The New York Times used to employ a guy who wrote the book about this going on four years ago, is only now just catching up

 Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Getting Sick...

Alex Berenson is collecting receipts, and I for one sure hope he wins his lawsuit against Twitter, as I hope Sarah Palin wins hers against The New York Times

Twitter has changed the warning label on the tweet that got Alex suspended last summer.

But of course you can't see that. Only Alex can see that. 

Evidence tampering. Admission of error.

Story.

By changing its mask guidance on July 27, 2021, the CDC itself was admitting that the vaccines don't stop infection or transmission.

The elephant in the room which to this day the medical-pharma complex denies is there.

Provincetown, MA, was impossible to ignore, so CDC warped the story to make it about Delta, not about vaccine failure.

Alex simply pointed it out and got singled out for it because the former New York Times columnist was read by too many people.

He had to be canceled, a Twitter specialty.

 

New Mexico's Senator Lujan, hospitalized for a stroke, was vaccinated way back in December 2020, so it's a real stretch to connect the two

 Yeah, I'm talking to you, Alex.

Alex Berenson still thinks The Atlantic was wrong about Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice

You can still read Alex Berenson, at Substack, as I do. He continues to be an important source for stories our media continues to ignore (censor) because they don't fit the narrative. But sometimes the takes can be odd.

Alex today still thinks the Georgia story way back when was a bad covid take, and that Germany's troubles presently somehow invalidate The Atlantic's positive opinion on the record of Europe's biggest country outside of Russia.

Neither point is defensible.

The US State of Georgia today ranks 10th worst in the US for deaths per million of its population, at 2961/m. Mississippi is our very worst, at 3511/m. In between there, there are red and blue states, including New Jersey and New York.

But Germany today is at 1361/m. Worst place in the world Peru by contrast is at 6336/m.

Germany's done pretty damn well considering it has a population of 83 million compared with Georgia's paltry <10 million.

The situation in Georgia to date, in fact, is 118% worse than in Germany. And if Georgia were a country, it would be ranked in the top 15 worst performers in the world today for deaths per million.

I think Alex is letting animus cloud his judgment. Animus certainly for The Atlantic, but perhaps also for Germany.

Gee, why would that be?

Georgia's done a very poor job. Not as poor as New Jersey and New York, and not poor enough by comparison with them to be singled out the way they were. "Stupid hicks" elitism, right? On that we agree. But Germany's done remarkably well, and we should care enough to understand why.

But Alex is too busy to go into that right now. The drive-by-shooting of the "little homily on the brilliance of Germany’s Covid response" will have to do for now.

LOL, Alex Berenson writes that for most of its history Australia has been a white outpost against the Asian hordes, like that's a bad thing

Here:

Anyhow, Covid was perfect for Australia, which has a long and ugly history of trying to protect its borders at all costs. For most of its national existence it viewed itself pretty much explicitly as a white outpost against the Asian hordes.

I guess whites are the only people in the world not allowed to go cray-cray if they want to.

The anti-white racism just never ends, does it?

Globally speaking, the India variant wave appears already to have peaked both in respect of cases/million and deaths/million

It also looks as if the India variant has been not only less deadly, but less infectious as well, not more as most experts had been saying.

The January outbreak remains the dominant one of all the waves so far as to cases, but as to deaths we are clearly seeing a step down in severity.

I'm sure vaccine advocates will chalk it all up to the success of the vaccines, ignoring that the latest wave began on the first day of summer, fully six months into the mass vaccination effort, which most certainly did not prevent infection and transmission as the US CDC continues to say to this day. Pointing this out on Twitter a few days ago got Alex Berenson finally and permanently banned.

The Vaccine Church wants to credit the dramatic decline in cases since January to the vaccines, but refuses to own the wave of July and August. Instead it blames the unvaccinated at the same time it admits that vaccinated people get infected and spread the disease, as was proven by the dramatic Provincetown, Massachusetts, incident. Conveniently for the investors in big pharma, the CDC doesn't count breakthrough cases unless they end up in hospital or die, excluding from the statistics an entire class of superspreaders. There are literally hundreds of millions of them.

Meanwhile as to deaths few will consider that the easy fruit had already been harvested by the Grim Reaper before the India variant even arrived, that as to cases prior infection immunized millions while millions more who were vaccinated relaxed masking and social distancing, with official encouragement, spreading the virus.

There is also the simple fact of seasonality, which may loom larger than we know.

No one can really say.

There isn't just one variable to blame or credit, but that is what tired, frightened, small, greedy, and often hysterical minds end up doing.

It's human nature.

The virus may or may not peter out, but we'll always have human nature.

 

 

Coronavirus virulence since the India variant became dominant in the US is actually running below the first year average

News reports in early July declared the India variant to be dominant in the United States.

From July 6-August 6 total announced cases per the New York Times data have grown by 1.97 million.

But during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, dated roughly from March 7, 2020 to March 7, 2021 (when The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic stopped collecting data), total announced cases averaged 2.42 million per month over the entire twelve month period.

What is more, since March 7, 2021 total announced cases are averaging an even lower 1.34 million per month to August 6 (five months), which includes the new period of the India variant.

 

So the India variant is really going to have to outperform from here on out to prove the claim by the authorities that the India variant is much more virulent, much more transmissible, et cetera. It is going to have to produce many more millions of cases per month than it is doing in order to do it. They have 7 more months, because that's how these things must be measured to be meaningful (disease morbidity is measured in cases per 100,000 per year). 

But this far at least, the India variant isn't living up to the hype, from either side, which includes the Buck Sextons and Alex Berensons of the world who keep insisting on the basis of specious antibody testing that far more people have been exposed than the case counts show and that natural immunity is widespread.

Twitter has suspended Alex Berenson this week for having the temerity to publish the Pfizer trials conclusion that 15 died in the vaccine group, 14 in the placebo

During the blinded, controlled period, 15 BNT162b2 and 14 placebo recipients died; during the open-label period, 3 BNT162b2 and 2 original placebo recipients who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators. Causes of death were balanced between BNT162b2 and placebo groups (Table S4).

More.

Six Month Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full-text

The results receive considerable discussion in the comments section. Many people are uncomfortable given all the hype surrounding this "vaccine" when confronted with the result that 15 vax recipients died and 14 placebo recipients died from all causes.

Many will wonder if causes of death are balanced between the groups, what's the point of getting the vaccine?

And what was the point of the First Amendment again?

ROFLMAO: Iceland has way over 75% of its population fully-vaccinated but is now experiencing a coronavirus moonshot outbreak

Herd immunity schmamunity.

If vaccines are supposed to prevent illness, these aren't vaccines. 

h/t Alex Berenson

Alex Berenson: COVID-19 deaths started dropping long before most people had received shots

Vaccine advocates rarely acknowledge the fact that deaths started dropping long before most people had received shots. In reality, even acknowledging that many people who received vaccines in January and February were older and vulnerable, seasonality and herd immunity seem to have had a greater impact on broad Covid trends than vaccinations.

More.

Fredo Fauci on US mortality rate for COVID-19 vs. influenza

Anthony Fauci should have known better than to make a mistake like this in March 2020, saying the coronavirus mortality rate was 2%, but I think he's getting beat up over this unfairly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He meant case mortality rate.

Technically that's not a thing, but that's how most of us were talking at the time, as a synonym for case fatality rate. Admittedly using the word "mortality" in this way only confuses matters. And to this day. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Berenson.

Fauci was, after all, responding to the popular press, understanding correctly how the popular press talks about these matters.

Mortality rate is a technical measure of the number of deaths in a particular population per unit of time, usually annual, usually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 of population (not per cases!). Since the virus was barely 3 months old, any annual rate could only be a projection, not an observation, and I don't think Fauci was so foolish as to be making such a projection based on not even three months experience with a new virus.

The implications of a 2% mortality rate would be astounding. It would mean 2% of the US population dying over the course of a year, or 6.6 million. The quick spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world by aircraft was reason enough to think this magnitude of death was possible if in fact prevalence of the disease were to dwarf that for influenza.

I don't think Fauci meant that. I think he meant case fatality rate, which fluctuates with cases and necessarily declines over time. One person gets sick with something new and dies, the case fatality rate is automatically 100%. The second case survives, the rate falls to 50%, and so on. CFR is a function of cases.

Mortality rate is function of population and time.

His flu comparison shows that he didn't mean the mortality rate technically understood. He didn't technically give the "mortality rate" for the flu.

He gave the case fatality rate for flu, which is 0.1%.

Prevalence of influenza in the US is roughly 8% of population annually on average (the morbidity rate). In any given year roughly 8% of the population gets the flu. 8% of 328 million people is 26 million cases, 0.1% of which die every year, or 26,000. If the prevalence is a little higher, you'll get more deaths. Just one more point of prevalence gets you to almost 30 million cases and 30,000 deaths, and so on. And that's what we've actually experienced in the US. As the population has aged, more older people have experienced flu which kills. Annual cases for all groups have come in at an average of almost 30 million for the last decade. Deaths have averaged almost 36k per year.

That's an average annual case fatality rate of 0.12%, just as Fauci indicated in the email.

So it's pretty clear to me that Fauci was not referring to the technical "mortality rate", but to the "case fatality rate". We were all talking about it, sloppily.

Here's how COVID-19 in the United States actually looks after what amounts to one year, using covidtracking.com data through March 7, 2021, when it quit its data gathering operation, from which we can calculate an actual mortality rate because it had been a year (population figure is US Census for Sep 7, 2020, the mid-way point, at 331.7774 million):

Confirmed US cases C19 to 3/7/21: 28.7565 million

Cumulative hospitalized to 3/7: 0.8786m

Cumulative dead to 3/7: 0.5152m

% cases hospitalized: 3.06

% cases dead: 1.79 (case fatality rate)

% population infected: ~ 8.67 (morbidity rate, very similar to influenza)

% pop. hospitalized: ~ 0.26

% pop. dead: ~ 0.16 (mortality rate).

 

Now let's compare COVID-19 to flu in terms of the "mortality rate", technically understood, expressed per 100k of population.

To 3/7/21, 515151 C19 deaths per 331.7774 million people works out to 155 deaths per 100k.

Average annual flu deaths of 36,000 per 331.7774 million people (0.011% of population) works out to 10.85 deaths per 100k (In 2019 it was 15.2/100k).

Thus COVID-19 in the US after one year has a mortality rate 14.3 times worse than for the flu on average. Its case fatality rate, 1.79%, has been 14.9 times worse than for flu's average 0.12%.

Fauci's 2% estimate in March 2020 was good enough for government work.

It doesn't follow that rigorous measures against coronavirus fail to produce low new daily cases, unless you are an asshat who thinks 10x more cases or 22x more deaths on the way there is preferable

Finland: 7,443 cases; 329 deaths from COVID; 4.4% case fatality rate

Norway: 9,249 cases; 255 deaths from COVID; 2.75% case fatality rate

Sweden: 80,422 cases; 5,743 deaths from COVID; 7.1% case fatality rate