Covid-19 Pandemic

[17thfabn]

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

 The bottleneck is production capacity, and the need to keep mRNA vaccines cooled at -70°C when trying to distribute them in tropical areas with unreliable infrastructure.

The article says an Indian pharmaceutical manufacture is making 100 million doses a month. With a couple of more manufacturers that could be much higher. And potentially China could make it also. From what I've read China's early vaccine was about as effective as a placebo. 

It didn't say what handling requirements were, for instance how cold it needs to be kept.

They did say one down side to the vaccine was it could not be tweaked as quickly to respond to new variants. On the other hand as far as I know the vaccines and boosters being used by Pfizer, Moderna, J&J etc. now are the same as those that started being given out in late 2020.

[bojan]

11 minutes ago, 17thfabn said:

...From what I've read China's early vaccine was about as effective as a placebo...

Supposedly effective from keeping younger (20-45y/o) population away from the harsher versions of covid, but nothing more.

[JWB]

LONDON — An estimated 1.3 million people across the United Kingdom say they are living with long covid, new data from the Office for National Statistics shows.

The organization said that the figures, which were self reported, make up about 2 percent of the population. Around 64 percent of those involved in the study said the condition affected their daily activities.

[Ssnake]

2 hours ago, 17thfabn said:

The article says an Indian pharmaceutical manufacture is making 100 million doses a month. With a couple of more manufacturers that could be much higher.

Yes, they can make 100 million doses.

It's not impossible to teach others how to set up a manufacturing process line. The bottleneck to expanding production capacity are, however, the very specialists that can teach others how to set up the manufacturing process. And even then you need certain highly specialized pre-products like Merck's nano-lipid globules that apparently only Merck knows how to produce, and they said that they can't easily scale up that production either.

So, as usual, the issue is far more complex than the typical media and neomarxist activist headlines can convey. The former I can excuse up to a point (and there are laudable counter-examples, otherwise I wouldn't know the stuff above either), the latter I fully understand why they are taking advantage of this particular weakness of the press - I just happen to be diametrally opposite to what they are trying to achieve.

Abolishing the patents isn't going to solve anything, except creating a strong disincentive to researchers to bend over backwards the next time that we're being confronted with a much more dangerous outbreak. Covid is benign enough and sufficinetly scare to teach us what and how to do it (and what to avoid next time) if we're willing to pay attention (again, here's the hopeless optimist and dreamer in me). We have a new pandemic about every eight to ten years, and hopefully none too soon that combines a high transmission rate with high lethality and long incubation time.

2 hours ago, 17thfabn said:

And potentially China could make it also.

BioNTech has a deal sign-ready with Sinovac, but then the Politbureau decided that because, China Stronk, they didn't need to approve the deadly vaccine from foreign devils, so unless there's going to be a massive and uncontrollable Omicron outbreak in China I don't think they'll change their position. So, "potentially yes" but highly unlikely in practice because  public embarrassment for the dear leader seems to be a worse fate than sacrificing a few ten thousand citizens, or crashing a recovering economy.

[Harold Jones]

Another illustration of the effect of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Pournelle’s iron law considers organizations as being made of two types of people: 

“First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization…Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.   

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.” 

 

 

[sunday]

If only, Harold, if only. There are worse things in play here.

Bad science, bad faith.

Some excerpts:

Quote

The public’s relationship with science should, ideally, be governed by what’s known as “good-faith skepticism.” It’s an assumption going in that scientists are not trying to do harm, and indeed, most sincerely want to do good. But, under certain conditions, be it human error, avarice, political pressure, or competition for grants, even people with decent intentions can foul up.

Good-faith skepticism regarding scientists is vital for a healthy society. It’s a balance: Should it tip too far in one direction (mindless gullibility and acceptance of everything a lab-coater tells you) or the other (automatic dismissal of science as a field and scientists as “Tuskegee Frankensteins”), it’s bad news. And two years of Covid have brought nothin’ but bad news, with some leftists coming to view scientists as gods, and some rightists coming to view them as Mengeles.

Quote

But perhaps the biggest giveaway is that not once since the pandemic began have leftist politicians sacrificed ideology for “safety.” Imagine the effect on public behavior had the Biden administration refused to flood the nation with untested, unvaxxed illegals. That would’ve sent a clear message that the Covid crisis is of such importance that Democrats were willing to sacrifice their most beloved policy in the name of controlling the bug. But no. Instead they bragged about letting in unvaxxed and untested Third Worlders.

Or that group of “scientists and doctors” last year who released a public letter stating that BLM protests were more important than Covid precautions. Few things sowed Covid skepticism on the right as much as that. To a great extent, Covid bad-faith skepticism is on the heads of the people who signed that letter.

Quote

Now, here’s the punchline: As Soros-funded DAs around the nation invoke “science” as proof that their policies work even in the face of empirical evidence that those policies are failing, Soros himself, when lecturing abroad, openly admits that invoking science as his DAs are doing is bunk:

Even scientific laws can’t be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt. They can only be falsified by testing. One failed test is enough to falsify, but no amount of confirming is sufficient to verify. Scientific laws are hypothetical in character, and their truth remains subject to testing.

“Trust the science” is bullshit. Soros knows that; he just hopes you don’t.

Soros personifies why bad-faith skepticism is often justified. And he, too, is failing to read the room. As trust in science among the unwashed continues to collapse, so too will his minions’ ability to hide behind it for cover.

Science is merely a discipline. But it’s an essential discipline for any civilized nation. The exploitation of science by the likes of Fauci, Soros, and the Democrats, and the resulting evaporation of trust in science among large sectors of the public, is not beneficial.

It’ll boomerang back on the Dems, and that’s good. But it’ll also harm the nation…and that isn’t.

 

[lucklucky]

You would assume that if the CDC was going to crush the civil and individual rights of those with natural immunity by having them expelled from school, fired from their jobs, separated from the military, and worse, the CDC would have proof of at least one instance of an unvaccinated, naturally immune individual transmitting the COVID-19 virus to another individual. If you thought this, you would be wrong.

My firm, on behalf of ICAN, asked the CDC for precisely this proof (see below). ICAN wanted to see proof of any instance in which someone who previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else. The CDC’s incredible response is that it does not have a single document reflecting that this has ever occurred. Not one.

– Aaron Siri

 

https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/cdc-admits-crushing-rights-of-naturally

 

CDC Admits Crushing Rights of Naturally Immune Without Proof They Transmit the Virus

After formal demand, the CDC concedes it does not have proof of a single instance of a naturally immune individual spreading the virus.

 

[rmgill]

7 hours ago, Steven P Allen said:

I have known very out of shape people who have had it and had no problems; I have known old folks who got it and had few problems.  I have known the opposite.  And I have known young, in-shape sorts who have suffered a lot or died.

Too many variables to reach general conclusions.   A few cases may be just personal observations, but that fact doesn't invalidate their existence.  I don't believe in much of anything being said about the "pandemic" because we really don't know that much about it. 

Inflammation issues is a key thing. 

[Ivanhoe]

3 hours ago, rmgill said:

Inflammation issues is a key thing. 

If our public health system, and our health systems in general, gave a frack, we would have far more extensive data that would enable identification of critical factors. Instead, we have COVID death certificates for folks who died in MVAs.

 

[rmgill]

Seriously. Did you see how Ethan Klein has had a melt down about how Joe Rogan isn't a fat body and was pointing out the links to negative covid outcomes and obesity? 

[Ivanhoe]

 

[rmgill]

 

[JWB]

The World Health Organization warned Thursday that although omicron may be less severe than previous coronavirus variants, it is still serious and deadly.

“While omicron does appear to be less severe compared to delta, especially in those vaccinated, it does not mean it should be categorized as ‘mild,’ ” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news briefing in Geneva. “Just like previous variants, omicron is hospitalizing people, and it is killing people.

 

Among fully vaccinated American adults, the risk of severe illness or dying from covid-19 remains “rare,” according to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday.

The study looked at people who had completed a primary vaccination from December 2020 to October 2021 across 465 U.S. health-care facilities. It found that out of more than 1.2 million adults, a tiny portion faced severe illnesses, such as those requiring ICU admission, (0.015 percent) or death (0.0033 percent).

[lucklucky]

 

Alarming excess deaths this year in Europe for 15-44 years olds. Does it appear in first pages of newspapers and TV news opening? Of course not... we are talking about the most dishonest profession.

 

 

[rmgill]

Now how many of those were because of covid, were with covid or had nothing to do with covid? 

[sunday]

1 hour ago, rmgill said:

Now how many of those were because of covid, were with covid or had nothing to do with covid? 

Or because these consequences of governments policies:

-Administration of experimental gene therapy.

-Confinement preventing medical control of chronic illnesses.

-Mental illnesses because of confinement.

[Ssnake]

That's the nice thing with "excess mortality", you need to explain what else it could have been, other than the pandemic.

[DKTanker]

2 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

That's the nice thing with "excess mortality", you need to explain what else it could have been, other than the pandemic.

I would think it would be incumbent upon those claiming excess deaths to explain ALL deaths and why they are excessive.

[rmgill]

4 hours ago, Ssnake said:

That's the nice thing with "excess mortality", you need to explain what else it could have been, other than the pandemic.

_co_morbidities. 

The thing with excess deaths, you need to say what the Cause of Death was. And if it was a car accident, you REALLY don't need to have them slated as COVID because they tested positive for COVID when they died of head trauma from their head going through the driver's side window. 

[seahawk]

6 hours ago, sunday said:

Or because these consequences of governments policies:

-Administration of experimental gene therapy.

-Confinement preventing medical control of chronic illnesses.

-Mental illnesses because of confinement.

Mostly those.

[rmgill]

Drug abuse.

Increased homicide rates. 

We remembered the increased homicide rates right? Note how the 2019 and 2020 excess deaths were already above the base line. 

 

[bojan]

Do you have any idea how much suicide and murder rate would have to go up for it to have  serious impact on a total deaths?

60% increase in deaths per year here, with hearth diseases and cancer (80% of causes of deaths before covid) having less than 10% increase compared to 2019. Murders are less that before covid, through that is a drop in the ocean around here anyway, with 1.11/100k, 77 murders in 2021. vs 79 (1.15/100k) in 2019. vs 160k* total deaths in 2021. Suicides increased to 13.1/100k in 2021. vs previous 11.4/100k for 2019, but again that is 787 suicides total. Drug related deaths were 49 in 2022, serious increase compared to 19 in 2019, but again drop in the ocean.

*100k for 2019, 130k for 2021, 160k for 2022.

Edited January 8, 2022 by bojan

[jmsaari]

12 hours ago, lucklucky said:

 

Alarming excess deaths this year in Europe for 15-44 years olds. Does it appear in first pages of newspapers and TV news opening? Of course not... we are talking about the most dishonest profession.

Several things come to mind. 45-64 category curves follow more or less the waves of the pandemic with sharp climb in 2020 spring and another bulge at 2020-2021 winter. 15-44 year has some of the same pattern but not so clear, so presumably some of the excess deaths is directly caused by COVID, but also other causes. 

The other issue is the  magnitude of the increase, 15-44 category it's an order of magnitude less than in 45-64, so how much is it really? I don't know how many there are in EU in that age category and how many you would expect to die but for ballpark figure lets say 150 M people and mortality is the same as in US for which google gave nice table of expected mortality per age, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html , so on average you'd expect about 0.37% of those to die in 2 years, or 733 K.  9000 more means bit over 1% increase, which is probably more than you can expect from random variation year-by-year, but not by much.  

Back to the causes, considering 2019 was already above, Jan-Feb 2020 continued on that, part of the explanation probably has nothing to do with COVID, part is COVID directly, and part is indirect COVID causes. And the indirectly caused but pandemic-reality deaths would almost certainly continue to cause excess mortality for at least a year or two even if a miracle cure stopped the COVID tomorrow... at least over here, and probably in most places, the diagnosis rates of cardiovascular diseases and cancers went down considerably from long-term average on both 2020 and 2021, meaning sick people are getting treatment started later, which will have consequences later.

Edited January 8, 2022 by jmsaari

[jmsaari]

On 1/5/2022 at 12:15 PM, Der Zeitgeist said:

Here's a recent study:

Summary: https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protection

Full text: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118

 

thanks, this was quite a good read, hadn't come across it yet... 

[jmsaari]

On 1/5/2022 at 2:55 PM, DKTanker said:

A study using mannequins and modeling, no actual double blind studies involving living breathing human beings in a real world setting?  Kind of smacks of a conclusion requiring a study.

More like a study trying to figure out some of the basic mechanisms what are at play here and add one more spoon of information to a pretty big and so far not even half-filled pool that is understanding the pandemic and it's mechanisms of spreading and how it can be affected.

There's exactly one study I know of that has tried to have a real-world setting involving real living breathing human beings, which was conducted in Bangladesh by Yale and Stanford researchers. Real-world setting has its advantages obviously but also disadvantages, you cant realistically conduct a double-bind study involving human-to-human COVID transmission with various combinations of masking. So what they did was to frame the research question around the impact of providing masks and information on their use and why they should be used, or not, and compare outcomes between villages in different categories. Which provides different information than the pnas study above, both very much incomplete, but useful as initial steps on trying to gather an understanding, and so far both seem to reinforce the rough conclusion that masks work  a bit, enough to be useful to slow the spread of a pandemic, but not enough that you're "safe" just because you have a mask, or people around you are "safe" if you're the source of infection but masked. (Unless one puts on a fresh new FFP2 on every time going out and seals it with double-sided adhesive tape around the nose, which nobody will realistically do...)