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In the words of Bret Weinstein who has been an incorrigible wild card on multiple facets of the COVID discussion, "welcome to complex systems."

The most solidly supported conclusion of all is that it turns out it's really difficult to do good science and urgency does not excuse the need for it.

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perhaps the other one is this:

the precautionary principle does NOT say “hey, when you’re scared or lack data, assume nothing in the world works like it ever has in the past and do something staggeringly aggressive and costly.”

in fact, it warns against this.

dramatic actions demand strong evidence, not its absence.

dramatic action in the absence of data is called "panic."

and panic is not helpful.

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I'm struggling to maintain any faith that the precautionary principle is EVER a good one after 2020/2021(/2022?). It's so, so easy to pervert and escalate.

I'm reminded of the McGovern committee on new dietary guidelines for heart health a few decades ago, and we're still mopping up that mess (it's a good thing cats are obligate carnivores). "Senators do not have the luxury that the research scientist does of waiting until every last shred of evidence is in..."

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Mike Ryan of WHO back in Mar 2020: "My experience of Ebola tells me we haven't got time to look at the data, we must get ahead of the virus". or words to that effect. That was a key video in the chain of panic.

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I love your balanced posts. Regarding counting hospitalizations, I went digging through the Montana COVID site way at the beginning, and they fully admit that they count a "COVID hospitalization" as both those hospitalized *for* COVID and those who test positive while in the hospital. From which we can conclude, you can go in for elective knee surgery, test positive for COVID, be asymptomatic, and still show up as a "COVID hospitalization." I suspect this is similar across states, and yes it is a highly ludicrous and deceptive practice and does not inspire confidence once you begin to understand how bad the data is but how much they act like it's something we all must take uber seriously. It's all a really big joke with a really bad punchline.

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worse, they test all those admitted and hospitals are a hotbed of nosocomial infection and are riddled with trace virus. so you pick up some trace virus or viral fragment or the test swab gets contaminated etc.

and keep in mind "cases" are still a huge gravy train for hospitals with lots of extra billing and federal funds.

when you subsidize something, you get more of it. we're paying handsomely for pandemic perpetuation.

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It's not just in the United States, it's across the world. This has been a collective global panic.

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Iowa actually broke down 'with covid' vs 'of covid' and they CONSITENTLY had 30% 'with covid' in the hospital. CDC states that 30% of our covid hospitalizations are pregnant women (the most common reason for a hospital stay).

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Thank you so much -- as always, but for this post especially -- for providing the sanest analysis throughout all this. You allow me to hang on to a tiny shred of hope that perhaps reason is not completely dead. It's clearly these days just running on fumes, but maybe, just maybe, there is hope.

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A balanced analysis like this is a nice oasis from the madness. But I got to admit, watching government officials frothing at the mouth and talking about writing executive orders to "encourage" vaccination and then seeing the weaponized sheep point fingers at anyone who doesn't want to play along is scary.

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Keeps me up at night for sure.

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On @NPR just now, @ScottGottliebMD says he heard CDC stopped collecting outpatient data on all breakthrough cases “for cost reasons.”

How can these people get out of bed and keep doing this????

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I believe he gets out of bed to check on the Pfizer stock price.

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Bravo 👏🏻 excellent analysis. We will not see the end of this #plan demic for years to come. Moderna has hired former FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn (via FlagshipPioneering) his predecessor now works for Pfizer. Furthermore plenty of published proof that Moderna is geared up to release mRNA vaccines for multiple strains of FLU, RSV and “variants of Covid”. The Quadrivalent mRNA is ready and Covalent “Covid” boosters likely ready for EUA by fall. Dive deep into #FlagshipPioneering and the founder (who is the co-founder of Moderna) and you will see a tangled web of plans including the controversial Epigenomics on the horizon that has investors salivating chomping at the bit, to double down on possibilities of patents that would solidify FlagshipPioneering as #1 :/ #NoEndInSight

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Yesterday in news in the netherlands: most of the hospitalized are unvaccinated. If you pass headline then you find out it was kind of survey of lung doctors and we talk about 315 patients. From them 75% were unvaccinated or not vaccinated. There was no separation, no definition what is partly vaccinated (some count you as partly after second shot but still 2 weeks to go and only then you are fully vaccinated). There were no numbers, just % or parts. There were no information why these people were hospitalized. Absolute mess of data where everyone can imagine what they wish.

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With statistics in my training, your take(s) are ihow I have been viewing the empirical data and logic around vaccines and masks...so I simply cannot understand why many Ivy League and other universities—supposedly bastions if intelligent people—are applying strict vaccine mandates for the fall term. It seems like insanity. Even acknowledging that their leaders may not actually be intelligent, why don’t the professors who know better protest against such stupid and destructive mandates? The UC system has just announced that it will likely be mandating boosters as well...!

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2020 was the year that the mob of the hopelessly (and haplessly) mediocre bullied the best and brightest into silence through endless virtue signaling and institutional capture.

no one who is any good at medicine gets an MPH. it's the booby prize for failures and political climbers. yet these are those to whom we turned and it turns out they are:

stupid, venal, power hungry, hysterical, and hopelessly politically captured by grant money and political need.

we handed medicine to the brownshirts and got totalitarian response back. cost benefit and calculated harm reduction was abandoned for moral absolutes and absurdist hectoring.

government backed it. media backed it. it's the natural unholy alliance of authoritarians, political climbers, and self-serving fear mongers.

and now we need to uncook this pernicious porridge of oppressive mediocrity and the only way to do it is to dump out the bowl and start again.

this whole branch of government and its tentacles into schools (though money and cultivated dependence) and business (through regulation like FAA, OSHA etc) need to be ripped out or it WILL do this again.

always poignant gatopal @elonbachman summed up this danger nicely:

https://twitter.com/ElonBachman/status/1420065102250844164?s=20

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I would suspect mob pressure and cancel culture, money (grants for research) as some of the reasons for staying quiet.

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Cowardice should not be rewarded or forgiven. If all those in positions of authority, influence, and power who disagreed with the insane narratives had spoken up, perhaps none of this would have happened.

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Most professors can't raise their heads above the parapet without risking cancellation.

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We should call them what they are...cowards.

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Thanks for being a trusted voice in the midst of madness.

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Why won't they just stop testing? They don't want COVID to go away, and I don't know why.

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$100bn + revenue industries do not take kindly to being put out of business.

keep in mind the whole covid PCR industry is a completely dependent on this one thing. it goes to zero when this ends.

health officials love this. they love the power.

test more! always sounds like "doing something" so the fearful love it as well.

an awful lot of people have a vested interest (emotional, financial, career boosting) in testing.

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the way it seems to work...

a vaccinated human exposed to virus, it enters blood stream, enters cells and looks like the mrna influenced cells and your b memory cells call out t cells made from vaccine processing.

you get some c19 replication but t cell eat up the cells that make the new viruses....

what walensky said is possible but very unlikely ie that a vaccinated person could make a viral load that is transmissible. that is more unlikely than a mask doing any of what they say they do!

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"Among the 469 cases linked to the Barnstable outbreak in the CDC report, nearly 75% were fully vaccinated. For people with breakthrough infections, almost 80% had symptoms of cough, headache, sore throat or fever. Four were hospitalized and no deaths were reported..."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-says-new-mask-mandate-informed-by-cape-cod-outbreak-11627664465?mod=searchresults_pos2&page=1&fbclid=IwAR2uV4G_CZlggZRPyKZBXOf8m9JUPf2Sd62ZpDp5_UrdrVUCOihpVYQaeHQ

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"All but one are vaccinated."

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/update-sydney-141-new-covid-hospitalizations-vaccinated-except-one-video/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PostSideSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons&fbclid=IwAR0EZ4xW-SU_EoLHf9c4atv1il-xKUUWJqyWZDlW4OLacfA-aAhq5LaJTY0

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"Another estimates that there are 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/29/cdc-mask-guidance/?fbclid=IwAR3U2f3pnn3vLLlhYsbS3fiCed4DESHKaRRuf-mvdVtVsn1KHTlxNdZ2RGg

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Delta in England as of 7/19/2021...

Unvaxxed: 121,402 cases/165 deaths/0.1359%

Unvaxxed <50: 119,063 cases/34 deaths/0.0286%

Unvaxxed 50+: 2,337 cases/131 deaths/5.606%

Fully Vaxxed: 28,773 cases/224 deaths/0.7785%

Fully Vaxxed <50: 15,346 cases/4 deaths/0.0260%

Fully Vaxxed 50+: 13,427 cases/220 deaths/1.6385%

24,952 Unlinked Infections

54,091 Partially Vaxxed Infections

28,773 Fully Vaxxed Infections

121,402 Unvaxxed Infections

There were 59 more deaths of fully vaxxed than unvaxxed.

124 more deaths of fully/partially vaxxed than unvaxxed.

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It appears that the fully vaxxed can be infected and can transmit to each other and to the unvaxxed.

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i never went out ewith a may.

walensky's statement had a string of conditions, iirc a series of "mays"

i lost track and more than one condition in a probability statement requires a peer reviewed thesis with far more rigor than any covidian.......

c19 has been decoupling from deaths for over a year now, may be we are testing too much and getting closer to actual cases, may be a lot of things including less dry tinder, more immune from what ever, lessened bugs....

good news from harvard prof on ingraham .... studies show c19 and sars recuperated clear of cov colds too

implies delta not big deal,,,, with a cfr of 2/1000 in uk anyway! and short run gompertz in india.

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According to Public Health England, the Delta variant has a CFR of 0.2% (0.2 to 0.3%). The Alpha (UK) variant has a CFR of 1.9% (1.8 to 2.0%).

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001358/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_18.pdf

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With apology if someone already noted this, but there are some reports out of Israel that vaccine efficacy in preventing infection is down to 16% in those vaccinated in January. They are considering requiring a third vaccination for those over 60 - 70 years old, apparently. (As you noted in a previous post, the Israeli data is complex, but damn!)

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Supposedly a math error.

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Simply outstanding analysis… You and @ethicalskeptic are my absolute favorites!

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Here's a question. Just saw a U.S. "transmission" of Delta Varian map showing many "red" areas. How is "transmission" tracked and who is collecting this data? Or are they still making it up as they go along? Thanks.

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Excellent analysis, gato.

This is what we get by throwing away all pandemic preparedness plans, and relying on voodoo rituals.

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