Tag Archives: health care

Follow the Narrative–I Mean Science

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Here’s some science—the Great Barrington Declaration.

James Freeman, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal column, opened with this:

This week dozens of esteemed medical experts with blue-chip academic credentials published a warning about the destructive policies adopted to address Covid-19. Since the Sunday publication of this Great Barrington Declaration more than a thousand biological scientists and more than 1,500 medical practitioners have added their names to the petition. Yet it’s been almost entirely ignored by the media outlets that spend much of their days presenting themselves as obedient to science.

The declaration says this, in part:

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.

The declaration closes with its recommendation for how we should deal with the virus [emphasis added].

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home.  …
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish….

Of course the Great Barrington Declaration and its Focused Protection proposal have been ignored by the media outlets. They’re also being ignored by Progressive-Democrats everywhere from Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer on down.

The Great Barrington Declaration is the wrong science to follow; it’s too politically inconvenient to settled narrative.

Likelihoods

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Scott Gottlieb and Yuval Levin had an uproar in their knickers in their Sunday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

The two center their piece on the failure of President Donald Trump, et al., to take precautions satisfactory to Gottlieb and Levin to minimize their chances of getting the Wuhan Virus. The money quote in their piece, though—from my perspective—is this:

For months, some of them condoned nonchalance about the virus, mocking precautions such as wearing masks as marks of weakness and dismissing public-health concerns as overwrought.

Disregard the distorted characterization of the behavior of “some of them;” what Gottlieb and Levin ignore of those “months” is the empirical demonstration of the low likelihood of getting a Wuhan Virus infection serious enough to be noticed, even in a high-contact, high traffic, high-interaction environment.

On second thought, accept their mischaracterization: that nonchalance emphasizes the low likelihood.

Testing Criteria

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The FDA wants to add new Wuhan Virus vaccine testing criteria to emergency use authorization applications—weeks after several pharma companies’ Phase III trials (the last phase requiring substantial data collection before EUA can be requested, the phase whose satisfactory completion is required before general use authorization can be requested) already have begun.

As part of the new guidelines, manufacturers seeking authorization would have to follow trial participants for at least two months after a second vaccine shot.
The new standards would also reportedly ask developers to identify a specific number of severe COVID-19 cases in patients who received a placebo in trials.

These data collection steps would be useful; however, it’s ridiculous to try to make them Critical Items for EUA. The FDA has known the structure of existing tests all along—it approved those tests’ advance into Phase III trials. If the FDA really thought these new “standards” and data collection criteria were important, it would have levied them on the original pharma companies at the time it approved their Phase III trials.

Waiting until this late date to try to add them is suspicious.

“Sharing a household with children and risk of COVID-19”

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That’s the title of a medRxiv preprint (unpeer-reviewed) paper that looked at the risk to adults—in particular, Scottish NHS healthcare workers, NHS-contracted general practice service providers, and members of their households—of contracting the Wuhan Virus (my term) when they lived in households with children with ages ranging from new-born to 11 years old. Total participants numbered more than 300,000 adults and children.

The results are correlative rather than causative, but the strength of the correlation is strongly suggestive.

The risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 was lower in those with one child and lower still in those with two or more children….

And the money quote:

Conclusion[:] Increased household exposure to young children was associated with an attenuated risk of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and appeared to also be associated with an attenuated risk of COVID-19 disease severe enough to require hospitalisation.

That suggests, also (my conclusion; the authors didn’t address the matter), that putting children back in school (at least grade school) poses no serious risk of spreading serious illness from the virus.

The preprint abstract can be read here.

Unsafe at any Quickness

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Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn is being asked by some 20 Senators—Republican; no Progressive-Democrat wanted any part of this—to take the abortifacient Mifeprex or mifepristone off the market.

The senators say that based on FDA reporting the drug has resulted in the death of more than 3.7 million unborn children and two dozen pregnant women.
They also said the drug has caused at least 4,195 negative reactions in pregnant women including hemorrhaging, excruciating abdominal pain and severe, life-threatening infections.

The drug is unsafe for a significant fraction of the mothers who take the drug. It’s 100% unsafe for the 3.7 million unborn babies that have been killed with it.