One-Size-Fits-All COVID Vaccination Narrative and Internet Censorship

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, MD PhD, writing on the website of Dr. Vinay Prasad (who was interviewed by Saagar and Krystal). Hoeg is concerned about one-size-fits-all vaccination and internet censorship of comments (even by doctors) that are off-narrative):

My interpretation of the data is vaccines continue to be the best tool we have to prevent severe disease. When health care workers could get vaccinated, I got mine the first day I could. That being said, I had wished my parents and older patients could have gotten theirs before me. I begged unsuccessfully to extend my time between the first and second dose because of cardiac side effects I had had from the first dose (which came on quite severely while running). I continue to strongly recommend vaccines to my patients (and now boosters for all over 40-50 or with specific risk factors) and help facilitate vaccination appointments for them and talk them through the data. I recommended to my younger healthier adult patients to only get one dose if they had already been infected based on the data we already had late last winter and a need to preserve vaccinations. I have always felt, based on the data that healthy children were at very low risk and vaccinating them before older adults across the world was unethical and irresponsible. You and I wrote about this for the Atlantic with Monica Gandhi. I still stand by what we said.

Over the spring and summer, the evidence suggested vaccines were very effectively preventing transmission, which was a major rationale for vaccinating everyone. But I also knew, as did you, in the spring that a serious vaccine adverse effect could quickly tip the individual harms of the vaccine beyond those of the benefits for healthy children. And I actually tweeted about the uncertainty about the risk-benefit ratio of vaccination in healthy boys on June 10th as the myocarditis data were accumulating from Israel and our own CDC.

My tweet was censored by Twitter and that landed me on Tucker Carlson (which I had never watched). I understand the political nature of this pandemic (certainly on social media) but the censorship of an issue as important as vaccine-associated myocarditis in boys and young men really got under my skin. I was receiving texts and messages from physicians I knew seeing post-vaccination myocarditis in young boys and men across the country and I was vexed the CDC did not prioritize getting an accurate, stratified estimate of this occurrence. Certainly, as a mom I wanted to have a reasonable sense of the benefits vs risks in my old children. At that time I was glad to connect with the cardiologist John Mandrola because we are very like-minded, particularly on this issue (we’ll discuss our study below).

I have consistently viewed attempts to estimate the rates and define the severity of a vaccine side effect as highly pro-vaccine. Anything else, especially when it comes to children, will quickly erode public trust and fuel overall vaccine hesitancy. Especially now with the vaccines’ limited and transient impact on transmission, we need to be considering each individual’s risks from COVID-19 and their expected benefits (and risks) from each dose. The most important factors to consider in this analysis include age, sex, risk factors for severe COVID-19 and history of infection.

What still boggles my mind, is when you just do the simple math using the German study of infection-hospitalization rates in healthy children, you get a 1/2400 chance a healthy 12-17 year old will be hospitalized for COVID-19 requiring specific covid treatment (this eliminates incidental hospitalizations) and, now with omicron, that is likely around 1/5000 risk (or lower) and yet the rate of symptomatic post vax myocarditis after dose 2 in this age group is around 1/3000 (see below) and yet so few seem to be questioning dose 2 for them (when mathematically it’s the wrong decision), let alone dose 3, which seems a clear mistake to mandate without evidence of benefit. . .

Continue ReadingOne-Size-Fits-All COVID Vaccination Narrative and Internet Censorship

NYT and WP Play Coy Regarding Sources for their COVID “Natural Origins” Cheerleading

The Biden Administration is rightfully looking into the COVID lab origin theory (even though it was seen as shameful to even ask this question in recent times). In the meantime, NYT and WP are now cheerleading for the "natural origin" theory based, in part, on the opinions of two thoroughly discredited infectious disease researchers. Follow the public evidence offered by Glenn Greenwald to see that Peter Daszak has a well-documented career-threatening conflict of interest (and history of deceit) and Robert Garry received a multi-million dollar NIAID research grant shortly before his 180 degree change of opinion. Glenn Greenwald's story is focused on the irresponsible reporting by the NYT and WP. Why would these newspapers fail to inform their readers that there are concrete reasons to distrust both of these two experts upon whom their recent stories rely? National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is the well funded agency directed by Anthony Fauci, who also has some explaining to do.

Greenwald's article is titled: "To Deny the "Lab Leak" COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted SourcesA bizarre and abrupt reversal by scientists regarding COVID's origins, along with clear conflicts of interest, create serious doubts about their integrity. Yet major news outlets keep relying on them."

Here is Daszak explaining his state of the art research back in 2017:

Here's another link to Daszak's video.

Continue ReadingNYT and WP Play Coy Regarding Sources for their COVID “Natural Origins” Cheerleading

New Evidence Regarding COVID Lab Leak Possibility Puts More Light on Partisan Faultline

I don't claim to know the ultimate answer, but this new willingness to look at the evidence reflects poorly on many scientists (including some with blatant conflicts of interest) and ultra-credible news outlets, including the NYT, which declared that the lab leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory and even published an 05/26/2021 article by Apoorva Mandavilli, claiming that to even ask the question about lab leak origin was "racist."

Now we have a new book shedding light on this question, described at Reason in this article: "Was It a Lab Leak? The Mysterious Origin of COVID-19: Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, authors of the new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, say the preponderance of evidence now points toward a lab origin and genetic engineering." Here's an excerpt:

Ridley says that White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci's emails, which were made public through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that behind the scenes scientists were taking the lab-leak theory seriously all along.

"A number of leading virologists were talking to each other and were saying to each other, 'we think this might look a bit like a virus that's been engineered in the laboratory,'" says Ridley, referencing a January 31, 2020, email in which researcher Kristian G. Andersen says that "one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered." Fauci replies a day later, "Thanks, Kristian. Talk soon on the call."

"And at the end of that phone call, they all did a very rapid volte-face, and started writing articles almost immediately," says Ridley, referring to an influential article Andersen and his colleagues published in Nature on March 17, 2020, stating that "our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." On March 6, Andersen emailed Fauci to tell him the paper had been accepted for publication, to which Fauci replied, "Nice job on the paper."

From Plindia:

Two New York Times workers have confirmed to The Spectator on Monday that a top editor of the American daily newspaper had told employees early in the year 2020 when the world was just about starting to come to terms with the global pandemic that had been unleashed on it, that they should not probe or follow up the origins of the deadly and highly contagious virus.

The NYT journalist reportedly told Dominic Green, the deputy editor of the US edition of The Spectator: “In early 2020, I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].

Google and other social media outlets also drank the Koolaid and decided to shut down the conversation because they were so damned certain of the answer:

HBO host Bill Maher criticized social media and search engine companies for suppressing and blocking stories about the origins of the coronavirus over this past year, specifically the lab leak theory.

"Facebook banned any post for four months about COVID coming from a lab. Of course, now, even the Biden administration is looking into this," Maher said Friday during a panel discussion on his show Real Time.

Continue ReadingNew Evidence Regarding COVID Lab Leak Possibility Puts More Light on Partisan Faultline

Krystal and Saagar Offer Non-Partisan Discussion of COVID

I often look forward to hearing the nonparisan analysis of the news offered by Saagar and Krystal. On this episode they talk about COVID in ways you will not hear on left-leaning or right-leaning legacy news outlets. You'll hear their views on the segments re the TV show, "The View," and on Saagar's own segment. They love the vaccines but are opposed to mandates. They believe that masks should be optional. They shoot down the hyperbole that we are hearing from the right and the left and they are highly critical of Fauci's arbitrary targets. They offer some statistics that I hadn't heard before, e.g., children are more like to die of the flu than COVID, which means they should be back in school. They urge that it's time for America to move on, as many Americans are now doing.

Krystal and Saagar also offer a worrisome segment about Joe Biden's physical and political performance (they have applauded Biden's decision re Afghanistan, and I agree). If you are trapped in the FOX bubble or the NPR/NYT/WP bubble, I recommend that you listen to an episode of Breaking Points.

Continue ReadingKrystal and Saagar Offer Non-Partisan Discussion of COVID