Hmmm, weird things happening in the world of vaccination.
So, they claim this guy in Germany got 217 Covid vaccines and shows no bad effects so it is fine if you get 10 or 20 or 30 or whatever the CDC decides today's number is. Lots of discussion on Xitter:
The MSM has jumped all over it. Big Pharma must have been feeling the reduction in sales really bad if they are now ramping up the following: "See, that guy got 217 and is fine. It really is safe!"
1. Dr. Kory and some nurses pointed out, that it was a very rigid software system to classify patients. E.G. shot taken elsewhere had to be put manually in the system, on other page than the initial classification. This defaulted too often to "unvaccinated". A study looking at this found, that 44% of unvaxed were in fact vaxed. US hospital studies or cdc/fda studies I take with a can of salt.
2. I started following british ONS late 2021. The rates of vaxed/unvaxed were like 2% / 1% infections. With omicron, I was waiting for it, first january report had numbers like 6%/2%, so both relative and absolute difference exploded. Worst were faring the 40/49 years olds, but this shifted towards younger with omicron. Numbers are 4 week rolling average, so the actual change is more dramatic!
3. The Alberta graphical data, covered by Igor, showed that almost 50% of reinfection happened 14 days after 1st shot. This 2 weeks was typically omitted or labeled "unvaxed", in written Alberta data and in Pfizer trials as well as their first 6 weeks reporting to fda. The second vax breakthru infections peaked at month 5,6,7, so the window of observation is very important, most often too short. As in pfizer trials, they conveniently unblinded just before month 5...
4. Alberta showed also hospitalizations and deaths, with visible correlations to the above infections, but without unvaxed comparison group.
5. Most reliable excess death data comes from life expectancy. In the USA -3 years, in my country -2 months, starting july 21, 6 months after rollout. The same with all european countries, I mean the starting time point relative to rollout. These larger excess death models are exactly that: exact observation - modelled baseline = modelled excess. Even if life expectancy is adjusted every year, the change is still visible. Expectancy goes down most effectively, when middle aged people start dying more. Also, if above expectancy -oldies start dying faster, the average glides backwards. Dowds work on acturies tells the story, also regarding the vast amounts of recently handicapped.
6. The first 4 weeks in VAERS dec 20 - jan 21, was equivalent with a norm year with 50 000 reports. With a fraction of old norm year's shots. The first report from pfizer to fda on international and US reports to them, 6 weeks from the start, 40 000 reports which surpriced them. Both ended up adding some 2000 more accountants to label these reports. This seemed to be the biggest problem; to be able to label and report. How about the context, please?
7. the app Vsafe showed 7% getting medical help after shot, at doctor or in hospital, in a tight timeframe (donot remember). Fixed options for problems in the form did not reveal that much, and the free text is becoming available... How to describe a catastrofe, this is it.
The situation with hospitalizations is like assessing statin with CVD only; mild improvement, but no overall benefit, maybe replace CVD with cancer in the death certificate.
I do regret deeply my pfoison pfinjection and moderna shit as a second. I developed fever, my pulse was 10 ticks higher for a month, did not understand just wondering then. And these were reported on the pfizer report to fda as well. So now we know the myocarditis danger, I have yet to check with that. By the way, seeing the alberta data and knowing the inviting effect of omicron for the vaxed, I predicted 6 moths for breakthru infection. Spot on, easter 22 I got it for one "hot and sweaty" day in the bed.
RE 1, usually I stay away from US data, but ok here I am taking this hospital study because Berenson wants to present a backwards interpretation to the reader. So, this idea that the vaccinated are being misclassified by hospitals, actually it usually isn't relevant to published US statistics or studies, because they use the local health system to classify vaccine status - it doesn't matter what the hospital inputs. But here it is the hospital's paper, and I don't know if they are using their own records or what. But as long as misclassification is occurring randomly, all this would mean is that some old, high-comorbidity vaccinated were counted as unvaccinated - diluting the difference between the vaccinated (old, high-comorbidity) and unvaccinated (more variety of ages and comorbidity). Only if there is a bias in misclassification would there be a problem, because maybe the vaccinated weren't really different from the unvaccinated. One, this seems like a low probability; two, hypothetical inaccuracy doesn't really change the question of "what is the data shown in this paper, what is a natural conclusion from this data, vs. what is the data that Berenson showed, what is a conclusion that is flipped around to fit Berenson's dogma." My first choice would have been not to discuss this paper at all.
2 I believe you mean the UKHS. The ONS uses a more restrictive unvaccinated denominator. It's possible, or I would say certain, that the UKHS unvaccinated denominator was too big and so the resulting per- infection rates were just wrong math. It is hard to square the idea that the unvaccinated were being infected half as much with serosurveys and verbal surveys which those who hopped on with boosters had barely any infections by mid-2022, unlike the unvaccinated or 2-dose-only. (In the latter case, you have a lot of people who get infected before booster, so they don't want a booster, because they see no more point to it.)
You go to Germany in mid-2022, more than half of people surveyed in an ER (for unrelated stuff), almost all of whom are vaxxed, say they still have not yet had their first infection. Very few reported multiple infections among the ever-infected - https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-germany-impaired-immunity-study. So this doesn't square with negative efficacy. Similar results in surveys by Nash, et al. This isn't the UK, but the idea here is lets say that Germany had been reporting higher infection rates for the vaxxed for two years, but then find out in mid-2022 that over half of vaxxed are still not yet infected - so the imaginary report wasn't telling you what was really happening. So yes, sometimes one does need to cherry pick comparisons with the vaxxed and unvaxxed, because some comparisons 1) don't build a working model with other observations 2) make choices that are clearly unreliable (defining uv denominator as census minus v).
3 The Alberta data and similar don't have an unvaccinated comparison. So, you have this hump and then a long tail. The null assumption is that if the unvaccinated were plotted (converted to a rate) they would just be a solid bar at the height of the apex of the hump. The vaccine isn't doing anything in the first 14 days except introducing a bit of bias for no actual current infections (currently sick people don't get the vax). Pfizer didn't omit this data except in the sense that it doesn't go into the efficacy math. It's still in the raw data. In fact, a point I make repeatedly, Pfizer would have met efficacy end-points weeks earlier if they had just tracked from the first dose day 0. Because there was no negative efficacy ("worry window") anywhere https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-worry-window-is-not-real-post
5 If the point is that life expectancy is powered by more middle-aged deaths, many highly-vaccinated countries had below-trend working-age deaths in 2021, 2022. This in fact is precisely what I mean by vaccine harms "not being in the statistics." The deaths just aren't there. Dowd I believe is just pretending not to see the signal that when the deaths *are* there, as in the US, they correspond to the virus, and to less vaccinated states and countries. I have discussed https://unglossed.substack.com/p/american-excess-mortality-does-not
6 and 7 VAERS were built to fail, and they failed. I trawled a lot of VAERS reports, a big driver was breakthrough infection, which shows the priorities of healthcare personnel who didn't care about medical harms.
I am glad the pulse elevation resolved relatively quickly. I wasn't able to get down to 60 for most of early 2022; don't know 100% if that was related to Omicron or just disruption to exercise routine or whatever.
This data is rather clean, they kept covid away by "hermit strategy ". They could vaccinate BEFORE omicron late 2021. The hospitals started filling up immediately, 1000 per month was 25 to 50 times the background noice (Influenza vax mostly) , per dose or per person. 60% were serious. Covid cases for the full year were ca 1000.
So the bradford-hill & co lung cancer epidemiology was ca 30 times to non-smokers. We are in the same Ball Park in here.
Rebekah has link to the official report. The massive hospital fill-up was steady until omicron arrived 6 months later. They were fully vaxed and boosted, which only had negative meaning (as with english data).
In case the vax saved from serious illness, before that we had "lung cancer moment" in 6 months, filling the hospitals in the absense of covid. Clean data.
Berenson has to keep at it. It's what his subscribers demand. Being paid to be right, or tell the truth, is an inherently dangerous position to be in. As for most of the rest of covid-skepticism I explained it well here,
'Some people make their decisions on analytical criteria, ‘What is the truth about this? What is the real nature of the matter in question?’ and we pride ourselves on our commitment to truth and our separation from ‘the masses’. And it seems to be an immutable fact of human nature that the majority of people make their decisions on aesthetic criteria, ‘how does it look? how does it feel?’ and this can run the gamut from the utterly superficial who are simply cast adrift on the opinions of those around them to those who ‘know themselves’ and come to a more or less integrated and complete whole. It should be pointed out that such people are often startlingly insightful and shrewd. That is only startling because the analytical thinkers have managed to claim the moral and social high ground, because what is uncommon is often able to claim superiority though, in fact, it depends on the common in more situations than the common depends on it.
The analytical thinker is often ‘high IQ’, and we should stop briefly to consider why the Analytical generally are so much easier to fool, especially in the case at hand of the Plandemic. Intelligence is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, the ability to rapidly integrate what is new into the way that you think and act. The Moving Truth at the heart of modern society has grossly exaggerated the importance of this ability from its historic usefullness. So, the Analytical have taken to heart the great lesson of our society-’Compliance brings reward’ and have focused on complying in such a way as to maximize their reward, thus creating a strong bias to comply. The Aesthetic have learned a different lesson, that even if they comply they are usually cheated out of their reward, thus creating a strong bias to not comply. But in an increasingly evil and deranged society noncompliance is much more likely to be the correct response, but most of the Analytical are not as smart as they think that they are and have not caught up to that yet.' from my 'almost as inflammatory as Brian' Why Abortions should be performed in Backalleys with Coathangers. https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/why-abortions-should-be-performed
Our society has created a permanent underclass based on cognitive function. We have streamlined society for people who think in one particular way among many with corresponding obstacles for people who think in other ways. So, analytical thinkers have become biased towards compliance and all other thinkers have become biased towards non-compliance. This is why the same set of people are skeptical and non-compliant on almost every issue, because they have learned that society is rigged against them. When society was on a bit of an upswing, the compliant were right more often than they had reason to be and now that society is a steaming pile of filth the non-compliant enjoy all of the advantages. But in either case we must strive to move beyond bias in either direction to considering the truth.
This also resembles Scott Adams' "you were right" heuristic from last year. And I think some intelligent people who are heterodox on mainstream topics, they are allergic to conspiracy theories, and allergic to distrust of science, purely as a reaction to the fact that these ways of thinking are "low class." True, conspiratorial thinking is associated with negative life experiences - what does this have to do with whether it is right or wrong? But "dress for the part," as they say. So this was how Bret Weinstein (regardless of whether he is an op or swindler or what) became such a pariah in his own circle when he questioned the vaccines.
But I think this is also all a bit particular to the post-War/post-Nuremburg world where an entire half of the political and ethical spectrum became gradually delegitimized and ghettoized. So you have two generations of smart people, experts, who have grown up insulated from real history, can't imagine the world not being what it says on the label.
It honestly feels as if the COVID skeptic side is in a precarious position. It doesn't seem like much headway is being made regarding any reconciliation over the mass vaccinations and the adverse events. Because of this there seems to be some strange scramble going on, with lots of infighting and a need to hark on points that seem rather moot at this point. What utility is there to pushing the idea of no efficacy, vaccine shedding, or things like that at this point when there are likely to be better points to be made?
This is probably why we are seeing this surge in fringe ideas or conspiracies, or even absurd claims being taken as fact. It's weird to see all of these things happening, and yet it's a likely consequence of any movement that may fizzle out and needs to find a way to sustain itself, because irrespective of the comments suggesting "we are winning" I really don't see much of anything happening any time soon.
There were never any wins to be had from the skeptic side besides "the vaccines were going to kill or sterilize everyone who got them and now you are survivor." That didn't happen. People want to pretend that "the vaccines didn't work" is a consolation prize, when in reality the mainstream / normies don't even care about the question anymore. But, in fact, the vaccines reduced severe disease.
As I wrote in my severe efficacy post, the real problem here is that you obviously wouldn't want to roll the dice on "everyone takes this new untested medicine" over and over, so in fact, "scary virus" is stupid reason to do it even once.
It's funny to consider that the initial comments were always around the limited trials and the idea of bodily autonomy, only for people to fall down all of these rabbit holes. Irrespective of whether these vaccines were safe and effective it was always about people being given the choice and not have it be mandated. But it seems the only approach that one can take that afford some degree of sustainability is to take a reactionary, contrarian position, so any point argued in favor of vaccines has to be rebutted even if the evidence used isn't that great.
It's inability to see the bigger picture. 1. Look scary virus better shut down society. 2. Look this thing protect against virus. 3. I don't want thing, but scary virus scary - thing don't work!
Not safe BUT effective? This argument holds in my view ONLY if you see the SARS-Cov-2 illness as a true Pandemic AND a Viral one whatever the source.
Firstly the supposed rampant infections spreading over the earth narrative arising in early 2020 just does NOT stand up to challenge.
Secondly the Viral nature ONLY holds so long as you accept the belief, yes it is a belief, that Viruses are infectious pathological entities invading cells to replicate and transmissible from one to another living biological entity in particular within a species. This narrative too is problematic and like religion and political philosophies, largely holds together ONLY within itself. Challenge any piece and all too often the evidence is lacking to support the claims.
The COVID-19 injectibles have been extremely effective not in curing, minimizing or preventing illness but for quite the opposite. They kill and maim in deliberately randomized ways (e.g. lot/batch variability) as intended as a weapon of war and are setting the battlefield for the next deployment, Wireless Radiation.
Like you say, this comes down to the initial, too good to be true, repeated ad nauseum claims of ~95% generalised efficacy (back then there was rarely a distinction made between infection/hospitalisation/death healthy/young, young/old).
To break it down (because it is somewhat non-linear and oft misunderstood): 95% efficacy equates to a 1:~20 växxed:unvaxxed risk ratio i.e. vaxxed should be ~20 times less likely than unvaxxed to get infected/hospitalises/die. Real world data very quickly showed effectiveness was vastly less against infection, much less against hospitalisation, and also less against death.
Your example calculation of ~70% efficacy (under 60's population) based on Israeli data, equates to a ratio of 1:~3 I.e. vaxxed were ~3 times less likely to be hospitalised.
Hospitalisation for a middle-aged person going from 20 times less likely to only 3 times less likely is a very considerable loss of effectiveness, and, to play pharma's "trick" of highlighting relative risk reductions: this represents an ~85% relative reduction in the relative risks (advertised relative risk ratio 1:~20, real world relative risk ratio 1:~3)
Keeping in mind that theses were relative risk ratios, we'd need to know the absolute risk before we can consider the actual absolute risk reduction benefit.
I know, I know, Brian will say I am stuck in their paradigm, and the mandates were unconsciable regardless, but I just wanted to restate that numbers did not justify mandates even if Brian has shown Berensons inflated claims (mirroring? the Pharma MSM) are untenable.
My stance on absolute vs. relative isn't so much that it inflates the value - obviously it can only prevent the cases that would occur, so it makes sense to measure efficacy against that denominator (the unvax case rate) - but rather, I try to keep emphasis on more wholistic risk logic. "No individual is actually likely to be in danger, and if you are so unlucky as to be in danger, guess what, 1/3 to 1/5 chance you still have a severe case anyway. So the overall chance of benefiting is very small for everyone."
Great article as usual, I guess most of Berensons audience are polarized to thinking the vaxx cannot be of any benefit, and so he must find evidence for them to confirm their biases.
What's interesting to me is the rationale behind widely mass vaxxing regardless of risk, to 'prevent more serious/vaxx evading variants.' This to me is more about preserving the need for the vaxx, rather than allowing nature to take it's course with milder variants in the long run.
It seems patently obvious on reflection, but the covidian mainstream cannot allow themselves to see the 'mistake' let alone admit to it. The zero covid 'expert' busybodies should have seen that it was a very poor candidate for elimination and eradication, but could not permit themselves to.
Since a long long time long ago when medicine was essentially quackery, there has been strong 'intervention bias' for any treatment, and these days the regulatory approval bodies and public heath are by no means an exception. In being unable to resist, some of the quackery continues to this very day, so let the patients beware, proper evidence is your friend. :-)
I think Berenson is just motivated by the fact that he said in advance that mRNA wouldn't work (his T Cells told him, I guess). And reality for him just reshapes itself to this belief. Additionally, I would guess he supports the meta logic that if severe efficacy is real, everyone should take them. I don't, so I have no problem acknowledging what the evidence says on this point.
The experts' flirtation with eradication and herd immunity were a very interesting part of 2021. In the end I don't think the vaccines did anything as far as pressure on the virus, because after all they didn't stop infection long term. If you let the virus replicate regardless of any particular mutation then you can't exert selection pressure. Only after a lot of people had natural immunity, did immune escape seem to be driving mutations, this is starting late 2022 when you have different Omicron offshoots choosing the same RBD mutations simultaneously.
Brian I also want to add my support. It hasn't always been comfortable having my biases challenged or disproven by you but it has always been beneficial. Being able to honestly debate with the pro-vaccine side strengthens the arguments against the censorship, the mandates, and the experimental nature of the vaccine. People will often dismiss all of one's rguments if they detect one they believe is patently false. (Similar to the "poisoning the well tactic").
I agree. Of course, the mainstream, normal people who took the vaccine, they have basically memory-holed the whole subject at this point. But if it were still a subject that people were discussing, of course it would be helpful if not necessary not to be in an alternate reality on severe efficacy. "Yes I agree with your fact about severe efficacy, but not the decision you made based on it. Here is why."
So this is about efficacy that is apparently better than most anti-vaxxers think.. But do you then also think that the vaccine injuries are not so bad?
Vaccine injuries are bad anecdotally. I don't dismiss the anecdotes - I personally know people with bad experiences. But statistically, it doesn't seem like there was much short term evidence (e.g. elevated cardiac deaths correspond to the virus rather than vaccine rollout https://unglossed.substack.com/p/checking-back-on-us-cardiac-deaths). The biggest thing of all is that medium term doesn't seem as bad as I thought it would be about 15 months ago. There were a lot of young sudden deaths in summer 2022 but this trend didn't worsen.
I am now living with a bad anecdote. Got the vax and later had ischemic stroke. Blood clot in the brain. Wheelchairing it now, aphasia too. Won't show up in Vaers. Probably a coincidence. Big win for big pharma however, she now takes a fistful of pills twice a day. And no, they don't keep the doctor away.
Neighbor got bad case of shingles after second shot. Remarkably, blamed himself for not getting the Shingles vaccine!
Stillborn baby was a crushing blow to a co-workers daughter and her husband.
Husband of former co-worker in the hospital for 89 days with Guillain Barre.
But wasn't there evidence from Israel that the number of ambulance calls for heart issues increased, correlated to the roll out of the jab? Or was this also wrongly interpreted data?
Perhaps. I also remember some stories about record numbers of miscarriages in Israel. The problem is, the population is increasing, it is a small urbanized country, so in fact you should expect that healthcare utilization is always higher than any previous year in absolute counts. You need to account for the trend.
Nothing convincing ever came out of any of the data that I saw, and for excess mortality in non-elderly a lot of the most heavily vaccinated countries were negative (lower than previous trend deaths).
This claim does not make sense in terms of lower hospitalizations on either absolute, per-capita-alive, or per-infection terms. Alive vaccinated people cannot be protected by dead ones.
Absolute blind fool or propagandist? Go back to Pfizer. Tell them you failed on Substack. Keep the money. The rest will be distributed among survivors.
A dislike of being lied to. There are people who simply won't cooperate with people who are lying to them. I find that to be understandable. It's both a moral and an aesthetic thing. Christ is Truth; Satan is the Father of Lies, if you want to put it in religious terms. If a person is lying to you then they are starting from a wrong basis and can't be trusted and should not be rewarded with obedience. That is not contrarianism.
Don't want to derail this substack, but /some/ of the Ukraine contrarianism may be down to the 2014 Maiden 'revolution' (overthrow of a democratically elected government) when Victoria Nuland and John McCain got somehow involved soon after and so gave it a strong whiff of deep state involvement (but! the cookies!)
That said it shouldn't be polarising to the extent that Ukraine shouldn't get military aid, trouble is they need a *lot* of suitable battlefield weapons, not just hi tech weapons for strikes that generate headlines but don't move the front line a single centimetre...
There were lots more open minded readers in skeptic substack in 2021. They fell off throughout 2022 and most new subs I get are quite disconnected from non-comic-book data on the shots. I don’t mind riling them up. This blog will just continue to be focused on producing reader value, not reader ego stroking…
Hmmm, weird things happening in the world of vaccination.
So, they claim this guy in Germany got 217 Covid vaccines and shows no bad effects so it is fine if you get 10 or 20 or 30 or whatever the CDC decides today's number is. Lots of discussion on Xitter:
https://twitter.com/WeeklyRich/status/1765624599956668817
How does someone get 48 shots in one month?
The MSM has jumped all over it. Big Pharma must have been feeling the reduction in sales really bad if they are now ramping up the following: "See, that guy got 217 and is fine. It really is safe!"
Hi, some thoughts on this.
1. Dr. Kory and some nurses pointed out, that it was a very rigid software system to classify patients. E.G. shot taken elsewhere had to be put manually in the system, on other page than the initial classification. This defaulted too often to "unvaccinated". A study looking at this found, that 44% of unvaxed were in fact vaxed. US hospital studies or cdc/fda studies I take with a can of salt.
2. I started following british ONS late 2021. The rates of vaxed/unvaxed were like 2% / 1% infections. With omicron, I was waiting for it, first january report had numbers like 6%/2%, so both relative and absolute difference exploded. Worst were faring the 40/49 years olds, but this shifted towards younger with omicron. Numbers are 4 week rolling average, so the actual change is more dramatic!
3. The Alberta graphical data, covered by Igor, showed that almost 50% of reinfection happened 14 days after 1st shot. This 2 weeks was typically omitted or labeled "unvaxed", in written Alberta data and in Pfizer trials as well as their first 6 weeks reporting to fda. The second vax breakthru infections peaked at month 5,6,7, so the window of observation is very important, most often too short. As in pfizer trials, they conveniently unblinded just before month 5...
4. Alberta showed also hospitalizations and deaths, with visible correlations to the above infections, but without unvaxed comparison group.
5. Most reliable excess death data comes from life expectancy. In the USA -3 years, in my country -2 months, starting july 21, 6 months after rollout. The same with all european countries, I mean the starting time point relative to rollout. These larger excess death models are exactly that: exact observation - modelled baseline = modelled excess. Even if life expectancy is adjusted every year, the change is still visible. Expectancy goes down most effectively, when middle aged people start dying more. Also, if above expectancy -oldies start dying faster, the average glides backwards. Dowds work on acturies tells the story, also regarding the vast amounts of recently handicapped.
6. The first 4 weeks in VAERS dec 20 - jan 21, was equivalent with a norm year with 50 000 reports. With a fraction of old norm year's shots. The first report from pfizer to fda on international and US reports to them, 6 weeks from the start, 40 000 reports which surpriced them. Both ended up adding some 2000 more accountants to label these reports. This seemed to be the biggest problem; to be able to label and report. How about the context, please?
7. the app Vsafe showed 7% getting medical help after shot, at doctor or in hospital, in a tight timeframe (donot remember). Fixed options for problems in the form did not reveal that much, and the free text is becoming available... How to describe a catastrofe, this is it.
The situation with hospitalizations is like assessing statin with CVD only; mild improvement, but no overall benefit, maybe replace CVD with cancer in the death certificate.
I do regret deeply my pfoison pfinjection and moderna shit as a second. I developed fever, my pulse was 10 ticks higher for a month, did not understand just wondering then. And these were reported on the pfizer report to fda as well. So now we know the myocarditis danger, I have yet to check with that. By the way, seeing the alberta data and knowing the inviting effect of omicron for the vaxed, I predicted 6 moths for breakthru infection. Spot on, easter 22 I got it for one "hot and sweaty" day in the bed.
JR
RE 1, usually I stay away from US data, but ok here I am taking this hospital study because Berenson wants to present a backwards interpretation to the reader. So, this idea that the vaccinated are being misclassified by hospitals, actually it usually isn't relevant to published US statistics or studies, because they use the local health system to classify vaccine status - it doesn't matter what the hospital inputs. But here it is the hospital's paper, and I don't know if they are using their own records or what. But as long as misclassification is occurring randomly, all this would mean is that some old, high-comorbidity vaccinated were counted as unvaccinated - diluting the difference between the vaccinated (old, high-comorbidity) and unvaccinated (more variety of ages and comorbidity). Only if there is a bias in misclassification would there be a problem, because maybe the vaccinated weren't really different from the unvaccinated. One, this seems like a low probability; two, hypothetical inaccuracy doesn't really change the question of "what is the data shown in this paper, what is a natural conclusion from this data, vs. what is the data that Berenson showed, what is a conclusion that is flipped around to fit Berenson's dogma." My first choice would have been not to discuss this paper at all.
2 I believe you mean the UKHS. The ONS uses a more restrictive unvaccinated denominator. It's possible, or I would say certain, that the UKHS unvaccinated denominator was too big and so the resulting per- infection rates were just wrong math. It is hard to square the idea that the unvaccinated were being infected half as much with serosurveys and verbal surveys which those who hopped on with boosters had barely any infections by mid-2022, unlike the unvaccinated or 2-dose-only. (In the latter case, you have a lot of people who get infected before booster, so they don't want a booster, because they see no more point to it.)
You go to Germany in mid-2022, more than half of people surveyed in an ER (for unrelated stuff), almost all of whom are vaxxed, say they still have not yet had their first infection. Very few reported multiple infections among the ever-infected - https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-germany-impaired-immunity-study. So this doesn't square with negative efficacy. Similar results in surveys by Nash, et al. This isn't the UK, but the idea here is lets say that Germany had been reporting higher infection rates for the vaxxed for two years, but then find out in mid-2022 that over half of vaxxed are still not yet infected - so the imaginary report wasn't telling you what was really happening. So yes, sometimes one does need to cherry pick comparisons with the vaxxed and unvaxxed, because some comparisons 1) don't build a working model with other observations 2) make choices that are clearly unreliable (defining uv denominator as census minus v).
3 The Alberta data and similar don't have an unvaccinated comparison. So, you have this hump and then a long tail. The null assumption is that if the unvaccinated were plotted (converted to a rate) they would just be a solid bar at the height of the apex of the hump. The vaccine isn't doing anything in the first 14 days except introducing a bit of bias for no actual current infections (currently sick people don't get the vax). Pfizer didn't omit this data except in the sense that it doesn't go into the efficacy math. It's still in the raw data. In fact, a point I make repeatedly, Pfizer would have met efficacy end-points weeks earlier if they had just tracked from the first dose day 0. Because there was no negative efficacy ("worry window") anywhere https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-worry-window-is-not-real-post
5 If the point is that life expectancy is powered by more middle-aged deaths, many highly-vaccinated countries had below-trend working-age deaths in 2021, 2022. This in fact is precisely what I mean by vaccine harms "not being in the statistics." The deaths just aren't there. Dowd I believe is just pretending not to see the signal that when the deaths *are* there, as in the US, they correspond to the virus, and to less vaccinated states and countries. I have discussed https://unglossed.substack.com/p/american-excess-mortality-does-not
6 and 7 VAERS were built to fail, and they failed. I trawled a lot of VAERS reports, a big driver was breakthrough infection, which shows the priorities of healthcare personnel who didn't care about medical harms.
I am glad the pulse elevation resolved relatively quickly. I wasn't able to get down to 60 for most of early 2022; don't know 100% if that was related to Omicron or just disruption to exercise routine or whatever.
Thank you for this comprehensive response.
Let me add hospital related data from western Australia. Hermit...
https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/west-australian-government-finally
This data is rather clean, they kept covid away by "hermit strategy ". They could vaccinate BEFORE omicron late 2021. The hospitals started filling up immediately, 1000 per month was 25 to 50 times the background noice (Influenza vax mostly) , per dose or per person. 60% were serious. Covid cases for the full year were ca 1000.
So the bradford-hill & co lung cancer epidemiology was ca 30 times to non-smokers. We are in the same Ball Park in here.
Rebekah has link to the official report. The massive hospital fill-up was steady until omicron arrived 6 months later. They were fully vaxed and boosted, which only had negative meaning (as with english data).
In case the vax saved from serious illness, before that we had "lung cancer moment" in 6 months, filling the hospitals in the absense of covid. Clean data.
Never again, I was vax neutral. 3 years ago.
JR
Berenson has to keep at it. It's what his subscribers demand. Being paid to be right, or tell the truth, is an inherently dangerous position to be in. As for most of the rest of covid-skepticism I explained it well here,
'Some people make their decisions on analytical criteria, ‘What is the truth about this? What is the real nature of the matter in question?’ and we pride ourselves on our commitment to truth and our separation from ‘the masses’. And it seems to be an immutable fact of human nature that the majority of people make their decisions on aesthetic criteria, ‘how does it look? how does it feel?’ and this can run the gamut from the utterly superficial who are simply cast adrift on the opinions of those around them to those who ‘know themselves’ and come to a more or less integrated and complete whole. It should be pointed out that such people are often startlingly insightful and shrewd. That is only startling because the analytical thinkers have managed to claim the moral and social high ground, because what is uncommon is often able to claim superiority though, in fact, it depends on the common in more situations than the common depends on it.
The analytical thinker is often ‘high IQ’, and we should stop briefly to consider why the Analytical generally are so much easier to fool, especially in the case at hand of the Plandemic. Intelligence is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, the ability to rapidly integrate what is new into the way that you think and act. The Moving Truth at the heart of modern society has grossly exaggerated the importance of this ability from its historic usefullness. So, the Analytical have taken to heart the great lesson of our society-’Compliance brings reward’ and have focused on complying in such a way as to maximize their reward, thus creating a strong bias to comply. The Aesthetic have learned a different lesson, that even if they comply they are usually cheated out of their reward, thus creating a strong bias to not comply. But in an increasingly evil and deranged society noncompliance is much more likely to be the correct response, but most of the Analytical are not as smart as they think that they are and have not caught up to that yet.' from my 'almost as inflammatory as Brian' Why Abortions should be performed in Backalleys with Coathangers. https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/why-abortions-should-be-performed
Our society has created a permanent underclass based on cognitive function. We have streamlined society for people who think in one particular way among many with corresponding obstacles for people who think in other ways. So, analytical thinkers have become biased towards compliance and all other thinkers have become biased towards non-compliance. This is why the same set of people are skeptical and non-compliant on almost every issue, because they have learned that society is rigged against them. When society was on a bit of an upswing, the compliant were right more often than they had reason to be and now that society is a steaming pile of filth the non-compliant enjoy all of the advantages. But in either case we must strive to move beyond bias in either direction to considering the truth.
This also resembles Scott Adams' "you were right" heuristic from last year. And I think some intelligent people who are heterodox on mainstream topics, they are allergic to conspiracy theories, and allergic to distrust of science, purely as a reaction to the fact that these ways of thinking are "low class." True, conspiratorial thinking is associated with negative life experiences - what does this have to do with whether it is right or wrong? But "dress for the part," as they say. So this was how Bret Weinstein (regardless of whether he is an op or swindler or what) became such a pariah in his own circle when he questioned the vaccines.
But I think this is also all a bit particular to the post-War/post-Nuremburg world where an entire half of the political and ethical spectrum became gradually delegitimized and ghettoized. So you have two generations of smart people, experts, who have grown up insulated from real history, can't imagine the world not being what it says on the label.
It honestly feels as if the COVID skeptic side is in a precarious position. It doesn't seem like much headway is being made regarding any reconciliation over the mass vaccinations and the adverse events. Because of this there seems to be some strange scramble going on, with lots of infighting and a need to hark on points that seem rather moot at this point. What utility is there to pushing the idea of no efficacy, vaccine shedding, or things like that at this point when there are likely to be better points to be made?
This is probably why we are seeing this surge in fringe ideas or conspiracies, or even absurd claims being taken as fact. It's weird to see all of these things happening, and yet it's a likely consequence of any movement that may fizzle out and needs to find a way to sustain itself, because irrespective of the comments suggesting "we are winning" I really don't see much of anything happening any time soon.
There were never any wins to be had from the skeptic side besides "the vaccines were going to kill or sterilize everyone who got them and now you are survivor." That didn't happen. People want to pretend that "the vaccines didn't work" is a consolation prize, when in reality the mainstream / normies don't even care about the question anymore. But, in fact, the vaccines reduced severe disease.
As I wrote in my severe efficacy post, the real problem here is that you obviously wouldn't want to roll the dice on "everyone takes this new untested medicine" over and over, so in fact, "scary virus" is stupid reason to do it even once.
Surviving Bidens winter of severe illness and death two years ago seems like a win to me.
It's funny to consider that the initial comments were always around the limited trials and the idea of bodily autonomy, only for people to fall down all of these rabbit holes. Irrespective of whether these vaccines were safe and effective it was always about people being given the choice and not have it be mandated. But it seems the only approach that one can take that afford some degree of sustainability is to take a reactionary, contrarian position, so any point argued in favor of vaccines has to be rebutted even if the evidence used isn't that great.
It's inability to see the bigger picture. 1. Look scary virus better shut down society. 2. Look this thing protect against virus. 3. I don't want thing, but scary virus scary - thing don't work!
No. Thing work, Virus isn't scary.
Not safe BUT effective? This argument holds in my view ONLY if you see the SARS-Cov-2 illness as a true Pandemic AND a Viral one whatever the source.
Firstly the supposed rampant infections spreading over the earth narrative arising in early 2020 just does NOT stand up to challenge.
Secondly the Viral nature ONLY holds so long as you accept the belief, yes it is a belief, that Viruses are infectious pathological entities invading cells to replicate and transmissible from one to another living biological entity in particular within a species. This narrative too is problematic and like religion and political philosophies, largely holds together ONLY within itself. Challenge any piece and all too often the evidence is lacking to support the claims.
The COVID-19 injectibles have been extremely effective not in curing, minimizing or preventing illness but for quite the opposite. They kill and maim in deliberately randomized ways (e.g. lot/batch variability) as intended as a weapon of war and are setting the battlefield for the next deployment, Wireless Radiation.
Like you say, this comes down to the initial, too good to be true, repeated ad nauseum claims of ~95% generalised efficacy (back then there was rarely a distinction made between infection/hospitalisation/death healthy/young, young/old).
To break it down (because it is somewhat non-linear and oft misunderstood): 95% efficacy equates to a 1:~20 växxed:unvaxxed risk ratio i.e. vaxxed should be ~20 times less likely than unvaxxed to get infected/hospitalises/die. Real world data very quickly showed effectiveness was vastly less against infection, much less against hospitalisation, and also less against death.
Your example calculation of ~70% efficacy (under 60's population) based on Israeli data, equates to a ratio of 1:~3 I.e. vaxxed were ~3 times less likely to be hospitalised.
Hospitalisation for a middle-aged person going from 20 times less likely to only 3 times less likely is a very considerable loss of effectiveness, and, to play pharma's "trick" of highlighting relative risk reductions: this represents an ~85% relative reduction in the relative risks (advertised relative risk ratio 1:~20, real world relative risk ratio 1:~3)
Keeping in mind that theses were relative risk ratios, we'd need to know the absolute risk before we can consider the actual absolute risk reduction benefit.
I know, I know, Brian will say I am stuck in their paradigm, and the mandates were unconsciable regardless, but I just wanted to restate that numbers did not justify mandates even if Brian has shown Berensons inflated claims (mirroring? the Pharma MSM) are untenable.
My stance on absolute vs. relative isn't so much that it inflates the value - obviously it can only prevent the cases that would occur, so it makes sense to measure efficacy against that denominator (the unvax case rate) - but rather, I try to keep emphasis on more wholistic risk logic. "No individual is actually likely to be in danger, and if you are so unlucky as to be in danger, guess what, 1/3 to 1/5 chance you still have a severe case anyway. So the overall chance of benefiting is very small for everyone."
Great article as usual, I guess most of Berensons audience are polarized to thinking the vaxx cannot be of any benefit, and so he must find evidence for them to confirm their biases.
What's interesting to me is the rationale behind widely mass vaxxing regardless of risk, to 'prevent more serious/vaxx evading variants.' This to me is more about preserving the need for the vaxx, rather than allowing nature to take it's course with milder variants in the long run.
It seems patently obvious on reflection, but the covidian mainstream cannot allow themselves to see the 'mistake' let alone admit to it. The zero covid 'expert' busybodies should have seen that it was a very poor candidate for elimination and eradication, but could not permit themselves to.
Since a long long time long ago when medicine was essentially quackery, there has been strong 'intervention bias' for any treatment, and these days the regulatory approval bodies and public heath are by no means an exception. In being unable to resist, some of the quackery continues to this very day, so let the patients beware, proper evidence is your friend. :-)
Thanks!
I think Berenson is just motivated by the fact that he said in advance that mRNA wouldn't work (his T Cells told him, I guess). And reality for him just reshapes itself to this belief. Additionally, I would guess he supports the meta logic that if severe efficacy is real, everyone should take them. I don't, so I have no problem acknowledging what the evidence says on this point.
The experts' flirtation with eradication and herd immunity were a very interesting part of 2021. In the end I don't think the vaccines did anything as far as pressure on the virus, because after all they didn't stop infection long term. If you let the virus replicate regardless of any particular mutation then you can't exert selection pressure. Only after a lot of people had natural immunity, did immune escape seem to be driving mutations, this is starting late 2022 when you have different Omicron offshoots choosing the same RBD mutations simultaneously.
Brian I also want to add my support. It hasn't always been comfortable having my biases challenged or disproven by you but it has always been beneficial. Being able to honestly debate with the pro-vaccine side strengthens the arguments against the censorship, the mandates, and the experimental nature of the vaccine. People will often dismiss all of one's rguments if they detect one they believe is patently false. (Similar to the "poisoning the well tactic").
Thank you!
I agree. Of course, the mainstream, normal people who took the vaccine, they have basically memory-holed the whole subject at this point. But if it were still a subject that people were discussing, of course it would be helpful if not necessary not to be in an alternate reality on severe efficacy. "Yes I agree with your fact about severe efficacy, but not the decision you made based on it. Here is why."
So this is about efficacy that is apparently better than most anti-vaxxers think.. But do you then also think that the vaccine injuries are not so bad?
Vaccine injuries are bad anecdotally. I don't dismiss the anecdotes - I personally know people with bad experiences. But statistically, it doesn't seem like there was much short term evidence (e.g. elevated cardiac deaths correspond to the virus rather than vaccine rollout https://unglossed.substack.com/p/checking-back-on-us-cardiac-deaths). The biggest thing of all is that medium term doesn't seem as bad as I thought it would be about 15 months ago. There were a lot of young sudden deaths in summer 2022 but this trend didn't worsen.
Long term, I can't say what will happen.
I am now living with a bad anecdote. Got the vax and later had ischemic stroke. Blood clot in the brain. Wheelchairing it now, aphasia too. Won't show up in Vaers. Probably a coincidence. Big win for big pharma however, she now takes a fistful of pills twice a day. And no, they don't keep the doctor away.
Neighbor got bad case of shingles after second shot. Remarkably, blamed himself for not getting the Shingles vaccine!
Stillborn baby was a crushing blow to a co-workers daughter and her husband.
Husband of former co-worker in the hospital for 89 days with Guillain Barre.
People, not stats.
But wasn't there evidence from Israel that the number of ambulance calls for heart issues increased, correlated to the roll out of the jab? Or was this also wrongly interpreted data?
Perhaps. I also remember some stories about record numbers of miscarriages in Israel. The problem is, the population is increasing, it is a small urbanized country, so in fact you should expect that healthcare utilization is always higher than any previous year in absolute counts. You need to account for the trend.
Nothing convincing ever came out of any of the data that I saw, and for excess mortality in non-elderly a lot of the most heavily vaccinated countries were negative (lower than previous trend deaths).
https://gsconlinepress.com/journals/gscarr/content/are-mrna-vaccines-inducing-sanarelli-shwartzman-phenomenon
https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/12
https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Vitamin_C_Mitigating_and_Rescuing_from_Synergistic_Toxicity_Sodium_Fluoride_Silicofluorides_Aluminum_Salts_Electromagnetic_Pollution_and_SARS-CoV-2/13580318/1
Hydrophobic Catalysis by L-Ascorbic Acid: A supramolecular Strategy to counter the SARS-CoV2 ADP Ribose Glycohydrolase (figshare.com)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IhQlLMxJrs
Yes, they do prevent severe disease by causing death.
This claim does not make sense in terms of lower hospitalizations on either absolute, per-capita-alive, or per-infection terms. Alive vaccinated people cannot be protected by dead ones.
Absolute blind fool or propagandist? Go back to Pfizer. Tell them you failed on Substack. Keep the money. The rest will be distributed among survivors.
I don’t understand. Why is there a “rest” of the money if I am keeping it.
It's apparent to me you don't understand.
Would you be willing to expound on your discomfort on the lack of support for aid to Ukraine?
A dislike of being lied to. There are people who simply won't cooperate with people who are lying to them. I find that to be understandable. It's both a moral and an aesthetic thing. Christ is Truth; Satan is the Father of Lies, if you want to put it in religious terms. If a person is lying to you then they are starting from a wrong basis and can't be trusted and should not be rewarded with obedience. That is not contrarianism.
Don't want to derail this substack, but /some/ of the Ukraine contrarianism may be down to the 2014 Maiden 'revolution' (overthrow of a democratically elected government) when Victoria Nuland and John McCain got somehow involved soon after and so gave it a strong whiff of deep state involvement (but! the cookies!)
That said it shouldn't be polarising to the extent that Ukraine shouldn't get military aid, trouble is they need a *lot* of suitable battlefield weapons, not just hi tech weapons for strikes that generate headlines but don't move the front line a single centimetre...
I love those types of comments.
There were lots more open minded readers in skeptic substack in 2021. They fell off throughout 2022 and most new subs I get are quite disconnected from non-comic-book data on the shots. I don’t mind riling them up. This blog will just continue to be focused on producing reader value, not reader ego stroking…