The Pandemicists Must Be Stopped
The Pandemicists at Work:
This strange and mildly disturbing illustration actually accompanies the article, one of many cases where the NYT betray the sinister undertones of their agenda via accompanying imagery.
eugyppius – December 14, 2021
Corona has vastly expanded the ranks of pandemic planners and public health botherers. Unless something is done, these people will destroy all of society in their radical pursuit of a few viruses.
Just a few words on “Omicron is a Dress Rehearsal for the Next Pandemic”, a New York Times article by Emily Anthes, a science journalist with ties to the World Economic Forum. It’s subtitled “America’s response to the variant highlights both how much progress we have made over the past two years — and how much work remains,” and it’s every inch as awful as you’d imagine.
In the piece, Anthes laments that the United States is “woefully unprepared for the challenges ahead, starting with the most fundamental of tasks: detecting the virus.” She quotes a microbiologist to complain that “We had a delay of one to two months before we were even able to identify the presence of [Omicron] … And by that time, it had already circulated widely between multiple states and from coast to coast.” She wastes many words on the necessity of “Testing, testing, testing”; here, apparently, America still needs vastly more capacity. She and her many scientist informants also want more gene sequencing to detect variants sooner. She’s sure that all of this is absolutely necessary, even though she doesn’t know why:
Scientists are finding more Omicron cases every day, and the variant could soon overtake Delta. What comes next — what we should aim for, even — is less clear. Should we spend the winter trying to stop every infection? Protecting the highest risk people from severe disease and death? Ensuring that hospitals are not overrun?
“One thing that we’ve lacked continuously through the pandemic is a goal,” said Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We still don’t have that. Certainly, we don’t have that for Omicron.”
No realistic public health goal underpins this diagnostic mania, of course. People who test positive for Corona are sent home to suffer in untreated silence by themselves. Endlessly testing, tracing, sequencing, panicking and closing is, however, a goal in itself for people like Emily Gurley and all the other pandemicists Anthes gleefully quotes, from Eric Topol to Trevor Bedford to Ezekiel J. Emanuel. All of them want the Corona Circus to play on, and after it ends they hope for a sequel sometime soon. Never before have they enjoyed such personal and professional prominence.
Even if by some miracle all of this winds down tomorrow, this whole odious internationally networked enterprise of Virus Astrology, from virologers to sequencers to testers to planners to nudgers to vaccinators, won’t go away. They were a malign influence even before Corona, of course. In 2009, when we suffered under a small fraction of the Pandemicism that burdens us now, they succeeded in causing an international uproar over a mild strain of pandemic influenza. Now their ranks have been vastly expanded, and they are already hoping for the next opportunity to close our schools, lock us up at home and stick us full of needles.
The pandemicists are truly dangerous, and they will grind human civilisation into the dust unless we find some way of putting all of them out of work. They aren’t going to save anybody from the next pandemic; in the event it happens, they’ll just take advantage of the opportunity to expand their ranks still further and make all of our lives worse. And should novel viruses prove slow to materialise in the post-Corona era, they’ll get up to other tricks. Tricks like new and enhanced histrionics over every seasonal influenza outbreak. Tricks like the intentional release of more engineered viral pathogens to keep the grant funding flowing. Tricks like constant lunatic mass vaccination schemes against ever milder viruses. Still other tricks I haven’t considered. The pandemicists have to go.
A huge Israeli study shows natural Covid immunity is far superior to the vaccine-generated kind
By Alex Berenson | December 14, 2021
mRNA vaccine protection from Covid is far weaker than natural immunity and declines very fast, according to a new study of almost 6 million people in Israel.
During the summer Covid wave, more than 140,000 Israelis who had been vaccinated but not received a booster shot became infected with Covid. Put another way, in just two months, about 1 out of every 20 vaccinated Israelis became infected with Sars-Cov-2.
Natural immunity – the protection following infection and recovery – lasts much longer, the study shows.
In fact, people who had already had Covid once had better protection from the virus more than a year later than people who had been vaccinated only three months before.
The gap was even larger in cases of severe infection.
Vaccinated people were more than five times as likely to develop severe infections than people with natural immunity. Only 25 out of roughly 300,000 Israelis with natural immunity developed severe Covid infections in the summer wave – compared to almost 1,400 vaccinated Israelis.
The difference did not result from gaps in age between vaccinated and recovered people. People over 60 benefitted even more from natural immunity relative to vaccination than did younger people.
The study also showed that giving people who had natural immunity a vaccine dose did little to lower rates of infection for them, raising the question of why they should ever be vaccinated.
Finally, the study offered a disturbing signal that vaccination may ultimately interfere with the development of lasting immunity in people who are infected after being vaccinated.
A booster shot did lower the risk of infection about to the level of peak protection from natural immunity – but because the study ended in September, it is impossible to know how long that protection may last.
All these findings come out of a database of Covid infections among almost 6 million Israelis in August and September, at the peak of the fourth Covid wave in Israel. The database contains information on essentially every Israeli over age 16 who was fully vaccinated or had previously had a Covid infection.
The paper, “Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity,” is currently available as a preprint at:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v1.full.pdf
Oddly, the paper’s title does not mention waning of vaccine immunity, although the figures it presents make the severity of the problem clear. Such shyness is common among researchers presenting bad news about Covid vaccines – they will offer the data, but not highlight it.
Israel has exclusively used the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, began mass vaccinations before almost any other country, and has an excellent health care database. As a result, it has among the best information on the effectiveness of the shots. It offers far more complete data than the United States.
The vaccine failure over the summer in Israel – following apparent success in the spring – has presaged a similar pattern across the United States and Europe, and a similar desperate campaign for boosters.
In this paper, the researchers examined infection rates among five different groups of Israelis – those with natural immunity, those who had received boosters, those who were vaccinated but had not received boosters, those with natural immunity who had also received a vaccine, and those who had become infected after being vaccinated.
The researchers specifically excluded unvaccinated Israelis without natural immunity from the comparison because Israel has very few of them and they are “unrepresentative of the overall population.”
In other words, the researchers explicitly denied the validity of the comparison that vaccine advocates make when they compare Covid rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated people in places with high vaccination rates (a point I have been trying to make for months).
The researchers found that the highest rates of infection by far came in people who had been vaccinated at least six months before. They had a nearly 3 percent chance of being infected per month (the researchers present the figure as 89 per 100,000 “person-days.”)
Those people were four times as likely to be infected as newly vaccinated people. They were also seven times as likely to be infected as people who had natural immunity from an infection six to eight months before, and three times as likely as those who had natural immunity from an infection more than year before.
A single vaccination dose in people with natural immunity temporarily produced strong protection, the researchers found. But after six months, the advantage had faded to within the margin of statistical error. In other words, so-called hybrid immunity hardly appeared to exist after six months – natural immunity was once again providing the protection.
Nor did vaccination appear to stop severe disease.
Nearly every case of severe disease in the database – almost 1,400 of the roughly 1,600 cases – came in vaccinated but unboosted people. Boosters did appear to reduce severe disease significantly. Again, though, the study covered less than two months after the booster program began, when boosters should be at peak effectiveness.
Finally, the study showed that people who had been vaccinated and then been infected and recovered were actually more likely to be infected again six months later than those who had only “pure” natural immunity.
That finding, though based on a small number of cases, adds to worrying data that mRNA vaccination may actually wrong-foot our immune systems in the long run and make it harder to build lifelong protection against Covid.
Since Biden’s Injection Order the Rate of Covid Deaths in the US Military Has Quadrupled
Anti-Empire | December 12, 2021
On August 25th Biden ordered that every member of the US military (active, reserve and national guard) must perform a fundamental sacrament of the mind virus cult known as “vaccination”.
A week before the order US military Covid deaths stood at 34.
Presently they stand at 79.
In other words, in the 4 months since the injection order as many US servicemen were deemed to have died with/from Covid as in the entire 17 months before the order was given.
In the entire vaccine-free 2020 fewer than 20 US servicemen died with/from Covid. (24 by March.)
The unvaccinated military of 2020 experienced three times fewer Covid deaths than the heavily injected military of 2021.
Even so at 2 million strong and 79 deaths, a Covid death is still rarer than a lottery win.
The Pentagon says the dead were overwhelmingly “not fully vaccinated,” but the Pentagon also doesn’t consider troops “fully vaccinated” until 14 days after the 2nd dose — that is to say until the initial period of negative vaccine efficiency has ended.
Comirnaty, liability, and how the HHS lies, cheats and steals
By Meryl Nass, MD | December 12, 2021
I checked the Federal Register and there has been no notice that Comirnaty has been added to the National Childhood Vaccine injury Program (NVICP). I confirmed this by checking whether Comirnaty had been added to the childhood schedule, and according to the HRSA, which manages both compensation programs, it has not.
So, if you receive the licensed Comirnaty vaccine, correctly labeled as the brand-name product and not the vaccine being fobbed off as licensed product, and you are injured, you are free to sue the manufacturer for your injury. Could this be why Pfizer wrote, “Pfizer does not plan to produce any product with these new [Comirnaty National Drug Codes] and labels over the next few months while EUA authorized product is still available and being made available for U.S. distribution.”
If, however, you receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine under Emergency Use Authorization, or the Moderna or J and J vaccine, you can’t sue anyone. You have the right to beg HRSA for compensation of lost wages and unpaid medical bills, period. So far, HRSA and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program it administers have not paid out one dime for the approximately one million injuries and 20,000 deaths reported to VAERS for any COVID vaccine.
In other words, the federal government (DHHS) has not admitted a single injury was caused by a COVID vaccine. CDC says it has not linked a single death to a COVID vaccine–not even when the patient walked into the vaccination center but got carried out to the morgue. FDA doesn’t know much about myocarditis, Bell’s Palsy, thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, pulmonary emboli, etc. There are no black box warnings on any of the COVID vaccines.
HRSA, FDA, CDC and NIH are all agencies within the federal Department of Health and Human Services. They have all gotten their stories straight. They know nothing and they are just following orders. Heil HHS!
They can’t find a doggone problem in the 20 or so databases they are spending many $millions of your money to “study.”
Want to know the biggest conspiracy in the US right now? It is the HHS.
FDA has access to a bunch of electronic databases it has termed the “BEST” Initiative, and it published a plan to use them to study heart attacks, pulmonary embolism, thrombocytopenia, etc. back in July. Where are the results, FDA? What are you waiting for? (According to CDC, “More than 459 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through November 29, 2021.”). It seems clear that we aren’t supposed to be informed of FDA’s findings until everyone possible has been vaccinated, at which point the results will be irrelevant.
In October 2020, FDA’s Steve Anderson told us there were even more databases that would be studied.
On August 23, 2021, FDA announced its databases were inadequate to assess myocarditis, so BioNTech would have to do it for them. Here is what FDA wrote about its inability to use VAERS and its many other databases:
- As noted above, the FDA acknowledges that “We have determined that an analysis of spontaneous postmarketing adverse events reported under section 505(k)(1) of the FDCA [in other words, VAERS–Nass] will not be sufficient to assess known serious risks of myocarditis and pericarditis and identify an unexpected serious risk of subclinical myocarditis.
- Furthermore, the pharmacovigilance system that FDA is required to maintain under section 505(k)(3) of the FDCA [in other words, FDA’s many other databases that cost the taxpayer zillions–Nass] is not sufficient to assess these serious risks.”
NOT SUFFICIENT???
Unsaid, but implied, is that if FDA is incapable of studying thousands of reported cases of myocarditis, it probably cannot study the other serious adverse events that have been reported in conjunction with COVID vaccines.
VAERS has operated for 30 years, collecting reports of vaccine adverse events. It averaged under 100 cases of myocarditis reported yearly until this year. Through November, CDC reports it received 1949 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, in those under 30. CDC didn’t say what the total number of reports for all ages was.
Somehow, these HHS don’t seem all that concerned that the admitted reporting rate of myocarditis is over 20 times the average during the past 30 years. Why?
CDC has been even more shady in its analyses of safety as FDA, if that is even possible. Below, Nancy Messonier, then head of Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, presented this list of databases that CDC would be using in the evaluation of COVID vaccine safety, on December 10, 2020. Apart from the V-safe (which they stopped talking about last January), VSD (which somehow can’t find any problems, not even myocarditis) and VAERS, all these other databases have been MIA.
NIH, whose job has never been to issue treatment guidelines, but instead to do and fund research, suddenly took over the treatment guidelines for COVID early in 2020. It formed a committee of internal and eternal “experts” to make up the guidelines. How were they chosen? That is not clear, but what is clear is that 16 of these so-called experts had current or recent financial entanglements with Gilead, the maker of remdesivir. NIH and the US Army also owned pieces of remdesivir. A number of other had financial conflicts with Merck. While NIH is the biggest single funder of medical research in the world, I cannot recall seeing a single study it funded on the safety of COVID vaccines. But somehow vaccines are its number one recommendation.
But it is not even clear that the committee is functional. The NIH has been sued to learn whether a vote was even taken by the committee regarding its ivermectin guidelines, which fly in the face of the evidence on ivermectin. How was NIH somehow authorized to issue guidelines in the first place?
Here is what has obviously occurred. All these agencies were told they had to keep quiet on vaccine problems (and perhaps problems of other COVID treatments), and they had to fiddle with their data or their analytic methods, or both, to get the required results. And there was to be NO BAD NEWS, no matter what. And no good news regarding generic treatments.
As we have seen, the so-called scientists and physicians working as bureaucrats in these agencies all caved, sucked it up, did the dirty work, kept their jobs, and betrayed their oaths and the trust of the people of the USA and the world.
Whilst you were distracted by a Christmas Party the UK Gov. released a report confirming the Fully Vaccinated account for 4 in every 5 Covid-19 Deaths in England since August
THE EXPOSÉ | DECEMBER 11, 2021
Serious questions need to be answered as to why Boris Johnson’s Government have decided to restrict the freedoms of the unvaccinated population through the introduction of Vaccine Passports, when the latest official data shows that the vaccinated population have accounted for 3 in every 5 Covid-19 cases, 3 in every 5 Covid-19 hospitalisations, and 4 in every 5 Covid-19 deaths, in England since August 16th 2021.
During a national Covid-19 briefing that took place on Tuesday December 8th, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announced that ‘Plan B’ would be implemented in England from Wednesday December 15th, which would entail ‘working from home’ (if you can) orders, and the introduction of Vaccine Passports.
The reason given for the commencement of ‘Plan B’ is that it has to be done to protect the public from the alleged new Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus. A variant which as of December 11th, has failed to cause a single fatality in the UK, with just several hundred cases allegedly being confirmed.
A new law will come into effect from Wednesday December 15th, which will state that Vaccine Passports will become mandatory for entry to nightclubs and other large venues, including Premier League football matches and concerts. We’re told they will be required for indoor settings of 500 people or more, outdoor settings of 4,000 people or more, and any setting with 10,000 attendees or more.
There will be many in England who believe Vaccine Passports are the answer to their prayers. Two years of misinformation, and disinformation mixed with propaganda published by the mainstream media can do that to people. But unfortunately the official data published by the UK Government proves that they are far from it, and suggests Vaccine Passports have absolutely nothing to do with protecting public health, and instead everything to do with controlling the nation.
The UK Health Security Agency (PHE) is an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care and recently replaced Public Health England. The Chief Executive of the agency is Dr Jenny Harries OBE, who you may recognise from the television as she has served as Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England throughout the pandemic.
The UKHSA publish a weekly ‘Vaccine Surveillance’ report which contains data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths by vaccination status over a period of four weeks, and unfortunately for the vaccinated population, the official data shows that they have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths for at least the past four months.
We have used the following official reports for our analysis –
- COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – Week 37 (Covers Week 33-36)
- COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – Week 41 (Covers Week 37-40)
- COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – Week 45 (Covers Week 41-44)
- COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – Week 49 (Covers Week 45-48)
Covid-19 Cases
Table 8 of the latest report shows the number of Covid-19 cases by vaccination status in England. The table may have been attributed a different number in previous reports published by the UKHSA, but the following chart shows cases by vaccination status over a period of 16 weeks from 16 Aug 21 to 05 Dec 21.
The chart shows that between August and early September, the vaccinated population accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases. However, between the middle of September and early October this switched to the not-vaccinated population accounting for the majority of cases. This is most likely due to children returning to school in September and being “encouraged” to test on a regular basis.
But between October 11th and December 5th the roles reversed again, and it is the fully vaccinated population that have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases in England.
This data alone puts an end to the myth that it is selfish to not be vaccinated, because it’s quite clear the jabs do not prevent infection or transmission. Which begs the question as to why Boris Johnson has decided to implement Vaccine Passports in England?
The above chart shows the cumulative number of cases by vaccination status between 16 Aug 21 and 05 Dec 21, and illustrates quite clearly that the fully vaccinated have accounted for the majority of cases since August.
What we can see from the above is that the unvaccinated had accounted for the majority of cases up to October 10th, however since this date there has been a switch with the fully vaccinated taking the lead, hitting a cumulative total of 1.5 million confirmed cases by Dec 5th.
When including the 258,387 confirmed cases among the partly vaccinated during this period, the total cases among the vaccinated population rises to 1,757,444. Whilst the number of cases among the unvaccinated population during this period of 16 weeks has amounted to 1,403,100.
Covid-19 Hospitalisations
Table 9 of the latest report shows the number of Covid-19 hospitalisations by vaccination status in England. The table may have been attributed a different number in previous reports published by the UKHSA, but the following chart shows cases by vaccination status over a period of 16 weeks from 16 Aug 21 to 05 Dec 21.
You may have heard several times this week on national television from people such as Dr Hilary, Lorraine Kelly, and Martin Kemp that “90% of the people currently in hospital with Covid-19 have not been vaccinated”.
Well it looks like they have been lying to you because the official UK Government data the fully vaccinated population have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 hospitalisation every month since at least August.
The above chart shows the cumulative number of hospitalisations by vaccination status between 16 Aug 21 and 05Dec 21, and shows just how bad things have actually been for the vaccinated population compared to the unvaccinated.
Between Aug 16 and Dec 05, the unvaccinated population accounted for 11,767 Covid-19 hospitalisations. But the vaccinated population have accounted for nearly double the amount, recording 19,730 hospitalisations, with 18,406 of those being among the 2/3 dose vaccinated population. This means the vaccinated population have accounted for 63% of Covid-19 hospitalisations since August 2021.
Covid-19 Deaths
Table 10 (b) of the latest report shows the number of Covid-19 hospitalisations by vaccination status in England. The table may have been attributed a different number in previous reports published by the UKHSA, but the following chart shows cases by vaccination status over a period of 16 weeks from 16 Aug 21 to 05 Dec 21.
The above chart proves that the fully vaccinated population have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 deaths every single month since August 2021, with things really taking a turn for the worse in October.
The highest number of Covid-19 deaths in single four week period among the fully vaccinated population has been 3,284, whereas the highest number of Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated population in a four week period has been just 850. That’s a 286% difference.
The above chart shows the cumulative number of deaths by vaccination status between 16 Aug 21 and 05 Dec 21, and illustrates quite clearly that this is very much a pandemic of the fully vaccinated.
Between 16 Aug 21 and 05 Dec 21 there were 3,070 Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated population in England, compared to 12,058 deaths among the vaccinated population during the same time frame. That is a 293% difference.
Covid-19 Fatality Rates by Vaccination Status
The official data shows the the vaccinated population have accounted for 56% of Covid-19 cases, 63% of hospitalisations, and 80% of deaths over the past 16 weeks in England.
It’s quite clear that the jabs do not prevent infection or transmission, but they are alleged to reduce the risk of hospitalisation and death. However, if this were the case then should we not be seeing a graph that looks more like this?
So why aren’t we?
It could have something to do witht he fact that the data suggests the Covid-19 injections are actually increasing the risk of death due to Covid-19 rather than reducing it by the claimed 95%.
The following graph shows the case-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population, and the case-fatality rate among the 2/3 dose vaccinated population over the past 16 weeks.
The case-fatality rate is calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known cases among the population. As we can see from the above the case-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population is just 0.2%, which is what is in line with the average case-fatality rate in 2020 before a Covid-19 injection was introduced to the masses.
However, the case-fatality rate among the fully vaccinated population is much higher, equating to 0.8%. Therefore the fully vaccinated are 4 times / 300% more likely to die if exposed to the Covid-19 virus based on official UK Government figures.
The following graph shows the hospitalisation-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population, and the hospitalisation-fatality rate among the 2/3 dose vaccinated population over the past 16 weeks.
The hospitalisation-fatality rate is calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known hospitalisations among the population. As we can see from the above the hospitalsiation-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population is 26%.
But the hospitalisation-fatality rate among the fully vaccinated population is frighteningly higher equating to a shocking 63%. This means the fully vaccinated population are 2.4 / 142% more likely to die once hospitalised with Covid-19.
So now that you know that the double / triple jabbed population have accounted for 3 in every 5 cases, 3 in every 5 hospitalisations, and 4 in every 5 Deaths over the past 4 months in England, and that the UK Government has been laughing at you since at least Christmas 2020 through their alleged Christmas parties, are you going to allow them to take away your freedom yet again in response to an alleged variant that has so far caused zero fatalities, or are you going to stand up, carry on living, and say “no” this time around?
Because this will not end until we all say it does.
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.
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.
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From the Archives
Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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