Tag Archives: health care

Some Wuhan Virus Statistics

Posted on by
Reply

…from the JAMA Network, measured in the 12 months from August 2021. First, some mortality rates for children:

  • 3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year [with their unformed immune systems]
  • 6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years
  • 4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years
  • 5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years

This works out to a mortality rate of around 0.5 per 100,000 for children 14 years old and younger. For 15-19 year olds—the remaining category of “children”—the mortality rate was 1.8 per 100,000.

The leading causes of death among children in 2019, pre-Virus, included these, and their rates, which were changed, if at all, only by the rate of lockdown and school closure:

  • perinatal conditions (12.7 per 100 000)
  • unintentional injuries (9.1 per 100 000)
  • congenital malformations or deformations (6.5 per 100 000)

The Virus represented only 2% of all the causes of child deaths in the report’s period.  In contrast, the mortality rate from the Virus for all Virus cases—which includes adults—was 109 per 100,000 population.

The risk to children from side effects of the various Wuhan Virus vaccines is very small, even as some of those side effects can be quite severe. The risk to children from going unvaccinated is just as small, if not smaller. That makes the risk to children from vaccine side effects not worth the gain in mitigating mortality from an “unprotected” infection. Furthermore, since the vaccines introduce parts of the Virus particles into the body to stimulate an immune reaction and antibody construction, that would seem to make the vaccines especially risky for those babies, who have no effective immune system to be stimulated and so cannot counteract even the partial Virus particles.

Maybe

Posted on by
Reply

The Wuhan Virus has been spreading rapidly throughout the People’s Republic of China since President Xi Jinping lifted the Virus-related restrictions he’d been imposing for the last three years.

Sun Yang, a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, presented the figures [250 million infected with the Virus since the restrictions were lifted] during a closed-door meeting of high-level officials, according to the Financial Times. The figure, which accounts for 18% of the population, includes 37 million people who were infected on Tuesday [20 Dec] alone.

Some think this outbreak also will give an indication of the “true” lethality of the Omicron variant of the Wuhan Virus, since that seems to be the prevalent version in this outbreak. After all,

In countries including the US, high levels of Omicron-fueled infections are translating into less severe disease compared with earlier waves.
But Covid-19 vaccines and prior infections have bolstered immune defenses in the US and elsewhere, public-health experts said, lowering risks of hospitalization and death as the pandemic goes on.

However, a lethality assessment based on the PRC’s outcomes would require that PRC government-published data can be believed. That government routinely downplays and conceals infection and mortality rates related to its three-years of Virus presence (along with inaccurate reporting of a host of other, unrelated, data—for instance, the nation’s economic performance).

Tracking Omicron’s impact in [the PC] will be a challenge because undercounted deaths could obscure its deadliness and blind residents to the full danger, public-health experts said. They, along with relatives of deceased patients, have said they think the government isn’t publicizing the full toll from the virus.

For instance:

[The PRC’s] National Health Commission said there had been no new deaths [since 20 Dec]—and that it was retracting one of the Beijing fatalities from the official tally of Covid’s toll. No explanation was given.

The PRC’s NHC also has…altered…its definition of death by Wuhan Virus: henceforth it can only be by pneumonia or respiratory failure linked directly to the coronavirus; the presence of other factors—heart disease or any other comorbidity, even if only a co-factor, with the Virus the primary cause (by objective criteria)—mean the Virus could not possibly have been the cause of death.

Any Excuse

Posted on by
Reply

…to extend an “emergency” in order to continue Government’s expanded powers and reduced individual liberties, an expansion that depends on that continued emergency. Here’s the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics in a letter to President Joe Biden (D) and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (D):

…unprecedented levels of RSV happening with growing flu rates, ongoing high numbers of children in mental health crisis and serious workforce shortages are combining to stretch pediatric care capacity at the hospital and community level to the breaking point[.]
…
Your ongoing response to COVID-19 has successfully supported strategies to mitigate the impact of health care capacity issues for adult patients. Please take this action to allow these same strategies to be employed in service of our nation’s children.

Understand that this is the same American Academy of Pediatrics that promotes “gender-affirming care”—gender-affirming: destigmatizing gender variance—in children who, even at their tender age, think they’re confused about their sex—including in some cases puberty blockers. The Children’s Hospital Association also actively supports gender-affirming care. These are entities wholly unqualified to have medical or psychological opinions regarding the health and well-being of our children.

Notice, also, that this same hysterical “overloaded hospital” bleat was made during the Wuhan Virus situation—and no, hospitals were not, in the main, overloaded then. On the contrary, those Wuhan Virus situation strategies did nothing useful regarding the virus, but they did hammer our economy and do long-term damage to our children while expanding government powers over us average Americans.

Withal, keep in mind the origin of any shortages of medicines or medical facilities for handling the present outbreaks of respiratory virus and influenza in our children.

This situation is a direct result of school lockdowns and other moves to isolate our children from each other and from adults outside the immediate family, lockdowns and other moves that were pushed zealously by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, teachers union managers, these medical “experts,” and the Left generally.

This forced isolation blocked continued development of our children’s immune systems, which left our children vulnerable to viruses against which they would have developed natural resistance absent that shameful, deliberate isolation. It’s no wonder viral outbreaks in our children are spiking.

We might have expected these Medical Wonders to understand and predict the impact of isolation on children’s immune systems and prepare for just these outbreaks.

No, this demand to extend a “medical” emergency is just another naked power grab by Party and Party supporters.

Progressive-Democrat Lies

Posted on by
Reply

These two are especially egregious in this final runup to voting in two weeks.

The first is by Joe Biden, our Progressive-Democrat President:

The most common price of gas in America is $3.39, down from over five dollars when I took office[.]

No, the most common price of gas in America as of the week ending January 25, 2021, the week Biden was inaugurated, was $2.39 [hit the full history XLS link for “U.S. Regular Gasoline Prices*(dollars per gallon)”, and select Data 3 in the resulting spreadsheet]. (Lots of good data on the US Energy Information Administration site.) Biden knows the actual price of gasoline, both then and now.

The second is by Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Progressive-Democrat Governor. In last Tuesday’s debate with Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, Dixon said Whitmer kept Michigan schools closed longer than any other State. Whitmer claimed

That’s just not true…. Kids were out for three months.

Whitmer made that claim even knowing that tens of thousands of Michigan’s students still can’t get in-person/in-school learning in the present school year, which has been in progress for two months.

In fact, Whitmer didn’t even recommend, much less require, schools open for in-person learning until March 2021, a year after she ordered schools closed in March 2020. In March 2021, also,

23% of Michigan schools were fully in person, compared with 47% in Ohio, 54% in Wisconsin, and 76% in Indiana.

Those three surrounding States were reopening, strongly, for in-school learning. Whitmer knew this at the time she made her claim, even as she tried after the debate to weasel-word her answer:

[Whitmer] referred only to her or her Health Department’s orders in making the “three months” statement.

Never mind that she took no overt countervailing action for that subsequent year and more.

Why We Can’t Trust the CDC

Posted on by
Reply

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s primary advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has voted unanimously to recommend routine Wuhan Virus (my term) vaccinations for children via the Vaccines for Children program, which pays for ACIP-recommended vaccines for children in low-income families. This likely will lead to green-lighting schools—especially teachers union-controlled schools—to require the vaccinations as a condition of enrolling.

It doesn’t matter that the vaccines aren’t FDA-approved for children under 12.

It doesn’t matter that children well into junior high age aren’t at risk from the virus beyond—perhaps—getting mildly ill and recovering in a day or two.

It doesn’t matter that the risk from the virus is extremely tiny for any healthy person up through adulthood and into old age.

Here are some hard numbers illustrating the degree of “risk” from the virus, based on work by John Ioannidis, who has routinely studied Wuhan Virus infection fatality rates (IFR) since early in the pandemic:

…median IFRs of 0.0003% for 0-19 years, 0.003% for 20-29 and 0.011% for 30-39, according to the preprint, which has not been peer-reviewed.
The IFR jumps substantially between ages 50-59 (0.129%) and 60-69 (0.501%).

Even that “substantial jump” is from a risk of nearly zero to a level still right next door to zero.

But the CDC takes seriously an advisory panel that insists on vaccination because…”we say so.”

The CDC could walk well down the path back toward trustworthiness if it rejects the ACIP’s recommendation and then gets rid of the ACIP altogether.