A Scary Thought

 

The evidence is beginning to look damning: that the COVID vaccines were actually more dangerous, for most of us, than the virus itself.

This explains why many governments, including that of Canada, suddenly around last September became insistent that everyone must be vaccinated, and imposed vaccine mandates even on truckers  There was no medical case for this, even if the vaccines worked and were safe. All that was needed was to vaccinate the most vulnerable. It was an otherwise unnecessary violation of human rights.

I assume they knew by about September, if not before, that herd immunity was not possible through vaccination, that the vaccines did not prevent the virus's spread, and that the vaccines were riskier than advertised. Up to t his point, pushing the vaccine on everyone might have been an innocent mistake. The responsible thing to do then would have been to pull back on the vaccination program. But then they risked being held to account for all those who died unnecessarily due to the vaccine.

Rather than intake their lumps. the safer political path was to try to force everyone to vaccinate, to hide the terrible reality that people who were vaccinated were dying at a higher rate than people who were not vaccinated. This would also explain why Trudeau called a snap election in the middle of a pandemic, which the public saw as unnecessary. It was to get a solid mandate before the truth came out.

No wonder they react so badly to any mention of the Nuremberg Code. No wonder they resorted to the Emergency Act. No wonder they have suddenly gone so authoritarian. They figure if and when this hits the fan, they are in big trouble. They are like burglars doubling down by trying to kill the witnesses...

A frightening thought, but it does seem to explain the facts at a time when government actions otherwise seem bizarre.

Armageddon Nervous

 

The news is coming in fast right now--about the new Omicron variant of COVID. It sounds as though it is far more virulent than the previous strains, as contagious as anything we’ve ever seen. Just when it looked as though we were about to come out of the pandemic, down we go again. I first heard of the new variant yesterday. Today, it is already reported from seven African countries, Belgium, Israel, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Hospitalizations in one South Africa province have doubled in the past day. The New York Times is running live updates.

Speculation is that it may be able to bypass the vaccinations, since it has mutated significantly. Nobody is prepared to say yet whether it is more or less deadly than previous strains. One doctor says lockdowns are not going to do much against this one.

Meantime, yesterday the abstract of a study was released suggesting that the mRNA vaccines significantly increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Stock markets are taking a hit.

It begins to feel as though we are in a downward spiral. It reminds me of the pace of Orson Welles’s radio version of War of the Worlds.

A Journal of the Plague Year--Year 2

 

Out and about in downtown Toronto yesterday. In the Eaton Centre, the Food Court seating is cordoned off. To enter you must wear a mask, and show your vaccine passport and some form of ID. 

As I was sitting there with a friend, a group of perhaps five blonde women of varying ages walked past me, opened the cordon, walked out, then replaced the cordon. None of them were wearing masks. They did this right beside a group of five security guards and police, standing around talking to one another, presumably there to enforce the rules.

It seems obvious to me that this was a planned act of defiance. No doubt there were other places where they could have left the seating area that were not right beside a gaggle of security guards. It was anything but sneaky. It obviously did not affect anyone’s safety. It would have been little or no inconvenience for them to have just walked out by the designated exit; to leave, they would not have had to show anything.

One of the security guards challenged them. “Do you think you’re special? Do you think you don’t have to follow the rules like everyone else?”

I imagine this is what they had wanted. The women assembled in front of him. One of them responded, in a distinctly Eastern European accent: “we are doing this for you. You will thank us in two or three years. We are from a Communist country. We know how this is going to go. We are fighting for your freedom.”

The five stood there and took turns arguing with the security guard, remaining relatively calm. One turned to me and apologized for the disturbance.

I was impressed.

I hope they are wrong.

UK OK?

 

It looks as though Britain may be the first nation to achieve herd immunity to COVID. And it was not all that painful. England opened up on July 19. Cases soared. But deaths did not. Now, the rate of infection has begun falling as quickly as it rose—and in the UK, the reporting system is very good. There might be a new spike in the fall; there might be some new variant. But thiis looks promising. Past drops seemed to reflect measures like lockdowns, masking, and vaccines. This time, most folks are already vaccinated, and other measures have been mostly removed. What else but growing herd immunity could be causing it?

The Endless Pandemic

 

People are losing hope. In Canada, we are into a third wave of the pandemic, and each wave seems worse than the last. Friend Xerxes writes a column on “What if it never ends?”

It will end.

Even without any human intervention, all epidemics end. The Spanish flu managed four waves, but it ended, without a vaccine.

We are going to break this third wave by summer. We may be fighting variants for a few years, but at a lower level, with booster shots. 

See if I’m not right.

A Journal of the Plague Year

 

It is now more than a year.

Just as the vaccines seemed to bring hope of an end, new concerns. The AstraZeneca shot, hoped to be the workhorse, has been suspended in Canada for under-55s for fear of causing blood clots. New variants are spreading that are deadlier and more virulent than the original virus. People are speaking of a “Third Wave.” 

It seems possible that the virus will be able to mutate faster than vaccines can keep up. If, say, the UK and the US manage to vaccinate nearly everybody, new variants might still breed in other countries, enter the US/UK, and be resistant to the vaccines. New round of new vaccines, new round of virus mutations, and the battle goes on year after year.

And everyone seems at the breaking point with the lockdowns.

The Threat from Danish Mink

 

There is a possibility they may spread coronavirus to a reservoir in nature.

A Journal of the Plague Year

 

I say the concern with COVID, if not the pandemic itself, will be over by the end of September. 

Reasons for optimism are accumulating.

Most notably, the UAE actually seems to have an effective vaccine from China out and ready to roll. This vaccine completed stage 2 trials in July, so it has now plausibly completed stage 3. One hundred thousand people have been given the vaccine, and none have contracted COVID-19. No serious side effects reported.

So it looks as though the race is over, and China won. The numbers of new cases in China too have been absurdly small for some time—only 12 yesterday. Figures from China may not be reliable, but figures from the UAE probably are.

So now the only problem is supply. It will take some time for this or another vaccine to get to a shoulder near you, but this must boost morale. If those most at risk are vaccinated first, it should make the death rates drop fast where it is deployed.

This puts pressure on the US and UK, where they are a month or two behind. The CEO of Pfizer says there is a better than even chance that their vaccine will be out of trial and ready to go by the end of October. Three other entries are moving at about the same pace. There are other efforts in China, India, Israel, perhaps elsewhere.

In the meantime, a new study suggests that, aside from preventing the spread of the virus to others, face masks ensure that, if you get the virus, you get a low dose. With this low initial dose, your chances of being symptomless go from 40% to 80%. In effect, this is a natural inoculation. And if the threshold is really only 20% or so, as some studies have now suggested, we may soon reach herd immunity.

And then there is Vitamin D. If everyone made sure their Vitamin-D levels were high, and wore masks everywhere, the chance of a serious infection gets vanishingly small. Even without hydroxychloroquine and zinc, which the authorities still unaccountably and criminally refuse to investigate.

A Journal of the Plague Year

New evidence from Germany is that the coronavirus is becoming less deadly. We have seen the death rate fall as the infection rate rises. We had thought this might have to do with more young people getting the virus. The German figures show this is not so: the death rate is falling quickly among older patients.

In other news, trials of the Oxford vaccine have resumed. The one patient who fell sick apparently had something unrelated to the vaccine.

What Trump Told Woodward

It flies through the air with the greatest of ease--
That coronavirus at which not to sneeze.

In 2016, Donald Trump was not my candidate. I thought his nomination by the Republicans was disastrous. I would never have supported Clinton, but would have preferred almost any other Republican.

Not the first time I’ve been wrong.

The reality is that he has done an unusually good job, by all visible indications. If any president deserved a second term, he does. The fact that the polls are still against him seems insane.

There is currently a scandal, it is true, about his supposed lying to the public about the COVID pandemic. And demands that Kayleigh McEnerny must also resign for saying that Trump did not lie. Because he told Bob Woodward on February 7 that the coronavirus spread by air and that it was more severe than flu. At the same time, and later, his public announcements were that the virus was “under control” and that Americans should "Just stay calm. It will go away."

I can’t see any lie here; except by the Democrats. If Trump “knew” that COVID was spread by air, and was worse than the flu, he can only have heard this from the experts. The experts at the same time were telling the public that COVID was under control, the risk was low, and they did not know whether it was spread by air. These same experts who advised Trump, or others like them, would have advised members of Congress. No members of Congress were warning the public as of February 7 that COVID was more serious than they realized, and was spread by air. China was saying at the same time that it was under control and probably was not spread by air. The WHO was still refusing to confirm airborne transmission as of July 8. The Centre for Disease Control would not confirm either that it was airborne or how deadly it was. Bob Woodward too obviously knew whatever Trump knew, having just been told by Trump; and he too told nobody.

They were all, of course, acting rationally and in everyone’s best interests. Nobody knew any of this for sure; it was speculation, although reasonable speculation. Everyone was trying to keep everyone calm. Trump was more honest than anyone: he actually publicly said, at the time, that his prime concern was to keep everyone calm. He was the most honest.

It is this that the corrupt elite cannot tolerate.

Trump is consistently a straight-talker. Those who oppose him seem to lie persistently and without compunction.

New Belgian Study

Suggests that hydroxychloroquine indeed does work.

Dr. Campbell is nonplussed by the fact that other studies finding hydroxychloroquine NOT to work used a non-standard dosage.

Why? Why did it take so long to get a study using the standard recommended dosage? Why did none of the studies use the combination first reported to work, hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc and azithromycin, administered early in the course of the disease?

I think Dr. Campbell hints at it without saying: the problem is that hydroxychloroquine is readily available and cheap. Drug companies can't make much money on it, and if it works, it reduces the market for any new proprietary treatment, like remdezavir, that they come up with.

In other news, a British study finds another possible treatment: an extract of eucalyptus readily found in insect repellants.

Even if it's a miracle cure, God knows how long it will take to get that approved...

The Final Lap

They are of course hedging their bets, but it looks from this news story as though the EU is betting on England's Oxford group being first out with an effective vaccine.

Meantime, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are putting in for early supplies of the Russian Sputnik V. This feels less significant. Given their cash reserves and small population, a bad bet it less risky for them.

A Torrent of Good News

... on COVID-19.

The Virtues of Conformity?

Why is Canada doing so better than the USA with COVID-19? The US has 16,364 cases per million population, and 515 deaths p.m.. Canada has 3,209 cases per million, and 239 deaths p.m.. Yet the two countries are next to each other, and culturally similar.

It may have to do with the larger Black and Hispanic populations in the US; dark-skinned people are more vulnerable to the virus, probably because of a deficit of vitamin D. Obesity is also more common in the US, and this is a risk factor for the coronavirus. A leftist friend wants to credit the difference to Canada’s government health insurance, but I don’t see any plausible argument for that.

A Chinese student has a theory. It’s due to good old American individualism. If the US government tells people to stay apart or wear a mask, Americans start to riot. In some other countries—he is thinking of China, but it applies to Canada—people are far more inclined to do as they are told by government or experts.

Canadians are famously law-abiding and orderly: in the much-quoted words of the original Canadian constitution, not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but “peace, order, and good government.”

The same thesis seems to make sense of the German experience in comparison to Italy, Spain, or the UK. Italians are always disorderly, and I imagine Spaniards too. The English are individualistic, like the Americans, and unusually tolerant of eccentricity.

This serves to explain again the lower levels of contagion in the Far East. We cannot trust the Chinese figures, but Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have all had an easier time of it; and all are notably for the sense of social cohesion and going along with the group, if not the government. Compare the Philippines, which has absorbed some of the American and the Spanish model, and so is more individualistic: higher numbers.

It may be that the virus has exposed a problem with that approach.

But the game is not over yet.

A Journal of the Plague Year

I’ve had an intuition for a while that the coronavirus scare would be mostly over by September.

I think there are inklings that it might be so.

The international race for a virus seems to be entering the final lap. Russia has actually announced that have one ready for distribution. This is a bit of a dodge; they are simply skipping the traditional third stage of trials, and will be testing it while using it. In this emergency situation, this seems to me to make sense.

But it means that they have not yet won the race; we will only know in a few months, as with several of the other candidates.

And it is a race; an international race for allies and prestige. Whoever does get a good vaccine out the door first will have scored a major coup. The Russians at least are well aware of this—they’ve named their vaccine “Sputnik V, an intentional reference to the space race.

Another prime candidate in this contemporary space race is England. All seems on track there; the New York Times reports that their Oxford vaccine has already been given to more than 10,000 volunteers in Britain, Brazil and South Africa. 30,000 people in the United States are to receive the vaccine next week. This means they are actually ahead of the Russians. AstraZeneca is poised to put out two billion doses if and when it is approved. Some months ago, the Oxford team was saying September was possible; it looks as though it may be.

The next strong competitor is China; or rather, a China-Canada collaboration. They are also into stage three, and still looks promising. China has several other candidates, one of which they have already, like Russia, begun using on their military.

The US of course has several vaccines in development too, and are pouring a lot of money into them, with “Operation Warp Speed.” They are pre-producing massive numbers of doses to roll out as soon as one is approved. Dr. Fauci says he is cautiously optimistic that one will be ready by the end of the year.

Evidence is growing that there is already widespread semi-immunity to the virus. The figure that comes up most often is 50%: 50% of the population already immune, due to prior exposure to other coronaviruses, aka the common cold.

This bodes well for finding a vaccine for the other 50%; in effect, we already have one. Quick and not so dirty: isolate the virus, and expose people to it. They get a cold; they do not die from coronavirus.

And if a cold can do it, it stands to reason that a lab-based vaccine should do it equally easily.

This also suggests that “herd immunity” is a lot closer than we thought. If we already are 50% immune, only another 20% of the population getting vaccinated should do it. There are indications that herd immunity has already taken effect in Sweden, or in London or New York City.

If herd immunity is this close, the Swedish approach might have been the right one: at worst, just open things up, let it rip, and in a month or two, the virus will be spent everywhere. The death rate in the meantime is going down, as we learn more about how to prevent and how to treat. The virus is becoming steadily less deadly.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Amidst the chaos, a ray of sunlight: in Germany and the UK, dogs have been found able to detect coronavirus in saliva or urine 94-95% of the time. That hit rate is so high, one suspects it may really be 100%--the dogs are simply more accurate than the tests they are being compared to.

If this turns out to work on sweat as well, we have a quick, reliable, almost cost-free test. A dog can sniff and give a result in 1.5 seconds. Station trained canines at all ports of entry, and at the entrances to any large public buildings, and we can all go back to work with a fair bit of confidence.

Combined, of course, with general mask-wearing, good sanitation, and Vitamin D supplements.

Teachers in the US are balking at returning to class in September; in Canada too.

This looks like a golden opportunity to bust the teachers’ unions—Scott Adams has declared them the root of all the problems in the USA. The national emergency can provide legal and political cover.

There are about seven times more graduates of teachers’ colleges than we actually need in classrooms. But more importantly, studies show that those who have not gone to teachers’ college teach better than those who have. The teachers’ colleges are only indoctrination factories.

The teachers have no bargaining power the government hasn’t given them.

I’ve downloaded the contact and tracing app sanctioned by the Canadian government. Since everything about it is voluntary, I doubt it will be very effective.

At this point, I think general despair is settling in. Fond hopes this would be just a temporary interruption, a bit of a lark, really, are gone. Fond hopes that we would all pull together, that the experts would have a handle on it, are gone.

In the meantime, the US military has in effect admitted contact with UFOs in the sense of off-world vehicles. And nobody is interested; in this time of uncertainty, nothing seems able to shock any more.

Now, as ever, dogs seem the only people we can trust.

Hydroxychloroquine Hopscotch

Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and the WHO keep saying emphatically that there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine works.

Yet at the same time, we keep getting reports that it does.


What is going on here? We who are not scientists; how are we to judge?

It may be true that there are no double-blind controlled studies that show hydroxychloroquine works; but at the same time it seems odd that, with time at a premium, nobody seems to have actually studied the combination that has been reported as working from the earliest days of the virus outbreak, hydroxychloroquine plus zinc plus azithromycin, administered at first symptoms. Instead, they seem to have been studying everything else but. How does this make sense?

Scott Adams makes an interesting argument. Given that we know hydroxychloroquine to be by and large a safe drug, what is the problem? If government authorities promote it, and it does not work, what is lost? Any doctor should know that the placebo effect is a real effect: people are likely to be helped anyway. For a cost of only about $20 per treatment. If, on the other hand, government authorities suppress it, and it turns out it does work, they are responsible for the needless deaths of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.

Yet it really does look as though any suggestion that hydroxychloroquine works is being suppressed. When a group of “front-line doctors” recently put out a video saying it did, the video was taken down by YouTube and Twitter. Fauci more recently testified that a Henry Ford study showing the hydroxychloroquine treatment worked was not valid, because it did not account for the concurrent use of steroids on the same patients. Yet apparently it did.

“Never attribute to malice,” it is said, “what can adequately be explained by ordinary human incompetence.”

But it is not hard to guess at a motive: there is no money in hydroxychloroquine for drug companies. While Fauci, Birx, and doctors generally are not drug companies, their interests tend to converge: the entire business of the average doctor is the prescribing of pills, and the drug companies spend a lot of money on perks to keep them happy and on the team.

“We are men of science” can easily be the last refuge of a scoundrel. It is a line that the Marxists have long used. Or the Scientologists.

Your Week in Pictures

Thanks to Powerline:

The New Moonshot

When the US ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the reason was said to be that they were engaged in industrial espionage—specifically, trying to steal information about American coronavirus vaccines. Now I hear reports of Russian hacking into UK and US computers for the same purpose.

Why was this their focus? One would assume that different teams are sharing their information in any case, right?

Maybe not. It seems to me that the race for an effective vaccine, or else a genuine cure, for COVID-19, is this era’s space race. Whoever gets there first demonstrates technological supremacy, and the payoff in national prestige will be immense. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea have already boosted their international prestige immensely by efficient responses to the virus. Countries known to be aggressively in the race are the USA, UK, Australia, Germany, China, Canada, and Israel.