I have mentioned before that Massachusetts was one of the few places that looked like they were overcounting their Covid cases, while most of the rest of the country was undercounting. They have reduced their number from 22.9K to 19.2K this week, dropping them from 11th place to 31st in deaths per million. That is more in line with the rest of New England. I don't know enough to comment whether this is the right thing or not. It's interesting.
This last surge, which we have been hoping and believing is the last of Covid - and still might be, though it is going down slowly - has been more likely to have child deaths. 10% of those since the beginning has been very recent, and that number is likely to rise, as children's deaths are way more likely to get autopsies and it takes a while to get the full data reported. That's still a very low number, but it bears watching. Whether this is because more kids got this variant or because it is more deadly for children is not known at present. If this variant is more deadly for children, than all further variants from that line are likely to be so as well, so we should hope it's just sheer numbers.
Just to note, the drop in deaths/rank puts the MA COVID death count much more in line with our all cause excess mortality rate, leading me to believe it's likely closer to the truth than the original count was. Using the original number we were one of the only states to have more COVID deaths than excess mortality, which seems unlikely.
ReplyDeleteI'll double check when I run the numbers again.
"This last surge, which we have been hoping and believing is the last of Covid - and still might be"
ReplyDeleteSad.
I've watched this pandemic play out over the last two and a half years. Every single idea that the mainstream eventually adopted was something which "conspiracy theorists" had been saying for months. Hence the joke:
"the science changed"? Sure it did. It changed to exactly what people were being banned and canceled for saying two months ago.
Now I come here to archive binge your blog, and see how far behind you still are. COVID stopped being a "pandemic", and became "endemic" months ago. Jimmy Dore was announcing it in January. He's a working-class comedian and labor union advocate. You're a Prometheus member.
If you had a psych patient who told you that messages about the future were being beamed into his head and the messages were always right (obviously schizophrenic); and thus he could predict the future... of course I would take your word about things over the patient's word.
If however, you and the psych patient differed on a hundred predictions about the future, and all 100 out of 100 times, the psych patient was eventually proven right, and you were proven wrong, would I still take you seriously because you're more 'respectable'?
No. By the 101st time the two of you disagreed, I would have less respect for your opinion than I did for the psych patient's opinion at the start of the first disagreement. That's where we are now. The mainstream narrative is propaganda, and conspiracy theories aren't conspiracy theories anymore. They're spoiler alerts.
This is simply untrue
ReplyDeleteThe conspiracy theorists were not proven right repeatedly. They got the part about the virus being a lab escape rather than a food market. That's it. They went down in flames repeatedly. As the story unfolded the research scientists got it more and more accurate - and no, they did not come around to ideas that the skeptics had been saying all along. The vaccine is not killing people. Ivermectin still works only on the diseases we already knew it worked on. It doesn't touch covid. The whole thing wasn't made up as a coverup for 5G. The subsequent variants behaved differently than the original, which the actual experts had warned was possible right from the beginning. It was the so-called skeptics who then claimed "Oh, you're changing what you said," No, it's the opposite. A million people did actually die of covid, not of other conditions which unexplainably increased over the last two years. Sorry you have a separate reality, but if you are that deep in, there's no talking to you.
Here's a hint. You use extreme language and make extreme claims, that all of the claims of the side you are rooting for proved out, or taking as an example 100 out 100 times for predictions by a hypothetical psych patient. Whenever you encounter that, on any subject, you are up over 90% chance that the person speaking has stopped thinking. Reality doesn't do that. Only misinterpreted reality by fanatics does that.
You're correct, it wasn't 100 out of 100, and I was making a hyperbolic analogy. Dissident commenters vs. the mainstream was not 100 to 0, but is certainly wasn't close to even either. The 5G, Rothschild and Illuminati people are a different group. Most of the ones I've talked to don't believe the virus escaped from a lab, because they believe the virus never existed in the first place, and was always just a planned hoax. I can give you a list of names of commenters I align with and who I think were way ahead of the mainstream.
ReplyDeleteThe people who are way ahead on predictions made more than just the one about the lab, although that was the first thing they got right. Here's my highlights list from memory:
1. It escaped from a lab.
2. It was not simply a naturally occurring virus, but was rather a chimera virus genetically engineered via so called "gene splicing" and "gain of function research"
3. Some of the money used to produce it came from funding for bioweapons.
In all fairness, Chris Langan told me on Facebook that it was a bio-weapon (he said this at about the time the first case in South Korea was reported). I laughed that off as him being paranoid (and I think he is on the spectrum for PPD), but much later I found out that Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance got $39 million in bioweapons research funding from the Department of Defense. Either way, one of the two of us was wrong about something once.
4. I was predicting deaths in the low hundred thousands to low millions before the first person in the U.S. died from it.
5. Unlike toilet paper zombies, I actually had all the provisions I needed before the panic broke out, and I've got receipts dated January 2020 to prove it.
6. On that list was masks with n-95 or better filtration, preferably p-100. The p-100 masks never caught on, but stupid cloth fashion masks did. Not until 2022 did mainstream sources start admitting that the cloth masks weren't good enough. (Langan independently came to the exact same conclusions about p-100 masks before the end of January 2020)
7. No one wants to remember this: but before the government was mandating that people wear masks, the government was telling people not to wear masks.
ReplyDelete8. Before the government was putting restrictions on travel within the U.S., it was blocking efforts to restrict travel from overseas.
9. Also, before you were told to socially distance, you were being told to go to Chinatown and hug strangers to prove that you're not racist.
10. The Chinese Communist Party launched a coverup, and the UN helped them. Peter Daszak who funneled the money to create the virus led the UN team investigating the origins of the virus.
11. Daszak also had a hand in the Lancet lab-leak letter. If bumkins disagree with the lies, or suggest that our institutions have become corrupted, we're not only racist, but also anti-science.
Right now, you and I are talking about the Ivermectin controversy, but let me remind you that before we were having this discussion about Ivermectin, the public conversation was about hydroxychloroquine.
12. I heard from orange man that hydroxychloroquine was a medicine, and from the media, big tech, and the establishment in general, and from NPCs that hydroxychloroquine was a dangerous fish tank cleaning chemical. At the time, I went my bookshelf, got my wife's Physicians Drug Reference book, and sure enough hydroxychloroquine was a medicine for humans. One more point for conspiracy theorists who `do their own research`.
ReplyDeleteAn EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) for a vaccine depends on various factors, such as whether there are any existing treatments (including off label) for the disease that the vaccine is supposed to protect against. Big Pharma got their EUA based on the statement that no medicines whatsoever could be used to treat COVID. Not surprisingly there was a lot of censorship of any discussions about using any existing drugs to treat COVID... especially generic drugs.
The justification given for censoring discussions of hydroxychloroquine was that it was dangerous poison and people were being mislead into thinking it was a medicine and then dying from ingesting it. A group of doctors gave a press conference about hydroxychloroquine. The breakout star of the press conference was quickly dubbed "the demon semen lady". I watched the video immediately because I knew it would be censored by the end of the day. So I know exactly what the demon semen lady really said.
She said that the clinical trials with hydroxychloroquine were being sabotaged. She said that the drug was being given in doses that were too high, and you should only give it the normal doses. If you swallow an entire bottle of aspirin it will kill you. The same goes for a bottle of caffeine pills.
She said don't give it in a dangerous dose, give it in a normal dose, and she kept repeating what the normal dose was, so why I grabbed my wife's Physicians Drug Reference book, and saw that the dose the doctor (I mean demon semen lady) was suggesting was in the range of doses that the drug was supposed to be prescribed in.
Right after the video got censored, there was a moral panic about how dangerous the video was, and how we were going to need a partnership between government and big tech to stop misinformation.
Journalists were accusing doctors of spreading medical misinformation, and demanding that doctors lose their licenses for not doing what journalists told them to.
And who was funding all these journalists? Take a guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ
That press conference was in July of 2020. Early strains of COVID killed by respiratory failure, which was itself caused by lung inflammation, which was caused by a cytokine storm. Hydroxychloroquine was an anti-inflammatory. How many people needlessly died because Big Pharma tried to suppress the use of treatments they couldn't make lots of money on?
13. Another thing the establishment didn't want discussed was that numerous viruses can't be stopped by vaccines because those viruses mutate too fast for humans to make vaccines against every variant. That's why HIV, which is an RNA virus, can't be stopped by vaccines. COVID is also an RNA virus. Before the vaccine was even available to the public, only people on the fringes were thinking about or openly discussing the idea that the vaccine might not stop COVID. Oh, and I include most credentialed experts on microbiology, when I'm talking about the fringes.
ReplyDelete14. By September of 2020 scientific research had revealed that there was yet another drug that could be used to treat COVID. Ivermectin would bind COVID's spike glycoprotein in complex thus preventing that spike protein from docking with its ACE2 host cell receptor.
Big Pharma launched a campaign attacking what they knew was the most effective drug for treating COVID. At exactly the same time, they also started trying to sell and/or develop their own protease inhibitors, namely remdesivir and paxlovid.
Big Pharma got the news channels, newspapers, and late-night comedians to peddle lies about ivermectin. They got doctors fired for prescribing it. They got published scientific papers retracted by journals. They got the FDA to post the infamous "You are not a horse" tweet, even though ivermectin won the 2015 Nobel Prize for human medicine.
Does ivermectin bind to the COVID spike protein?
Does the COVID spike protein dock with the ACE2 receptor in human cells that COVID infects?
If both these statements are true how can it be physically possible for ivermectin not to be useful in treating COVID?
15. Only 'bad people' and 'conspiracy theorist' talked about vaccine injury. When Eric Clapton (who got two doses of COVID vaccine) talked about his vaccine injury, he instantly became a conspiracy theorist. NBC News says: "Clapton's racism and conspiracy theories can no longer be ignored".
ReplyDelete16. Only 'bad people' and 'conspiracy theorists' suggested that they didn't need to get vaccinated to protect their neighbors. Way back when my parents got the polio vaccine, it wasn't to prevent the neighbor's kid from catching polio. When I got a tetanus shot as a child, my parents didn't get it for me to prevent the neighbor's kid from catching tetanus. If you get vaccinated against a disease, and you still get sick with the disease, it was a lousy vaccine.
You write:
"The subsequent variants behaved differently than the original, which the actual experts had warned was possible right from the beginning."
I agree. The REAL experts were making good predictions, and the mainstream narrative frequently contradicted those predictions, and bullied the impartial experts.
A professional researcher with two masters degrees, a PhD, and three post-docs, can predict that a quickly mutating virus will have not only a changing genome, but also changing behavior over time. An autodidact who normies snicker at can make that same prediction.
How many accurate predictions did you make?
If I scroll up, you say:
"This last surge, which we have been hoping and believing is the last of Covid - and still might be"
Seriously??? Am I misreading that? COVID never existed until it was cooked up in a laboratory. Now the Pandora’s box has been opened, so COVID and its descendants will live in human bodies until our species goes extinct. How am I going to believe that you personally made any good predictions in the past, when I can't believe that you're making even the easiest predictions correctly at this very moment.
Do you really believe that COVID might suddenly disappear completely?
Expected. You are cherry picking, including the usual tripe that they said masks, then no masks - which was about two weeks. The conspiracy theorists you don't like you dismiss with a wave of the hand and say "Oh, that's someone different." You are cherry picking from my comments as well.
ReplyDeleteCome in and participate in the discussions as they happen and you will have some credibility. Playing Archive always turns out exactly as you have found here. You always get to be right and the others were always fools, fools, I tell you! We can all do this. It does not demonstrate the intelligence you think, it just demonstrates a sort of Aspie- OCD quality.
I will not respond again. Go get a job with some skin in the game and see what it's like.
Skin in the game like when I spent my own money to buy PPE and a deep freeze full of food while others were snickering about how more people die from the flu? Or how I navigated my family through the pandemic with none of us catching COVID?
ReplyDeleteYou've got skin in the game right? How are you helping the people most important to you get ready for the inevitable global famine that's happening later this year? Skin in the game right?
Skin in the game like how I bought all the formula my youngest needed *BEFORE* the current baby formula shortage hit. Skin in the game like how I already have solar panels and an electric vehicle before future price controls cause fuel shortages?
Skin in the game like how I'm already allocating investments to be ready for what's going to happen to the economy and what will happen to the dollar? What are the low P/E stocks I own with recession-proof earnings, and how many shares do I have? What's my exit strategy for selling the commodities investments I hold now?
Clearly I have no skin in the game, and I can't take photos to back up the claims I'm making, so there's no point in responding to me. And obviously I've never held a job... Much less any jobs where I worked for some of the entities I critique and saw how they operated from the inside out.
Hey, you want to know *WHY* the time period where the government was telling you not to wear masks was so short????
Because they didn't have enough PPE stockpiled for their own employees and the people they're responsible for, so they needed to go out and buy all that PPE on the open market. They didn't want you or other unimportant people to get that PPE first so they lied to you. Once they bought up all the PPE for themselves, they told you the truth.
Isn't it funny that you're more mad at me for pointing out how you were tricked, than you are at them for tricking you?