Absolute Vs. Relative Risk Reduction; Trump Likes Vaccines; The Fabulous Fauci; Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam Getting Theirs; More! -- Coronavirus Update LXXIII
WE CONTINUE
The consensus---and we never buck consensii; consensuses?---was to keep these updates going for the time being, but expanding their scope.
I have therefore cut back on some of the old plots and added others from around the word.
The biological crisis is over in the USA, and has been for some time. The mental and political crisis, the panic and various forms of insanity, are sadly still with us.
PASS THIS ON: HURRY, HURRY
Trump in an interview over the weekend said, "I'm a big fan of the vaccine".
This is great news. Tell every lefty, progressive, woke friend (well, acquaintance) you have that Trump likes the vaccine. That he wants people to be vaccinated. Hurry!
Especially since the EEOC said employers are free to require the vex from employees.
https://twitter.com/JamesDelingpole/status/1398739288074985479
There was an enormous freedom rally in England last week, after which, coincidentally, the government backed down on vaccine passports.
Plus, the side effects are racking up. What we don't know is their rate.
https://twitter.com/NoTricksZone/status/1398192438435618818
WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT PROBABILITY?
Many people sent me this Lancet note about the difference between relative and absolute risk reduction. I've warned us many times to use absolute numbers (in any situation, not just this), because relative numbers always exaggerate (unless one is keenly aware of the absolutes).
Here's an example. Suppose the conditional (on certain accepted evidence) risk of getting a dread disease is 0.001, or 0.1%. A drug or vexxine is developed and it is discovered (in update evidence) the risk of getting the disease is now 0.0001, or 0.01%.
The absolute risk reduction (ARR; conditional on the given evidence) is 0.001 - 0.0001 = 0.0009, or 0.09%.
The relative risk is a ratio of the two risks, and the risk reduction ratio is 1 minus this, or 1 - 0.0001/0.001 = 0.9, or 90%.
That relative 90% reduction (RRR) sounds much more marketable than the actual 0.09% reduction; indeed, it sounds 1,000 times better!
Here from the the Lancet piece are some numbers using published results, recalling, as the authors do, that everything is conditional on the evidence, which is always changing.
VaccineRRRARR Pfizer95%0.84% Moderna94%1.2% Gamaleya91%0.93% Johnson & Johnson67%1.2% AstraZeneca67%1.3%
The authors rightly say "ARR (and NNV) are sensitive to background risk---the higher the risk, the higher the effectiveness---as exemplified by the analyses of the J&J's vaccine on centrally confirmed cases compared with all cases: both the numerator and denominator change, RRR does not change (66–67%)," but the ARR does change.
The inverse is also true. The lower the risk, as say herd immunity approaches, the more the reductions drop. In children, the risk itself was already low, and falling. Which means it will become difficult to practically impossible to know if the vexxine works in kids.
For instance, the CDC says only 300 kids 0-17 died with or of coronadoom (a terrific argument kids don't need to be vexxed). Population of this age group is about 65 million. We don't know how many infected or exposed or this group, but you can see that differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated kids would be very small.
Incidentally, you can reverse the equations too. Suppose you estimate your* IFR is 1% (you're old, maybe). And you believe the AZ vex will reduce your risk by 67%. What is the ARR? Easy:
RRR = 2/3 = 1 - RR = 1 - risk_vex/risk_novex
2/3 = 1 - risk_vex/ 0.01
1/3 * 0.01 = 0.0033 = risk_vex
Thus you go from 1% to 0.333%, for an ARR of 0.66%. Sound as exciting?
*Nobody has an IFR, just as nobody has a probability of dying from the doom. All rates and probabilities are conditional on the evidence you use. For you, if you insist, if you get the doom, either you die or you don't, and your IFR is 1 or 0.
FABULOUS FAUCI
Senator Rand cross-examined Fauci, and discovered Fauci indeed funded gain-of-lethality experiments responsible for creation of the coronadoom. Rand said: "There was gain of [lehtality] research going on with this Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan institute. In her paper, she actually thanks Dr. Fauci and the NIAID, which is a part of NIH that Dr. Fauci runs, it’s listed at the end of the paper."
Alas, Rand is not woke, which is all the reason our rulers and media need to ignore him.
The panic was always about politics, which is proved by the story of the Fabulous Fauci, who gained his fame by being anti-Trump at a time the left was desperately afraid, not of death, but of Trump's reelection.
The Science was always, and was always going to be, whatever Trump was against. The nation's scientists and doctors largely went along with this, afraid if they told the truth what would happen to them.
Fauci flip-flopped more than a docked perch, but it never mattered. He was yet another cudgel to wield against Trump. Fauci is also, as all evidence indicates, a narcissist.
Remember when---we have shown the video often---Fauci said truthfully masks didn't work? Too bad it became known Trump knew this. Masks became a political symbol, a way to virtue signal and prove you were afraid. Remember how the Lancet was scammed by that anti-HCQ paper?
After Trump promoted the idea, Fauci repeatedly rubbished the use of the common, cheap-to-produce drug hydroxychloroquine as a therapeutic or prophylactic for COVID-19. A second fact: Studies conducted in North America of hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness in treating COVID are 3.4 times more likely to report negative results than studies of the same conducted anywhere else in the world. There is no obvious causal connection. But would you want your lab’s name in the hot glaring sun embarrassing America’s doctor? Or would you want it under that fat federal cloud that rains buckets of money on you and your peers?
Remember all those gay worship videos, Tic Tocs and the like, praising Fauci? His infamous gay opening pitch was straighter than his advice.
Fauci was partly responsible for the creation of the coronadoom, and largely responsible for the panic.
“My theory is that Anthony Fauci is a sociopath,” says ["Harvard-trained economist"] Navarro. “He knew full well that virus came from the lab. He knew full well that he was the one who reauthorized gain-of-function. And day after day, for nine months leading up to the election, he did not level with the American people.”
He still isn't. He won't. Because he tells the media and our rulers what they want to hear.
GLOBAL TOUR
Is it worth pointing out we had the 1957 Asian Flu and the Hong Kong flu a decade later that, the CDC says, killed up to four million people each worldwide, all without panic? With no lockdowns and with no mask mandates? And when the population was much lower
Nah, nobody remembers.
Island nations, like Japan and Taiwan, that did a good job keeping infected people from entering their countries by strictly controlling their borders, and therefore keeping the coronadoom from spreading, at last have fallen.
The story of Taiwan is amusing. If reports are right, a pilot leaving an early quarantine found comfort in the arms of a prostitute in Taipei's red-light district, and she passed that comfort on to many, and they, in turn, passed it on to others. That country is now having its turn with the doom, though it doesn't appear particularly bad.
Masks compliance was high before they started their "soft lockdowns", so we have more evidence masks are useless. It won't stop governments from mandating them, because governments are desperate to been seen as "doing something"---none of them want to be blamed for deaths caused natural spreads, and the populations in many lands are now effeminate---and what better than a publicly visible symbol like masks.
This isn't just my opinion, but that of "IM", a writer at Substack, who typed out "Taiwan: The Ignorance of Experts and Media". I steal this picture from him:
This is a week old, and the number of "cases" (positive tests) is went higher and is now dropping. We've seen these anti-masks plots a hundred times, and this writer has several more, for Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, and so on. All of these places are now getting it. Even with high mask usage.
Meh. We can study it, because it's always good to know, but why whine about it? Our rulers and scientists are now immune to Reality, having been inoculated at college.
In looking up masks in Taiwan, I discovered one guy jogging wearing a mask passed out from lack of O2. The government recommends weight training indoors alone instead. Hiliarious.
Japan's spread is less well explained, even with 98% mask compliance, but it's a much bigger country which many more entry points.
Up and now coming back down. Same kind of picture in Malaysia, Vietnam and so forth. Don't forget Japan's population is 126 million.
It was at one point hoped the genetics of East Asians, or perhaps earlier experiences of similar viruses, might have bought them some measure of natural immunity. It was not to be.
The lesson is these bugs just take time to spread around. We're not quite as global one world as we thought.
Vaccines haven't been shipped to Asian countries as quickly, they not having had need of them until now, so as that gears up we'll see some good old fashioned panic and useless lockdowns.
Meanwhile in England:
https://twitter.com/LD_Sceptics/status/1399411079462141954
TESTING DRAMA
This is from the New York Times, so you know it's true. (I loathe how news stories have to begin with these mini-life stories. I wish they'd get right to the point.)
Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.
Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of...[an] epidemic?...
Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given...a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.
You know the rest. But in case you don't, here it is:
Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm...it appears the health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.
Now, as they look back on the episode, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists say the problem was that they placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test that led them astray.
Ho ho, what fun! They thought it was whooping cough, had a best test with swarms of false positives, panicked, realized their error, and then calmed down. And forgot--utterly---about such things.
The story is from 2007.
BOOK
Website of similar name: price of panic.
THE NUMBERS
Sources: CDC State data (source), CDC official toll number one, number two (the old weekly file, now suspect). Causes of death (source). Deaths by age. Covid & flu. WHO flu tracker. All current as of Monday night.
All these numbers are old: we don't have this week's because of Memorial Day.
Daily tests (not shown; see here from Johns Hopkins) are finally below a million a day. Panic won't be over until this sinks to same level as flu.
CDC deaths "involving" COVID.
Even with the late numbers, it's still dropping. Even the media is now forced to admit it.
The week-of-the-year all-cause deaths.
THIS IS KEY.
Green line is 2021, red is 2020. The dotted line are all cause deaths minus COVID. That means the 2020 deaths that look out of place (above the mass of other lines but below the dotted line) are likely deaths caused by the panic.
Again, been saying this for weeks, but even accounting for late counting, 2021 deaths are at or BELOW where'd we expect them. Yes, people really do die of things other than COVID.
Yes, really. Here's proof:
Heart disease and cancer killing far more people now. No panic over heart attacks or cancers. Which is strange, since in UK alone 300,000 had to skip their cancer checks during the panic.
Notice the spike in heart disease deaths at the start of the panic. Likely iatrogenic. Panic kills. Also notice the doom was only the top killer in winter time, and briefly at start of panic. I saw elsewhere claims all "excess" deaths in 2020 were the doom. No. The panic killed a great many, too.
Flu is still missing, but it's always low this time of year, so I'll skip the plot.
About masks in more depth, see this article and this one and especially this one. Leave the Cult of the Mask.
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