No, Covid hasn’t gone away: Links & comments

Covid isn’t over.  This is what we still need to be doing.

 

We need multiple mitigations because no single one works perfectly

The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control have declared “Emergency Over” regarding Covid.

They say you don’t have to take any precautions except keeping your vaccinations up to date. That’s politically expedient, but Covid is what it is, and isn’t paying attention to political pronouncements.

You May Be Early, but You’re Not Wrong: a Covid Reading List by Jessica Wildfire for OK Doomer.

There’s no permanent immunity from this virus.  Each time we catch it, this virus attacks our hearts and minds.  It weakens us. It tries to kill us. It imprints on us, so a future variant has a better shot next time.

That next time could be a few months later.

Here are the key points:

1. You can catch Covid multiple times.

2. Reinfections are common, not rare.

3. Breakthrough infections are common.

4. Covid can kill you months after you recover.

5. It can cause brain damage.

6. It can cause blood clots and heart attacks.

7. It doesn’t spare children.

8. Vaccines help, but only some.

9. Masks work.

Here are some links to medical studies collected by Jessica Wildfire.

Long-term neurological outcomes of COVID-19 from Nature Medicine.  Anybody can get Long Covid.

Long Covid after breakthrough SARS-Cov-2 inflection from Nature Medicine.  Vaccines help, but not as much as everyone thinks.

SARS-CoV-2 promotes microglial synapse elimination in huma brain organoids from Molecular Psychiatry.  Covid eats your brain.

Excess risk for acute myocardial infraction mortality among the COVID-19 pandemic from the Journal of Medical Virology.  Covid can kill healthy young people.  It’s giving them heart attacks.

Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection from Nature Immunology.  Covid attacks your immune system.  You don’t develop immunity.  You lose it.

ACE2-independent infection of T lymphocytes by SARS-CoV-2 from Signal Technology and Targeted Therapy.  Covid kills T cells.  It makes you more vulnerable to other diseases.

Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune testing from a Yale preprint.  Every Covid infection runs a risk of weakening your immune system.  It can even reactivate old viral inflections.

Immune boosting by B.1.1.529 (Omicron) depends on previous SARS-CoV-2 exposure from Science.  One Covid infection sets up another.  We’re not building immunity.

Covid and Acute Neurological Complications in Children from Pediatrics (American Academy of Pediatrics).  Children aren’t safe from Covid.  They need protection.

Post-COVID-19-associated morbidity in children, adolescents and adults: A matched cohort study including more than 157,000 individuals with COVID-19 in Germany from PLOS Medicine.   Covid isn’t like a cold.  Children shouldn’t catch it.

Lifting Universal Masking in Schools – Covid-19 incidence among Students and Staff from the New England Journal of Medicine.  Masks work.

Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection from Nature Medicine.  If you got Covid once, you’re not in the clear.  It’s not over.

No, we’re not done with Covid-19

We Americans aren’t dying at as high a rate as we were last year this time, but a lot of us face long-term organ damage and chronic illness.  It’s too soon to say “mission accomplished.”

How Covid-impaired is the US government?

This chart shows which Biden Cabinet members have had Covid.  Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, and Xavier Becerra, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, have each had it twice.

Joe Biden, Jill Biden and Kamala Harris have each had Covid.  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have had it.

There is a non-trivial chance that a Covid infection will result in organ damage, including brain damage, even if you’re vaccinated.  Read Lambert Strether’s article for details.

 I don’t rule out the possibility that brain damage is already occurring at high levels of government.  This is not sarcasm (well, not completely).

LINK

Will “Living With Covid” Even Be Possible? (Because What About the Brain Fog)?  by ‘Lambert Strether’ for Naked Capitalism.  Strongly recommended.

Why is vaccination a political issue?

Hat tip to kottke.org.

A long time ago I tried to convince an old friend that nuclear power was safe.  This was long before the Chernobyl and Fukushima controversies.  His answer was that all the people who advocated for nuclear power were the same as people who advocated for U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and that was all he needed to know.

That’s not a terrible way to make up your mind about things.  You can’t research everything, especially if you have a job, family responsibilities and other things you’re concerned with.  So you decide who you trust and follow them.

I personally don’t trust Antony Fauci and his ever-changing advice.  I always waited before getting vaccinated to see the effects on the first wave of people to get vaccinated.  But I think the.facts show that getting vaccinated will drastically reduce the odds of dying or winding up in an intensive care unit as a result of the coronavirus.

Vaccination doesn’t offer perfect protection.  Some vaccinated people die of the virus.  Vaccinated people are infectious.  Vaccinated people can suffer long-term organ damage from the virus—the “long Covid.”  But. the results show that I’m better off being vaccinated than not being vaccinated.

Vaccination isn’t enough.  I still wear a mask when I’m indoors among strangers or a large group; I don’t care if some elected official says masks aren’t needed.  Improved ventilation helps.  We need research on an actual cure rather than just protection against the symptoms of the disease.

Donald Trump advocates vaccination, and his administration’s Warp Speed crash research program is responsible for the vaccines that we have.  But his scoffing at the seriousness of the disease contributed to opposition to vaccination.

But Democrats’ attacks on the unvaccinated don’t help.  If you tell me I’m ignorant, anti-science and to blame for whatever happens to me, I am not going to listen to you.

If you are a vaccine skeptic yourself, I urge you to talk to your physician, if you have one.  Share your doubts with someone who has the expert knowledge to respond to you.  You may have a good personal reason for not being vaccinated.

But maybe you don’t have a personal physician, or you can’t afford to pay for a visit to the doctor.  In that case, I don’t know what to tell you.   We have a rotten medical care system in the USA, no doubt about it.

What I think about the Canadian trucker protests

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s emergency order is a radical violation of the principle of the rule of law.

He ordered Canadian banks and financial institutions to stop serving any participant or supporter of the Canadian trucker protests.

That means they’ll freeze their checking accounts, cancel their credit cards, cut off their insurance and refuse to issue them loans.

Of course the Canadian government was fully justified in making arrests of persons who unlawfully occupied their capital or blocked international bridge crossings.

But this doesn’t justify extreme actions against persons who haven’t been charged with any crime or, in many cases, have not violated any laws now on the books.

The Canadian trucker protest is an example of the uneven enforcement of laws against protesters.

Here in the USA, some kinds of protests are treated very harshly and others very leniently.  Sometimes it will protesters will be treated brutally by local authorities and coddled by federal authorities; sometimes it is just the reverse.

In Ottawa, it seems as if the truckers are being treated leniently by the local police, in contrast to the draconian policy of the national government.

I don’t think there will be a civil war in the USA, much less Canada, but if there is, it will have been possible because elements of the police and military support different sides.

I somewhat disagree with the truckers on the merits of their complaints.

The truckers initially protested requirements that they show proof of vaccination upon leaving Canada and and that they be subject to a two-week quarantine if they try to return unvaccinated.

Trying to prevent the spread of a deadly contagious disease is not tyranny.  The Canadian government has the right and duty to stop the spread of the virus

But vaccine passports, in my opinion, are not the best way to do this, because a vaccinated person can still be infectious and an unvaccinated person can be free from the disease.

It would be better to ask the truckers to show recent covid virus tests.  Or take their temperatures when they approach the border and, if they run a fever, ask them to take a virus test.

Where people stand on the truckers largely reflects where they stand on larger conflicts.

Team Red is largely pro-trucker and Team Blue is largely anti-trucker.  Rural people and people who work with their hands seem pre-disposed to be pro-trucker.  Urban people and college-educated professionals seem predisposed to be anti-trucker.

I’m not sure the protesters are representative of Canadian working people, or even of truckers as a whole.  But I see no particular reason to think the truckers are particularly racist.

LINKS

Banks are moving to freeze accounts linked to convoy protests | Here’s what you need to know by John Paul Tasker for CBC News.

Trudeau’s Money Heist: Emergencies Act Allows Seizure of Bank Accounts, Securities, Crypto of Those Suspected of “Links” to Convoy Members Without Court Order by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

Squad member Ilhan Omar defends Ottawa cafe owner who donated to Canadian Freedom Convoy truckers by Ronny Reyes and James Gordon for The Daily Mail (London)

Why the Left Doesn’t Copy the Truck Protests by Ian Welsh.

What About the Canadian Truckers? by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.

Thoughts on the Canadian Trucker “Freedom Convoys” by Lambert Strether for Naked Capitalism.

Reality Honks Back by N.S. Lyons for The Upheaval.

Waiting for Omicron: Links & comments

Covid Situation Continuing to Develop in Ways Not Necessarily to Officialdom’s Advantage by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

The Big Name Journalists Who Are Trying to ‘Both Sides’ Covid by Melody Schreiber for The New Republic.

When We Are Done With Covid the Virus Will Not Be Done With Us by Bernhard for Moon of Alabama.

We’re being told that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is “mild” and that it soon will die down.  Infections and deaths in fact do seem to be declining, and this had better be permanent because we in the USA and other rich white countries don’t have a good alternative if it is.

We’re told that the Omicron virus is more infectious than the other variants, but less likely to kill us or leave us in intensive care.  This is true, but the number of deaths is bad enough and intensive care units in the USA are full to overflowing.

We’re further learning that immunity from vaccines and also from infection is not necessarily permanent.  We’re also learning that “mild” Omicron can create long-term organ damage, including brain fog, and shorten our life-expectancies.

Our basic resources for now are vaccines and masks.  I’ve been vaccinated, and I wear a mask when I’m indoors with people I don’t know, but this might not be enough.

If this doesn’t prove to be enough, we are told to blame the unvaccinated.  They are supposedly to blame for the fact that our hospitals and emergency care systems have been pared down so that there is no extra capacity for emergencies.

American capitalism demands the infection of China by Andre Damon for the World Socialist Web site.

Click to enlarge

I understand that the USA and other Western countries are not set up to do what the Chinese government does.  We are not capable of completely shutting down a medium-sized city overnight, making sure that every single family in the city has food and water and testing everyone for the coronavirus.  We could not build a completely functioning hospital in less than two weeks.

You can make the argument that preserving our values of individualism and limited government are more important.

But by what right do Americans demand that the Chinese relax their Covid restrictions so that world commerce flows more smoothly?  Why should they sacrifice the lives of their people in order to make things more convenient for us?

Our government let Covid take hold rather than impose moderate restrictions before the need was obvious to all.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans died as a result.  That, too, impeded world commerce.

New Triumphs & Struggles for Non-Profit Covid Vaxes by Hilda Bastian for Absolutely Maybe.

A Potential COVID Game-Changer by Walter Bragman and Andrew Perez for The Daily Poster.

Covid coming back

Daily U.S. Covid cases set new record as of Dec. 30, 2021.

One of the reasons Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 elections was because of Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic and made it into a political issue.  He discouraged testing and gathering of data because it made him look bad.  

On the other hand, his administration deserves credit for Operation Warp Speed and the rapid development of effective vaccines.

Biden’s rhetoric is better, but his administration’s actions fall short of what is needed.  His administration’s leaders talk as if vaccination is a way to prevent the spread of the virus.  The vaccines now in use are not sterilizing.  You can catch the virus from a vaccinated person.

He talks as if vaccines are the answer to everything.  Being vaccinated will cut your risk of death or being hospitalized, but catching the virus can still do long-term damage to you.  The way to protect from infection is to make cheap Covid tests available to everyone.

His administration ignores the fact that we now know that Covid-19 is spread as an aerosol, like fog or cigarette smoke, and not in droplets.  So we should pay less attention to cleaning surfaces and more to proper ventilation.

Some of these failures are a result of the long-term hollowing out of public health and medical capacity.  Some originated with Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control rather than Trump or Biden personally.  

But they are the ones with the ultimate responsibility and power.  When the ship goes aground, the captain is responsible.  He can’t fix everything overnight, but he can begin.

Like Trump, Biden prioritizes getting back to normal.  Like him, he pushes responsibility onto state governments.  We the people need something better than leaders who take the path of political least resistance.

 LINKS

Don’t Be Too Cavalier About Omicron – Long Covid Is Still a Real Risk by Elizabeth Yuko for Rolling Stone.

Administration’s Obvious Covid Fail: Officially Abdicates as Case Count Hits Record; Scientists and Press Misrepresent Data to Put a Happy Face on Omicron by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

The very bad day at the CDC by Eric Topol for Ground Truths.

Covid Cases Fill More New York City Hospital Beds, Threatening Halt on Elective Surgeries by Greg B. Smith for The City.

A Myth Is Born: How CDC, FDA and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies That Outlive the Truth by Linda Bonvie and Mary Beth Pfeiffer for Michael Capuzzo’s Rescue substack.

USA tops peer nations in COVID-19 deaths

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LINKS

Health Experts Worry CDC’s Covid Vaccination Rates Appear Inflated by Phil Galewitz for Kaiser Health News. [Added 12/10/2021]

The Pandemic of the Vaccinated Is Here by Rachel Gutman for The Atlantic.  [Added 12/10/2021]

Omicron Happy Talk in the US v. Toughening Restrictions in the UK, Israel by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism. [Added 12/9/2021]

Vaccine Politics Not Working to Biden Administration Advantage by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.  [Added 11/30/2021]

We Got a Head Start on Omicron, So Let’s Not Blow It by Zeynep Tufekci for the New York Times.  [Added 11/29/2021]

The Covid pandemic is not taking the very best of turns by Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution.  [Added 11/27/2021]

Covid vaccinations keep people alive

Vaccination for COVID-19 won’t necessarily prevent you from catching the virus.  It won’t necessarily stop you from infecting other people.  It won’t even guarantee you won’t be harmed by the virus.

And of course there are good reasons to be suspicious of the big drug companies

But the facts show that, unless you’re a special case, vaccinations will definitely reduce the odds of you dying from the disease.

LINKS

How do death rates from COVID-19 differ between people who are vaccinated and those who are not? by Eduard Mattieu and Max Roser for Our World in Data.  This is the most complete survey I could find, but I was unable to extract charts from their web site.  Below are some of the charts I did find.

Covid death rates in U.S. counties with high and low vaccination rates

As Covid Cases Rise All Over U.S., Lower Vaccination Rates Point to Worse Outcomes by Lauren Leatherby for the New York Times.

Covid vaccination and death rates in Europe in one devastating chart by Ryan Heath on Twitter.  This decodes the abbreviations for countries.

Truth and doubt in a time of pandemic

In the pandemic, I find it hard to decide who I can trust about questions such as vaccine effectiveness, lockdown effectiveness, ivermectin effectiveness and so on.

Authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization haven’t always told the truth, or at least not the whole truth.  But this doesn’t mean the critics of the CDC and WHO are necessarily reliable.   When doctors disagree, how can I, a layman, decide?

That’s why I’m impressed with this interview of Eric Osgood, a physician, by David Fuller, a co-founder of a podcast called Rebel Wisdom, even though I don’t usually spend time watching long videos on computer screens.

Fuller is more interested in getting the facts right, and Ogood more interested in what is best for his patients, than about defending one side or another.

Osgood recommends vaccination to most of his patients, but also prescribes ivermectin.  He gets flak from the right-wing anti-vax fanatics, who tell him he is a tool of the establishment, and the left-wing anti-ivermectin zealots, who say he is helping the anti-vaxxers.  

 He used to be a member of the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, which is the chief promoter of ivermectin, but now has reservations about Dr. Pierre Kory’s recommendation to double the dose against the Delta variant, which he doesn’t think has any empirical basis.

I think Dr. Kory has followed a common path by those who question an ideological orthodoxy. A dissenter is cast out by those he had been accustomed to thinking of as his friends.  His dissent is welcomed by those of the opposing ideological orthodoxy.  Gradually, the opposing orthodoxy comes to seem more and more reasonable.

One interesting fact that I hadn’t known is that Dr. Kory himself and his daughter caught Covid-19.  Dr. Kory is not explicitly anti-vaccination, but he didn’t get vaccinated himself. 

His infection was a mild case, so maybe ivermectin did some good.  Dr. Osgood’s view is that ivermectin is harmless, cheap and of some benefit, and just possibly the wonder drug that Dr. Kory thinks it might be, so there is no reason not to use.

For what it’s worth, that’s what I now think, too.  I was much more of an ivermectin enthusiast when I first heard about it than I am now.  I still oppose the campaign to prevent it being prescribed or discussed.

The economic consequences of the pandemic

SHUTDOWN: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze (2021)

Adam Tooze is possibly the world’s foremost economic historian.  He wrote thick, comprehensive books on the Nazi economy (Wages of Destruction), the war debts crisis of the 1920s (The Deluge) and the 2008 financial crisis (Crashed!).  

His strengths are his international perspective (he is a British subject, educated in Germany who now teaches at Columbia University) and his deep understanding of high finance and how it affects society, politics and the overall economy.

Shutdown is not like his other books. It’s slim, and it is being published while the pandemic is still going on, not from the perspective of history.  This is because he thinks his message is too urgent to wait.

What is his message?

It is that we the public are on the brink of a new era, an era when our worst crises will not be the result of tyranny, corruption and human folly, but blowbacks from our natural environment.

And we are woefully unprepared for this. The coronavirus pandemic had taken 3.2 million lives, including half a million American dead, as of April, when Tooze completed his book.  The number is up to 4.5 million now.

The pandemic resulted in tens of trillions of dollars in economic loss. Yet only tens of billions has been spent on vaccine development, and much less than that on getting the vaccine to the public.

COVID-19 was not a black swan, a completely unpredictable event. It was a grey rhino, an event that many predicted, but were ignored. The climate crisis has bred other grey rhinos—devastating fires, floods, droughts and superstorms.

Tooze wrote that the reason we are unprepared is that the neoliberal policies of the past 50 years have stripped the governments of the USA, UK and much of the Western world of the capacity to respond to emergencies.

The neoliberal philosophy is that, in order to maximize efficiency, institutions should spend no more than they absolutely need in order to function. This means that there is no reserve capacity in case of emergencies, and hospital emergency rooms in the USA are overflowing with Covid patients.

What’s needed, he wrote, is something like the Green New Deal supported by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others.  Governments must spend whatever is necessary to be prepared for the predictable crises that lie ahead, and do it in a way that creates full employment and puts money in the pockets of working people.

The International Monetary Fund has estimated that a successful global vaccination program would add $7 trillion annually to the world economy by 2014.  Tooze said others estimate that such a vaccination program would cost $50 billion to $100 billion. Yet governments of rich countries, which have spent trillions of dollars on economic stimulus programs, say this is unaffordable.

Tooze quoted the great economist John Maynard Keynes: “Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”  

That is, if the human and physical resources to accomplish a goal exist, and the political will to accomplish the goal exists, the problem of finance can be solved.  People generally understand this in wartime.  Why not in peacetime?

Matt Taibbi on the cult of the vaccine neurotic

I’ve been vaccinated for Covid, I think vaccination is a good idea for most people, but I think it very strange that the Biden administration, the mainstream press and the public health establishment say you shouldn’t consider treatments for the disease.

Why not explore anything and everything that might work?  Why limit yourself to just one thing?

The idea is that the general public is so stupid that if they think there is anything other than vaccination that is helpful in fighting the disease, they won’t get vaccinated.  The problem with this is that if you blatantly treat people as if they are stupid, they will stop listening to you.  Matt Taibbi had a good article about this on his Substack blog.

LINK

The Cult of the Vaccine Neurotic by Matt Taibbi for TK News.

To stop the spread, require tests, not jabs

School children in Austria are tested for Covid

I think most people would benefit from being vaccinated against the coronavirus, because you’ll be much less likely to wind up in the hospital or morgue if you catch it.

But this will do little to stop the spread of the virus because you can catch it from a vaccinated person just as you can from an unvaccinated person.

If I was the parent of a small schoolchild, I wouldn’t care if the school staff was vaccinated.

What I’d want is for everyone who goes through the door of the school to have a temperature check, and for everyone who registered a fever to get a Covid test, and for everyone who tested positive for Covid to stay home for a week.

Ideally, people infected with the coronavirus should go into quarantine, but we in the USA don’t have the capability for that.

I’d apply the same policies to high schools and colleges, and to hospitals (except, of course, I wouldn’t send the patients home).

I think vaccine skeptics underrate the harm done by the coronavirus. It’s true the virus kills a relatively small percentage of those infected, but that small percentage adds up to hundreds of thousands (in the USA) and millions (worldwide).

And this is not something where that which does not kill you does not make you stronger. I had a friend who was vaccinated, but nevertheless suffered what I am convinced was a “breakthrough” infection. She was in such severe pain, along with chills and fever, for a couple of days, that she was not able to function.

I know of a family—husband, wife, three children—who got it. The husband went to the hospital. The wife somehow was able to function at home. They’re all well now, but they don’t know what long-term organ damage the virus may have caused.

But I admit that we also don’t know the long-term effects of the vaccines, especially with pregnant women and small children. If I was the husband of a pregnant woman or the father of small children, I’m not sure what I would advise.

Just as some of us are at greater risk for the virus, so others of us are at greater risk for the vaccines.

I do think that if businesses and other institutions require vaccinations, they should give the employee a day off with pay to get the vaccination, and also days off with pay to recover from side effects.

The reasonable case for considering ivermectin

Some physicians think invermectin is useful as a treatment for Covid; others don’t.  I don’t have the medical or scientific knowledge to judge who is right.  

My view of invermectin is a form of Pascal’s Wager.  It is cheap and, if used as prescribed by a physician, it is safe.   If vaccines have failed or are not available, a person infected with Covid has everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying it.

I am vaccinated.  I think everybody who has access to vaccines should get vaccinated, unless they already have had Covid or have a good medical reason not to.  

But the vaccines now in use do not prevent infection or the spread of the disease.  You can catch Covid from a vaccinated person.  

Vaccines may not prevent breakthrough Covid.  A friend of mine who was vaccinated spent a weekend suffering intense pain, fever and chills, which I think was probably breakthrough Covid.

This doesn’t mean the current vaccines are useless.  They rally the body’s immune system to fight the virus.

What it does show, in my opinion, is the need for a treatment, or a sterilizing vaccine, that will actually kill the virus.

If ivermectin is such a treatment, this would be great for everyone. 

The small-scale clinical trials showing the benefits of ivermectin have sometimes been flawed.  All or almost all have been too limited to bring about conclusive results.  

That is why there should be large-scale clinical trials to settle the question one way or other other.  If ivermectin is not what it’s cracked up to be, then there should be an intense program, equivalent to Operation Warp Speed, to develop one.

It is established medical practice in the USA and other countries to allow government-approved drugs to be used for treatments of diseases other than the ones they’ve been approved for.  

I don’t believe in self-medication for serious conditions, but I believe physicians should be able to use their own judgment about legal treatments.

I  also believe physicians and scientists should be able to post discuss medical treatments on the Internet without being censored.

If I were dying of Covid, I wouldn’t want to be put on a ventilator, I would want my physician to try ivermectin.  If I were the president of an African country that couldn’t get vaccines because majority-white countries such as the USA and Canada want to give their citizens third doses, I would certainly  distribute ivermectin.

Vaccines and COVID-19 death rates

Click to enlarge

Hat tip to David Zweig.

I’ll be 85 years old in December.  This chart from England makes me very, very glad that I was able to get vaccinated.  

I wasn’t able to find the original link to the chart, but the links below have the basic information.

LINKS

COVID-19 confirmed deaths in England (to 31 January 2021) by Public Health England.

Risk for COVID-19 Infection, Hospitalization and Death by Age Group in the USA by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

COVID-19 and the war on populism

Hat tip to Bill Harvey.

Thomas Frank had a good interview last week on the Breaking Points TV show.  It’s worth watching.

He talked about how failure to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, instead of being blamed on the failed health care system, is instead blamed on people who are skeptical of established authority.

The problem is that there are good reasons to be skeptical of authority.  It was Anthony Fauci, who is nowadays considered to the voice of science, who in the early days of the pandemic said that it was not to be taken seriously, it was just like the ‘flu, and that masks were useless.

It was the Centers for DIsease Control that, in the early days, advised the U.S. government not to screen air travelers coming in from China. 

Established authority nowadays tells us that vaccination will prevent the spread of the disease, when, so far as is known, it merely suppresses the symptoms and does little or nothing to stop the spread.

Nobody is being called to account for this.  The bulk of the press, the political establishment and the medical establishment say that everything that has gone wrong, and everything that is predictably going to go wrong, is the fault of right-wingers who refuse to get vaccinated.

There are all kinds of reasons why people don’t get vaccinated.  There are medical reasons.  There are economic reasons.  There are religious reasons.

And of course there are conspiracy theorists who think the pandemic is a Democratic hoax.  I don’t share their views, of course, but conspiracy theories flourish in times like these, when established authority can’t be trusted.

Whatever the reasons people have for not getting vaccinated, ridicule and scapegoating are not good methods for bringing them around.  They are, however, good tactics for diverting blame for failure from the people in charge.

The plan is for all Americans to get COVID

The Biden administration’s plan for fighting COVID-19 is for all Americans to get vaccinated. But that won’t stop the spread of the disease.  Being vaccinated just means you’re less likely to die or need hospital care if you get it.

But there is nothing in place to stamp out the disease and very little to stop the spread of the disease.  This means that all of us Americans are bound to get it, sooner or later.

I’m in favor of vaccination.  I’ve received two shots myself.  I would like as many people as possible to get vaccinated.   Mandatory vaccinations are nothing new.  Schools and other institutions have every right to require masking and vaccinations.

The thing of it is—the vaccines now available are not sterilizing vaccines, at least not as far we know.  They do not kill the virus, just rally the body’s defenses to resist it.  Other things being equal, a vaccinated person is just as potentially infectious as an unvaccinated person.

The way to stop the spread of the virus would be to require everyone entering an indoor public space to be tested, whether vaccinated or not.  As in China, there would be a temperature check, and everybody running a temperature would get a test.

Those infected would be isolated and treated until the infection goes away.  Do this long enough and the virus dies out.

Why isn’t this being done?  Probably because the U.S. pubic health system and medical care system don’t have the capacity to carry it out.

Of course, there are other ways to slow the spread.  Indoor ventilation would be a big help.  Indoor masking also would be a big help. 

But the disease won’t be stopped until there are treatments that kill the virus, as penicillin kills bacterial infections.  There is no national effort to develop one.

The Biden administration is content to push vaccination alone, vaccination and nothing else, and it blames people who don’t get vaccinated for the spread of the disease. 

The unvaccinated are conflated with deplorables who believe in crazy conspiracy theories, and both groups are conflated with Trump voters.  They will be the scapegoats for the comeback of COVID-19 this winter.

I’ve even heard people say that the unvaccinated do not deserve to be treated for the coronavius. 

Would such people say that cigarette smokers do not deserve medical care lung cancer? that sexually active gay men do not deserve medical care for AIDS? that people who’ve attempted suicide, and failed, deserve no medical care at all?

Pushback against the war on ivermectin

The American Medical Association has joined the campaign to discourage people from using invermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.  But not all physicians are willing to accept the AMA’s judgment.

The following is a letter from Jane M. Orient, M.D., executive director of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, to Gerald E. Harmon, M.D., president of the American Medical Association.

The AMA has taken the startling and unprecedented position that American physicians should immediately stop prescribing, and pharmacists should stop honoring their prescriptions for ivermectin for COVID-19 patients.  The AMA is thus contradicting the professional judgment of a very large number of physicians, who are writing about 88,000 prescriptions per week.  It also contradicts the Chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, Haruo Ozaki, who recommended that all doctors in Japan immediately begin using Ivermectin to treat COVID.

AMA claims that ivermectin is dangerous and ineffective despite the safe prescription of billions of doses since 1981, and the mostly favorable results of 63 controlled studies in COVID-19.

AMA does not specify any recommended early treatments, but simply urges face masks, distancing, and vaccination.

Our members would appreciate clarification of the AMA’s stand on the following questions:

• What are the criteria for advocating that pharmacists override the judgment of fully qualified physicians who are responsible for individual patients?
• What are the criteria for forbidding off-label use of long-approved drugs, which constitute at least 20 percent of all prescriptions?
• On what basis does AMA demand use only within a clinical trial for ivermectin, but call for virtually universal vaccination outside of controlled trials, despite FDA warnings of potential cardiac damage in healthy young patients, and no information about long-term effects?

We believe that these questions get to the heart of issues of physician and patient autonomy, as well as scientific principles such as the need for a control group in experiments.

We look forward to your response.

Ivermectin is a drug originally developed as a cure for parasitic disease, and has come to be used as an off-label treatment for bacterial and virus diseases.  Many reputable physicians prescribe it for COVID-19—not as a substitute for vaccination, but as a supplement for vaccines or as an alternative when vaccines are not available or not medically recommended.

Vaccines do not cure COVID-19.  They protect infected people against the worst symptoms of the disease.  We need for a treatment or a “sterilizing vaccine” that will kill the disease.

Everything I know about ivermectin leads to me think that it might be such a treatment, but I’m not a physician or an epidemiologist and I could be wrong.  If not there should be a search for a treatment—a search as intense as last year’s search for a vaccine.

The chief disadvantage of ivermectin from the standpoint of the pharmaceutical industry is that it is cheap, safe and not patented, which means that it is relatively unprofitable.  Using Occam’s Razor, this is the simplest explanation for the industry’s behavior.

LINKS

AAPS Letter to AMA Re: Ivermectin and COVID.

As US Prepares to Ban Ivermectin for Covid-19, More Countries in Asia Begin Using It by Nick Corbishley for Naked Capitalism.

US as Failed State: Covid Booster Shot Mess by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

Public schools can be petri dishes for coronavirus

Back during the George W. Bush administration, Carter Mecher was head of a White House task force charged with making a plan to prevent pandemics.  He was contacted by Robert Glass, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, who’d been running computer simulations of pandemics.

Glass’s models indicated that kindergartens and schools were potential petri dishes for the spread of contagious disease.  I don’t think this would have been surprising to most parents and teachers.

At that time, there were more than 100,000 K-12 schools in the U.S., with 50 million children in them.  There were 500,000 school buses in operation, compared to 70,000 in the regular U.S. transportation system.  On an average day, school buses carried twice as many passengers as the entire public transportation system.

Michael Lewis, author of The Premonition, told what happened next.  Becher decided to visit schools. He found school classrooms were more crowded than any other public space.  Chlldren sat, on average, three and a half feet apart; they could touch each other.

In hallways and at bus stops, young children crowded together.  They lacked the adult idea of personal space.  School bus seats were on average 40 inches wide, just wide enough for three children close packed together.

School bus aisles were narrower than aisles of regular buses. Paramedics used special stretchers for school buses because regular stretchers wouldn’t fit.

Becher made videos of homes where the ratio of children to floor space was the same as in public schools.  They looked like refugee prisons, Lewis wrote.

Glass had concluded that closing schools and reducing contacts among children were the key to controlling pandemics.

That doesn’t necessarily apply to the present situation, because teachers and children over 12 can get vaccinated.  Many schools try to practice social distancing, although this doesn’t protect from an airborne virus in an enclosed space.  Glass’s model assumed no vaccines and no treatments.

But vaccines don’t eliminate the danger.  They suppress the symptoms of the disease, but they don’t necessarily kill the virus.  Vaccinated people can still be spreaders of the disease.  And vaccines may not be 100 percent effective.

I don’t know what I’d do if I were a parent, except listen to the teachers rather than the politicians or the CDC.

Children in families with a lot of books in the home, who watch educational programs on TV and talk about current events and books around the supper table—the education of these children would not suffer all that much from school lockdowns.

But children in families without books in the home, children with parents who work multiple jobs and don’t have time for suppertime conversations, children who depend on school lunches for their main nourishing meal of the day—these children would be hurt a lot by long-term school closing.

Wearing masks can help some.  Good ventilation can help a lot.  Vaccine mandates for teachers and staff might help, but regular tests for the virus would help more.

Ivermectin study retracted

A report of a clinical study on the benefits of ivermectin as an anti-Covid treatment has been withdrawn.

 

The resport reportedly gave results that were mathematically impossible and differed from the raw data.

 

The retraction does not, in itself, discredit ivermectin as a possible treatment.  There are other studies that support the benefits of invermectin. 

 

But the fact that the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and the British Invermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) Group cited it is not a good look.

 

My own opinion remains the same.  I believe the sale of drugs should be regulated.  I don’t think somebody should be able to sell Dr. Quack’s Covid Cure over-the-counter.  But prescribing approved drugs for non-approved purposes is a legal and common practice.

 

Ivermectin is a drug that has long been approved for treatment of parasitic disease and seems to hold promise for treatment of virus disease.  It has been proven safe, and is cheap because no longer protected by patents. 

 

There is no reason physicians should not prescribe ivermectin if in their judgment there is a benefit, especially when vaccines are not available or have failed.  Studies of invermectin should continue, and discussion of ivermectin should not be suppressed.

 

LINKS

 

Why Was a Major Study on Invermectin for COVID-19 Just Retracted? by Jack Lawrence for GRFTR.

 

Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdraw over ethical concerns by Melissa Davey for The Guardian.

 

Joint Statement of the FLCCC Alliance and British Ivermectin Research Development Group on Retraction of Early Research on Invermectin.

 

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know by Scott Alexander Suskind for Astral Codex Ten.  [Added 11/17/2021]

A vaccination-only anti-virus strategy

It seems as if the Biden administration intends to rely on vaccines alone to fight the COVID-19 virus.

The official advice is that once you get vaccinated, it’s safe to do anything you want, including spending time unmasked in poorly-ventilated indoor spaces.

That’s wrong.  Even if you’re vaccinated, you can be infected and you can infect others.  Masking, ventilation and other safety measures are still needed.

It’s true that availability of vaccines has dramatically reduced the death rate from COVID.  The chart above, showing waves of COVID infection before and after vaccines were available, indicates this.

Vaccination, however, does not confer 100 percent immunity.  The vaccines stimulate the immune system, so that, if you are infected, you are unlikely to experience symptoms of the disease and even less likely to be hospitalized. 

But they often fail to kill the virus.  You can be vaccinated and symptom-free and still be a spreader of the disease.

I’m in favor of vaccination. I got two shots of the Moderna vaccine as soon as I could, one in March and one in April.  I don’t take that as guaranteeing perfect safety.

It’s going to be a while before I eat a restaurant  meal indoors or watch a movie in a theater.  I may never take an airplane trip again.  I intend to wear a mask any time I am indoors with people I don’t know.

That’s not because I like masks.  I get short of breath when I wear one for a long time.  Everybody looks like they’re either terrorists, robbers or assisting in surgery.  But I can put up with this minor annoyance in order to reduce my own risk and the risk I create for others.

I understand that not everybody is willing to live as I do, or in a position to do so.  I am 84 years old, retired, unmarried, an introvert and a recluse. 

I don’t have to venture out into the world to earn my daily bread, and my temperament makes it easier for me than for most people to do without hugs and kisses.

Lab leak or animal transmission?

It’s very possible that SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal and was transmitted to a human being, because that’s how so many virus diseases originated.

But we don’t as yet have any example of an animal in the wild carrying the disease, let alone a specific person getting the disease from an animal.

It’s possible that the virus spread as the result of a laboratory accident, because lab accidents have been known to happen.

But we don’t have any proof that a laboratory accident actually occurred, let alone a specific person being infected.

It’s argued that it is more than coincidence that the virus was first discovered in Wuhan, China, a center for research in coronaviruses. I agree.

A center for the study of a virus in the lab would be a place where people would be most alert to detect the virus. But that’s not proof that the virus originated there. Diseases frequently are first discovered in places distant from where they originate.

It’s argued that the virus must be an artificial creation because it is so tailored to exploit human weaknesses. I don’t have the knowledge to make a scientific judgement one way or the other.

But it seems to me that this argument underestimates the malignant ingenuity of Mother Nature, operating through Darwinian random variation and natural selection.

None of this disproves the lab leak hypothesis, of course.

The lab leak hypothesis is more comforting than the animal transmission hypothesis because it is easier to fix human error that it is to cope with the forces of nature.

China haters tend to like the lab leak hypothesis. Trump haters tend to dislike it.

As for myself, I don’t have an opinion either way.

Why the U.S. failed to avert the pandemic (2)

Like Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a story of how people in authority disregarded warnings and allowed the COVID-19 virus to gain a foothold in the United States.

But while Lewis described the efforts of a number of far-sighted prophets, Slavitt concentrates on just one—himself.

Slavitt is an interesting figure—a political operator and member of the professional-managerial class, who influences policy, moves back and forth between government and the private sector, but would be unknown to the public except for this book.

He was an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, a consultant for McKinsey & Co., and founder of a company called HealthAllies, and then worked for United Health Group after it acquired HealthAllies. 

He served the Obama administration as head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2014, and was a medical adviser to the Biden administration during its first few months.

His power comes from being embedded in a network of politicians, corporate CEOs, wealthy philanthropists and academics, who all answer his phone calls and listen to what he has to say.

Preventable is about how he tried to alert the public to the danger, while also trying, from behind the scenes, to influence the Trump administration to take action before it was too late.

His book is a good overview of the Trump administration’s pandemic response and of the inadequacies of the American medical care system generally.

Much of the criticism of Trump is based on a knee-jerk response to his vulgar and offensive comments on Twitter and elsewhere, which don’t matter, and on a gullible acceptance of charges of collusion with Russian and Ukrainian leaders, which were either bogus or trivial.

Slavitt did a good job of showing the real problem with Trump, which was his inadequacy as an administrator and leader.  Trump refused to face unpleasant facts.  He thought of policy only in terms of public relations, not in terms of consequences, and he failed to think ahead even about public relations.

He calculated that closings are unpopular and openings are popular, so he shifted responsibilities for closings onto governors of states while positioning himself as the champion of openings.

As damning as Slavitt’s portrait of Trump is, it will not change the minds of Trump’s admirers because of Slavitt’s obvious bias and partisanship. 

The only named persons he holds accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic are Trump supporters, members of Trump’s administration and Donald Trump himself.  Democrats get a free pass.

How the virus took hold in the U.S.

The following timeline is from Andy Slavitt’s Preventable.  It shows when there was a window of opportunity to prevent the COVID-19 virus from establishing itself in the United States, and when that window closed.

Nov. 17, 2019.  First COVID-19 case in Wuhan, China.

U.S. total cases: 0.

U.S. total deaths: 0.

U.S. daily cases: 0.

Jan. 20, 2020.  First COVID-19 case in the United States

U.S. total cases: 1

U.S. total deaths: 0.

U.S. daily cases: 1.

Jan. 29, 2020.  White House task force created.

U.S. total cases: 6.

U.S. total deaths: 0.

U.S. daily cases:  1.

Jan. 31, 2020.  First COVID-19 case in Italy.

U.S. total cases:  9.

U.S. total deaths:  0.

U.S. daily cases:  1.

Feb. 26, 2020.  First COVID-19 death in the United States

U.S. total cases: 16.

U.S. total deaths: 1.

U.S. daily cases: 1.

March 3, 2020.  100th U.S. case.

U.S. total cases: 100.

U.S. total deaths: 14.

U.S. daily cases: 50.

March 9, 2020.  1,000th U.S. case.

U.S. total cases: 1,000.

U.S. total deaths: 35.

U.S. daily cases: 292.

March 17, 2020.  10,000th U.S. case

U.S. total cases:  10,000.

U.S. total deaths: 123.

U.S. daily cases: 2,570.

March 20, 2020.  100th COVID-19 death in South Korea.

U.S. total cases:  24,100.

U.S. total deaths: 273.

U.S. daily cases: 6,090.

Why the U.S. failed to avert the pandemic (1)

Michael Lewis’s The Premonition tells stories of Americans who foresaw the danger of a pandemic and created workable plans and technologies to fight it, but in the end were brushed aside.

He throws light on U.S. unpreparedness to deal with pandemic disease and how COVID-19 was allowed to take hold when it could have been eradicated.

The stories of his heroes are oddly inspirational, even though they mostly failed in the end.  Their plans and inventions were usually not tried, or tried too late.  They were like Winston Churchill’s in a world in which he was never called to power and World War Two ended in stalemate.

Lewis’s book leaves off in the spring of 2020 when it became plain that a pandemic was not going to be averted.  Andy Slavitt’s Preventable takes up the story at that point. 

Slavitt’s provided a good overview of the Trump administration’s failures, but I learned little that was new to me.  Lewis’s book is more fragmentary, but his insights are deeper and his writing is much more readable.

The back stories of Lewis’s heroes are as illuminating as their responses to the pandemic.  I’ll just give the highlights of one of them.

Charity Dean was public health officer for Santa Barbara County, California.  In 2013. she was alerted that a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara had symptoms of meningitis B, a rare infectious disease that attacked healthy young people and could kill them in hours.  The test for the disease was inconclusive.

She asked the Centers for Disease Control what to do.  The CDC advised her to do nothing.  She didn’t have enough data.  She ordered the university medical authorities to test any student with a low-grade fever four the disease.  Three tested positive.  The CDC still advised her to do nothing.

Instead she ordered lockdowns of the fraternities and sororities and to gave the 1,200 students a prophylactic (preventive medicine).  Over the objections of the CDC, she thinned out the dormitories by sending some students into hotel rooms, shut down intramural sports and administered a vaccine that had been approved in Europe, but not by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

There were no more cases.  Two years later, the CDC drew up a plan for best practices for an outbreak of meningitis B, which included most of the things Dr. Dean had done.

Another time she was faced with the decision as to what to do about a home for the elderly, which was within the path of a possible mudslide that would kill them all. 

Meteorologists said there was a 20 percent chance of such a mudslide.  The medical director of the home said that maybe 5 percent of the 100 residents were so frail to they would die if they were moved.

Based on those figures, she ordered the evacuation.  Seven of the old people died.  There was no mudslide.

A short time later, Karen Smith, public health director for the state of California, asked Dean to become deputy state public health director. 

Dean asked, Why me?  Smith answered, Because you make decisions.