Stunning data from South Africa suggest Omicron may be the end of Covid (and of Covid vaccines)
By Alex Berenson | Unreported Truths | December 11, 2021
A six-tweet thread from a South African engineer sums up the apparent state of play: Omicron appears more contagious but far milder than earlier strains of Covid.
South African physicians and hospitals have leaned in this direction all along. But now we have close to three weeks of data and they are saying so with increasing certainty. The lag from symptoms to severe disease is about a week. If large numbers of patients were going to progress to hospitalization or intensive care, they almost surely would have done so by now.
Perhaps one more week and we will know for sure, but at this point it would be a stunning reversal if Omicron were NEARLY as dangerous as earlier strains. And the Omicron’s mildness is not because South Africa is highly vaccinated; only about 1 in 4 South Africans is fully vaccinated.
What has not yet been said – and will surely NOT be by the media – is that assuming this data holds, Omicron’s emergence should end any and all vaccination efforts with the mRNA or DNA/AAV vaccines. Their risk profile has been steadily worsening – one has yet coherently explained the synchronized rise in all-cause mortality in highly vaccinated countries. The Netherlands saw all-cause mortality 41 percent above normal (yes, 41 percent) in its most recent week of data. Only one of five of those deaths was Covid related.
Giving these vaccines for a virus that appears to be becoming a cold for most people is horrendously bad public policy. Especially since the vaccines don’t appear to work very well against Omicron in any case.
All that’s left now is to track the mess from the vaccines. Let’s hope it’s temporary.
The end.
SOURCE:
Americans are smartening up about the boosters
By Meryl Nass, MD | December 11, 2021
According to the CDC, as of December 10, 2021:
About 200.7 million people, or 60.5% of the total U.S. population, have been fully vaccinated.*
About 49.9 million additional/booster doses in fully vaccinated people have been reported.“
What does this really mean?
- At least 16% of those who got their first dose of a two shot series decided not to go back for number 2, or perhaps died.
- Less than 25% of those who did become fully vaccinated have gone back for a first booster.
I think a large chunk of the population was sucked into getting the vaccines initially, but a considerable number of them have seen through the vaccine propaganda and realize it is not solving the COVID problem, and is not providing vaccinated individuals much protection.
Perhaps some of them have noticed that Israel is already talking about shot #4. Or they may have heard that if the Omicron strain continues to cause very mild disease, it will serve as as a natural vaccine, inoculating people who get it.
Journalist Andy Ngô is sued for sharing riot videos on Twitter
The photographers claim it caused them “harassment.”Ngô’s lawyer says the lawsuit is “frivolous.”
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 11, 2021
Two photographers from Portland Oregon have filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against journalist and author Andy Ngô. The photographers claim that Ngô shared their videos of protests in Portland on his Twitter account.
Andy Ngô has amassed a following in conservative circles for documenting riots and other events from BLM supporters, Antifa, and other groups.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court of Portland. It cites two videos taken by the plaintiffs, Melissa Lewis and Grace Morgan, during protests in Portland. The plaintiffs want the court to order Ngô to stop sharing their videos and for financial compensation.
The suit claims that Ngô “has made a practice of illegally copying and uploading plaintiffs’ videos onto his own Twitter account.”
The suit also notes that Ngô is popular in “right-wing” circles, and the photographers are “left-wing.” As a result, they allege they are “are deluged with harassing comments” when their videos are shared.
“This has resulted in instances where (Morgan and Lewis) were physically attacked by (Ngô’s) followers,” the suit adds.
The lawyer representing Ngô, Harmeet K Dhillon, claimed that Ngô did not violate Twitter’s rules and described the lawsuit as “frivolous.”
“The plaintiffs shared their videos publicly on Twitter, a platform designed for exactly their purpose, and Mr. Ngô commented on this publicly posted content using Twitter platform tools, not somehow surreptitiously downloading and uploading the clips as the plaintiffs falsely claim,” Dhillon said in a statement.
The complaint appears to be somewhat contradictory, in that it expresses that using a standard Twitter feature to share videos in a way that credits the original tweeter is causing them harassment but also that sharing their videos themselves is copyright infringement.
“Being an effective journalist means people will try to silence you. I was beaten several times by antifa. Now two antifa videographers in Portland filed a lawsuit against me. Why? Because I retweeted them on Twitter,” Ngô commented, showing screenshots of times he used Twitter’s sharing features to share the videos.
US delivers rockets to Ukraine
By Layla Guest | RT | December 11, 2021
The Pentagon has disclosed details of the shipment of anti-tank missile systems and projectiles supplied to Kiev, as Moscow grows increasingly concerned about the prospect of a full-blown conflict in Ukraine’s Donbass region.
In a statement received by Russian news outlet TASS on Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Anton Semelroth said that “the $60 million package… included 30 Javelin command and control launchers, as well as 180 missiles.” According to him, the rocket launchers were delivered to Ukraine on October 23.
“In 2021, the US allocated more than $450 million in aid to Ukraine for security tasks as part of our continued commitment to support the country’s ability to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the spokesman added.
Semelroth’s comments come amid warnings from Moscow over tensions in the war-torn region close to Russia’s borders. Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that “more and more forces and equipment are being accumulated on the line of contact in the Donbass, supported by an increasing number of Western instructors.”
At the end of November, the top diplomat said that claims Ukraine’s troops had deployed American-made Javelin rocket launchers were a matter of grave concern and could lead to a full-blown offensive in the war-torn region.
“In recent weeks, we have seen a stream of consciousness from the Ukrainian leadership – especially when it comes to the military – that is excessively inflamed and dangerous,” Lavrov said.
Just hours before, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, Kirill Budanov, revealed that advanced US-made Javelin systems had been tested by Ukraine’s troops and were being used by soldiers in the Donbass.
Russia’s ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Antonov, warned the White House earlier in November that supplying Ukraine with deadly armaments could diminish hopes for peace in the region, stating that Moscow believes “another opportunity to encourage Kiev to stop the war has been missed.”
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began following the events of the 2014 Maidan, which eventually led to the ‘People’s Republics’ in Donetsk and Lugansk declaring their independence. However, neither Moscow nor Kiev officially recognize them, and the Kremlin has insisted that the onus is on Ukraine to strike a peace deal with the leaders of the breakaway regions.
Latest Modelling on Omicron Ignores All Evidence of Lower Severity, Among Numerous Other Problems
By Mike Hearn | The Daily Sceptic | December 11, 2021
Today the Telegraph reported that:
Experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) predict that a wave of infection caused by Omicron – if no additional restrictions are introduced – could lead to hospital admissions being around twice as high as the previous peak seen in January 2021.
Dr Rosanna Barnard, from LSHTM’s Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, who co-led the research, said the modellers’ most pessimistic scenario suggests that “we may have to endure more stringent restrictions to ensure the NHS is not overwhelmed”.
As we’ve come to expect from LSHTM and epidemiology in general, the model forming the basis for this ‘expert’ claim is unscientific and contains severe problems, making its predictions worthless. Equally expected, the press ignores these issues and indeed gives the impression that they haven’t actually read the underlying paper at all.
The ‘paper’ was uploaded an hour ago as of writing, but I put the word paper in quotes because not only is this document not peer reviewed in any way, it’s not even a single document. Instead, it’s a file that claims it will be continually updated, yet which has no version numbers. This might make it tricky to talk about, as by the time you read this it’s possible the document will have changed. Fortunately, they’re uploading files via GitHub, meaning we can follow any future revisions that are uploaded here.
Errors
The first shortcoming of the ‘paper’ becomes apparent on page 1:
Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the same severity as Delta.
In reality, there is data and so far it indicates that Omicron is much milder than Delta:
Early data from the Steve Biko and Tshwane District Hospital Complex in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, which is at the centre of the outbreak, showed that on December 2nd only nine of the 42 patients on the Covid ward, all of whom were unvaccinated, were being treated for the virus and were in need of oxygen. The remainder of the patients had tested positive but were asymptomatic and being treated for other conditions.
The pattern of milder disease in Pretoria is corroborated by data for the whole of Gauteng province. Eight per cent of Covid-positive hospital patients are being treated in intensive care units, down from 23% throughout the Delta wave, and just 2% are on ventilators, down from 11%.
Financial Times, December 7th
The LSHTM document claims to be accurate as of today, but just ignores the data available so far and replaces it with an assumption; one that lets them argue for more restrictions.
What kind of restrictions? The LSHTM modellers are big fans of mask wearing:
All scenarios considered assume a 7.5% reduction in transmission following the introduction of limited mask-wearing measures by the U.K. Government on November 30th 2021, which we assume lasts until April 30th 2022. This is in keeping with our previous estimates for the impact of increased mask-wearing on transmission.
I was curious how they arrived at this number given the abundant evidence that mask mandates have no impact at all (example one, example two). But no such luck – a reference at the end of the above paragraph points to this document, which doesn’t contain the word “mask” anywhere and “7.5%” likewise cannot be found. I wondered if maybe this was a typo but the claim that the relevant reference supports mask wearing appears several times and the word “mask” isn’t mentioned in references before or after either.
There are many other assumptions of dubious validity in this paper. I don’t have time today to try and list all of them, although maybe someone else wants to have a go. A few that jumped out on a quick read through are:
- An assumption that S gene drop-outs, i.e. cases where a PCR test doesn’t detect the spike protein gene at all, are always Omicron. That doesn’t follow logically given the very high number of mutations and given that theoretically PCR testing is very precise, meaning a missing S gene should be interpreted as “not Covid”. Of course, in reality – as is by now well known – PCR results are routinely presented in a have-cake-and-eat-it way, in which they’re claimed to be both highly precise but also capable of detecting viruses with near arbitrary levels of mutation, depending on what argument the user wishes to support.
- “We use the relationship between mean neutralisation titre and protective efficacy from Khoury et al. (7) to arrive at assumptions for vaccine efficacy against infection with Omicron” – The cited paper was published in May and has nothing to say on the topic of vaccine effectiveness against Omicron, which is advertised as being heavily mutated. Despite not citing any actual measured data on real-world vaccine effectiveness, the modelling team proceeds to make arguments for widespread boosting with a vaccine targeted at the original 2019 Wuhan version of SARS-CoV-2.
- They make scenarios that vary based on unmeasurable variables like “rate of introduction of Omicron”, making their predictions effectively unfalsifiable. Regardless of what happens, they can claim that they projected a scenario that anticipated it, and because such a rate is unknowable, nobody can prove otherwise. Predictions have to be falsifiable to be scientific, but these are not.
- Their conclusion says “These results suggest that the introduction of the Omicron B.1.1.529 variant in England will lead to a substantial increase in SARS-CoV-2 transmission” even though earlier in the ‘paper’ they say they assume anywhere between a 5%-10% lower transmissibility than Delta to 30%-50% higher (page 7), or in other words, they have no idea what the underlying difference in transmissibility is – and that’s assuming this is actually something that can be summed up in a single number to begin with.
Analysis
If you’re new to adversarial reviews of epidemiology papers some of the above points may seem nit-picky, or even made in bad faith. Take the problem of the citation error – does it really matter? Surely, it’s just some sort of obscure copy/paste error or typo? Unfortunately, we cannot simply overlook such failures. The phenomenon of apparently random or outright deceptive citations is one I’ve written about previously. This problem is astoundingly widespread in academia. Most people will assume that a numerical claim by researchers that has a citation must have at least some level of truth to it, but in fact, meta-scientific study has indicated the error rate in citations is as high as 25%. A full quarter of scientific claims pointing to ‘evidence’ turn out when checked to be citing something that doesn’t support their point! This error rate feels roughly in line with my own experiences and that’s why it’s always worth verifying citations for dubious claims.
The reality is that academic output, especially in anything that involves statistical modelling, frequently turns out to not merely be unreliable but leaves the reader with the impression that the authors must have started with a desired conclusion and then worked backwards to try and find sciencey-sounding points to support it. Inconvenient data is claimed not to exist, convenient data is cherry picked, and where no convenient data can be found it’s just conjured into existence. Claims are made and cited but the citations don’t contain supporting evidence, or turn out to be just more assumptions. Every possible outcome is modelled and all but the most alarming are discarded. The scientific method is inconsistently used, at best, and instead scientism rules the day; meanwhile, universities applaud and defend this behaviour to the bitter end. Academia is in serious trouble: huge numbers of researchers just have no standards whatsoever and there are no institutional incentives to care.
Some readers will undoubtably wonder why we’re still bothering to do this kind of analysis given that there’s nothing really new here. On the Daily Sceptic alone we’ve covered these sorts of errors here, here, here, here, here and here – and that’s not even a comprehensive list. So why bother? I think it’s worth continuing to do this kind of work for a couple of reasons:
- Many people who didn’t doubt the science last year have developed newfound doubts this year, but won’t search through the archives to read old articles.
- The continued publication of these sorts of ‘papers’ is itself useful information. It shows that academia doesn’t seem to be capable of self-improvement and despite a long run of prediction failures, nobody within the institutions cares about the collective reputation of professors. The appearance of being scientific is what matters. Actually being scientific, not so much.
Majority of Covid ICU Patients in October and November Were Vaccinated
By Will Jones – The Daily Sceptic – December 11, 2021
Contrary to the claims made by Dr Rachel Clarke and Professor Stephen Powis last month and used to blame the unvaccinated for the mounting troubles of the NHS, new data out this week shows that the majority of Covid ICU admissions in October and November were among the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated.
The latest report from ICNARC shows that of Covid ICU patients in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 50.5% in October and 50.7% in November were double vaccinated. Add to that the 2.8% in October and 1.8% in November who were single-vaccinated and you get overall vaccinated proportions of 53.3% in October and 52.5% in November. That compares to 46.7% unvaccinated in October and 47.5% in November. Note that the unvaccinated here includes people who received a vaccine less than 14 days prior to the positive Covid test, so includes some (an unknown number) who are actually single vaccinated.
This is not what the public has been led to believe by some prominent medics and newspapers.
Two weeks ago, Professor Stephen Powis, the National Medical Director of NHS England, was quoted in the Sunday Times saying: “Data shows that the overwhelming majority of people admitted to intensive care with Covid are not fully vaccinated.” A source was not provided for this claim but the article implied that it meant right now, with an opening paragraph stating: “Hundreds of intensive care beds that could be used for life-saving surgery are instead occupied by unvaccinated Covid patients, one of NHS England’s top officials has said.”
The same day the Sunday Times also printed an article by Dr. Rachel Clarke with the subheading: “Some 75% of those suffocating in intensive care with the coronavirus are unvaccinated.” In it she states: “Of the Covid patients treated in intensive care in recent months, the majority – nearly 75% according to the latest data – have chosen not to be vaccinated.”
The Guardian published a piece in November headlined “ICU is full of the unvaccinated – my patience with them is wearing thin”, written by an anonymous medic who claimed that the ICU patient population “consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice”.
Now that the data has been released it’s clear that the claim that ICUs are “full of” the unvaccinated is highly misleading. While the unvaccinated do currently appear to be over-represented (depending how many of them are misclassified), no one now can claim that ICUs are “full of” the unvaccinated or that the unvaccinated constitute the “overwhelming majority” of Covid ICU admissions. If you spot any newspapers still peddling this misinformation, particularly it if is being used to stigmatise and pressure the unvaccinated, you can complain to IPSO here.