I truly feel for the parents who lined up their kids for this, especially those who's children were harmed and who the medical establishment has gaslighted them like they do not exist or are mentally ill. There truly is an increasing avalanche of bad news around this, and I am ever more convinced the government provoked Russia into the Ukraine in part to distract from that.
That said I subscribed to Berenson, just because he is so reviled by the medical establishment. But I was suspicious of him right off, not for his Covid info, but something about his demeanor, and then he slandered Dr Malone on Fox News, then finding out he has some sort of pathological vendetta against cannabis, and now that he has acted like the establishment Narrative around Ukraine is some sort of Absolute Truth.
Mar 1, 2022·edited Mar 1, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
From Alex's article:
> The mRNA jabs provide some protection for the first two weeks of “full vaccination.” But it declines rapidly, turns negative by the fifth week, and more sharply negative in the sixth
During the Delta wave, Didier Raoult commented on the fact that adults were more likely to get covid within the first week, after getting their first shot.
It takes at least 2 weeks for a person to be fully immunized.... we were told, so we could happily ignore this 2 week period as it was assumed it could not be worse than being unvaccinated.
It so happens that is a really, REALLY, bad assumption.
What does "fully-vaccinated" mean?
Why is it so hard to get clean, transparent, and well categorized data?
I wish Alex would use his platform to make this more widely known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cJnzRZRLlg (This video shows the same is happening with Omicron after people take their booster shot.)
Matthew, you meant to be funny I hope. Because that was a hilarious article...I am still laughing..."I will assume that children in New York"......"aren't keen to open any databases let alone" oh dear the erudite snark in some sentences has me rolling on the floor....
Berenson should stay in his lane. He parroted the headline slamming Ivermectin in a recent small study that showed great promise but was very small and flawed due to delay of start and using IVM in isolation. The headline was chum to get the thing published, but one must read it to see the actual results. Berenson doesn't have a stats background, that's fine. But he's too arrogant to admit he's oversimplifying or misinterpreting things. Jessica Rose said she'd email him, but he's impervious to introspection. A man of the left.
Interestingly, in the UK from 18-69. (and I suspect to 79 by the end of the week) the 2 Dose case rate is lower than the 3 Dose rate. I offer three hypotheses, one of which is that more vaccine means more long term immune suppression and once you stop misassigning cases to the 2 Dose cohort, that signal becomes clear. Time will tell if this is correct I hope.
I go over this in more detail in my Substack but the idea of immune suppression being seen in boosted individuals over 2 Dose cohorts was too similar to not bring up here
Hey Mat, if you get a chance, would you please be able to do a quick explanation of how the biases work and how they impact the data… Or point me to an easy to understand article?
I think I understand the health/testing bias as seen in the current NZ omicron data. The very low rate of infection amongst the unjabbed (3% infection vs 7% population) is being explained away as reluctance by the unjabbed to get tested. The interesting thing is there has also been a lot of speculation, based on anecdotal evidence, that many of the jabbed are resisting testing because of relatively stringent isolation rules for positive tests, resulting in businesses being shut down for two weeks, when one staff member tested positive. To be fair, this has recently been relaxed in the last week or so, due to sky-rocketing case rates (over 14K yesterday for a pop of 5M - US was 80K!!!). Omicron is on fire, which is delightfully rough justice for our ‘zero cases’ policy Prime Minister.
As much as I would love to ride the "negative efficacy" train, I think this is a cohort-issue. Theer is no immulogic mechanism that can explain this. Even if you'd want to go to cool theories like ADE (which is just a name of a collection of mechanisms, where nobody really described how it would work with covid), these are reactive mechanisms. They would not explain how it is possible you get infected in higher rates. You get infected by breathing in aerosols. ADE and other cool stuff is only reactive.
Also Delta gained the ability to infect the higher airways, where humoral vaccines do nothing by definition, and Omicron moved dominantly into these higher airways. Even if vaccines would hurt your immune response, a virus replicating completely independent and far away from where these antibodies and vaccine induced T/B cells are present, would not be affected. Perhaps severity would increase - but that the data doesn't show.
So as disappointing as it may be, a cohort issue is far more likely. People who are getting boosted are not a random sample from the population. These behave differently, have behaved differently in the past and hence may have less natural immunity and do not get tested equally and also not tested with the same tests (PCR vs antigen). They are also often older. Also as mRNA shots reduce immunity temporally, but you are only seen as boosted after two weeks, that represses the 2-dose vaccinated. And I could go on.
Also PCR tests only show exposure, which we should know as it was us who pointed this out. So you can get a common cold with symptoms while having asymptomatic covid, and a month later again with another common cold virus. Since we *still* don't show the PCR rounds, a PCR test is not reliable.
We've been working with very bad data and warned for it. The "experts" didn't care because the bad data let to outcomes that fit their narrative. We shouldn't fall for the same trap, just because now the narrative works in our favour. The data is still very bad.
Funny. This was partially during the test shortage, so there may have been a bias in who could afford / would bother to get their kids tested in the last weeks. I don't know what the scene was like on the ground. eTable 1 should get around this since the comparison is vaxxed vs vaxxed, and the less recently vaxxed do consistently worse. But the absolute case rates are also plummeting for all groups. "Efficacy" vs unvaxxed really becomes uninteresting if almost no kids in either groups are getting infected.
At least the hospitalization results don't suggest that the vax is giving the kids Super-AIDS, per the rumors.
Early into the transatlantic pond crossings I developed a system in which the flight staff at the gate who would be boarding, but at the very last moment, would have the benefit of a little bit of innocuous small talk early in.
The occasional intermittent eye contact exchanged throughout served us well. I would be allowed to board almost always, along with them. It takes only a few times doing the penguin march down the fuselage to consider the range of options.
Thereafter, I would take a modicum of pride as being the last guy on board.
The early imagery of the Wuhan outbreak seemed alarming enough, the unspoken but certainly, if not quietly, considered premise of it breaching the 'drastic containment' efforts of the CCP, (the fact that it was attributed to cell phone footage that was smuggled through their firewall I found initially, to be suspect) and reaching us here in the West. February 5th , 2020, I would find myself back and forth to the ER for the next several days with a bad bout of prostatitis. It was my birthday. I was 53. Nothing says welcome to middle age quite like a situation like that. So while I was back and forth to the ER as it were, (My reluctance to return home with a catheter installed brought about a degree of trial and error) there was an awareness in the hospital setting of the troubles in China, but as of that window in time there was little that I noticed in the way of Pandemic response, which I found fairly comforting. Perhaps oddly even, .. to be honest, I had rather pressing issues. (I ended up largely curing myself via my, at times, unorthodox dance around the topic of necessity. I learned much from one physician who seemed to enjoy my capacity for the tech of it all, despite my insistence on changing what I concluded to be an ineffective antibiotic, ciprofloxacin and his calm and well paced explanation of it being the one of choice, the only choice, as its slow mechanism of action was perfectly suited to the lack of blood flow in the abdominal region of the prostate gland, seated directly below, the bladder. It would be during this time he afforded me, nearing 5am, that I considered the idea too radical to mention aloud, lest he take drastic interventions to dissuade, but having had one experience with a nurse irrigating the tube with saline up into the bladder, incase their were any blockage, well.. having had these front row seats would prove beneficial very soon thereafter.
Colloidal silver was on hand my bathroom cabinet, adding to a weak saline solution and sending up up and away into the bladder was dead easy. The yoga poses and jumping about on the bed to 'slosh it around' for thirty minutes, proving the hardest, but it would be 18 hours later that I would withdraw 5 or so cc's of air out of the auxiliary line that inflates the ball that seats the catheter in place, and deflate the same followed by the slow and steady withdrawal of the tube that was originally on patent, since 1953.
The last one on board, suffice to say, I'm not helped or hindered by an injection I decided fairly early in that I would not be getting under any circumstances.. the least of which, being that of some odd 'popularity' social theme... like a tacky swizzle stick that proved you'd been to Niagara Falls.
I truly feel for the parents who lined up their kids for this, especially those who's children were harmed and who the medical establishment has gaslighted them like they do not exist or are mentally ill. There truly is an increasing avalanche of bad news around this, and I am ever more convinced the government provoked Russia into the Ukraine in part to distract from that.
That said I subscribed to Berenson, just because he is so reviled by the medical establishment. But I was suspicious of him right off, not for his Covid info, but something about his demeanor, and then he slandered Dr Malone on Fox News, then finding out he has some sort of pathological vendetta against cannabis, and now that he has acted like the establishment Narrative around Ukraine is some sort of Absolute Truth.
From Alex's article:
> The mRNA jabs provide some protection for the first two weeks of “full vaccination.” But it declines rapidly, turns negative by the fifth week, and more sharply negative in the sixth
During the Delta wave, Didier Raoult commented on the fact that adults were more likely to get covid within the first week, after getting their first shot.
It takes at least 2 weeks for a person to be fully immunized.... we were told, so we could happily ignore this 2 week period as it was assumed it could not be worse than being unvaccinated.
It so happens that is a really, REALLY, bad assumption.
What does "fully-vaccinated" mean?
Why is it so hard to get clean, transparent, and well categorized data?
I wish Alex would use his platform to make this more widely known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cJnzRZRLlg (This video shows the same is happening with Omicron after people take their booster shot.)
Matthew, you meant to be funny I hope. Because that was a hilarious article...I am still laughing..."I will assume that children in New York"......"aren't keen to open any databases let alone" oh dear the erudite snark in some sentences has me rolling on the floor....
Berenson should stay in his lane. He parroted the headline slamming Ivermectin in a recent small study that showed great promise but was very small and flawed due to delay of start and using IVM in isolation. The headline was chum to get the thing published, but one must read it to see the actual results. Berenson doesn't have a stats background, that's fine. But he's too arrogant to admit he's oversimplifying or misinterpreting things. Jessica Rose said she'd email him, but he's impervious to introspection. A man of the left.
Alex who?
Interestingly, in the UK from 18-69. (and I suspect to 79 by the end of the week) the 2 Dose case rate is lower than the 3 Dose rate. I offer three hypotheses, one of which is that more vaccine means more long term immune suppression and once you stop misassigning cases to the 2 Dose cohort, that signal becomes clear. Time will tell if this is correct I hope.
I go over this in more detail in my Substack but the idea of immune suppression being seen in boosted individuals over 2 Dose cohorts was too similar to not bring up here
I’d love to be involved in a lager project! Don’t drink and drive though!
Hey Mat, if you get a chance, would you please be able to do a quick explanation of how the biases work and how they impact the data… Or point me to an easy to understand article?
I think I understand the health/testing bias as seen in the current NZ omicron data. The very low rate of infection amongst the unjabbed (3% infection vs 7% population) is being explained away as reluctance by the unjabbed to get tested. The interesting thing is there has also been a lot of speculation, based on anecdotal evidence, that many of the jabbed are resisting testing because of relatively stringent isolation rules for positive tests, resulting in businesses being shut down for two weeks, when one staff member tested positive. To be fair, this has recently been relaxed in the last week or so, due to sky-rocketing case rates (over 14K yesterday for a pop of 5M - US was 80K!!!). Omicron is on fire, which is delightfully rough justice for our ‘zero cases’ policy Prime Minister.
But, I simply don’t understand survivor bias…🤨
Thanks so much…
As much as I would love to ride the "negative efficacy" train, I think this is a cohort-issue. Theer is no immulogic mechanism that can explain this. Even if you'd want to go to cool theories like ADE (which is just a name of a collection of mechanisms, where nobody really described how it would work with covid), these are reactive mechanisms. They would not explain how it is possible you get infected in higher rates. You get infected by breathing in aerosols. ADE and other cool stuff is only reactive.
Also Delta gained the ability to infect the higher airways, where humoral vaccines do nothing by definition, and Omicron moved dominantly into these higher airways. Even if vaccines would hurt your immune response, a virus replicating completely independent and far away from where these antibodies and vaccine induced T/B cells are present, would not be affected. Perhaps severity would increase - but that the data doesn't show.
So as disappointing as it may be, a cohort issue is far more likely. People who are getting boosted are not a random sample from the population. These behave differently, have behaved differently in the past and hence may have less natural immunity and do not get tested equally and also not tested with the same tests (PCR vs antigen). They are also often older. Also as mRNA shots reduce immunity temporally, but you are only seen as boosted after two weeks, that represses the 2-dose vaccinated. And I could go on.
Also PCR tests only show exposure, which we should know as it was us who pointed this out. So you can get a common cold with symptoms while having asymptomatic covid, and a month later again with another common cold virus. Since we *still* don't show the PCR rounds, a PCR test is not reliable.
We've been working with very bad data and warned for it. The "experts" didn't care because the bad data let to outcomes that fit their narrative. We shouldn't fall for the same trap, just because now the narrative works in our favour. The data is still very bad.
Funny. This was partially during the test shortage, so there may have been a bias in who could afford / would bother to get their kids tested in the last weeks. I don't know what the scene was like on the ground. eTable 1 should get around this since the comparison is vaxxed vs vaxxed, and the less recently vaxxed do consistently worse. But the absolute case rates are also plummeting for all groups. "Efficacy" vs unvaxxed really becomes uninteresting if almost no kids in either groups are getting infected.
At least the hospitalization results don't suggest that the vax is giving the kids Super-AIDS, per the rumors.
I used to be a frequent flyer.
Early into the transatlantic pond crossings I developed a system in which the flight staff at the gate who would be boarding, but at the very last moment, would have the benefit of a little bit of innocuous small talk early in.
The occasional intermittent eye contact exchanged throughout served us well. I would be allowed to board almost always, along with them. It takes only a few times doing the penguin march down the fuselage to consider the range of options.
Thereafter, I would take a modicum of pride as being the last guy on board.
The early imagery of the Wuhan outbreak seemed alarming enough, the unspoken but certainly, if not quietly, considered premise of it breaching the 'drastic containment' efforts of the CCP, (the fact that it was attributed to cell phone footage that was smuggled through their firewall I found initially, to be suspect) and reaching us here in the West. February 5th , 2020, I would find myself back and forth to the ER for the next several days with a bad bout of prostatitis. It was my birthday. I was 53. Nothing says welcome to middle age quite like a situation like that. So while I was back and forth to the ER as it were, (My reluctance to return home with a catheter installed brought about a degree of trial and error) there was an awareness in the hospital setting of the troubles in China, but as of that window in time there was little that I noticed in the way of Pandemic response, which I found fairly comforting. Perhaps oddly even, .. to be honest, I had rather pressing issues. (I ended up largely curing myself via my, at times, unorthodox dance around the topic of necessity. I learned much from one physician who seemed to enjoy my capacity for the tech of it all, despite my insistence on changing what I concluded to be an ineffective antibiotic, ciprofloxacin and his calm and well paced explanation of it being the one of choice, the only choice, as its slow mechanism of action was perfectly suited to the lack of blood flow in the abdominal region of the prostate gland, seated directly below, the bladder. It would be during this time he afforded me, nearing 5am, that I considered the idea too radical to mention aloud, lest he take drastic interventions to dissuade, but having had one experience with a nurse irrigating the tube with saline up into the bladder, incase their were any blockage, well.. having had these front row seats would prove beneficial very soon thereafter.
Colloidal silver was on hand my bathroom cabinet, adding to a weak saline solution and sending up up and away into the bladder was dead easy. The yoga poses and jumping about on the bed to 'slosh it around' for thirty minutes, proving the hardest, but it would be 18 hours later that I would withdraw 5 or so cc's of air out of the auxiliary line that inflates the ball that seats the catheter in place, and deflate the same followed by the slow and steady withdrawal of the tube that was originally on patent, since 1953.
The last one on board, suffice to say, I'm not helped or hindered by an injection I decided fairly early in that I would not be getting under any circumstances.. the least of which, being that of some odd 'popularity' social theme... like a tacky swizzle stick that proved you'd been to Niagara Falls.
Thank you, I appreciate you shining more light on the study. 👍🏼💕
In Alex's simplified view, it seemed to show negative efficacy against cases, not hospitalizations and deaths as far as I could understand.
To distill your statement. Mileage may vary depending on use.