Just came across this opinion on the studies that purport to show effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against Covid. It's by Peter Doshi, associate editor at the British Journal of Medicine.
Summary: Even the effectiveness claims are doubtful. They showed the vaccines reduce positive PCR tests. When looking at people with symptoms, rather than people who test positive, the effects of the treatments are underwhelming. And the number of people in the study with symptoms vastly exceed the number of positive PCR tests.
PCR tests are a bureaucratic measure. Who actually cares about tests? In life, we care about outcomes.
And then: Even the claim that PCR positives are reduced is based on throwing away data about hundreds of individuals. These are people who received at least one dose of the treatment but were excluded for reasons that are not explained. The number of excluded people dwarfs the number on which the efficacy estimate is based.
And then: Critical raw data are not made available. They are just... kept safely hidden. Think about that for a bit.
Countries are coercing millions of people into these treatments on the assumption that the studies were sound science and were done in good faith. An unverified, unverifiable assumption.
People who don't know better are being shamed to not be "anti-science", when the full data are not even available to verify. And what's available showed only a reduction in PCR positives. Not anyone's actual outcomes!
All of this, after the inventor of PCR famously railed for decades against Tony Fauci, saying that PCR is not a test, and it should not be used to diagnose anything:
Showing 10 out of 10 comments, oldest first:
Comment on May 11, 2021 at 18:59 by Joe Data
The final weekly totals will be between the dashed line and the dotted line (high estimate of correction for data lag). By week 12, deaths are almost back to historic levels.
This is death from all causes so any questions about PCR tests or classification don't enter into it at all.
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 01:45 by denisbider
The first spike, around May 2020, is likely exacerbated by the nursing home chainsaw massacre, which as far as I can tell was done on purpose to get the pandemic going. The goal, of course, to provide a context such that rules can be relaxed and mass voting by mail can be justified for the November election.
Fascinatingly, excess deaths were growing up to January 6, then held for a couple weeks, then started seriously falling by Biden's inauguration. The intuitive explanation is that the vaccines rolled out and started working.
I propose, though, that another explanation is possible. Now that the Security State regime secured power, it is no longer necessary to kill people on purpose (screenshot of article).
Some other data make me believe this is plausible. While Trump was in "power", mass media, social media as well as the medical authorities ran intense ridicule, suppression and censorship of treatments with known long-term safety records that are effective against Covid. These include HCQ, ivermectin, budesonide, shown to be safe and effective by hundreds of studies.
These treatments were denied and suppressed up to the point of the Jan 20 power transition. When people experienced serious cases of Covid, they were not given known, safe, effective treatments. Instead, they were hooked up on ventilators where death rates were 50-90%. This was done on purpose; the incentive structures were such that hospitals received money from the government for essentially killing people they could diagnose with Covid.
After Jan 20, suppressing effective treatments has become no longer as important, and even Facebook has admitted a "mistake" about censoring HCQ information. ("Mistake" my ass: they achieved their objective, over the bodies of tens of thousands.)
Even so, some patients still have trouble accessing effective treatments. In Chicago, a patient's family had to take the hospital to court to allow an outside doctor to administer ivermectin, after which the patient showed improvement.
Remember the changes to Covid diagnostic criteria, implemented by WHO coincidentally a day after Biden's inauguration.
All things considered – yes, it could be the vaccines are reducing the number of severe Covid cases. But on the other hand, this pandemic has so many other obviously suspicious and planned components, it's hard to say how much of the decrease in deaths is simply because they no longer find it useful to keep killing people.
Also, if you look at the ages of most Covid deaths, they're 85 and older. At some point, you run out of frail nursing home people that the governors treated as expendable to begin with.
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 07:01 by Joe Data
I am surprised that you think there are tens of thousands of murderous doctors and nurses in hospitals across the United States plotting to kill people to get rid of Trump. I just got out of the hospital after a week of IV antibiotics and debridement of an infected wound. I never got the sense that the medical personnel were out to kill me. Has your experience with doctors been different?
I am aware of the WHO memo reminding people to read the instructions for their test devices. I am not aware of any evidence that even one laboratory in the United States has changed testing procedures since the memo. Do you have evidence of that?
However, since I am aware of the controversies around testing and classification of deaths, and also because it's the most important statistic, I always concentrate on the number of deaths from all causes.
There are many other countries that have experienced levels of excess mortality similar to or greater than the United States (deaths per 100K in excess of statistical expectations). Among those countries are: Albania, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Britain, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, North Macedonia, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and South Africa. That list isn't meant to be complete since many countries don't provide timely, accurate statistics and we have to wait for more complete numbers.
If we apply the kind of politics-first analysis that you seem to like, is there something in common among these countries? Did Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson and Putin also kill their own citizens to get rid of Trump?
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 13:28 by denisbider
Previously, the media reported "Trump is insane and wants to kill us all by suggesting completely unsafe HCQ treatments." Now they report, "Yeah, maybe we were wrong about HCQ." This likely reflects relaxed policies by medical administrators, though not uniformly.
Unknown: I am surprised that you think there are tens of thousands of murderous doctors and nurses in hospitals across the United States plotting to kill people to get rid of Trump.
Doctors and nurses follow policies set by medical administrators. They do this to keep jobs and licenses.
Administrators will turn a blind eye and implement policies that coincidentally increase deaths, if the hospital makes $50,000 per death rather than $1,000 per cure.
The State will put in place incentives which reward hospitals for "aligned" policies.
The doctors then do "everything in their power" to help, just without tools that work. If a doctor attempted effective treatments, they risked losing their job and license.
Unknown: I am aware of the WHO memo reminding people to read the instructions for their test devices.
Here is the guidance, and an Epoch Times article on it.
Here is a graph of daily Covid-19 cases in the US. It starts to fall just around the time of this WHO guidance.
Places like Florida caught on to the PCR cycle scam, and mandated that PCR tests report the number of cycles. Awareness of this started in December.
And would you look at that. After that, Covid-19 cases come tumbling.
Unknown: However, since I am aware of the controversies around testing and classification of deaths, and also because it's the most important statistic, I always concentrate on the number of deaths from all causes.
I agree that's a likely reliable statistic.
Unknown: There are many other countries that have experienced levels of excess mortality similar to or greater than the United States [...] is there something in common among these countries?
You don't link sources, so I quickly found this one. Note the negative "excess" for Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, South Korea. The source claims this correlates with a lower number of Covid-19 deaths.
What's the difference between Denmark (-4.3% of expected mortality) and Slovenia (+12% of expected mortality)? They both implemented masks and severe lockdowns. How did the Danish health care system handle Covid patients? How did the Slovenian?
Covid panickers expected Texas and Florida to suffer a catastrophe due to relaxation of pandemic measures. Instead, both states are fine. Meanwhile, cases in Michigan spiked, despite Whitmer's lockdowns.
It does seem there's an actual virus, and it seems to have accelerated deaths, especially in the elderly with comorbidities.
What I can tell you is that anyone knows you don't "quarantine" people recovering from respiratory issues by sending them into nursing homes. The only reason anyone would do that is to spread respiratory issues inside nursing homes. This is what happened, and can be correlated to tens of thousands of deaths.
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 13:40 by denisbider
Foreign countries may believe such information is in good faith, thinking surely the Americans have no incentive to screw us over. Well they don't, but the US propaganda is lying to achieve their own goals. It just happens to hurt others by coincidence.
If American propaganda says HCQ is dangerous, if medical administrators prohibit the use of ivermectin on pain of doctors losing their licenses, other countries might assume this is in good faith and is something they should do. If they do this, they naively raise their own death count.
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 13:58 by denisbider
This less kind interpretation takes into account recent media misinformation about Covid in India. The misinformation includes fake narratives about funeral pyres and misrepresented videos and imagery claiming people are "dying of Covid" on the streets. (The funeral pyres are their tradition which resumed after the pandemic, and the imagery of dead people in the streets is from a gas leak in 2020.)
This seems to all weave together into a push for global vaccination, regardless of long-term risks of the vaccines.
The push is global and is being done with such urgency, it comes across as if they want to get everyone vaccinated before people start to find out the negative long-term effects.
Then, it's recently been all but confirmed that the virus has been manufactured in the Wuhan lab, financed by the US under the keen eye of Fauci.
The evidence seems to suggest it's not the vaccines meant to help the pandemic. Instead, the pandemic is meant to help with the vaccines.
As to what the vaccines actually do – no idea! Their whole point seems to be that almost everyone is meant to be already treated by the time we discover.
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 19:24 by Boris Kolar
I think we need to rebuild almost all pillars of society (news, social networks, money, economy, politics, ...). It won't be easy and it will take coordinated effort of many people. How do we start building the future we want?
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 20:30 by denisbider
Major events of not that long ago - the Bolshevik revolution, the World Wars, the Holocaust, the French Revolution - must have felt surreal, too. Events do not stop, so we could have expected something major in our lifetimes that would change the way we see things dramatically. As major events go, this one might be mild, if we're lucky.
I think key principles for a bright future are these two:
1. Realization of internal locus of control. All discussions of classical liberalism vs. socialism and Marxism come back to this. Example. Another example. Jordan Peterson's classes and books revolve around getting people to take responsibility for their choices, and stop looking for excuses outside.
This is absolutely central and must be applied to everything, including health. The United States right now has 70% overweight people, 35% obese, 30 million people with diabetes, and 80 million pre-diabetics. All of this comes from the fixed idea that health is not our own responsibility, it's someone else's. If I'm obese, this is not due to 10,000 choices I made over several years, it's because the nasty corporations dare to sell me tasty food that makes me fat. If I get diabetes, then I do not fix this with 6 weeks of aerobic exercise, I instead go to a doctor and get railroaded on a map of diabetes where I poke myself with insulin 3 times a day. Over the years, I develop neuropathy and blindness and finally die from "complications of diabetes".
All of this is people chronically rejecting that their locus of control is in themselves. You are in charge of your health, you can have a fit body, you can fix your diabetes, the doctor cannot and will not and if you "outsource" your health to a doctor, you will experience miserable outcomes.
This goes just as well for the economy. Marxism is an attempt to fix everyone's economic problems in the same way a doctor "fixes" diabetes. It means not fixing anything at all, just addressing symptoms while the root causes continue, creating a miserable experience for everyone.
2. A rigorous focus on scientific integrity and epistemology. Narrative and ideology can never be allowed to override integrity, even when people are so absolutely sure that they're fighting for the right thing. Studies must involve radically greater transparency, must be questioned more deeply, and must go further to show that integrity was maintained through the entirety of the process.
Once this principle is widely established, we will discover that many of our core assumptions are false. The anthropogenic climate change science is so biased, I'm convinced it will turn out it is false. I also think the assumption of a universe made of dead matter will be demonstrated false.
The problems we're seeing are caused by violations of these principles:
(1) The popular support for socialism and communism comes from acceptance of victimhood narratives. A person's locus of control is perceived to be external: economically, socially, medically. Hundreds of millions believe themselves or others to be victims and so demand top-down "change", which means coercion.
(2) The elites may believe in anthropogenic climate change to such an extent that they're trying to "save the world" by either killing many, or making us infertile. This is caused by violations of scientific integrity: the climate change science is ideological and is conducted in a way designed to prove a foregone conclusion.
Comment on May 12, 2021 at 23:19 by denisbider
Comment on May 23, 2021 at 23:12 by denisbider
It could be the answer lies in how much each country prevented access to health care for other, non-Covid related reasons, that would normally cause people to seek help.
In Slovenia, still, it can take up to 5 days (if it's a weekend) to get a negative PCR test which is required to see a doctor. They won't accept negative results from regular quick tests that people take every week, either.
I've heard first-hand examples of people not being able to access treatment - for things like pneumonia and possible cancer - because the doctors are hiding from Covid. If Denmark is not doing such things, this could explain the difference in excess deaths.