I was surprised, at first, when many heavily vaccinated countries were hit by a new wave of covid-19 at the beginning of autumn. I was surprised, that is, until I started to see studies coming out that showed that the protection offered by the vaccines is far less impressive than was initially thought, and drops to low levels after just a few months.
In light of this, I’ve been comparing covid death rates between different countries, to try to understand exactly what’s going on. Death rates are far preferrable to case rates, because they are much less variable over time. Case rates have varied enormously over the course of the pandemic as the amount of tests being carried out has changed, as the definition of what constitutes a case has changed, and as the tests themselves have changed. Case rates are therefore impossible to use as a tool for understanding how the pandemic has evolved over time. Although different countries define covid deaths differently, they tend to be pretty internally consistent over time. Death rates are thus far more reliable than case rates, and therefore far more useful for understanding how the pandemic is evolving.
So, here’s Sweden, the country I live in and therefore know best:
What we see is an initial large wave in spring of 2020 due to the initial Wuhan variant, then a drop to virtually zero deaths due to the onset of summer. It should be clear to everyone by now that covid-19 is a highly seasonal virus, which, like other winter viruses, largely vanishes from late spring to early autumn.
What we see next in the Swedish data is a resurgence of the Wuhan variant in the autumn of 2020, which begins to decline after a few months as sufficient population (a.k.a. “herd”) immunity is reached. This decline is however halted and countered by an even more rapid rise in deaths, which is due to the arrival of the British alpha variant on Swedish shores.
How can the alpha variant cause another wave if population immunity has already been reached, you might ask?
Because the threshold for population immunity is dependent on the infectiousness and transmissibility of the virus. The more transmissible a variant is, the higher the threshold for population immunity becomes. So the threshold was reached for population immunity against the Wuhan variant in December 2020, but when the alpha variant arrived, the threshold rose to a higher level, and a new bout of pandemic spread began.
Let’s get back to what we see in the graph – so, the the alpha variant quickly burns through the population and sufficient population immunity is reached against the new variant by mid-January 2021. Once again it becomes difficult for the virus to find new hosts, at which point the rate of infections drops down to a lower, more endemic seasonal level, which it remains at until the arrival of the new summer season.
For those who would like to attribute the decline in covid deaths in February to the vaccines, I would point out that only a few percent of Sweden’s population were vaccinated at this point, so the vaccines cannot have had anything to do with the decline.
After summer, the levels start to rise again to a slightly higher seasonally appropriate level, but remain at the low level you would expect for a virus that has now become endemic. Even though the highly infectious delta variant arrives in Sweden in late spring, and is by autumn totally dominant, it is not able to create a new wave, due to the high levels of pre-existing immunity.
We see very similar patterns for other places that, like Sweden, were hit hard in the spring of 2020. Here’s New York:
And here’s Lombardy, in Italy (which for some reason unfortunately isn’t showing the first few months of 2020):
Here you clearly see the first two waves caused by the Wuhan variant, then the third wave caused by the alpha variant, and then nothing, in spite of the arrival of the delta variant. The inability of the delta variant to create a new wave in these places could be explained in two ways – either it’s not sufficiently more transmissible than the alpha variant to generate a new wave in places that already have population immunity generated by the alpha variant, or the vaccines are doing their thing, for now.
Let’s turn to India, because of what it teaches us about the delta variant:
In early 2021, the Delta variant springs in to existence in India, and rapidly races through the population. Population antibody testing reveals that roughly 50% of India’s population become infected over the course of just a few months, with the proportion of the population with antibodies rapidly rising from 20% to 70%, at which point sufficient population immunity sets in for viral spread to drop down to low endemic levels. Note that the vaccines clearly had no part to play here, since, just like with Sweden, only a few percent of the population were vaccinated at the point when the death rate dropped to low levels.
Now let’s look at some countries that have suffered a fourth wave during the autumn, and try to tease out why. Here’s Israel:
Israel is able to avoid getting much covid spread during the spring of 2020. During autumn it is hit first by the original Wuhan variant, and just as population immunity to that variant reaches levels where spread is beginning to decline, the country is hit by the alpha variant, with deaths peaking in late January 2021. At that point 20% of the population are already fully vaccinated, so here the vaccine may actually have played a role in causing the death rate to turn down. That could explain why the death rate thereafter drops very low quite quickly, instead of lagging at a more endemic level all the way in to May, like in Sweden (which was much slower to vaccinate).
Covid deaths stay low throughout the summer, as we would expect. Then we come to autumn 2021, and the surprising fourth wave. Or not so surprising if you look at the data which now shows pretty clearly that vaccine effectiveness drops rapidly, even when it comes to preventing severe disease (which is especially true for the frail elderly, who are after all the only segment of the population at serious risk from covid-19).
So, Israel gets hit by a fourth wave, as do many other palces. Why are the places discussed at the beginning of this article, Sweden, Lombardy, and New York, not currently experiencing fourth waves?
As I see it, there are two possibilities. The first is that these places have developed so much natural immunity, thanks to the fact that they’ve experienced a couple of extra months of heavy spread of covid-19 during the spring of 2020, that covid is now over and done with in those places and no more big waves are coming. Israel has high rates of vaccination, but at the beginning of autumn 2021 it had experienced fewer months of pandemic spread, and thereby had a lower proportion of the population that had developed natural immunity from prior infection. It’s been pretty well established by now that the immunity conferred by infection is far more durable than the immunity conferred by vaccination, so that is a reasonabe hypothesis, now that we know the immunity generated by the vaccines is so fleeting.
It can be instructive, here, to look at Eastern Europe. The eastern European countries have been particularly hard hit this autumn. Here’s Bulgaria:
And here’s Slovakia:
Notice anything special about these places?
I think two things are important to pay attention to. First, both places were almost completely spared in the spring of 2020. Second, both places still had a high degree of viral spread when the onset of summer caused infections to drop. They thus never reached population immunity to the more infectious variants, and were thus always going to have a resurgence in the autumn of 2021.
So, the first possible explanation I mentioned for why some places are not experiencing a fourth wave is that those places now have sufficient natural population immunity, which is protecting them. The second option is that these places are currently enjoying temporary protection, afforded by the fact that they vaccinated their populations later than places like Israel. If that is the case, then they will head in to fourth waves in another month or two.
The data from Germany suggests that the first alternative is more likely to be true. Here’s what the curve for Germany looks like. It currently appears to be heading in to a fourth wave.
Notice that Germany, like Israel, was barely touched by covid-19 during the spring of 2020. Instead it had a big wave during the winter of 2020/2021, caused by the Wuhan variant. Then there was a small spike caused by the alpha variant, which grew to become the dominant strain in Germany in April. The alpha variant was however hindered from causing a big new wave by the arrival of the warmer season. During this time period, Germany mass vaccinated it’s population, with most vaccinations happening between March and June. This is very similar to Sweden, which also vaccinated most of its population between March and June.
So why is Germany experiencing a resurgence now, and Sweden isn’t?
Clearly, it can’t be due to Germany being vaccinated earlier and losing immunity earlier, since both countries vaccinated their populations at the same time. For that reason I’m inclined to favour the first hypothesis, that Sweden has built up more population immunity, for the simple reason that covid started spreading massively in Sweden in spring of 2020, but didn’t start spreading properly in Germany until autumn of 2020. So, although the effect of the vaccines has already waned in both countries, Sweden is protected by its widespread natural population immunity, while Germany isn’t. If that is the case, then Sweden shouldn’t see another big wave. In another month or two we’ll know what the truth of the matter is.
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In Bulgaria, corruption in the medical community is quite high, the clinical path for covid is well paid and there are many known deaths that are recorded as covid. So the data on the death of covids are not very accurate. In addition, many doctors stopped treating for fear of becoming infected, and many chronic patients died from lack of hospital care.
Bulgaria have almost 2x excess deaths compared to covid deaths. Surely undercounted if anything?
There is the assumption that excess deaths are all from covid. They may instead be entirely from the restrictions, and not covid itself – eg increased suicides, deaths from domestic violence, heart attacks not treated quickly enough, cancers undiagnosed and where treatments were cancelled…
There is nothing accurate about viruses.
Immunity, spread, droplets. They used to say that these things could travel thousands of miles on the wind (1919 statement attributed to a Hungarian doctor in NZ media)
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/imageserver/newspapers/P29pZD1QQkgxOTIwMDUxMC4yLjU5LjUmY29sb3Vycz0zMiZleHQ9Z2lmJmFyZWE9MiZ3aWR0aD00Njk=
Viral particles on the wind
In the late 50’s early 60’s in the UK there were foot and mouth epidemics. I remember the reports that suggested infection travelled from farm to farm following the wind direction. The foot and mouth virus is about the same size a Sars-Cov-2. Checking up on this late last year I found a study of an F & M infection traveling from a farm in Normandy (France) across the the English channel to a farm on the Isle of Wight . . . around 300km. It begs the question, bearing in mind the obvious dilution of virions: How many virions does it take to infect an animal? And in the same vein, how many Sars-Cov-2 particles does it take to instigate an infection in an average person with an averagely active immune system?
One of last questions asked in this post: how does this virus mutate so fast? And more specifically does this mutation only occur in vaccinated folks?
Guess the answer to this could open many strange and delightful pathways down Alice’s rabbit hole!
Larry Banyash MD, retired
Relatively ineffective and yet the aggressive push continues. Just look at Austria as a prime example of that. What is really going on?!
Cui bono?
Pharma is making money hand over fist, the politicians will of course be getting their cut in due course.
The vaccine passports imposed on the back of cv-19 will never go away, the number and types of vaccines required to keep them valid will only ever expand providing pharma and the politician class with a reliable source of future income.
In the UK Boris Johnson spent £37bn to have a bespoke track n’ trace system created by his chums when there off the peg tried and tested options available to use.
The Boris Johnson version never even worked but his chums became fabulously rich and I am sure they will be genenerous towards Boris and the Tory party in the future.
Sebastian, it seems to me that you have been fooled by governments’ death statistics, in particular, as it has been acknowledged in the USA and Italy that the alleged covid deaths are actually only a fraction of those originally recorded as such. It was acknowledged by the CDC that the US figures were only 6%, and Italy 12%. Most of the countries in the developed world have used the same crooked recording methods, including the UK and Sweden. I am also disappointed that you place any credence on case numbers, as the fraudulent PCR tests cannot diagnose covid infections. I admire the way you analyse studies, so would expect you to be more scrupulous with these covid / vaccine stats.
I think along the exact same lines and would appreciate a response to the prior post please.
I also echo your ability to analyse studies and feel empowered by virtually all of them. There is the occasional email which stops me in my tracks, I would really like to become a patron member.
When I reached the final paragraph comparing Germany and Sweden and the so called ‘4th wave’, my first thought was, I wonder how many 5g towers there are in Sweden compared with Germany. The difference is startling and I wonder if this is the true cause of many of the issues experienced. I’m aware of a recent landmark 5g study and would appreciate it if you would analyse this for me/us.
Please also take into account that these towers can transmit on different frequencies and at certain frequencies are oxygen absorbing.
Maybe Stockholm will have a 4th wave, but what are the frequencies.
As a layman if you will, I have given an awful lot of time to figure this ‘business’ out and would very much appreciate someone like you speaking on the topic. The symptoms of radiation sickness are of course, very similar to CovID. Please help.
https://www.speedtest.net/ookla-5g-map
To add on OOKLA, there are 3 5g towers in my local area not on that map, so goodness knows the true number of these short wave frequencies around. Ookla appears to display the huge 5g towers, but not the smaller single cone ones.
I have come to just realize by divine process that the vast majority of COVID deaths have occurred in cows milk drinkers. And almost none in almond milk drinkers….
So……
Just a little theatric pause (big smile)
Larry B
I’m surprised at the non reply, never mind.
https://emfwatch.org
Most of the readings appear to be in London, but the radiation levels are insane.
If someone wouldn’t mind explaining why they believe Koch’s postulates wasn’t fulfilled for CovID that would be great.
Humanised mice, they were happy to prove it.
https://www.immunology.ox.ac.uk/covid-19/literature-digest-old/the-pathogenicity-of-sars-cov-2-in-hace2-transgenic-mice.
Finding actual human’s must have proved difficult, which doesn’t make sense. Proven by the millions of people who have just partaken in a world government experiment, without pay and no come back for any possible/likely loss incurred.
If someone can explain why many freedom of information requests all around the world have revealed the only government to have isolated this sequence is the CCP. That is some amount of trust being placed in the guys with a dreadful human rights history. Perhaps their social credit system is being admired from a far.
After the recent Climate conference, I would assume Price Charles would be a big fan given his statements.
Would someone kindly explain the method behind Trudeau’s vaccine along with his wife? They were thrown in like a dart. There were many issues with the administration of that vaccine, the masses are expected to believe.
I would add in respect to Sweden and why they are introducing the passport, one can only assume they have sold their soul. The UN will be pleased, Agenda 2020 a touch behind, but I’m sure they are understanding of the delay.
Some might question how Fauci was able to predict there would be an outbreak during the Trump administration, others would say good timing.
https://id2020.org/alliance covID sure helped this agenda.
In the UK, I don’t believe the 5g towers have been modulated. But it still begs the question, what frequencies?
Search Dr. Toshihiko Yayama, he lists the frequencies of difference types of metal. What happens when the metals resonate with outside frequencies? What is the impact on the body?
Jane Smith,
Sorry, you have swallowed quite a lot misinformation. Let me guess that you don’t understand science very well.
US Covid deaths are overstated, doubtlessly, but not by 94%. More like 25%.
It is true that mild covid cases can easily be misdiagnosed because PCR can produce “true” positives which have no culturable virus, but that isn’t true for more severe covid cases. Doctors don’t need PCR to diagnose covid cases that show up in the hospital.
“Basically, if you have a bilateral pneumonia with normal to low WBC, lymphopenia, normal
procalcitonin, elevated CRP and ferritin- you have covid-19 and do not need a nasal swab to tell you
that.”
https://www.mcgill.ca/familymed/files/familymed/this_is_real_experience_from_er_doc_from_new_orleans.pdf
“It is true that mild covid cases can easily be misdiagnosed because PCR can produce “true” positives which have no culturable virus, but that isn’t true for more severe covid cases. Doctors don’t need PCR to diagnose covid cases that show up in the hospital.”
this is true and it says nothing about the proportion of deaths actually due to Covid 19 unless you have a data source that ells you how many of those deaths met your criteria, something I have never seen.
I have seen many patients who were labelled as covid deaths with NONE of those criterial met.
Toolate,
Are you someone who works in the hospital and treats patients?
Are you saying that doctors working in hospitals don’t run those tests or are you saying that test results for the tests for progression don’t confirm the PCR test?
“It was acknowledged by the CDC that the US figures were only 6%” This is nonsense – a blatant untruth whose spread was made possible by people’s lack of knowledge of how death certificates are generated and what “comorbidities” means. It was debunked so long ago yet has now achieved “zombie lie” status.
Most of the “comorbidities” listed in the “other” 94% of death certificates listing covid as a cause of death – ARD, pneumonia, respiratory failure, cardiac arrest, “heart failure”, etc. – are actually conditions which were caused by covid. The comorbidities which are listed on some covid death certificates which aren’t caused by covid, such as diabetes or obesity, are usually not fatal conditions in and of themselves – unless the person gets covid.
A death certificate which lists only covid – the “6%” referred to – is actually incomplete, because “covid” doesn’t actually kill anyone. What kills people is their bodies’ reaction to being infected with covid. ***Every*** death which is caused by covid should list additional conditions as “comorbidities” on the death certificate – the actual specific mechanisms which were present in the infected patient at the time of death. Not just 94%! But that’s where that particular zombie lie came from.
As to overcounts/undercounts; some deaths are in fact mis-coded as being caused covid. But many more deaths which actually were caused by covid are not recorded as such because in the US deaths outside of hospitals are, in many cases, never reviewed by a doctor, no tests are performed, and the “cause of death” is simply listed as “heart failure” – which is always, in a sense, correct – by a local government official with minimal medical training. The latter group of deaths more than offset the former. The reality is that covid has been the primary cause of death for many more people, net, than the official figures. Anyone who believes otherwise has been misled by clumsy yet pernicious propaganda.
Sorry Steve,
Respectfully disagree as this virus is just not that deadly unless some comorbidities , heart disease, obesity, etc have compromised the immune system in such a fashion to predispose them to physiological fragility—hence bowling pins knocked over easily by a bowling ball—too easily. Guess what, COVID does not mean a death sentence at all—as the media would have you believe. So, I am rambling on this holiday and am just not as eloquent with the turkey post serotonin rush.
Larry+banyash I’m not sure why you think you’re dsisgreeing with me. No one is in “perfect” health; those who are less healthy are more vulnerable to most every disease or other insult to their bodies. A person with diabetes is less healthy than one without, and more likely to die if they get covid. But if a person with diabetes gets covid and dies, but would not have died if they didn’t get covid, then covid is the cause of their death. Right now about a million more Americans have died since March 2020 than statistically would have been the case without the pandemic. To me, all of those deaths have significance, because those people would still be alive if they hadn’t been infected with this virus.
How close to “perfect” health does a person have to be before their death “counts” for you?
Actually I am now a bit confused. I agree that any death has significance, but to just summarily say that a million people died directly due to COVID, is just not mathematically correct without blood and tissue studies, as by my training through autopsy—which practically no country is doing. Yes, I will agree that prob very many die WITH COVID. But not you nor anyone has clearly shown to me the evidence needed to prove that many attributable to COVID. At the very best your analysis is a huge assumption, with all due respect.
I don’t know how Swedish death certiifcates are compared to UK ones, but you will be aware that in the UK there are two parts. If a cause of death is in part one, it’s considered to be the main factor in the death, or at least one of them. I never saw any figures for how many death certificates included covid in part one in the UK. But I think I remember some Statistics Sweden figures which recorded about 5500 covid deaths, but which also recorded about 850 of those as being where covid was the main cause. Not sure, but I think it was approximately as of August 2020.
Wikipedia says most coronaviruses cause the common cold, with sars, mer and covid-19 being lethal variants. Now a non-lethal variety will spread worldwide until enough people are infected, when it runs out of hosts, and makes room for the next variety. So even in normal years, many of those who die will have a non-lethal cold variant. So say in November of 2006 there would be many people dying while they were carrying the common cold variant of 2004.
How do you distinguish between people who die from covid-19 and those who carry covid-19 while they die of other causes?
Fantastic work Seb. It seems Sweden, my favorite control group is leading the way again. At some point others have to be seeing this and starting to realize that this will be over the sooner we get out and get it. I like to think of India as the “big chicken pox party” of the past. Instead they are pretending the vaccine did this and giving credit to it.
It is sad and evil that people are being told immunity from previous infections does not exist. I personally had positive antibody tests in March of 2021 and again in September of 2021. I understand that the only reason I am still positive is because I am encountering the virus. If I took a trip to Uranus on a spaceship for 2 years I would lose those antibodies.
Dr. Tal Brosh, head of the State of Israel Health Ministry
“It’s unavoidable that the pandemic will infect the majority of the population”.
Harvards Dr. Michael Mina
So it’s only a matter of time before we actually have not only vaccine-derived immunity but natural infection-derived immunity, too.
Dr. Christian Drosten the head of Germanys Covid response
My goal as virologist Drosten … is: I want to have immunity from vaccination and then, building on that, I want to have my first general infection and my second my third. I have long since come to terms with this.”
How does the UK fit into this analysis? High levels in Spring 2020 but also a big 4th wave?
If you look at death statistics instead of case statistics, there is no big fourth wave in the UK. Like I say in the article, case statistics cannot be relied on for multiple different reasons.
Thanks 🙏
Once more, what is the role of the inoculated in spreading the infection? Wouldn’t it account for the Spring increase?
The countries that have low death rates at the moment often have vaccination rates just as high as the countries that have high death rates, so the vaccinations themselves don’t seem to be having much impact either up or down.
Is gathering “case” statistics really worth the expense? Is ‘test and trace’ pointless?
I can’t fathom why your country, Sweden, is considering using vaccine passports when it looks like the situation there is well in hand. The deaths and hospitalizations are a small fraction of what they were last autumn/winter. Is it purely a political move?
Because passports are not about health but about social control.
I literally have no idea. I think they adhere to the hypothesis that the current low level of spread is due to the vaccines, and that there will be a fourth wave when the vaccine efficacy drops low enough.
A reaction to the corona commission calling them out for being slow to react, given events across the bridge?
It sure is Al. It’s an election year here in Sweden where the political parties are competing now on who demonstrates the most aggressive methods to fight this “deadly” virus.
But FHM who proposed it are not a political party?
Lena I think that is a part of Swedens reactions. Very un sientific probably also lack of knowledge. The group of lawmen and MD:’s that wrote a answer to the proposal on having vaccine passports in Sweden. Read it, if you haven’t. Sebastian is one of many signers. I give the analysis 5 ***** out of 5 possible 🙂
The people who own nightclubs and host concerts and other large events are understandably worried that if a 4th wave starts, they will be shut completely down again. They only have been allowed to open since September 29th, after all. They’re pushing the politicians very hard about a vaccine passport as an alternative to outright ban. Of course, it is hard to know who (if anybody) the politicians are listening to.
What this shows to me, again and again, is that most governmental measures were useless. The virus is going to spread through the population no matter what. The seasonal patterns are simply different in different countries. Drastic measures only delay the inevitable spread until enough population immunity is reached. The only really helpful measure seems to be to vaccinate vulnerable people in a way to maximize the protection window over the winter months. I think the authors of the Great Barrington declaration were mostly right all along.
For Germany..there is immense panic in parts of the media and politics but looking at the different charts and comparing the different waves I am cautiously optimistic that the fourth wave won’t be as large as the second one.
I would like to know what the D3 status of the hospitalised (or even the ‘cases’) is.
That is also clearly a confounding in comparing the Mediterranean Israel, with north temperate Sweden, unless Sweden systematically supplements its vulnerable with high dose D3.
And why do people assume that the vaccines act independently of the immune system? Not only is D3 critical in turning on the immune response, but it controls the necessary mediation of inflammatory response vs shutting down inflammatory response. So if you have low D3 (typically the amount required to prevent rickets and no higher) then you have a weak response to the vaccine and any infection and a poor prognosis if the disease takes hold.
So true as the UK study just pointed out last week by Dr Campbell clearly showed almost zero hosp deaths if patients vit D levels were at 50.
L W Banyash MD
D3 is irrelevant as regards turning down the immune response. The critical element is the D metabolite, calcifediol.
Average D3 levels in Sweden are some of the highest in the world, whether that is due to diet or supplementation. Higher than Israel, as you can see from figure 2 of this paper https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11657-012-0093-0 which is paywalled although a thumbnail version of figure 2 is outside the paywall and can be zoomed in a web browser. That doesn’t mean that all Swedes have high D3 levels of course.
Scandinavian countries tend to have higher levels of vit D than Mediterranean ones ! This is particularly true for older people who are more likely to avoid the sun when it is really hot. Scandinavians eat a lot of oily fish . The vit D levels of elderly Spaniards and Italians are apparently dire. Women are more likely to be treated than men because of osteoporosis concerns. Some of the hottest countries in the world have the lowest vit D levels due to sun avoiding behaviour and extensive covering of the skin.
Hmmm… you don’t mention at all, what the role of the ‘vaccine’ that neither conveys immunity nor stops the inoculated from being infectious, plays in this new ‘wave’. What we need to know is the rate at which inoculated people are being infected (or reinfected) and what is the role of the inoculated in infecting everybody else?
Can for example, the inoculated infect someone who has acquired natural immunity through infection? From what I’ve read in the heavily censored MSM, the inoculated shed the spike protein! How long does this go on for? And hasn’t this mass inoculation drive made it virtually impossible for natural immunity to predominate, at least in those countries like the UK, Israel etc, who have high levels of inoculation, because the inoculation forces the virus to continually ‘mutate’? Or, have I got this all wrong?
Exosomes/virosomes? Possible reason for menstrual issues in women not vaccinated but living with someone who has been.
For the …gamer,
D3 is metabolized in the liver to the active calcifediol form. So I would surmise that total D3 levels are indeed ok to measure, as the recent UK meta analysis has shown.
BTW, in the US a single capsule of calcifediol costs over $1000. So with all that in mind, D3 is an excellent modulator of immune function for its inexpensive price.
Dr. Banyash,
” D3 is metabolized in the liver to the active calcifediol form. So I would surmise that total D3 levels are indeed ok to measure, as the recent UK meta analysis has shown.”
D3 has a half-life of about a day, while calcifediol has a half-life of about a month. The liver competes with adipose tissue for D3. Adipose tissue wins by ten lengths. It is well-known among nutritionists that supplementing with D3 is dilatory. There was a study of this that showed that many people couldn’t raise calcifediol levels to sufficient levels (> 30 ng/ml) in eight weeks.
If someone is in the hospital with covid, calcifediol is the way to go, not D3. They will either be dead or recovered before their 25OHD levels move much if you use D3.
For optimal immunity, it looks like 40-60 ng/ml (100-150 nM/L) is the target to aim for. Deficient is classified as < 20 ng/ml and insufficient is classified as 20+ to 30 ng/ml. Something like 75% of the US population is either deficient or insufficient in 25OHD.
"BTW, in the US a single capsule of calcifediol costs over $1000. So with all that in mind, D3 is an excellent modulator of immune function for its inexpensive price."
You are talking about Rayaldee, which comes as 30 mcg tabs and costs an arm and a leg. We got three bottles of 30 x 10 mcg tabs of calcifediol (Fortaro) for $25 each with free shipping. Online. Buy them before the FDA outlaws them.
If you have been getting sun all summer and your 25OHD levels are sufficient, then it makes sense to supplement with D3 in fall and winter. I do it. My wife didn't get much sun this past summer and she takes Fortaro.
My thought is you are spot on, but would like to see more evidence of that to support the complete elimination of these absurd mandates
Larry Banyash MD, retired
Thanks for that very valuable hint on forturo, from …gamer. I’ll go online and order some fire sure.
Larry Banyash MD, retired
Fortaro. Ordered three as I’m sure the FDA will try to make illegal.
Thanks again!!
And where are your blogs found?
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
I’m sorry, I don’t like to link my blogs publicly. I’m a bit paranoid. You can always private message me via the about page on my blog connected to this handle.
Thank you! Always so clear.
I’m not a doctor but I like to study statistics and in the past days I was looking at the same compairasons you just posted.
If you look at what’s happening in Ireland the 1st hypotesis seems to be the one. I’ve not found statistics about deaths numbers specific per county, but it’s quite interesting what happened at Waterford and in other similar counties. Despite one of the highest rate of vaccination (99.5%), they suffered more than other counties the forth wave. While during the second and third wave, Waterford county had one of the lowest rate of the country.
Consistency on the lack of natural acquired population immunity.
I know a different thing is to evaluate the impact on deaths and deasease, with or without vaccination (or sooner or later vaccination, and now boosters). If you look at the ratio between deaths and cases, in the other waves it seems now everhigher lower . Germany have today more cases compared to second and third wave, but very lower deaths. While Sweden is having a very low wave both on cases and deaths. So the vaccines seems to have a good effect on saving life (a short term very good benefit, but with a high risk to develop immune escape variants of SARS Cov2? So it would have been smarter to vaccine only vulnerable people to avoid this risk?)
What do you think? We have not to look at cases as mentioned at the start of your article?
Thanks for this column.
It’s very interesting and it helps me think.
Sebastian is the booster for an older variant than delta, and if so would that render it ineffective against the delta variant?
The booster is for the original Wuhan variant, like the initial vaccine. Basically you’re just getting another dose of the same vaccine.
So, does this make it likely that ‘original antigenic sin’ is playing a part in breakthrough infections?
Dr. Rushworth: In addition to population immunity, could the data you present be accounted for by the unfortunately named “dry tinder theory”, i.e. the people vulnerable to this disease were lost to it in the earlier waves so there are just fewer vulnerable to later exposures? This is a grim thing to acknowledge but could it be part of the explanation?
The ‘dry tinder’ should be considered part of ‘herd immunity’ – that is the virus sweeps through the population leaving immunity behind.
One doesn’t like to think of this, of course, especially if you think that if we are ever going to learn to live with SARS-CoV-2, then we are condemned to a naturally acquired herd immunity. The ‘dry tinder’ is self-generating as people’s immune systems are compromised by age and disease and will always be a part of long term mortality trends.
Even if we had effective vaccines, the ‘dry tinder’ will tend to be those to whom a vaccine is little use because of their compromised immune systems. Really, as well as protecting the vulnerable from infection as much as possible, we should be doing everything to improve their immune systems.
Excellent reply. At one time, even if not now, the immune health was not addressed—more in fact patients were advised to go home until they could not breathe, then come back to the hospital. (NIH, Oct 2020)
Larry W Banyash MD , retired
Thank you for the explanation.
Wasn’t the halt and rise in the cases for Sweden’s 2020 autumn curve due to a breach into the data system? If you look at the graph on FoHM’s own site it’s looking like a more steady rise.
I like your conclusion. It makes so much sense. I think maybe there will be a lot of cases in late February in Sweden but no more death waves due to natural immunity in younger population and boosters for the fragile.
In Massachusetts, which was a Covid hotbed when the pandemic began, February 2021 witnessed 51,088 cases, 1,572 deaths, and a mortality rate of 3.077%.
The previous month, January 2021, holds the record for the most number of cases, 141,330, but not deaths and mortality rate: 2,222 and 1.57%. The month over month reduction in the number of cases is 174.64%.
February 2021 was the first of five months of decline that ended in June 2021 with 2,604 cases, 113 deaths, and a case mortality rate of 4.339%.
July 2021 recorded the lowest number of deaths ever at 83, despite a month over month increase in cases of 284.83%, and a mortality rate of 0.83%, third lowest in twenty months.
August 2021 ranks first in the lowest mortality rate at 0.45%, despite a month over month increases in the number of cases: 274.59%.
At the current average daily rate of cases and deaths, November 2021 will see 52,066 cases, 406 deaths, and a case mortality rate of 0.780%, which is proof that the vaccines are having an effect.
The overwhelming majority of cases is amongst the unvaccinated.
The average age of death is 75, down from the beginning of the pandemic when it was over 80 but still disproportionately affecting older people. Regardless of age, comorbidity is a factor that affects the seriousness of the disease and the likelihood of death.
Regarding winter surges, the first began in August 2020 – January 2021 and the second, July 2021 – November, although October declined by 25% over September.
The 2020 data do not support surges or spikes as increases were already well underway before Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. In the absence of a definition or criteria for either, these terms should not be used because one, winter surge, is alarming and seasonally incorrect, and spike is meaningless.
Regarding the seasonality of Covid, it may very well be related to when people congregate inside to escape the heat or cold.
To establish exposure to pollutants, the EPA researched in 2001 the amount of time people spend indoors or out, and produced a report that indicated 93% and 7%, respectively. Although dated, the report is still referenced by numerous research sites.
Regardless, the subject is worthy of fuller study vis-a-vis the seasonality of Covid.
Since the pandemic began, I have recorded each day the data available on the Mass.gov website, which is my source for the information above.
I realize my state is not the world, but the data I have faithfully recorded presents a different picture.
You mention seasonality, and I again bring forth the possible benefit of vit D supported by the very recent UK study presented by Dr Campbell.
Dr Larry
Richard Connolly,
As Dr. Rushworth has shown, case numbers are meaningless.
Exactly, as the Mass. numbers support.
Richard Connolloy,
Mortality rates rely on case numbers. You put a lot of emphasis on mortality rates, which are meaningless because case numbers are meaningless.
Deaths per capita has some meaning over time in a given location. It’s useless for comparisons with other locations, though.
Your data implying that the shots are indeed beneficial is quite marred by not taking into account that the jab has , in combination, produced almost 2 million serious adverse effects up to and including death. What algorithm exists to correctly take that true number into the account of this “vaccines” short term, so called success and safety?
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
openvaers.com
I neglected to mention that 4,823,447 people of a total 6,976,600, or 69.14%, have received one or more vaccination shots since February 2021, and the number of breakout cases / deaths within that population is 54,199 / 438 or 1.12%. Vaccinated people have a 0.808% chance of dying from Covid-19 in Massachusetts.
Richard Connolly,
“Vaccinated people have a 0.808% chance of dying from Covid-19 in Massachusetts.”
From the FDA and medRxix data, the vaccinated have a 100 / 22,000 % chance of dying from covid. 0.0045% chance in the US during the five month Pfizer covid vaccine trial. Maybe it’s higher in Massachusetts?
The unvaccinated have a 200 / 22,000 % chance of dying from covid. 0.009% chance of dying from covid if you’re unvaccinated.
But the vaccinated have a 500 / 22,000 % chance of dying from all causes. 0.022% chance of dying from all causes above the baseline.
Thank you for noting my error, as I was not clear.
The 0.80813% refers to the percentage of people in Massachusetts who have had breakthrough cases (54,199) and died (438).
When the number of vaccinated people who died (438) is divided by the total number of people who are vaccinated (4,732,126), the percentage is 0.00926%.
Arb,
“Average D3 levels in Sweden are some of the highest in the world”
From your reference: “This study provides an overview of 25(OH)D levels around the globe.”
D3 is not equal to 25OHD. D3 is cholecalciferol and 25OHD is calcifediol. D3 is processed by the liver to produce 25OHD. D3 is also taken up by adipose tissue about 2x faster than it is processed by the liver. The serum half-life of D3 is around 29 hours, while the serum half-life of 25OHD is around 29 days. 25OHD is also much more active than D3 as regards vitamin D receptors, although calcitriol is the most active form.
I’m picky about what is actually being discussed because vitamin D is a difficult topic and there are so many opportunities to become confused about it.
Richard Connolly,
So, what is the time period for the “438” mortality figure? (I’m trying to compare it with the Pfizer covid vaccine safety study’s mortality figures for covid, which were over 6 months.)
Theasdgamer
You say: ‘From the FDA and medRxix data, the vaccinated have a 100 / 22,000 % chance of dying from covid. 0.0045% chance in the US during the five month Pfizer covid vaccine trial.’
This is a basic mathematical error. 100/22000 = 0.45%.
thanks for this insightful article. very interesting and gives another view on the global problem.
Like the article and I wonder if the combination of infection *then* vaccination that is quite common in Sweden contributes to at the very least a delay in the 4th wave? And then we know from Israel that 3rd dose shows far superior efficacy vs infection than 2nd so far – so maybe Sweden unlike most of Europe has bought itself breathing space to use these at the right time?
One other minor thing:
“For those who would like to attribute the decline in covid deaths in February to the vaccines, I would point out that only a few percent of Sweden’s population were vaccinated at this point, so the vaccines cannot have had anything to do with the decline.”
I can’t agree. The small % of the population who were vaccinated were essentially the small % of the population who made up the majority of deaths, and their carers of course.
….or the small percentage after vit D replenished in those who lived….
Larry
Great article, Dr. Rushworth! I figured you would have something on this coming out after Sweden’s latest vaccine passport announcement.
The NeverEnding Story continues…
Please approve my comment 🙂
Risks of the vaccine…
The FDA data shows 21 deaths for the Pfizer vaccine and 17 deaths for the placebo.
SOURCE: https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download (page 23)
The following article about the Pfizer vaccine shows one covid-related death in the vaccine arm and two covid-related deaths in the placebo arm…
SOURCE: Appendix to “Six Month Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine,” available at
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.supplementary-material
It’s in Table S-4 in the supplementary appendix, which is in a pdf file that you have to download.
Putting these together we discover that there were five deaths from Pfizer covid vaccines for every covid-related death they prevented.
And we can use this to extrapolate excess deaths from the vaccine and from covid.
69% of the US population has received at least one dose and 59% has received two doses.
22,000 people were fully vaccinated in the Pfizer trial.
The excess death rate from the vaccines is 5 / 22,000, or 0.000227
The US population is 330,000,000.
The fully vaxxed US population is 0.59 * 330,000,000, or 194,000,000.
The excess death rate from the fully vaxxed is 194,000,000 * 0.000227, or 44,000.
Let’s assume that those who receive only a single dose have half the mortality rate of the fully vaccinated.
10% of the US population has received a single vaccine dose, which is 33,000,000.
Half of the fully vaxxed mortality rate is 0.000113.
The contribution to excess mortality from the singly-vaxxed is 33,000,000 * 0.000113, or 3,700.
So, assuming that no one else gets vaccinated, the total excess mortality from vaccines should be 47,700.
And since one covid death is prevented by five vaxxed deaths, then the contribution to excess mortality is 0.2 * 47,700, or 9540.
The figures from the study should be accurate for the period of time of the study. If more people get vaccinated or there is mortality that accumulates over a longer period, then both rates and total numbers will increase. But at least we have a minimal baseline for vaccine deaths and for covid.
Very well done and helps to corroborate the openvaers.com data.
If we should only look.
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
It should be noted that the Vaers data is suspected to be greatly underreported, by as much as a factor of ten—which would greatly increase death rate ( absolute data) and the total disability rate due to the inoculation….(more likely relative)
I should mention that I built this off of Alex Berenson’s work and that it has flaws/weaknesses:
1) a lack of a 95% confidence interval for all cause mortality in the vaccine arm…maybe the range should be 3 to 8 deaths…
2) we don’t know that the extra deaths are due to the covid vaccine and it would be helpful to have autopsy data…
3) since the placebo arm was ultimately vaccinated, we can’t know relative safety data beyond this last paper
4) we cannot be certain that the medRxiv paper has undergone peer review
5) we cannot be certain that the FDA report corresponds to the raw data
I think that this is the best that we will have, though.
Theasdgamer
I don’t think you can extrapolate from the Pfizer trial result to estimate number of excess deaths in the general population that has been vaccinated, because risk of death and serious illness from covid rises exponentially with age, whereas we don’t know the age profile of those participating in the trial. We are told “41% of participants are between the ages of 56 and 85”, but that could mean 40% of participants were between the ages of 56 and 70. Almost certainly, the age profile will have been skewed towards the younger end, in which case the number of deaths in the trial would have under-reflected the proportion of deaths in the general population. For further questions about the trial, see
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/17/can-anything-about-the-pfizer-vaccine-trial-be-trusted/
Stephen Robinson,
That is why I said that my calculation for excess deaths represents a lower bound. Just because the Pfizer covid vaccine trial safety data isn’t perfect doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful.
Thank you for this very informative article. I am asked here in Germany, both at my work in the pharmacy and among my friends, how I assess the situation and how it can be that we have such a strong fourth wave here. After looking at number after number and comparing countries, the most obvious difference was the natural infection rate. The fact that we in Germany, with our very large population, have managed to get through to this fall with only a good 5% is amazing, but not helpful for this fall. Now we are “catching up”, today it is already 6.39% infection rate. Thank you again for your comments.
Thank you Dr. My question is why in light of this would Sweden now impose a vax pass?
Thanks for this insightful article Sebastian. Currently in The Netherlands we’re experiencing excess mortality due to covid. But we’ve also had a pretty serious first wave. How might this fit in?
Still too soon to say if Netherlands is experiencing a fourth wave, or if levels are just rising to an endemic seasonally appropriate level. Should be clear in another couple of weeks.
There is a good Netherlands seroprevalence study out and you can compare it to Sweden. Looks like Sweden had more infections but not by as much as compared to eg Germany or Denmark .
https://www.rivm.nl/en/pienter-corona-study/results
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/9c5893f84bd049e691562b9eeb0ca280/pavisning-antikroppar-mot-sars-cov-2-blodprov-oppenvarden.pdf
First, thank you again Dr Rushworth.
I am also interested in comparisons between Sweden and Netherlands + Belgium.
All three countries are fairly similar in terms of population density (urbanisation level approx 80% according to eurostatl , all suffered quite bad first waves and vaccination levels are high. I think general population health is also quite similar.
So why does Sweden stand out here?
Perhaps no stampede effect from opening and closing restauants etc?
It should be noted that the death toll in NL is far higher than reported in ourworldindata etc. The real number is well above 30000 rather than 19000. Basically on par with BE but higher than Sweden per capita.
An interesting question is, whether the vaccinated people who catch the virus, develop a robust natural immunity, or the vaccine stands in the way somehow, and as a result, the person is susceptible again in a few months when the vaccine protection wanes even further. That would be a key factor that shapes the trajectory of the pandemic in heavily vaccinated countries.
Excellent question. We (when I say we I mean those making and influencing decisions) should be thinking more long term — what are the downsides of vaccines not just in terms of direct damage/risk to health, but regarding the long term response to virus in vaccine recipients. Instead they seem to be digging their heels in ‘get another booster’ hole.
David, It’s potentially worse than that, because any primary immune response to such a limited antigenic repertoire created a narrow form of immunity. When the body is challenged with the actual virus, it responds the way it’s primed.
and the result is “original antigenic sin” more recently termed “linked epitope suppression”.
The word “sin” is appropriate, because the inadequate priming results in a set pattern, anda much lesser ability to respond fully in the future.
It is an excellent question, and saves me from asking it myself.
Data from the UKHSA show vaccine effectiveness against infection (VE) declining not merely to zero but to negative levels of -100% or more, depending on age group. Calculating VE depends on how you measure infection, so it is possible that part of the explanation is that more vaccinated people are tested for covid than unvaccinated people (though this is speculation). However, negative VE as low as -130% suggests that vaccination is damaging the immune system, in which case we are in a vicious circle. The Israel data can be interpreted as a case in point. Vaccination long-term increases susceptibility to covid, and the political answer to more waves of covid is to keep on vaccinating.
Well, shows that one just cannot fix stupid.
Larry Banyash MD, retired
Looks however that stupid can and is mandated on the intelligent
Thank you Sebastian for this conclusive way of thinking COVID differently! David’s reply is also very important to consider.
Hello Sebastian, Well thought-out post. However, I would like you to encourage bringing seasonality more into your argument. You mention rightly that seasonality decreases deaths at some times of the year, not vaccines, because the populations were not vaccinated at that time and were going into spring. My co-author and I wrote a paper on how temperature changes influence outbreaks and deaths, and how viruses can adapt to the environment they have been in. This can explain why outbreaks happen or do not happen, depending on weather. I think the vaccines do very little, and we are still heading into winter (fall has been very mild here in the US), so New York, Sweden and other places with some “prior immunity” may still be hit with a wave of deaths in a few weeks. But time will tell. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8209954/
Not a scientist but if seasons play a part in this how does that work in India where they don’t really have winters like Europe.
Monsoons have a way of keeping people indoors and not getting sun.
The same with hot summers, they spend time inside, both on and off work.
The same can be said of many other warm places, southern US for example.
When its +35 celsuis and you live in a city its nicer to stay inside your air -conned house, car, shopping mall or whatever.
India, moreover, has massive issues with diabetes, heart issues, obesity, lung disease etc due to high-carb diets (rice) and recent change to a more modern lifestyle with, for example, more cars and office work
My contacts in New Delhi have told me there are times when the smog created by farmers burning their fields is so intense people avoid going outside.
As another contributor noted, the health and hygiene problems of that country are beyond exaggeration, which has certainly contributed to its Covid experience.
They say that with a doctor a cold lasts 1 week, without 7 days. and a pandemic lasts 2 years with government measures and 24 months without it
Well, not to mention summers effect on serum vit D levels—which has now been shown by Dr Campbell if the UK that as serum levels of D increase, hospitalization with death as an absolute end point drops almost to zero…..( full well knowing this is impossible, absolutely)
Larry Banyash MD
To fully understand how different countries have been affected by covid one must take in account the restrictions applied in different countries.
hard restrictions in social mobility at different times could explain different ” peaks” in countries otherwise similar in helth care and vaccination rates.
But the peaks time perfectly with the rise of a new, more infectious variant to dominance. There is however no correlation between measures taken to fight covid and the number of deaths seen: https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/25/new-evidence-on-the-effectiveness-of-lockdown/
Tack Sebastian för ännu en bra artikel. Kanske din bästa! 😉 Ja det är märkligt att de kör vidare med vaccinpass nu. Tycker det är bra och klokt att jämföra bara döda i covid för att få en bättre förståelse och analys, men även det har sina problem som du nämner. Om man tar ytterligare ett steg ut och bara titta på mortaliten över de sista 20 åren så kan man se att 2020 hade vi en mortalitet på 0.936%, vilket var ett hopp från 2019 (lägsta mortalitet nånsin i Sveriges historia) på 0.86% och enda gången vi har hamnat under 0.9% mortalitet. 2000-2006 har vi legat över 1% mortalitet med topp år 2002 på 1.06%. Från 2007-2020 har vi legat under 1% (förutom 2019 se ovan). Tittar man nu på 2021 siffror fom 1-Jan- 1Nov på antal döda så kommer vi hamna på den näst lägsta mortalitets året om siffrorna fortsätter som de gör. Tänk att de kör vaccinpass på det näst lägsta mortalitets året.! 2020 var sjunde lägsta mortalitets året. Det tycker jag säger rätt mycket om denna “pandemi”. All data kommer från SCB. Jag förstår att man kan inte analysera covid helt och hållet bara titta på mortalitet, men det säger faktiskt en del. Vi har också haft en befolknings ökning från 2000-2020 på ca 14% så det kan ju också medföra en lägre mortalitet. Men skall bli intressant de närmaste 2 månaderna då får vi reda på hur det verkligen förhåller sig och om din hypotes stämmer.
Jag undrar verkligen om Sveriges strategi var så mycket Anders Tegnells(FHM) strategi, speciellt efter hans uttalande som “– Alla har nu egentligen haft möjligheten att vaccinera sig. Det gör uppdelningen mellan vaccinerade och ovaccinerade lättare ur ett etiskt och moraliskt perspektiv”. Det är ganska många logiska felslut som han gör med ett sånt uttalande. Han borde kanske kolla sin testoron nivå.
Man hoppades att han skulle vara klok och vis som du och Ann-Cathrin Engwall. Då skulle han vara hjälte och one of a kind i världen, men tror nog att det mesta är styrt av regeringen och de ville inte köra Lockdowns och vaccinpass av politiska skäl tidigare, men nu är tvungna. Svårt att veta vad som pågår bakom kulliserna , men det luktar korruption big time på en nivå som vi aldrig sett. Plus Sverige har mycket problem nu på många andra områden under regeringens tid. Så vi har nog inte ens resurser att implementera en lockdown, men det behövs inte för många är rädda nu av allt som pågått i snart 2 år. Dessutom så censureras människor åsikter på olika platformar som aldrig skett under internets historia. Enda sättet att succesivt göra massvaccination är med allas smartphone till slut. Kan du inte handla mat, ha ett bankkonto eller vara kvar på ditt jobb måste du till slut vaccinera dig. Så staten kommer tvinga företagen att få folk att vaccinera sig. Det känns som det är dit de vill nå för det verkar ju inte handla om hälsan längre. Så när staten och storföretagen går ihop då får vi ju fascism tyvärr. Tycker den utvecklingen är ganska läskig speciellt för den yngre generationen som inte vet så mycket om vad som hände på 1900 talet. Sen har vi bara kvar Pfizer som “vaccin” i sverige, världens mest korrupta medicinska företag om man tittar på skadestånd utbetalt senaste åren. Plus covid “vaccinerna” har mest biverkningar av alla vacciner 30 år tillbaka tillsammans. Vilken jäkla sits vi är i.
Hur som helst så uppskattar jag verkligen dina artiklar och skönt att veta att det finns läkare som är modiga, fast ni är ganska få. Ha en fin helg!
Dr. Rushworth, a few things you may wish to consider:
1. A very recent paper describes a study in Sweden that looked at the percentage of healthcare workers and blood donors who were serologically positive as having contracted COVID-19. They looked at multiple biomarkers to avoid underestimating the numbers. They found that as of January 2021, 16% of the healthcare workers and 12% of blood donors had been exposed to COVID. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.750448/full
2. Death rates are not a good metric for total COVID-19 cases over time unless they are adjusted for age and comorbidities. A review of the Swedish government response to the pandemic indicated that in its early response it failed to protect its most vulnerable such as the elderly in group homes where the virus could spread quickly and be deadly to the frail and those with comorbidities.
3. Your analysis does not consider effects of imposition of voluntary or mandated NPIs. You will recall that in November and December 2020 severe limits were imposed such as on the number of people allowed in gatherings. These restrictions correlate with a subsequent drop in the number of cases/deaths.
4. You state that COVID-19 is a seasonal disease. May I suggest you review worldwide data as well as data from semi-tropical countries as well as urbanized countries. Countries like India, Brazil, South Africa, Israel, US, do not appear to fit the summer/winter narrative. Rather than just a link with seasons, you may want to consider other factors such as links with periods of holiday or other gatherings, start of school or post-summer return to work, etc.
5. You may also want to consider the impacts of traditional public health responses on infection dynamics: when the number of cases increases, NPIs are imposed which decreases transmission to a level where the NPIs are lifted, followed by a subsequent increase in the number of cases.
Studies that have attempted to find a correlation between NPI’s and deaths have failed to find any correlation. Seasonal diseases act differently in different climates. Influenza, for example, has one pattern in northern climates and another pattern in tropical climates. Covid is the same. The US does fit the seasonal narrative if you look state by state. Since it’s such a big country it has multiple different climate zones. To say that covid isn’t seasonal is absurd at this point.
1. Your analysis appears to presume that death rates over time were not affected by the early death of a disproportionate number of those more susceptible to bad outcomes. What are your thoughts on this? Have you considered using age and comorbidity adjusted mortality data over time?
2. Do you have some good references for your mention of a lack of correlation between NPIs and reduced cases/deaths? The literature I’ve seen generally supports that NPIs correlate with reduced cases/deaths, although their mixed and intermittent application and compliance has impacted their effectiveness. FYI, here are some examples of published reviews and studies on the topic.
https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)00316-9/fulltext
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0253116
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9338
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34611668/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00845-2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827321000744
1. I would be interested in looking at that type of data if it’s available.
2. I’ve written a couple of articles on this topic:
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/09/does-lockdown-prevent-covid-deaths/
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/25/new-evidence-on-the-effectiveness-of-lockdown/
The thing about the studies you cite is that they are intended to prove something they cannot prove, because they are observational – if you want to make a case for NPI’s, you are very much helped by the natural progression of the pandemic. As death rates are rising, governments will implement more measures. When the curve turns down, as is inevitable, governments will take credit and say it was thanks to those measures. The measures preceded the decline – that doesn’t prove they caused it. It is in fact the other way around – the rise in deaths caused the implementation of ever stricter measures. That is why the studies you cite show a massive benefit to face mask use, when the randomized trials show modest benefit at best.
If you try to look at death rates in different places that provide reliable data (i.e. not China) and compare with strictness of NPI measures overall, you will not be able to tell which countries took a stricter approach and which took a more relaxed approach. Island countries far away from other nations have been able to keep the virus from getting a foothold, but once it’s established in a population, most measures have little effect.
Bruce Labelle,
Studies of face mask dynamics fall within the domain of physics. There haven’t been any high quality studies of face mask dynamics that show benefit yet. You can see lots of hand-waving, few well-designed studies, and no data.
Of course, doctors being out of field won’t prevent them from publishing their opinions about the dynamics of face-masking in high-impact medical journals. [wry grin]
One of the things that I see in journal articles today is that some part of the official narrative has to be supported in order to get an article published which undermines a different part of the official narrative. For example, Bazant and Bush destroy the belief that antisocial distancing is effective, but they have to wave their hands in favor of masking. It’s very important to be aware of this.
Michael Osterholm still laughs at those who claim Covid is seasonal. No idea why.
He can’t be very bright.
Of the utility of studying maths as a citizen’s culture
Calculus :
The curve being traced by a multifactorial rate of spread
The end of spread given by the area under the curve
I guess my point is that even one death in the fully vaccinated is one too many. And throws the entire strategy of these “vaccines” into quite serious question.
Larry Banyash MD, retired
The Pharma companies were quite clear that their trials were not aimed to show stopping infection or death, just reduction of symptoms. They *hoped* it would do more. The media ignored this and created the expectation that they would be a sterilizing treatment – based on everyone’s common understanding of what taking a vaccine used to mean.
I honestly did not know that. I really do not want this jab if all it does is reduce symptoms rather than prevent and eradicate illness —as do almost ALL other vaccines.
Dr Larry
Bruce Berry,
Since pharma is hiding their raw data, we ought to be skeptical about anything they say about what the studies are designed to show.
Bruce Berry,
Can you provide a reference to this statement please?
“The Pharma companies were quite clear that their trials were not aimed to show stopping infection or death, just reduction of symptoms.”
Thanks,
I would also like a reference
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
It wasn’t just the media! Also politicians, from the US president down, the CDC, Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.
https://twitter.com/AnonCitizenUK/status/1461705941850726401?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1461705941850726401%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdailysceptic.org%2F
This analysis (below) might explain why the Wuhan seemed to spread worldwide in 2 months, while the more infectious Delta took 10 months. Variants subsequent to the Wuhan behave as expected for a seasonal resp. virus, its the Wuhan that defies explanation without this:
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-concealed-sars-cov-2-presence-in-china-as-far-back-as-march-2018
‘What we see next in the Swedish data is a resurgence of the Wuhan variant in the autumn of 2020, which begins to decline after a few months as sufficient population (a.k.a. “herd”) immunity is reached. This decline is however halted and countered by an even more rapid rise in deaths, which is due to the arrival of the British alpha variant on Swedish shores.’
The Alpha variant or just the seasonal flu rebadged via the handy dandy PCR , take your pick.
Alex Berenson is reporting that the English Office of National Stsatistic data is showing that all cause mortality for the under 60s is running twice as high for the vaccinated as against the unvaccinated and that it has been thus for six months.
Shots that double your likelihood of dying – I’m not an expert or the science – but isn’t this a bad thing?
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adults-under-60?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NTgxMjc5MywicG9zdF9pZCI6NDQzMzc2NTQsIl8iOiI5eDhOZCIsImlhdCI6MTYzNzQ0NDAyNiwiZXhwIjoxNjM3NDQ3NjI2LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzYzMDgwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.2qgOMlCtWjKjJRB7pTbJ43aqTuUKjk3NEgRwVAurH8c
That’s seriously confounded by the different age distributions of vaccinated and unvaccinated in that age range; it’s not possible to draw any conclusions. It would be really good to see a comparison of all cause mortality stratified by age, with the immediate post-vaccination period counted as vaccinated.
The mortality lines between the vaccinated and unvaccinated are converging as would be expected as the younger ages become vaccinated.
My problem with his graph is that it doesn’t adjust for the characteristics of the patients. One might assume that the vaccinated are somewhat more likely to be chronically ill than the unvaccinated.
The Head of the UK Statistics Authority publicly berated these as flawed. The denominator for unvaccinated is significantly overstated which completely distorts the picture. I say this as someone who is healthily sceptical about much so called statistical evidence from many quarters.
It may be a different source of statistics that my comment was aimed at…..this article explains why the data on vaccination stats is misleading. In particular the large inaccuracies in the denominator.
https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/02/transparency-and-data-ukhsas-vaccines-report/
Bruce LaBelle,
The study you cite as No 1 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.750448/full
is flawed from the get go, because as they say, “Furthermore, methods used to confirm past infection vary and the immunological response after mild COVID-19 is still not well defined.”
That is an understatement. The immunological response after serious covid is still not well defined. There are some serious flaws even in that methodology, as shown by this study:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34484687/
Most clinicians seem to be blissfully unaware that the lung pathology they are seeing is a serious mast cell activation (allergic reaction) to spike protein, which has several regions of toxicity in the spike which results in anaphylaxis-type clinical responses. IgE is a crucial marker in this context, but few people have discussed that in the real world context, except Dr Shankar Chetty, who has an astounding record which should make all doctors sit up and take note. His description of covid pathophysiology is far more complete and clinically sound than most of what is in pubmed, though the article above is one of the few that sees what Dr Chetty has so successfully treated. If doctors actually used their brain the way Dr Chetty does, there would be no need for any vaccine. He has treated over 7,000 patients, with ZERO complications, ZERO patients on oxygen, ZERO hospitalisations and ZERO deaths.
Current methods of “defining” covid immunity, using Ig G and abs to N, S RBD, Nabs and CD4+ T-cell reactivity, take no account of front line immunity such as innate cells, effector cells and epithelial resident memory T-cell immunity as well as other local immunity factors which immunology has no ability to effectively measure.
As early as the 70’s most textbooks – including the front line ones by people like Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, commented on the fact that children with conditions such as agammaglobulinemia did very well with measles and even though they had no discernible antibodies, they had “immunity for life”. Which didn’t include antibodies.
The same will apply to covid. There are plenty of studies talking about pre-existing immunity, and natural heterologous immunity will always be better than a vaccine that only presents one protein – the spike – because the natural immunity in all layers of the immune system, recognises all the external, internal proteins, and the conserved regions common across all variants.
Which is why it will be vaccine immunity which lets countries down.
You cannot use a vaccine ONLY against a highly mutable spike ignoring all the other surface, viral and conserved proteins, and expect such a limited product to do a sterilising effective job.
When you look at ALL the vaccines made against rna viruses, the ones that have most success, are the ones with multiple antigenic targets thereby avoiding escape through changes on the surface ( e.g. measles ), and the ones that fail abysmally, are the ones that use one target and ignore conserved regions (e.g. influenza solely targeting haemaglutanin )
Quite why so few people can see this blindingly obvious fact, is the most stunning headshaker of the whole covid deal….
Immunology in many ways has not progressed very far. Most of the tests done today are the same as the ones done 40 years ago. What also has not progressed very far is the ability to think rationally and logically. Were that the case, the world would not have gone down this path.
To define a proposed “world immunity” by such a limited antibody test, and justify the vaccine using current immunology tests, is like measuring the most obvious tip of the iceberg assuming that is all there is. So using ONLY those tests in the article you put up, as a legitimate measuring rod, is flawed.
A thoughtful, self respecting immunologist should be ashamed of themselves if they do so, because any or all assumptions should take into account the fact that it’s been known for a very long time, that immunologists can only describe a very thin slice of the whole pie.
Well then, WHY do we keep giving this, in essence, killing and worthless “jab?”
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
Just wanted to say this is the most logical and informed comment I’ve read in a long time. Thank you
Interesting comment. Unfortunately, I can’t find any detailed rationale for Chetty’s protocol or his description of covid pathophysiology.
An adequate bolus of calcifediol like was done by Castillo looks like it will help with autoimmune problems from the spike protein just fine without giving antihistamines and anti-leukotrienes. It may not help as much if patients have elevated PTH.
Aspirin looks like it may help.
I wonder how many of the patients which Dr. Chetty treated were high risk. Dr. Brian Tyson has seen 30,000 covid patients at his practice and treated 6,000 with excellent results. If you see 30,000 people, 9 or so will die in a month because their health is very brittle, so zero deaths really isn’t possible for large numbers.
Does Dr. Chetty claim that he treats people in the hospital, or just outpatient? If someone presents at a clinic with pO2 < 80 and with other bad test results so that they are already near death, how can anybody expect to prevent death, barring some miracle?
I agree that many kinds of immunity are being ignored by the pharma-captured research community. Likely because pharma hasn't figured out any way to profit off of them.
The emphasis on IgE ties in with the Spanish nursing home study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7833340/#!po=34.9057 84 in which nursing home residents were treated with antihistamines and azithromycin during the first wave. They all caught COVID, as determined by antibody tests, but none were hospitalized and none died. Without treatment in a situation like that you would typically see a death rate of 20%.
Indeed, that study looks very interesting. Thank you.
I hope you are right about calcifediol. I am prescribed this in drops by my GP and have been taking it for 10 years. My average blood test is 70ng/mL. Against my better judgement I had the Janssen vaccine in August. I had no immediate side effects and the only odd thing that has happened since is a rise of 50% in my platelet count. I can’t find any info about rises in platelet count after the vaccine just thrombocytopenia.
Thank you Sebastian. Australia will be a good test site. Our third wave is on decline, attributed to massive vaccination and we’re approaching summer. Australia has a very low, I would say negligible rate of natural immunity, so when in 6 month our winter comes and the vaccines’ induced immunity declines or disappears, will we see the fourth wave and lockdowns?
Could you give us your opinion on one finding in this article https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/another-major-red-flag-about-covid that analyzed the Swedish study as well. Its conclusions are in line with yours but it also pointed to the data on page 32 of the 34-page report, a chart that shows that 3,939 of 4.03 million Swedes who received the second dose died less than two weeks later claiming that people appear to die at rates 20 percent or more above the normal rate for weeks after receiving their second Covid vaccine dose.
Again I ask of you and Dr R, then why do we keep on this inane road?
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
Madge + Hirsh,
Thrombocythemia!! Increased platelets… not by a whole lot, but worrisome as directly linked to increase blood clot formation. Textbook Hematology
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
Sebastian, I like your way of strict logical reasoning when looking at data. As an immunologist I can tell you that you draw the correct conclusion and that it is the natural T-cell immunity that makes the difference. Lockdowns and restriction measures in many countries prevented the spread of the first less efficient coronavirus variant. This means that only parts of the populations were exposed to the virus during the first wave and received natural immunity.
If you look at Sweden for example, a large outbreak of C19 occurred in the Stockholm in spring 2020. The virus transmission to other regions in Sweden was to some extent prevented by avoiding travelling to Stockholm from other parts of the country. By keeping distances and working at home many people also avoided being exposed and were still highly receptive for the virus. In autumn/winter 2020/2021 it was time for the Gothenburg and Malmö area to experience more severe outbreaks while the situation in Stockholm was a little bit better and in spring 2021 more isolated less populated areas for example in the northern part Sweden had severe outbreaks. Soon or later most populations in the world will be exposed to the virus and reach natural heard immunity. This is not a permanent condition, it can fluctuate a bit when new viruses develop, the virus will survive in different shapes and become seasonal. The severity of an outbreak depends on the level of natural immunity in the population. Heard immunity lower the amount of virus that are transmitted between individuals protecting the entire population.
Vaccine induced immunity is different from natural immunity since everybody become immunised with the same or a similar spike protein. When infected with the virus we are all immunised with a several different mutant viruses both as individuals but also in a population even though one virus variant will be more effective in spreading and will dominate at a specific time. This will generate a broader antibody protection but most important a T-cell immunity to inner viral proteins that are not changing so fast over time as the spike protein. The viruses that can escape the vaccine generated antibodies will have a huge advantage when many are vaccinated in a population. The vaccine escaping viruses can infect vaccinated people more often as previously been seen in Israel with the British mutant. Vaccinated people carried this virus variant about eight times (do not remember exactly) more frequent than non-vaccinated people. This means that viruses that can escape vaccine generated antibodies can be enriched in vaccinated people and vaccine resistance will develop faster the more vaccinated people there are. Another problem with mass vaccination is that when everybody is immunised with the same spike protein, meaning that all loose the protection at the same time and will be submissible simultaneously which can be dangerous. This is the most probable reason for the new wave we see in Europe. I do not believe we will experience the same situation in Sweden as in less exposed countries because we did not go for lockdowns in 2020. We can maybe se small outbreaks in certain areas but there will be no need for lockdown for medical reasons is my belief.
I was tired when I wrote this comment, what I meant to say was that the South African (beta) mutant was found more often in vaccinated people in Israel compared to unvaccinated, where the British mutant was predominant.
Another great article. What surprises me is that people refuse to come to the conclusion that the vaccines simply don’t work and never did. The short protection they seem to convey could most easily be explained by competitive inhibition rather than immune response. For a couple of months, the synthetic mRNA monopolizes the cellular machinery making spike protein so it is not free for the virus to use for viral reproduction. Once the mRNA has run its course, the person is once again free to be infected. Immunity is not something that should be fleeting. Fleeting immunity makes no sense.
The effect of a few other vaccines is short-lived, for example cholera vaccine.
Somehow I doubt that every vascular endothelial cell ends up making spike protein. Some, surely, but hardly a large percent.
Your doubt based in facts? Or feelings…..
Larry B
Dr. Banyash,
What is the number of cells in the body (trillions?) and what is the number of spike proteins made by the mRNA spike protein factories (billions?)?
Thanks for your reply. I really don’t know the number of spike protein units. Not have I seen that it has been measured…,,but thanks for giving me that visual. Only takes one to damage, whatever that process is.
Several have alluded that both short term and long term this “vaccine” is simply not worth the billions that pharma has received from it. This mRNA will kill and maim more , I believe I can accurately predict. Any of the other standard vaccines would have been pulled by an oversight body by now. No, this is more than medicine now, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth for our profession….
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
Good grief Charlie Brown, how about stopping Pfizer, et al, from any more jabs? Say immediately. All of these posts point to both minor and major continuing problems with this “vaccine.” —in relation to the actual disease.
The last thing I would be trusting is India data. Basically most states have stopped testing outside of urban centres. Only Kerala has reliable data and that shows no reduction in case numbers. Deaths are probably not being reported in rural areas. We need to be careful with “third world” data . For example only 4 countries on the African continent have mandated and near accurate death reporting.
Sebastian, according to your logic Sweden should not experience a new covid-19 wave anymore and for countries like Germany the forth wave should be the last one, correct?
Yes, that’s correct. We’ll soon know if my hypothesis is right or not.
If successive waves are due to novel virus types, then all is needed for another wave is new type.
Might come from ‘vaccine resistance’…
But each new wave has been due to a more infectious variant. The delta variant is so incredibly infectious that it is hard to see how a new variant can develop that beats it, and even if it does, it is unlikely to be more infectious enough to create a new wave. The countries that had a big wave due to alpha didn’t end up having another big wave due to delta, because the difference in infectiousness between the two variants isn’t big enough.
What would be an endemic level wave of covid deaths for Sweden that you would find within the bounds of your hypothesis?
In February, after the wave caused by alpha, deaths of/with covid in Sweden stabilized at 20-25 per day without any evidence of overall excess mortality in the population. So as long as we see roughly that level or lower and no excess mortality overall, then that suggests a normal seasonal endemic level to me.
Seb, where are your graphs from? Do you have a link for them?
I searched on “JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data” but just got heaps of complicated stuff from JHU, nothing like the easy-to-read graphs you have.
cheers from Australia
The graphs are straight off google
Massachusetts provided summary data, not daily.
At this point the number of corona deaths is arguably less important than the number of corona hospitalizations and/or IC intakes. In Belgium and the Netherlands the main concern seems to be the level of corona pressure on the healthcare system.
In that sense the discrepancy between IC intakes and deaths in Sweden during early 2021 is interesting. I hypothesize this was due to vaccination of elderly, because these people would not have been admitted to the IC anyway, but they were protected against death at the time.
The biggest question is if Swedish numbers (especially IC intakes) will remain low during the remainder of the flu season.
Sebastian, What are your thoughts regarding this recent study of COVID-19 death rates in Texas during 2021 and September 2021? Tables 6 and 8 seem interesting regarding numbers of deaths by age and vaccination status. If typical ratios hold, the number of deaths at younger/middle age in the unvaccinated would suggest there were significant numbers of hospitalizations and ICU admissions, some of which will result in post-acute sequelae that will impact the individuals and the healthcare system for a while.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/immunize/covid19/data/Cases-and-Deaths-by-Vaccination-Status-11082021.pdf For more information, here is the Texas DSHS COVID data dashboard site:
https://dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus/AdditionalData.aspx
Bruce Labelle,
Those deaths numbers for Texas are miniscule. Endemic level. Texas’ population is 29 million people.
Texas, like most states, doesn’t count deaths due to vaccinations, which I have calculated from the Pfizer data. Almost assuredly, more people in Texas died from vaccinations than from covid. That is still a small number, relatively speaking, at 0.0227% of the population. This is hardly noticeable by statisticians.
Texas has a huge number of hospitals and a huge number of staff for those hospitals despite the hospital administrators’ determination to reduce the size of their staff by firing unvaccinated staff.
Covid vaccinations have a small absolute risk of death from all causes and an even smaller absolute benefit of preventing death from covid, taken from my calculations of the Pfizer covid vaccine safety data and the FDA data.
Point is,
An innocent sheep standing in line to innocently get an “ordered or lifesaving shot”—-is now dead and in the ground. Something, I think we simply dismiss too easily as “health” providers. Numbers or no.
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
Dr. Banyash,
My reply to Bruce Labelle may have seemed unfeeling, but my point was that the risk of covid appears to be lower than the risk of the vaccine.
Of course, anyone who dies won’t care that his risk was low after he drew the mortality ticket.
I implied another point–that we likely won’t see the impact of the vaccines in excess mortality figures.
This scam will likely be discovered and written about by our great-grandchildren.
If we want to bring the perpetrators to justice, it will take both RICO and failure-to-treat malpractice lawsuits. The malpractice suits will aid with discovery of the facts for other kinds of lawsuits.
Thanks. Your reply makes a great deal of sense now….and our great grandchildren will write not of the miracle cures of the pharma companies, but how effectively the media could fool almost all the people….
Larry
The Texas public health agency’s review of death records in Texas that I referenced indicates that about 23,000 people died from COVID-19 so far during 2021. This equates to about .08% of Texans dying from COVID-19 so far this year. This is in comparison to about 227,000 all-cause deaths that would be expected. So, it’s about 10% of all deaths in Texas. This correlates well with an approximate 10% excess death rate compared with other years. As for considering it an insignificant number of deaths in a large state… the University of Texas football stadium holds ~100,000 people. Would it be reported as insignificant if 80 – mostly elderly – fans died as a result of a stampede or other incident?
Good point relating to significance. Getting into the realm of ethics, so to speak. A single life is not insignificant, could have been the dude who just discovered the cure for cancer.
Dr Larry,
Bruce Labelle,
1) The Texas data ignores changes with respect to time.
2) The Texas data includes mortality data from January and February, before two doses of vaccines could be given to the first, high-risk group.
3) It looks like about half the Texas covid deaths were between Jan. – Feb. 2021.
4) Texas covid mortality picked up again late August, long after vaccines had been given.
5) Texas doesn’t track covid vaccine AE deaths, so we can’t know if there was any net reduction in mortality.
The Texas data looks like it has too much wobble to make any judgments other than seasonality.
Are covid deaths in hospitals high-visibility deaths, like a stampede at a stadium? Do you really think that these are apples to apples comparisons?
On any given day, how many Texans die in nursing homes? Would you guess that it is more than your hypothetical stampede?
Mortality rate in the US runs about 0.00003 per day. 29 million * 0.00003 = 870
Sebastien wrote,
“Clearly, it can’t be due to Germany being vaccinated earlier and losing immunity earlier, since both countries vaccinated their populations at the same time. For that reason I’m inclined to favour the first hypothesis, that Sweden has built up more population immunity, for the simple reason that covid started spreading massively in Sweden in spring of 2020, but didn’t start spreading properly in Germany until autumn of 2020.”
So does “…spreading properly…” mean NOT artificially suppressing viral spread by locking down – as we know Sweden did not lock down like every other country has.
I think it’s more the case that random chance meant that covid arrived in Germany a little later than in Sweden, and Germany was thus able to avoid a real wave in spring 2020.
Is Biden vaccine-injured?
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/biden-is-highly-likely-vaccine-injured
Big Pharma cannot admit vaccines failure because their reputation will crumble. So they push, through media and politicians – for more and more vaccination levels. Starting from 60-70% to 90% now and 100% soon. Not feasible. They lost.
Very interesting post, thanks!
Everyone is talking all the time about the elderly beeing vulnerable, but I think that “hides” a very importanat aspect. Is’nt it so that the primary factor is if a person has co-morbidities, (one or several), the age is not that important for a perfectly healty say 60-80 years old person? (Only in the sense that co-morbidities tends to come with age.)
A perfectly good helth status should be regarded as (at least) just as fine as taking quickly vanning shoots.
So the vaccines don’t prevent transmission, but we all have to get vaccinated to stop the spread? And vaccine passports to boot?
The policy makers are bonkers. Absolute bonkers. Along with most of the medical community who push vaccines and haven’t bothered to use their critical thinking skills.
There are many who agree with you. Stay the course!
Larry Banyash MD
Theasdgamer, time to start your own blog? 🙂
I would read it…
I have a new one dedicated to covid, if you can find it. 😉
Theasdgamer
Thats exactly the point of this Covid story, despite of all mumbo jumbo around.
Reading this article and all the comments, and taking into account the perceived evidence and global reality, we can assert that:
At worse we are dealing with a (now) endemic grippe, at best we are dealing with a monumental systemic frenzy.
It proves this mainstream world is insane. And those who live outside of the Matrix, like some of us, can get perplexed on how this is happening in the information/communication era.
Is is simple, Mass media is making all the fear propaganda and misinformation.
God save us.
And the Queen.
Dr Larry
Pharma’s marketing subcontractors are doing most of the work with the mass media and social media…pushing the pharma narrative and keeping unfavorable science out of search engines, social media, and mass media
e.g., iHeartMedia, Fors March, Anser Corp, ATI
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/10/investigative-reports/operation-warp-speed/
There’s more…
https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2021/11/20/dr-david-martin-who-they-are-the-names-and-faces
I also found this other company involved in spreading the pharma narrative and destroying competing narratives:
VMLY&R
at
https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/pfizer-plans-dtc-effort-to-pitch-vaccine-safety-joins-broader-efforts-a-jam-packed-fall
[fiercepharma is about pharma politics]
“Pfizer’s Hwang also said the pharma is backing the “Stronger” marketing campaign supported by the biotech industry’s trade association, BIO. That national effort aims to stop the spread of misinformation around vaccines—and stop the war on truth and science.
The digital advocacy campaign is “the first vaccine advocacy campaign to focus on the root cause of vaccine hesitancy—misinformation.” Its run by non-profit Public Good Projects (PGP).”
Throw BIO, PGP, and VMLY&R into the RICO lawsuit along with the rest.
Well, what a theatre of brilliant minds.
I may have missed what I am looking for whilst moving through the stalls of posts on this page however, one feels sure that an answer to my simple question is there, or with someone from the audience.
My question is:
As a risk, what key indicators would I look for in a blood test [or, another] to see what good looks like for me and my immune system..?
I already have an angle on heart, sugars, inflammation, vitamins & mineral Mx- all with their own nuances – and tested once a year. You see; I also, look specifically at my WBC-count, CRP, PV, Vitamin D and Vitamin B6, B12 and B9, which seem to be very good so I am told for my defences, and according to my research, but what else could I get my GP to measure for me to assist with my Mx of risk in regards to a ‘Healthy Immunity’. Not only would it help me, but also those of my friends and family.
Irvin
What is your take on Geert Vanden Bossche’s hypothesis that vaccination is driving
virus evolution towards being more infectious (and potentially completely evade
vaccine-generated antibodies)?
He also seems to believe that asymptomatic infections only generate short-term
antibodies. That makes me wonder about these surveys of antibodies (India, etc.)
and whether these antibodies actually offer durable protection.
If the vaccines are at least somewhat effective at preventing transmission, then mass vaccination will drive the evolution of vaccine resistant strains.
Antibodies are always temporary. But if you’ve generated antibodies then you’ve also generated memory T-cells and memory B-cells, which are long lasting.
Seb, what do you and others here make of this 8 min talk by Rhonda Patrick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEZ8QSAiFp0
COVID-19 spike protein vs. vaccine spike protein: key differences | Dr. Rhonda Patrick
The youtube summary says:
There are about 26 spike proteins on the surface of each SARS-CoV-2 viral particle that help the virus enter and infect cells.
The spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor and undergoes a conformational change from a closed or pre-fusion conformation to an open or post-fusion structure (as it fuses with the cell membrane).
Some people surmise that if the viral spike protein is dangerous — because it allows the virus to enter cells — then vaccine-related spike proteins render vaccines unsafe.
COVID-19 vaccines contain different spike proteins than the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
All vaccines used in the United States contain two extra amino acids that lock the spike protein into the prefusion conformation, such that it cannot fuse with the cell membrane.
In this clip, Dr. Rhonda Patrick describes what distinguishes viral spike proteins from vaccine-related spike proteins.
I hadn’t heard before about
– the 26 spike proteins on the virus
– or the vax having different spike proteins
– or the 2 amino acids.
Cheers
As I understand, about 10% of Swedes have been infected with Covid. Probably not enough for herd immunity?
No, 10% is the number of confirmed cases. Most infections are not detected because they are asymptomatic or so mildly symptomatic that they don’t get tested, or because they had covid early in the pandemic when testing wasn’t available. The US government estimates that at least a third of Americans have had covid by now, and there’s no reason to think the proportion would be less in Sweden. Antibody testing of children in Sweden under the age of 12 a few months back found that 30% had antibodies (and since this age group hadn’t been vaccinated it can’t have been due to the vaccines). Considering that children are much less likely to be infected than adults, the number of adults with antibodies due to infection is likely much higher. Apart from that, antibodies wane (even though memory cells remain) and not everyone who gets infected develops measurable IgG antibodies in the blood stream, so looking at antibodies will always be an underestimate of aquired immunity.
Sebastian, what is your opinion about the follows?
On page 32 of the study, a chart shows that 3,939 of 4.03 million Swedes who received the second dose died less than two weeks later.
(SOURCE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410)
Over a one-year period, that rate of death would translate into an annual mortality rate of about 2.5 percent a year – 1 person in 40 – almost three times the overall Swedish average. In a typical year, about 1 in 115 Swedes dies.
Of course, that huge gap does not account for an important confounding factor: younger people, who have a much lower risk of death, were less likely to be vaccinated.
But Sweden also provides detailed data on overall deaths nationally, making a crude baseline comparison possible.
That data shows that from an average of about 1,650 Swedes died every week between 2015 and 2019 between April 1 and early August, the period in which almost all of those 4 million Swedes in the study received their second dose. Death rates hardly varied over those years.
(SOURCE: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-composition/population-statistics/)
In other words, during the spring and summer, Sweden normally has about 3,300 deaths every two weeks – not just in the people who received vaccines, but in all 10.6 million of its people.
So let’s make an incredibly conservative assumption, one that strongly favors the vaccines. Assume that the group of people who received vaccines were so much older and unhealthier than those who didn’t that they would have accounted for every single death in Sweden whether or not they were vaccinated. In other words, assume that even if the vaccines did not exist, every person in Sweden who died would have been part of that group of 4.03 million people the researchers tracked – while not one other person would have died.
In that case, those 4.03 million people “should” have about 3,300 deaths every two weeks. They CANNOT HAVE MORE – because all of Sweden does not have more.
But the vaccines do exist. Those 4.03 million people received them. And in the two weeks after receiving the second vaccine dose, as a group, the researchers reported they had not about 3,300 deaths, but 3,939.
And 3,939 deaths is about 20 percent more deaths than “should” have occurred in those two post-vaccine weeks. Again, the 20 percent figure understates the real gap, because in the real world some deaths will occur in the 6.6 million unvaccinated people too, so the actual baseline number for the vaccinated group is not 3,300 deaths but somewhat lower.
Wow….is this really a death shot? Or what is the real truth?
Smacks of global conspiracy. Sad to say.
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
Georg,
“In other words, during the spring and summer, Sweden normally has about 3,300 deaths every two weeks – not just in the people who received vaccines, but in all 10.6 million of its people.”
So the baseline mortality rate per two weeks is 0.00031.
If we assume that the baseline mortality rate applies to the vaccinated population, for the 4.03 million vaccinated people we should expect 4.03 million persons * 0.00031 deaths/person per two weeks = 1254 deaths per two weeks. So 3,939 deaths shows an excess mortality of 2684 deaths per two weeks.
The excess mortality looks quite significant, assuming that the researchers didn’t make a mistake in their calculations.
This is assuming that all the excess deaths were covid. Yet the death rate from suicides, domestic violence, heart disease and cancers which were directly resulting from the restrictions to covid and not covid itself have all skyrocketed.
I’m curious about a couple of things regarding the thesis that herd immunity was reached on Sweden. One potential data source for comparison is the age-adjusted IFR in other countries or US States where seroprevalence studies have been done (e.g., the periodic serology random surveys in the UK). Are the cumulative hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths in Sweden comparable to those in other countries with comparable seroprevalence?
Btw, I was looking to see if seroprevalence data in Sweden supports or conflicts with the thesis that herd immunity was achieved at any point in Sweden. Here are some links for your consideration.
https://covid19dataportal.se/data_types/serology/data/
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/nyheter-och-press/nyhetsarkiv/2020/maj/forsta-resultaten-fran-pagaende-undersokning-av-antikroppar-for-covid-19-virus/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20008686.2020.1806505
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/groundbreaking-covid-19-blood-donor-seroprevalence-study-illustrates-increase-in-population-with-antibodies-because-of-vaccination-301368634.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343462011_High_seroprevalence_of_SARS-CoV-2_in_elderly_care_employees_in_Sweden
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/ijerph/ijerph-18-00923/article_deploy/ijerph-18-00923-v2.pdf
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33033249/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18848-0
The importance of seroprevalence is overestimated as regards immunity, since about 40% of the population show no humoral response despite having asymptomatic infections. It’s like the case numbers in terms of significance. If those looking at herd immunity would add 40% baseline immunity to the seroprevalence percent, we’d probably get more accurate numbers for total immunity.
An interesting theory behind the seasonal character of the Covid virus:
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/theory-why-covid-cases-started-skyrocketing-central-europe-last-month?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=296
Sorry O.T. but could you Sebastian take look att Norman Fentons studies regarding total deaths statistics for vaccinated and unvaccinated?
The saying “lies, damned lies and statistics” comes to mind. Also, there’s so much complicated / flawed data flying around that it’s possible to draw any conclusion you want…
I guess it’s fair to say anyone who is vulnerable to the virus (with co-morbidities) would also be vulnerable to the vaccination (or any kind of extraordinary medical intervention).
So, I’ll throw another theory into the fire… Could it be another ‘dry tinder’ situation where vulnerable people tragically died from the vaccinations rather than (also tragically) dying from the disese? So the vaccination program took out the most fragile part of the population.
Ironically, that would make the vaccination program seem very successful, right?
Must be one big mess of data to try to analyse. I believe you’d have to look at every single case individually, including interviews with relatives, to make some sense from it.
I’m very much pro-vaccination, incl covid, but more importantly each and everyone should do their own risk-assessment. And for that, we need good information…
I’m pro-vaccination only if the research shows efficacy and both short- and long-term safety.
Have you looked at excess deaths? With a comparrision of % vaccinated?
Increases in myocarditis, heart disease, etc?
2 kommentarer
1. När det gäller hjordimmunitet anges ofta värde på 60% eller fler infekterade eller vaccinerade. Men på färgan utanför Japan där visserligen försök gjordes att dela upp passagerare och besättning i två delar så smittades inte mer än 25-33% och få platser kan sprida smitta lika bra som ett kryssningsfartyg. Min gissning är att hjordimmunitet kan uppnås vid 20-40 % sjuka eller vaccinerade för att en majoritet av befolkningen kommer oavsett inte att smittas och är inte mottagliga.
2. Skolmedicinare påstår att orsaken till att influensa, både förkylnings- och maginfluensa, är på top i januari varje år kan bero på att vi umgås mer än vanligt i december. Alternativmedicinare påstår att den årliga influensatoppen i januari beror på att vi ätit som grisar i december och supit som svin på nyår, och att det är kroppens sätt att rensa ut lite av det onyttiga vi fått i oss. Vad jag förstår så är båda synpunkterna logiska och kan troligtvis båda vara bidragande.
Tyvärr ger de muslimska ländernas influensatopp veckorna efter ramadan inte några ytterligare ledtrådar eftersom de beter sig på ramadan ungefär som vi gör i december, både umgås mer än vanligt och äter mindre hälsosamt än vanligt.
I agree. So since this shot has proven neither, I will actively refuse it. But still focused on continuing my Vit D, K3, ivermectin, and black elderberry gummies. And an occ Mickey D’s sandwich.
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
And as an aside, several old patients have asked my opinion, and I gave them my truth based on good clinical data, as I interpreted it, that this shot is NOT a healthy way to go.
Great analysis, like everything time will be the only teller of truth. It may uncover some nuggets or may turn us upside down and in a different direction. Even though the western first world nations have decided to move lockstep in a direction together the data has decided to deliver us surprises along the way. It is making the academics in charge look like buffoons who can’t admit their policies have not been so perfect, especially when compared to the population health outcomes of less financially fortunate countries that were forced into conservative logical health policy decisions. The west looks like pigs at the trough when it comes to vaccines and its is a great historical lesson that will be passed on for generations if it is allowed to be written in the history books.
It would great to see Sebastian look at the increase in all cause deaths vs 5yr average in heavily vaxxed countries.
In other words there’s an increase in deaths above the expected trendline that aren’t labelled COVID.
What could possibly be causing that I wonder? Seeing how most countries appear to have stopped doing autopsies it’s just a complete mystery.
How do we explain France then?
Look at deaths, not cases.
In case you havent seen it already: Dr Rushworth and Mr Cummings:
https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/Premiere-Q-A-Session-Final:0
Looking forward to see the actual movie.
Det skrivs hela tiden om hur en variant av viruset konkurrerar ut en annan. Alla tar det för självklart. Det ärslutklämmen i artikeln “Den största oron är att vaccinerna blir verkningslösa” i DN av Johan Nilsson idag 27 nov.
Men hur fungerar detta? Jag har för mig att det var professor Agnes Wold som sa att fenomenet är ett mysterium som vi inte förstår. Jag kan inte föreställa mig hur en ny mutation så snabbt tar över och eliminerar en tidigare. Vad skulle få den tidigare att falla tillbaka så snabbt?
(Filmidé: Tänk om viruset besitter en medveten intelligens mer lik vår egen än vi nu föreställer oss? ;-))
Summary translation: How does a new virus mutation so quickly eliminate an older one? Is this mechanism understood? (Sci fi-movie idea: Maybe the virus is more intelligent than we understand?)
Indeed an interesting question. I believe it also spans between different types of viruses?
Infkuenza, RS, Coronaviruses etc.
I guess because they all target the respiratory parts of the body and once one of the viruses have infected a person, his/hers immune system will often quickly wipe whichever virus that comes second? Or, there is another mechanism in the viruses that block each other?
Maybe the impact will be cross immunity against the more dangerous strain from the less dangerous strain?
kind of a better, safer vaccine, like cowpox was against smallpox
Only the FDA can cover up while saying that there were 24% more deaths from all-cause mortality with the clotshots. 🤣🤣🤣
+400% excess mortality for the clotshots over placebo
17 deaths in placebo arm, two of which were covid, leaving 15 deaths as the baseline non-covid mortality
21 deaths in the clotshot arm, one of which was covid.
16 deaths as the baseline covid mortality, based on minimum covid deaths, assuming people take the clotshot.
One covid death was prevented by the clotshot and five excess deaths were reported, leaving a net increase of 400% in excess mortality over the placebo.
Well, good grief again— it starts again……
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
Dear Sebastian
Thank you very much for this post. A fourth wave is not surprising to me. You may wish to consider the following.
As regards Covid 19 it is the ‘flu, the internal toxicosis of the body, partly due to metabolism of food and partly due to the many poisons in our environment which can and do enter our bodies in the air, food and water. Therefore adding more toxins via vaccines, if indeed they contain anything at all, is pointless.
I used to think that vaccines were of some use until, at 60 years of age last year, I researched properly. I changed my mind.
Whether a vaccine causes harm or sometimes death depends on the toxicity of the vaccine and the immune status of the individual. Vaccine harm and deaths are well documented over many decades. The current vaccines are no different and probably worse.
The real pandemic is vitamin D deficiency which has been the case for a number of years due to an increase in indoor working and living.
Resistance to the ‘flu is at an individual level, and there is only herd immunity in the sense that nations, tribes or families may have similar diets. No one person is quite the same however.
The differences in nations is due primarily to vitamin D levels. This may be due to sunshine levels, or diet or both. Also it depends on the toxins in the environment, food air and water which affect people’s health and individual toxicity.
Testing for vitamin D levels would be far better than the useless PCR tests which are complete waste of money, except for those who love money of course.
I have had my fair share of vaccines, certainly polio, tetanus and a BCG. The last mentioned may well have been the cause of what was diagnosed as measles when I was 15 years old. Whether any childhood vaccines I had (apart from polio I don’t know I can’t find any records and my mum who would have known is no longer in this world).
I put the following link on my website if you or anyone is interested. Please note I do use humour to lighten the mood and to help make the points.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/v-is-for-vaccination/
This has a link at the bottom to Covid 19 Summary which covers the various issues and who is behind it all.
This may also be of interest.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/2021/09/26/fear-is-the-key/
To have a vaccine is to play Russian roulette with your body. One of the shots may harm or kill, if you overload your immune system.
New waves of Covid 19 will be due to the usual winter ‘flu and vaccine side effects and deaths. I only hope it will not be too many from the vaccines.
Kind regards
Baldmichael Theresoluteprotector’sson
fyi…
“Abstract 10712: Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning”
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712
This is a good analysis, but it ignores one important confounder: if you’re routinely testing people and classifying them as covid cases regardless of symptoms many of those people who go on to die will be misattributed as a covid death. So deaths are very much a function of testing, and different countries have different standards for both testing and attribution. I’m not convinced that large secondary waves in places like Sweden were caused by pandemic rather than seasonal (endemic) covid, with their bulk being the syndemic of misattributed cause of death after the ramping up of testing. There are many potential causes for the observed bumps in excess death, not least the fallout from the radical covidisation of public health.
Mild covid diagnoses rely on PCR–mostly qualitative in many places, which is even less reliable for clinical use.
Diagnosing covid which has progressed relies on several other tests and the diagnoses look to be quite reliable.
I disagree that SARS-COV-2 is a seazonal virus. I’m a pulmonologist in Brazil and our worst wave ocurred from february to july 2021, during our late summer until initial winter.
Brazil has a tropical climate and the pattern is thus different from in northern latitudes. Tropical climates don’t show the same marked seasonality for seasonal viruses that you see in northern latitudes.
Yes we do have an influenza season during the winter, as it happens in the Northern hemisphere. I live in the southern region of Brazil, where our climate isn’t so tropical. Take a look to Chile, Uruguai or Argentina graphics.
This article discusses influenza seasonality in different regions:
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp.1002383
According to the article, influenza peaks in April in Brazil. If we look at covid death stats for Brazil we see that covid peaked in April, as would be expected if it follows the same seasonal pattern as influenza. Covid deaths in Brazil follow the pattern established by Hope-Simpson for seasonal flu.
We should always look at deaths, not cases, because deaths are a much more reliable metric that is less prone to manipulation.
Do the COVID-19 death trends support your hypothesis regarding seasonality? From a quick glance at death trends in the UK and the US, and assuming a surge in cases begins about 3-4 weeks prior to a surge in deaths, it appears the surges in the UK started in early March, mid September, and early July; and the surges in the US started in early March, late June, late September, and early July. The long-term data on seasonal influenza in the US shows the primary months for cases is in December-March. I could propose an alternative hypothesis that COVID-19 is not a “seasonal virus” driven by people spending time indoors in the winter; instead, that it is a “super-spreader event” virus driven by social contact events with potential for high aerosol mixing/poor ventilation at social gatherings and holidays or vacation seasons, along with shifting government policies and personal risk-taking.
“assuming a surge in cases begins about 3-4 weeks prior to a surge in deaths”
case reporting is dilatory wrt death reporting
I agree with you, as the data I provided about Massachusetts does not support seasonality. After the initial outbreak in March 2020, cases fell in May through June, began a sustained increase in August through January 2021, fell thereafter through June 2021, and rose again from July through December 2021, although October witnessed a decline.
Perhaps I do not understand what is meant by season because I am referring to the four seasons of the year and expect a winter increase to begin in the colder months, such as November, and continue through March.
I also discovered that no correlation exists between the number of cases, death, and mortality rates.
Massachusetts has a vaccination rate of 80%, and the vaccines were first available to the general public in January 2021.
A comparison of the first ten months of the pandemic in 2020 to 2021 shows that 2021 cases are 40% higher than a year ago, despite natural immunity and vaccinations, but the case mortality rate is nearly 70% lower this year.
The average age of victims has barely changed from 80 or more in 2020 to 75 today, and, yes, most had other medical problems.
I am baffled because the case increase makes no sense due to the fact that the people being infected now are the same demographic as a year ago, vaccination and immunity notwithstanding.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I can explain.
When I look at covid deaths in Massachusetts, I see a pattern that exactly mirrors what I would expect for a seasonal virus in northern latitudes. Look at deaths, not cases.
Massachusetts provides data from March 2020 through December 2021, a total of twenty-two months. I have compared ten months of 2020 to the first ten months of 2021. Otherwise, a year to year comparison would skew the data because 2020 has only ten months, and 2021, twelve.
The number of Massachusetts covid deaths declines from April 2020 through September 2020, rises in October 2020 through January 2021, declines from February 2021 through July 2021, when they reached an all time low before increasing in August 2021 through September, drop in October, then increase again in November.
At the current daily average death rate, December 2021 will show an increase over November.
In Massachusetts, September and October are relatively mild months, but February and March can be quite cold. April alternates between temperatures, May is quite pleasant, and June and July are divine, the humidity notwithstanding.
No one identifies the seasons according to the calendar, as it is really impossible to establish when one begins or ends in any given year because they are so fluid.
Consequently, I do not see seasonality in the death rate or, for that matter, number of cases, as no reference point for either exists.
It may very well be that a pattern is not obvious because covid is a young disease compared to the longer histories of other viruses.
Another measure could be when people are likely to be concentrated indoors during periods of heat or cold.
An 2001 EPA study indicated people in the United States spend 93% of their time on average indoors, and, although dated, it is still cited.
Massachusetts is not the world, so my observations may not be valid elsewhere.
In my suburban county with a population 500,000+, we have had ZERO covid deaths in the last week.
I am more concerned about the NPIs and damage to our freedoms than I am about covid.
Arguably, Massachusetts is the seat of liberty in the United States.
It is a one party state, and I would not live here if it were a sovereign nation, as we all know what one party states produce.
Mandates and executive orders are an affront to our civil liberties because they are unconstitutional because laws can require a certain behavior.
Otherwise, we are electing dictators, temporarily or not, and the constitutional balancing of powers among three equal branches with limited powers is rendered irrelevant.
What do we know that the founders of our country did not?
When I look at the state-level data for the Northern and Mid-tier of states, they generally show a surge in deaths beginning in September 2021. In some of the more liberal states such as MA an NJ, the surge in death appears to be present, but attenuated, perhaps by higher vaccination rates or greater compliance with NPIs (what matters is not the severity of NPIs, it’s the compliance). A surge in deaths in September suggests a surge in cases that began across the US in the late-summer of 2021. See the data for MA, CA, NJ, PA, VA, AZ, CO, IL, MI, MN, WA, etc.
Neither NPIs nor vaccination rates seem to have any impact on covid deaths.
The MA data show that covid deaths rise and fall, more or less, with the increase / decline in cases, but that data may be misleading because the case mortality rate can be high when the number of cases is low and vice-versa.
The number of cases in the first ten months of 2021 is 39.51% greater than the ten months of 2021, but deaths are down (68.28%), as is the average age of death from eighty plus to seventy-five.
It would seem that a correlation exists between vaccinations and deaths but is lacking in regards to NPI because no double blind, cause / effect studies regarding them have ever done, at least in MA to the best of my knowledge.
The rate of increase in cases from July 2021 through December 2021 is similar to what was seen in 2020, which baffles me because vaccines have be readily available since January 2021, and MA has a vaccination rate over 80%.
In trying to understand the data, I become more confused.
Perhaps someone more knowledgable than I can explain what is going on.
You see a lot of use of the excluded middle by public health officials, who are members of the vax cult. There ought to be several categories that are covered, but are not, which is by design. The categories follow:
Fully vaccinated category
2x vaccinated in timeout category
1x vaccinated category
1x vaccinated in timeout category
unvaccinated, recovered category
unvaccinated, naive category
(then you add booster categories, ad nauseam)
Only if you a priori assume that vaccines have a positive net risk/benefit do you only track fully-vaccinated and the rest.
The forced conclusion is that the dice are loaded.
I agree….. not knowing what NPI means. The personal freedoms are too great a risk to lose to this spin put on the great COVID hoax. How do I find your personal blog?
Larry W Banyash MD, retired
What do you think about what Lennart Svensson, professor i molekylär virologi, said in a video published on expressen, saying that there has never been a herd immunity before against any corona virus, and that it wont be any against this one either. I was a bit surprised cause I havent heard anyone say this before.
Link : https://www.expressen.se/tv/nyheter/coronaviruset/forskaren-darfor-nar-vi-inte-flockimmunitet/
I guess it depends on how you define herd immunity. If by herd immunity you mean that no-one will ever get covid, then no, we will never reach herd immunity. If by herd immunity you mean that there is so much immunity in the population that the virus spreads at a low endemic rate, with peaks in winter and troughs in summer, then we definitely do have herd immunity against the four other coronaviruses – it’s why they’re not currently causing a large scale pandemic.
But doesn’t natural immunity against common cold viruses last rather short time (6-8 weeks)?
It wasn’t unusual to get 2-3 colds per year. And just like vaccine-induced immunity claims
have been grossly overstated, I have read claims about how natural covid infection gives you
“robust and long-lasting immunity”. Maybe that was true for the original virus, but what about
Omicron now?
Actually, immunity after infection with a specific cold virus is long lasting, on the order of years to decades. The problem is that there are lots of different cold viruses and they’re constantly evolving, which is why it’s normal to get multiple colds per year.
I see! Thanks a lot for your answer!
Ah, and it’s the same with flu then — each strain is different enough for immune system
to not recognize it.
Which begs the question: since SARS-Cov2 mutates so rapidly, how much immunity will there be
when some new variant emerges later this year?
You seem to imply that there will be enough cross immunity for future variants.