Starting at the 20:00 mark.
The passing scene is hilarious, until it careens through the front yard and crashes into my living room.
Friday, September 10, 2021
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
In December of last year Anthony Fauci said 50% vaccination would be enough to have an impact on the number of infections
Wrong again.
The United States has added 7 million cases since achieving 50% vaccination with one dose on June 1, and that spike continued strong despite achieving 50% full vaccination on August 14.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's senior official for infectious diseases, predicts the United States could begin to achieve early stages of herd immunity against the deadly coronavirus by late spring or summer. And if that happens, Fauci anticipates, "we could really turn this thing around" toward the end of 2021.
In a wide-ranging interview Tuesday on Morning Edition, NPR's Rachel Martin asked Fauci how many Americans need to receive the vaccine to have an impact on the number of COVID-19 infections.
"I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."
It's amazing how wrong Anthony Fauci was last November but people still have faith in whatever he says
"Certainly it’s not going to be a pandemic for a lot longer, because I believe the vaccines are going to turn that around,” Fauci said. “Vaccines will help us. What we’ve got to do is just hang on and continue to double down on the public health measures.” ... The public also needs to be prepared for the likelihood that protection against the virus -- whether from vaccines or from fighting off Covid -- will probably only last for a year, perhaps two, he said. That’s based on experience with similar viruses and the growing number of documented cases of people being infected with this coronavirus twice, he said.
Thursday, August 5, 2021
Monday, August 2, 2021
When is the White House going to reign in Anthony Fauci for exaggerating about the Delta variant?
This is the CDC slide with the Delta comparison to Alpha which Fauci grossly exaggerated on MSNBC. It clearly states the Delta is 10 times worse than the Alpha for viral load, not 1,000 times as Fauci incorrectly stated. The White House claims to be upset about stuff like that.
Har-dee har har har.
Friday, July 30, 2021
Anthony Fauci falsely stated on MSNBC that with the Delta variant "the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000 times higher than with the alpha variant"
Nope. He's wrong. CDC says 10 times higher than with the Alpha, not 1,000 times.
Infection with the Delta variant produces virus amounts in the
airways that are tenfold higher than what is seen in people infected
with the Alpha variant, which is also highly contagious, the document
noted.
The amount of virus in a person infected with Delta is a thousandfold more than what is seen in people infected with the original version of the virus, according to one recent study.
The C.D.C. document relies on data from multiple studies, including an analysis of a recent outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., which began after the town’s Fourth of July festivities. By Thursday, that cluster had grown to 882 cases. About 74 percent were vaccinated, local health officials have said.
From The New York Times here.
Here is Fauci getting it wildly wrong.
Is he just getting too old for this, or is this a deliberate attempt to whip up hysteria about Delta?
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
The CDC Follies
Sunday, June 13, 2021
US COVID-19 charts update for Sunday 6/13/21
Alles in Ordnung.
Cases per million are steady at the new lows.
Deaths per million continue to fall to new lows.
Hospitalizations are almost 10 times lower than they were at the peak in January.
Test positivity is bouncing off the bottom at 2%.
Despite non-stop vaccination propaganda, the curve is bending with not quite 52% having received at least one dose.
Click on any chart to enlarge.
The UK variant continues to dominate in every US state, with prevalence well over 50% in most places. The latest scare from Fauci is about an India variant, but so far prevalence of an India variant is highest only in Arkansas at 10.1%. A Brazilian variant has 25.1% prevalence in Illinois. New York variants are prevalent in a range of 20-22% in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina.
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Fauci and others are not wrong to make comparisons between influenza and COVID-19 in terms of infection spread
One year of COVID-19 infected ~ 8.67% of the US population.
The average influenza year produces a similar result: about 8%.
Deaths are another matter entirely.
A typical flu year involves 36,000 deaths, or about 11/100k at current population.
COVID-19 gave us roughly 515k deaths in one year, March on March, or about 155/100k.
C19 has been 14 times more deadly than the flu.
But will it continue to be?
At this same point last year there were about 27k more dead from C19 than there are today, 108k vs. 81k.
Keep in mind that there are only just so many people with comorbidities and other vulnerabilities to fuel the death fire.
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
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.
FOIA'd Fauci email shows his top people informed him 31 Jan 2020 that the coronavirus looked engineered and was inconsistent with evolutionary theory
In other words, it might have come out of a lab, not out of nature by crossing from bats to some unknown animal intermediary found at the Wuhan wet market.
Friday, May 28, 2021
WAPo calls Chicom propaganda that coronavirus came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, "baseless"
I don't think so.
This is the same WAPo which highlighted an unexplained outbreak of a respiratory virus in Virginia, just across the border from the Fort Detrick biodefense facility, in June-July 2019, which killed 3 and hospitalized and sickened dozens more. The CDC concluded in late July 2019 that a "common cold" virus was to blame in the outbreak.
Hm, imagine that. But don't think about it too long. The investigative reporting on the right wants us to concentrate on a possible outbreak at the Wuhan lab, which, by the way, wasn't a Wall Street Journal scoop. An Australian journalist had the story already in March.
Meanwhile the CDC temporarily shut down the US Army part of the Fort Detrick operation in August 2019, just a month after the Virginia outbreak, for numerous safety and other violations, not the least of which was an incomplete inventory of agents. The latter problem seems to be chronic at Fort Detrick. The place was similarly cited way back in 2009.
And Congress was deliberately kept out of the loop.
What else is Fort Detrick famous for, besides bioweapons research long ago supposedly abandoned by the US government?
In 2001 a bunch of people were killed by anthrax mailed in letters shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick.
Robert Mueller and James Comey infamously fingered the wrong guy for those anthrax attacks, who was later compensated millions and exonerated. The true culprit was a senior scientist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 before our incompetent FBI could arrest him, seven years after the crimes.
What other nutjobs are still working in sensitive positions in our government?
In light of recent testimony by Anthony Fauci to Congress that he couldn't guarantee that NIH funds awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party were not used for gain of function research to weaponize viruses, you have to open your eyes to the fact of long-standing and intimate cooperation of US researchers with their Chinese counterparts. Chinese "scientists" are all over the place at American universities and research institutions, including at Fort Detrick, where their American counterparts seem all too often unruffled by the security implications. They are all also all dependent on US government, including military, funding for their livelihoods, as well as on funding from what President Eisenhower once warned us about, the military-industrial complex.
I don't believe any of these people as far as I can throw them.
We know the Chicoms were working on coronavirus. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that one of the inventory lacunae at Fort Detrick was the coronavirus, too. Was it just a coincidence that there was an outbreak of coronavirus-like disease in Virginia in the summer of 2019? CDC should be forced to reveal more.
The American elites who work on this stuff have all the same incentives to keep it all secret as the Chinese do. American scientists are thick as thieves with the Chinese. The fact is they are in this together, and we are the helpless bystanders on the outside. My estimation is they have too much to lose to tell the truth to the American people. Money trumps patriotism.
As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base:
Zhao, one of the country’s most notoriously hawkish diplomats, referenced a U.S. military location that has been baselessly linked to the coronavirus outbreak by Chinese media.