first a trickle, then a flood: the vaccine adverse events dam is breaking

that which was recently unspeakable is fast becoming common conversation

certain internet felines have proven prone to repeating certain adages over and over as though they were some sort of mantra.

and, apparently, they do not plan to stop now.

(thanks to wesley hoyle who created this template that i hijacked.)

but perhaps more interesting than snarky cats sounding like broken records are the new voices joining this chorus. more and more heavy hitters of academia and research are taking the stage and imposing once more some semblance of harmony upon two years of dissonant atonal screeching by histrionic backbench blowhards.

what had been the province of bloggers and a small vanguard of the uncommonly brave professors and pundits is fast opening up to the meaty masses of these fields.

THIS PAPER has a real whom’s whom (far more proper than a who’s who doncha know) in its authorship. these are top folks. sander greenland wrote more than a few of the widely used epidemiology textbooks.

this one will get much harder for those convinced of credentialism as the wellspring of all credibility to ignore. and won’t that be fun?

the topic is one near and dear to my felonious feline heart:

but it’s the conclusions that’re going to upset people.

(spoiler alert, those with bad cattitudes have seen this movie before)

welcome to “we need harm-benefit analyses” and “serious AE’s outweigh reduction in serious risks mitigated.”

boom.

ok, sorry, just needed to get that out of my system. (old habits die hard) but this is very much in alignment with lots of feline findings dating back quite some time, especially in anyone remotely young or healthy. in children, risk reward is appalling.

based on the trials, it’s a flat out loser overall.

there are detailed tables in the study (at the end). of particularly nasty risk ratio enhancement were: (risk ratio in parentheses)

• acute respiratory distress syndrome (2.0)

• myo/pericarditis (2.0)

• abscess (4.0)

• cholecystitis (2.0)

• arthritis (3.0) (particularly worrying as an auto-immune/inflam marker)

• and colitis/enteritis (2.0)

you can pile this all together and then compare to mitigation of serious risk because, wait for it…

medicine is everywhere and always a cost/benefit analysis.

man, that never gets old.

got that?

for every 6.4 people moderna kept out of hospital for covid, it inflicted 15.1 serious AE’s.

for every 2.3 people pfizer kept out of hospital, it inflicted 10.1 serious AE’s.

moderna’s ratio is terrible.

pfizer’s is tragic.

these vaccines fail massively on the most rudimentary harm-benefit analysis, and harms here look significantly suppressed and the placebo arms look salted with extras to make divergence appear less. there are lots of signs of pfraud in the trials.

and now the world is catching up.

look, let’s be clear, i’m not claiming to be smarter or better at epidemiology than the folks that just wrote this new piece. they have certainly forgotten more about this topic than i will ever know.

i got here first because cats don’t care about overton windows and academics and public figures do. we have created a system that makes the price of dissent far too costly for those in these precincts. because that’s what guilds do.

at any given time there is a window of acceptable common discourse.

some of us live to push hard on its edges if that’s where the data is leading us.

but most do not.

publish dissent from narrative too early or stray too far from accepted stances and your entire career is in jeopardy, especially in times like these that have been so full of censorship and cancellation. you lose your grants, your tenue, your ability to publish, and possibly your job.

cross the fauci, get an ouchy.

it’s not that these authors did not know these things or that the data was unavailable.

they did and the data has all been there for 9 months.

the notion of cost/benefit is the undeniable bedrock upon which medicine’s foundation anchors. it could literally be no other way. and yet this fact was not allowed to be spoken aloud for years without fear of vicious, suppressive reprisal and censure. this is outrageous. this is a serious, serious problem.

so how did medicine and the practitioners and researchers within it get so sick?

simple: they faced perverse incentives.

they were forced to perform a different risk benefit analysis and saw the risk of speaking out as too high relative to the benefits, and honestly, they may have been right.

the winged monkeys were savage 9 months ago and would have taken to oily flight and attacked relentlessly had any dared to speak of risks and balancing them vs gains instead of “zero covid uber allles” and burning the village to save it. and the public would not have heard them anyhow. because the people were not ready either.

there is simply no telling someone something they are not yet ready to hear.

humans go mad as one but regain their senses as individuals.

this was just not a story a populace as scared as ours was was mostly ready to accept. some were, but the majority were not. (take it from someone who spent a fair but of time pushing on that particular string.)

but they are now.

this is not driven so much by leadership as by pull through from the fat part of the human bell curve. social contagion works both ways and once the gompertz curve of sanity spread gets steep, things happen fast.

one day 5% believe something. a couple weeks later, it’s half. it’s like watching a full blown phase change. and it’s starting.

pfossible pfizer pfutures (and the regulators too)

there was a fair bit of skepticism when i published this last week and theorized that the time to flip on pfizer, declare pfraud, and give them an all expense paid trip beneath the bus was coming because the emerging truth was too vast to be eclipsed by the big lie.

but this is how that starts. first a trickle, then a torrent.

the mainstream is catching up and catching on and it’s becoming OK to speak the truth aloud again. (well, except on twitter, but hopefully we get some regime change there soon)

and the 95% of the politicos will not lead, they will follow, but they will do so all the more slavishly and desperately for having been late to the pivot.

the alchemy of politics will turn “wrong” into “righteous indignation.”

watch.

this is a slow, painful recovery from derangement because that’s how such recovery always works.

the real key is prevention and to do that, we must ground the monkeys.

no system where the true experts in fields are too afraid to speak can long persist as functional. it gives rise to grifters and the toadies of politicized science and power grabbing for fun and profit.

in so many parts of our lives, truth has become unspeakable because we have allowed it to be made so.

and we can make normal normal again.

free speech is free science.

it may not assure we’ll get it right, but at least it’ll give us a fighting chance.

push windows. move the debate. and shield those who do so also even and especially when you do not agree with them for the most important speech to protect is unpopular speech. that’s where change happens and the power to suppress one idea is the power to suppress any idea.

it’s discourse or dictatorship.

the price of the former is hearing people say things you don’t like. the price of the latter is everything else.

choose wisely.