Axios finally updated its Variant Tracker: So far "Delta" still dominates in the US, with Omicron most prevalent in Louisiana at just shy of 27%

Check it out here.

Politico reported last week that the CDC had to climb down about its estimate of the prevalence of Omicron in the US.

 

It had originally estimated prevalence of 73.2% in the US on Dec 18, but revised that down to just 22.5%.

 

Quite the doozy, that.

 

This was very amusing coming as it did with all the other messaging shifts last week:

Ditch the cloth masks for N95s;

Walensky at CDC claiming suddenly that PCR tests are unreliable;

You need only 5 days of quarantine, not ten, because, you know, Omicron is different;

Mr. I'm Going to Shut Down the Virus blurting out that there's no federal solution;

And Fauci suddenly admitting the distinction between being admitted to hospital for Covid as opposed to just with it.

During the final week of 2021 every day is the Friday afternoon news dump for the Biden administration

 

LOL, Anthony Fauci's name now appears third on a paper at the New England Journal of Medicine which says 'Vaccination has also been unable to prevent “breakthrough” infections, allowing subsequent transmission to other people'

 Here.

 

They move the goalposts so fast with these C19 vaccine recommendations it's hard even for Fauci to keep up: "Fully-vaccinated" to disappear in favor of annual shots

In September Fauci was already arguing for a 3-shot battery for COVID-19 as it was becoming clear the 2-shots for "fully vaccinated" were not holding up under the Delta onslaught. You can bet the farm he knew the number of breakthroughs after 2-shots was already much higher than the public knew, but because they didn't count them officially, no one was the wiser.

Just as with Trump, if you don't test you don't have cases!

Amid criticism from global health officials, Fauci argued that the COVID-19 vaccines should have been viewed as a three-shot regimen from the "get-go."

Three months later and Fauci is now hedging on that. He shape-shifts faster than a Terminator.

Fauci said the official definition of “fully vaccinated” is in some ways semantic, but important as a guidepost for the various vaccination requirements that employers, businesses, and other organizations have implemented. ... “As a public health person, I just say get your third shot,” Fauci said. “Forget about what the definition is. I just want to see people be optimally protected.”

The reason?

Some health experts are less sure — especially with the emergence of omicron — predicting it will be more like a flu vaccine where the shots are typically recommended on an annual basis.

“If that becomes the case, then ‘fully vaccinated’ becomes a term that’s sort of less useful, because there is no ‘fully vaccinated,'” Stephen Kissler, a Harvard infectious disease researcher, told reporters on a conference call this week. “Basically, how recently have you been vaccinated becomes the question.” 

Here's a news flash for ya:

No one's going to get 3 shots every year.

You can hardly get people to take the one for influenza. The average for adults in the last decade was barely 42%.

They are going to have to come up with something else, something that actually works and doesn't come with terrible side-effects.

Or maybe Omicron is a sign the virus will just save us all the trouble, by becoming less deadly over time.

The answer to COVID-19 is not 42.

Michigan's top epidemiologist, Sarah Lyon-Callo, falsely states "vaccines make a big difference in terms of community spread"

They do not.

Treating the vaccines like a panacea in order to get more people vaccinated has been a huge mistake.

These "experts" have totally oversold the vaccines, promising the moon. 

Countless people have become infected as a result, and many have died.

Michigan achieved 50% fully vaccinated on August 24th, the level at which Anthony Fauci at least three times indicated would be sufficient to guarantee that there would not be another surge. 

The experts couldn't have been more wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I certainly have seen people misinterpret this as vaccines (are not) effective,” said Dr. Sarah Lyon-Callo, the state’s top epidemiologist with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. In fact, the opposite is true, she said. “The vaccines still make a big difference in terms of community spread and the risk of severe outcomes for individuals.”

Here.

CDC has said differently since the July 4 Provincetown outbreak, and is repeating it again now:

This investigation highlights that the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 can spread quickly through a highly vaccinated population and can be transmitted to others regardless of vaccination status. ... our findings underscore the need for persons who are fully vaccinated to take precautions to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to themselves and others, such as wearing a mask in public indoor settings or crowded outdoor settings, particularly during substantial or high transmission. Vaccination, although critical to reduce illness and death from COVID-19, should be complemented by layered mitigation strategies to address the COVID-19 pandemic (25,31).

LOL, just 20 cases of Omicron in the US but Anthony Fauci is already confident of "community spread"

“We absolutely have community spread in this country,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told Bloomberg Television on Friday. “We don’t know how many of them, but there’s no doubt there’s community spread.”

Story.

Fauci was nothing but the picture of doubt on spread on Jan 28, 2020 when there were already over 6,000 cases in the world:

He also addressed concerns about whether the virus could be easily spread by asymptomatic carriers. "The driver of respiratory outbreaks is symptomatic people, not asymptomatic carriers," said Fauci.

Video shows him saying this most emphatically:

“In all the history of respiratory-borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. … Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.”

By June 10, 2020 Fauci wasn't saying that anymore and had completely reversed himself:

“In fact, the evidence we have given the percentage of people, which is about 25% [to] 45%, of the totality of infected people likely are without symptoms,” he said. “And we know from epidemiological studies that they can transmit to someone who is uninfected even when they are without symptoms.”

Waiting for the evidence on Omicron?

Fuhgettaboudit.

Flashback Sunday: Anthony Fauci Feb 17, 2020 said "there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask", danger from coronavirus is "just minuscule"

He couldn't have been more wrong, and on both counts no less.

Coronavirus went on to kill far more than flu ever has since 1918, and other "experts" now chalk up those low flu numbers partly to mask-wearing. 

USA AWAY, here in Feb 2020:

"If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn't really do much to protect you," he said. "People start saying, 'Should I start wearing a mask?' Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask." ...

Fauci doesn't want people to worry about coronavirus, the danger of which is "just minuscule." But he does want them to take precautions against the "influenza outbreak, which is having its second wave."

Coronavirus went on to kill 346,000 in the USA in 2020, but the flu killed just 700 over the entire 2020-2021 season.

The irony is the experts quoted by Scientific American now attribute the low number of flu deaths to mask wearing and social distancing, both of which Fauci only later embraced to stop coronavirus, but which has now gone on to kill an additional 440,000 despite those measures and mass vaccination:

Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have dropped to minute levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading—notably mask wearing and social distancing—also stop the flu.

Prevalence of COVID-19 in 2020 was just 6.1% of population (20m cases in 328m people) because it didn't really hit the country until March. In 2021 to date, prevalence is higher at 8.7% (28.923m cases in 332m people), about the level typical for influenza in an average year.

Why, when people have been masking, social distancing, and getting vaccinated?

Clearly something(s) has(have) stopped influenza, but the definitive transmission mechanism of coronavirus remains unsolved.

Similarly no one so far has explained how white tail deer populations have become riddled with coronavirus: We do not know how the deer were exposed to SARS-CoV-2. 

A new Penn State study is pretty certain hunters are somehow responsible:

“The viral lineages we identified correspond to the same lineages circulating in humans at that time,” said Kapur. “The fact that we found several different SARS-CoV-2 lineages circulating within geographically confined herds across the state suggests the occurrence of multiple independent spillover events from humans to deer, followed by local deer-to-deer transmission. This also raises the possibility of the spillback from deer back to humans, especially in exurban areas with high deer densities.”

But I doubt it's because they breathed on them out there in the woods.

The vectors must be human urine and feces, but to this day no one is focusing on those to explain the continuing crisis.

Stephen L. Miller, aka redsteeze, prefers alternative C19 facts when it suits his rhetorical purposes against Anthony Fauci

OK Stephen.

He’s not referring to the science of, say, the human manipulation of viruses that can lead to a global pandemic, research Fauci once said he believed was worth the risk. Or to the science that has possibly led to eleven million deaths worldwide and altered the lives of every citizen of every industrialized nation on the planet. ... He’s not going to be prosecuted. He’s not going to prison, no matter how many Twitter users crow about it. He will, however, be judged by science, real science, when this is all over. And the real science shows that eleven million people and counting have died so far.

The guy is nothing if not weird. It's almost like he has 6 million on the brain or something. 6 million + 5 million = 11 million. I dunno.

 

WaPo finds one sucka in Michigan to say how bad C19 hospitalizations are when 84% of beds statewide are occupied by non-COVID patients

"We don't have a darker color," said Darryl Elmouchi, president of Spectrum Health West Michigan. "So if we're red now, what are we in two weeks?" ...

Spectrum reported more than 370 people hospitalized with covid last week. The system has converted floors and tripled its intensive care unit space, yet there are still patients waiting for beds. Conference space and shared workspaces have been identified for conversion if the surge continues as expected. Elmouchi described the situation as "almost unmanageable."

More. 

The third graph shows 16% of Michigan hospital beds occupied by COVID patients right now.

Who's in the other 84%?

The way you manage a real emergency is to stop filling beds with people getting elective procedures. That they aren't doing this in general tells you they are exaggerating.

COVID patients don't make the hospitals any money. That's the real reason they are complaining. The COVID pandemic cuts into the hospitals' bottom line.

You should see the outpatient eye surgery operation at Grand Rapids Ophthalmology lately. They herd them in and out like cattle, performing cataract surgeries like crazy. The pandemic isn't stopping them one bit.

They've had plenty of time to prepare for this inevitable seasonal wave, but instead they placed their faith in a vaccine which didn't stop the spread. Big Pharma, Big Healthcare, and Big Fauci make suckers of us all:

At this point in the pandemic, months after the shots became widely available, the state's health-care workers expected to see occasional ebbs and flows in case numbers. But not at this level.

"I think all of us had hoped that with relatively reasonable vaccination rates - and a year-plus under our belt - we would not get another surge like this," Elmouchi said.

 

 

Meanwhile in 79% fully vaccinated Spain: Spread of COVID-19 "has raised concerns", lol

European nations are seeing Covid cases explode, with nations bringing in tough new measures and warnings of widespread lockdowns:

While Spain’s vaccination rates are positive – with 79 per cent of the population having both jabs – the Covid rates are rising.

The country has reported 88.6 cases per 100,000 over 14 days, a jump of 67 per cent, according to El Pais.

This is much lower than other badly hit European destinations such as Germany and Belgium, but the spike has raised concerns about the efforts to slow the spread.  

Spain achieved the 79% fully vaccinated threshold on Oct 10. Even that level did not eradicate cases, and now they are rising again.

 

 

 

 

 

The vaccine peddlers like Anthony Fauci insisted multiple times that the 50% level would prevent a surge in cases. Europe is 57% fully vaccinated, yet look at that headline.

Boosters will be the next panacea. And Eric Topol now insists we must have 90-95% vaccinated.

"The science has changed" is simply sanctification of moving the goalposts.

Meanwhile Africa, hardly 7% fully jabbed, is making monkeys of the wizards of smart. 

But no one asks, Why?

Welcome to The Planet of the Apes.

 

The powers that be insist the boosters will stop transmission when the first two jabs have not

Axios:

But boosters dramatically increase protection against infection, which can help reduce the spread of the virus.

Gibraltar, 100% vaccinated with Pfizer since the spring, did not escape the summer outbreak.

And with 35% already given the booster from early October, they are having an even bigger outbreak now.

Three jabs, but the virus still spreads.

The insanity is remarkable.

 

 

 

LOL, expert Eric Topol: 74% vaccinated isn't enough, gotta get to 90-95%

 In The Grauniad:

Noteworthy is Belgium with 74% fully vaccinated and one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, now at 79/100,000, currently 10th highest caseload globally. That alone tells us 74% isn’t enough, and that prior Covid (without vaccination, what some refer to as “natural immunity”) is unreliable for representing a solid immunity wall against the Delta variant. In fact, it has been projected for Delta that any country needs to achieve 90-95% of its total population fully vaccinated (or with recent Covid) in order to have population-level immunity that covers, providing relative protection, for the others.

Actually what it tells us is that the Pfizer vaccine, which is what Belgium overwhelmingly uses, does not stop the spread. 

The CDC and Anthony Fauci have held since late in 2020 that the reproduction rate for COVID-19 of 2.5 means a 60% vaccination level should stop the pandemic. 

The vaccines haven't done that. 

The United States is 57.6% fully vaccinated to date, plus 13.9% who have survived infection to date, thus 71.5% "immune".

Yet here we are, into the sixth wave:

 It's Eric Topol who is in denial.

Massachusetts shouldn't have had a Delta surge at all, and neither should the United States as a whole

We have known since July 30th from the Provincetown, MA outbreak on July 4th that the vaccines do not stop the spread, but the insane powers that be continue to insist that the jab is all we need.

Since the CDC considers the basic reproduction number for this disease to be 2.5, herd immunity should have been achieved in Massachusetts at about 60% fully vaccinated/survived infection. This is why Anthony Fauci had kept insisting that getting the country to 50% would prevent a surge.

But on July 4th Massachusetts was already at 71.9% fully vaccinated/survived infection (692k total announced cases minus total announced deaths, 4.28 million fully vaccinated, population of 6.912 million). 

If the vaccines work to inhibit spread, which is what people expect of a vaccine worthy of the name, Massachusetts shouldn't have had a Delta surge after July 4th AT ALL, let alone the high level of daily new cases it has experienced continuously since then.

And in the United States as a whole on July 4th, the fully vaccinated plus those who survived infection totaled 193.787 million, or 58.3% of the population of 332.4 million.

The Delta surge shouldn't have happened in the country at large either, if the vaccines work as INCESSANTLY sold to us.

They obviously do not inhibit spread, but because people commonly think that they do, the pandemic continues.

We're insane.

 

F is for Fauci: Lancet publishes study finding that vaccination does not prevent transmission of the India variant after elites blamed the August surge on the unvaccinated for months

... our findings suggest that vaccination is not sufficient to prevent transmission of the delta variant in household settings with prolonged exposures.

 

More.

Anthony Fauci actually predicted at least three times that mass vaccination against C19 would prevent a case surge

Fauci predicted this on December 15, 2020 and again on April 28, 2021.

It turns out he said the same thing as late as June 3:

Having about 50% of adults fully vaccinated and about 62% of adults having received at least one dose across the US as a whole means “as a nation, I feel fairly certain you’re not going to see the kind of surges we’ve seen in the past,” Fauci said. 

Three strikes, NPR, WSJ, CNN, and you are out!

How come US C19 cases EXPLODED in August even though the country was 49% fully-vaccinated by Aug 1?

Anthony Fauci, The Wall Street Journal, Apr 28, 2021:

"When you get to somewhere between 40 -50%, I believe you’re going to start seeing real change, the start of a precipitous drop in cases”.

Obviously cases exploded because Fauci was wildly mistaken about the vaccines and 165 million fully-vaccinated Americans were as capable of spreading C19 from Aug 1 as were the fewer than 500 fully-vaccinated but infected Provincetown, MA, revelers on Jul 4. Half of those revelers were vaccinated only 6-86 days before they became infected there.

The CDC reversed itself on masks far too late, on Jul 27, after it realized that Provincetown showed that the vaccines do not stop the spread.

This is the dirtiest little secret of the year, too dirty to be repeated in public.

 

 

For the six months Apr-Sep 2021 the combined UK/India variants produced 83% more cases compared with the same six months in 2020, despite Fauci's claims that mass vaccination would cause a steep downturn in cases

Cases and deaths Apr-Sep 2020 were 7.074m and 0.2025m respectively, for a cfr of 2.863%.

Cases and deaths Apr-Sep 2021 were 12.979m and 0.1463m respectively, for a cfr of 1.127%.

The C19 case fatality rate year over year Apr-Sep 2021 was therefore down over 60%. Total deaths period over period were down almost 28%. The theory that the so-called Delta is more transmissible yet less deadly seems to hold up. The virus has evolved to spread, at the expense of its ability to kill.

That there were comparatively FAR more cases in the 2021 period, nearly 6 million more cases, despite a mass vaccination effort is remarkable. How could that be?

The powers that be are blaming the unvaccinated.

But the timeline of events indicates that the vaccinated are implicated in the latest surge in cases, and therefore also in the deaths, which at over 57k in September are almost as bad as in April 2020.

CDC removed its mask guidance for the vaccinated in mid-May, which the president and vice-president both lauded with great enthusiasm.

And by June 1, 50% of the US population had received at least one dose of a C19 vaccine.

Vaccinated people took off their masks and enjoyed their summer.

Meanwhile Anthony Fauci had indicated on at least two occasions, in December 2020 and again in April 2021, that we would start to witness a decline in cases after achieving that level. But daily new cases just seemed to shrug their shoulders for a month instead, skipping along in a tight range for all of June. Then in July they began to soar, just as the India variant became dominant.

It's important to emphasize how fantastically wrong Fauci was about this.

In December 2020 Fauci had merely said a 50% vaccination level would need to be reached before an  impact on the infection numbers would be observed, but by late April, with cases in another steep decline, he really doubled down on his claim and amplified it:

"When you get to somewhere between 40 -50%, I believe you’re going to start seeing real change, the start of a precipitous drop in cases .”

Instead of that precipitous drop he was about to get 9.8 million new cases in Jul-Sep vs. 3.1 million in Apr-Jun.

The dirty truth in all this is that the wildly growing numbers in the vaccinated population unknowingly spread the virus for 2.5 months, from mid-May through July, before the CDC reversed itself on mask guidance at the end of July after the Provincetown, MA, study showed that the virus was spreading like wildfire among vaccinated people. A Texas prison inmate study has shown the same thing since then.

Many vaccinated people have continued to spread the disease since the CDC reversed itself, however, as numerous incidents of masklessness involving celebrities and government officials demonstrate. My own veterinarians saw no need to wear masks when I took my cats in for appointments in early and late August. The late August one even asked if that was OK with me, which was hardly part of the new guidance. Mask wearing by vaccinated people, especially professionals, should have been de rigueur in close quarters in public by then.

With Pfizer vaccine effectiveness falling off to undetectable levels by month seven, we have an awful lot of people walking around who think they are bulletproof when they are not. They are instead dangerous to public health.

The surge in cases beginning in the seventh month of the year proves it.

 

 

The India variant never matched the UK variant globally, which peaked in April, despite people like Anthony Fauci falsely claiming the level of Delta in the airways was 1,000 times higher

The CDC's own data showed it was 10 times higher, but even at that Delta cases per million measured globally peaked way below "alpha" from April, already a month ago now, on Aug 26.

How did this supposedly super-virulent Delta come up so short, eh Antnee?

And Delta hardly matched the 2020 strains for reach on top of that.

What will they come up with next to scare you into getting vaccinated?

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

 

 

 

LOL, my progressive neighbor lady was trying to set me straight on COVID-19 the other day by insisting that the case fatality rate was 3.4%

Which was true . . . way back in March 2020.

She's still using talking points from over a year ago, which she cuts and pastes into her emails.

The lights are on, but no one is home. 

I liked her better not knowing this, alas.

For the US to date the cfr is 1.6% and globally to date it's 2.05%, per Johns Hopkins this morning.

Notice, by the way, the imprecision in the popular press below, which was widespread at the time and even came out of Anthony Fauci's own mouth, mixing up case fatality rate and mortality rate. Mortality rate is usually expressed in deaths/100k/year, case fatality rate as a percentage of cases dying, which fluctuates constantly, obviously.

The cfr has been in steady decline, and consequently the mortality rate for the second year of the pandemic is going to be much lower than for the first year.

You can repeal the 19th Amendment, but you can't repeal the hysteria.

 

Perhaps more telling is that on 12/4/2020 Biden was spouting Fauci's belief that the combination of vaccines and masking for 100 days after his inauguration would cause a huge decline in infections and deaths