Tag Archives: health care

A Campaign Issue

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Republican candidates for Senator Dr Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker (Pennsylvania and Georgia, respectively) have been ordered by President Joe Biden (D) to resign from their positions on President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition “by the end of the day” or “face termination.

Both have refused.

Both, also, should wear their terminations as the badges of honor they will be, and they should use their terminations as campaign issues. Oz has the right of it:

Clearly, Joe Biden can’t be around anyone who doesn’t completely fall in line with his fear-mongering authoritarian one-size-fits-all COVID handling. I am proud of my service and will not resign.

It’s illustrative of Biden’s timidity and slowness to react to much of anything that he’s only now getting around to “ordering” the resignations. Did he truly think campaigning while serving was a problem, he would have made a request for their resignation the day after they announced their candidacies.

Biden did not.

Deaths from Wuhan Virus Vaccine Side Effects?

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Lancet claims so. Leave aside that the magazine long ago went political and abandoned serious medical paper publication, having already had to publicly retract one paper that was shown (not by the magazine’s putative peer reviewers) to be badly flawed and written from a predetermined political conclusion.

This paper is just as badly flawed, in its own right.

The paper begins by depending in part on the CDC and FDA jointly maintained Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System database. VAERS is a badly flawed database, being a collection of claims voluntarily reported by anyone who felt like interacting with it—and lacking who knows what other information that others didn’t feel like reporting.

The Lancet paper writers also depend in part on v-safe, a smart phone app(!) through which users can self-select their own reported symptom claims (or choose not to report them).

With those flaws at the center of the writing—which in an objective medical journal would have gotten the paper rejected—the paper’s writers claimed that 1.3% of the reported Wuhan Virus mRNA vaccinations resulted in deaths, and that 6.6% of the reports resulted in inpatient hospitalization [sic], prolongation of hospitalisation [sic], permanent disability, life-threatening illness, congenital anomaly, or birth defect.

Nonsense like this badly dilutes serious reporting and the public’s perception of serious reporting of the vaccines’ effectiveness and side effects. There may well be serious, but sub-lethal, and lethal outcomes to getting an mRNA vaccine against the virus. But sloppily done papers like this shed no light on the rates of those outcomes and sully legitimate reports that accurately estimate those rates.

There’s a Hint

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Approval of Pfizer vaccinations against the Wuhan Virus for kids under 5 years old has been delayed as Pfizer has opted to test more before looking for approval. The vaccines don’t seem to work as well as hoped against the Omicron variant. But this part of the reasoning in the linked article jumped out at me.

So few study subjects [those kids], whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, developed Covid-19 during testing thus far that the small number of Omicron cases made the vaccine appear less effective in an early statistical analysis, the people said.

There’s a hint there both about the kids’ baseline susceptibility and about the virus situation at large.

Wuhan Virus Boosters

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The CDC now says

studies showed effectiveness against COVID emergency-department and urgent-care incidents was “87% and 91%, respectively, during the two months after a third dose” of the [mRNA vaccine] booster,” but that it decreased to 66% and 78% by the fourth month after a third dose.

That’s for both the Delta and Omicron variants of the Wuhan Virus.

Leave aside, for the moment, the lack of credibility of anything coming from the Biden-Harris’ CDC; instead, accept, arguendo the narrow claims of the CDC paper Just the News cites.

Unmentioned in the CDC’s paper is the extremely low baseline rate of “emergency-department and urgent-care incidents.” The seemingly sharp reduction via the boosters is real in a purely narrow, statistical sense, but starting out so close to zero, it remains an open question of whether the booster really provides much value—even were its effects to last much longer.

Walensky Fails

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CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was asked on Bret Baier’s Fox News Sunday episode last Sunday,

Do you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are with COVID, but they had other comorbidities? Do you have that breakdown?

Walensky proceeded to weasel-word her answer and segued to the only talking point she could remember, that everyone must get vaccinated and boosted and get their children vaccinated, too, as soon as they’re eligible. Only toward the end of her off-topic response did she reveal her larger failure:

Yes, of course, with Omicron we’re following that very carefully….

And then she said she didn’t have even those data for the Omicron variant—they take “weeks” to gather….

However.

Why hasn’t she been following this matter, collecting these data, since the Wuhan Virus first arrived? Walensky has, or her staff has—or should have—2 years of these data, for the first Wuhan Virus (which, in truth, is Robert Redfield’s failure); a year or more for the Delta variant, which is on her watch; and more than “weeks” for the Omicron variant.

Beyond Baier’s simplified question, of sort-of necessity in a single segment of several in his program, however, there are four mortality categories of interest, and those four should be of interest to CDC:

  • Those for whom the virus was the sole cause of death
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the virus was the primary cause of death, but the comorbidities were contributing factors
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the comorbidities were the primary cause of death, but the virus was a contributing factor
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the comorbidities were the sole cause of death, and the virus was merely present.

The CDC is ignoring all of that.