaths are lower than trend. This is what you would "expect" after spikes in deaths that exceed normal seasonal patterns. The vulnerables are depleted. However, I think that in the modern era we have so much medical interference with the normal timing of death that even after all these "excess" deaths most places are still in "deaths debt," ie the life expectancy is being artificially prolonged beyond people's real health."
Then all but that one chart shows an ongoing health crisis, with people dying unexpectedly. It really doesn't matter if it is Covid, or the vaccines. Either way I interpret that as a failed vaccination program, and a failed health system. The vaccines were supposed to stop people dying, and they don't.
Interesting. In a quite a few states, it seems like the purple slope of excess deaths increases a little bit after EUA and a moderate slope increase following the booster. Of course, that is the same period you write "delta" as starting. But the first several weeks of Delta, no increase. Only following boosters. Hmm....excess deaths seems to tale off when omicron came out but also when omicron came out is when people stopped boosting (ie 4th booster is about 12% uptake) and many started to decline vaccines.
When Delta was happening, anyone claiming special needs could waltz into a pharmacy and get a booster even in August 21. I know several who did that, and then repeated the tactic with the new bivalent cure all.
California and Georgia are the most conspicuous for winter 20/21 deaths being disproportionate to cases. I think both (mainly in LA County in California's case, which is where all those deaths come from) might have been early adopters of doubling down on failed treatment protocols.
There's rarely increase in Delta-rectangle before the cases (light blue) uptick. But once that happens, regardless of whether before or after the booster approval, deaths go up. That's without even using a case-to-deaths offset.
This is not on topic but it is semi-related.
A claim that Ivermectin works in an even simpler manner than I thought. That is, it's main effect is not that it prevents the virus from replicating (due to binding to 3CLpro and/or the N-protein) but that it prevents the formation of syncytia in the lungs because it binds to the S-protein. Those syncytia can be either erythrocytes (ie, RBCs leading to blood clots) or epithelial cells in the lungs, etc.
That action would probably prevent invasion by pneumonia causing bacteria and allow the victims lungs to function properly:
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/ivermectins-mechanism-of-action-against
That mechanism is more compelling to me. But it's also why, for myself, I wondered if it would diminish how much my immune system reacts to spike. So it might be a tradeoff depending on age. Maybe best to fight without gloves while you still can.
Although this isn't an ideal debate method (there are much better ways), I still appreciate the back-and-forth. And, I hope you continue to respond to criticism and contention —particularly in the composed manner that you do. Thanks, Brian
Thanks for the remarks! (I did get hostile yesterday when a comment was just recycling the group-think at me!)
Why are you analyzing bad datasets?
What about "bad" explains why purple deviates positively from blue in the Delta era *only* in southern and midwestern states? What was different about their "bad" during only that time?
These states had surges of infection-associated deaths in the Delta era due to failures / suppression of treatment. The datasets have shown it. The "insurance working age deaths" were a reflection of this medical crime from the start. Other smart people than me refuse to point this out, so the reader needs to use their own eyes.
Thanks for compiling all of this data Brian. It does help put into perspective how each state differed in their trends. It's interesting a few had a spike in mortality right after the EUA or booster, but of course the booster's coinciding with Delta makes the data more difficult to parse due to that variable.
I am curious about the EUA timepoints for places such as California, as I believe they were one of the hardest locked-down states. So I'm curious if the removal of lockdowns due to these "highly protective" vaccines may have allowed vulnerable people to become infected. There's a ton of heterogeneity in the data so I understand why it's so difficult in getting accurate information.
Right, whether because of lockdowns or just insulation from B.1 (which hit New York via Europe), California had a light 2020. So there was more fuel for the virus. But importantly it still only killed in certain demographics, primarily LA County and inland elderly Hispanics. So "California deaths" aren't really about what "California" as a whole went through. Either way you end up with the *best* visual case for an inflection with the EUA and booster approval even though the people who are dying weren't the ones being injected, a morbidly funny accident.
Do you think we might be seeing excess deaths level off in places like NY and NJ, after November 2022, and deviate in trend from the case count, because booster uptake is dropped off? In other words covid cases rise in number but once the boosters have done their job and people who were going to die from them are dead, the deaths flatten?
So, remembering that this is just the 45-64 group (which I forgot in my other reply below), and that these are cumulative excess so they will be flat whenever weekly deaths are back to trend, I think the main thing that is happening is that the deaths flatten because Omicron is not deadly to the middle-aged. Beyond that you would need to cross-reference with cause of death codes by age to see what is happening in individual states. Are boosters actually still "preventing" (postponing) the rare middle-aged "Covid death" in northeastern states vs. low-uptake states? A lot could be going on.
Thanks. There's so much to keep track of. I didn't think of what you ask here: could boosters still be preventing the few omicron deaths in this age group, in these states.
What mess. Anyone could carelessly/unethically use the data to put forth almost any claim and then wait to be challenged. Like sunspots or the waning magnetic field of the Earth being behind the excess deaths.
It's time-lagged Lost episodes!
Wondering how the court case from the 1/2 dozen US universities affects these graphs. I.e. They all tested the same 1500 positive PCR tests all influenza A and a lesser % B. No convid detected. That only leaves medical malpractice, failure to treat flu with antibiotics and the jib jabs.
I believe this would have to depend on the PCR test and what genes are amplified. There's a ton of crossover between different viruses and so examining one gene would not be able to differentiate between other viruses. I think if PCR is being done on only the nucleocapsid gene, for example, then that is really not a smart decision since that's one of the most conserved antigens across many viruses.
Link? Sounds like a myth. PCR works. People thought it wouldn't, fine. Then it did. That's just how it worked out.
I found this interesting regarding PCR. I don't understand the technical details but the high false positive rate doesn't seem like a good thing to have in something used as the basis for society-wide suspension of civil liberties unless you are just looking for an excuse. Of course that would also taint immense amounts of follow-on data that relied on it as well.
https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/peer-reviewed-study-confirms-fatal
Lack of disobedience was more the basis for suspension of civil liberties, as far as I see it. If people are going to let the news tell them the law says they can't go outside, then they won't be free.
If false positives were a big problem, you could track a group of people who were previously PCR+ and you would see they get PCR+ again at the same rate as everyone else. Instead, they are PCR+ hardly at all. Here both the Cleveland Clinic studies decisively have demonstrated that PCR works, because the people who are PCR+ the least are always the ones who were (spring 2021) previously or (summer 2022) most recently PCR+. This would be a strange phenomenon to explain if it wasn't due to infection + immunity.
False positives only "fabricate" cases when the virus isn't around, ie between waves. But in these times there is just a trickle of anyone being positive at all. Conversely, when you do get the rare PCR positive in someone who has immunity, it is more likely to be false. So both these things are base rate fallacy problems that mean you do want to be careful with results that call PCR+ in these two conditions "cases."
It is incorrect that PCR led to mistaking other things for SARS-CoV-2 infection. From the beginning, there was aggressive screening for coinfections, it was a big worry, but it turned out hardly anyone had any co-infections, or at most there was one study that might report bacteria and another rhinovirus. But either way, everyone was screening.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/71/9/2459/5828058
"Despite frequent prescription of broad-spectrum empirical antimicrobials in patients with coronavirus-associated respiratory infections, there is a paucity of data to support the association with respiratory bacterial/fungal coinfection."
I get the intellectual argument against PCR, but at this point many people are just holding on to a 3 year-old assumption that the evidence contradicts resoundingly. So the argument against lockdowns needs to be based on other things.
What's interesting is where there's a fairly sharp 'elbow' in the waves of cases between Delta and Omicron showing a cleaner changeover, but in the flattish period before, the excess deaths are outpacing cases. California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Virginia, Washington are examples.
Alabama, Texas, Florida and Georgia are pretty good counter examples, though some show a similar though more muted effect between Alpha and Delta.
The rest are a bit 'meh', maybe seasonal effects and possibly population spread caused the different variant waves to merge together.
Something to check out from UK data & vax staus - https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/another-look-at-uk-all-cause-mortality?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=323914&post_id=95901339&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
This is just repeating an old error of not understanding that true 1st and 2nd dose >21 days ago rates include everyone in the 3rd dose group. So you need to add the buckets back together. egm is over a year behind in showing these artifacts as news.
Is there a way to get information on the average amount of time after the booster people have died? Also,is there a larger increase in death with every booster? Is there a shorter amount of time from booster until heart issues for each additional shot? I guess have to read a book on compiling statistics.
In the super-vaccinated UK, the ONS data set shows lower all-cause and non-Covid-19 deaths in the vaccinated and boosted up to April, 2022. In May there was a performance dip in some age groups. Then there was a data freeze, so who knows. But at least up until half a year after the approval of boosters there wasn't an obvious problem. https://unglossed.substack.com/i/95673306/why-no-one-has-noticed-the-ons-smoking-gun-before-because-it-doesnt-show-higher-mortality
One more question. How is Moderna staying out of the same spotlight Pfizer has been in?
Thanks for the link to the previous article. I missed it. Also thanks for explaining all of this in layman’s terms.
Brian what are your thoughts on Eric Topols article in praise of bivalent boosters? https://open.substack.com/pub/erictopol/p/the-bivalent-vaccine-booster-outperforms?r=7csq7&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
The lab studies are important just to show that early claims about zero difference in "immune response" haven't been replicated.
The Israel severe outcomes study is silly. You get survivorship bias by default. In other words, if someone is thinking about a booster and then gets an infection / PCR+, by definition, they can't get a post-booster infection. So the people getting boosters have already sailed through a lot of risk and that is why there are fewer infections in that group (though infections aren't reported, unlike in the Bar-On booster series). Only a few hundred really get the booster at the beginning of the time period and it's impossible to sort out how they fared.
👏👏👏👏💯👍. I'm very sure it is going to continue to trend up. I hope to hell it doesn't, but I think it will.
We are not at the peak effect yet. In the present and future, separating it out is going to be the hard part, and powers that be, are banking on keeping the data muddied. If we spend all our time chasing "clear data", we won't have time to pay attention to things that should not be happening- like the WHO pandemic response amendments, being voted in secret this week. See James Roguski's Substack.
Hark ... is that VAIDS that cometh?
Purple: Aggregate excess mortality, ages 45-64 Can never go down right? And yet it does.
*Edit: Ok so I wrote a reply last night forgetting two important things. New reply: All-age aggregate mortality would be expected to go down as the "vulnerable" who were depleted in the spike can not die again, so you get a pull-forward. 45-64, you wouldn't expect such a reversion per se.
However, it is important to keep in mind that a rolling mortality deficit has been seen in a lot of other countries, just not in most US states. Unz's whole point was to point this out - and he speculates that it is from changed behaviors resulting in fewer everyday accidents that drive deaths in the working age groups. So that is probably what is happening in those few east coast sates in 2022. They are having fewer "every day" deaths on a rolling basis.
Original reply: "It will go down when deaths are lower than trend. This is what you would "expect" after spikes in deaths that exceed normal seasonal patterns. The vulnerables are depleted. However, I think that in the modern era we have so much medical interference with the normal timing of death that even after all these "excess" deaths most places are still in "deaths debt," ie the life expectancy is being artificially prolonged beyond people's real health."
Arg. I wrote this forgetting that this post only uses 45-64's specifically to get around these kind of demographic trend paradoxes.
Then all but that one chart shows an ongoing health crisis, with people dying unexpectedly. It really doesn't matter if it is Covid, or the vaccines. Either way I interpret that as a failed vaccination program, and a failed health system. The vaccines were supposed to stop people dying, and they don't.
Right. And people in the US were frightened away from early treatments. So, tossed to the sharks of vaccine/covid.
Really good info. So it looks like Covid isn’t mild.
Interesting. In a quite a few states, it seems like the purple slope of excess deaths increases a little bit after EUA and a moderate slope increase following the booster. Of course, that is the same period you write "delta" as starting. But the first several weeks of Delta, no increase. Only following boosters. Hmm....excess deaths seems to tale off when omicron came out but also when omicron came out is when people stopped boosting (ie 4th booster is about 12% uptake) and many started to decline vaccines.
When Delta was happening, anyone claiming special needs could waltz into a pharmacy and get a booster even in August 21. I know several who did that, and then repeated the tactic with the new bivalent cure all.
California and Georgia are the most conspicuous for winter 20/21 deaths being disproportionate to cases. I think both (mainly in LA County in California's case, which is where all those deaths come from) might have been early adopters of doubling down on failed treatment protocols.
There's rarely increase in Delta-rectangle before the cases (light blue) uptick. But once that happens, regardless of whether before or after the booster approval, deaths go up. That's without even using a case-to-deaths offset.