Hello friends,
Welcome to a new edition of Weekly Crystallizations, a weekly newsletter where I highlight tweets from people making sense of what’s going on in the world today!
In this week’s edition:
Winter is upon us: Cases go up, vaccine effectiveness goes down
What is going on with the non-COVID excess deaths and full hospitals?
Pfizer whistleblower blows the whistle on malpractice during the Pfizer trials
COVID-19
Winter has arrived and cases have shot up across Europe.
Here’s the usual disclaimer that we shouldn’t concern ourselves too much with cases for a disease where 98% of cases are accompanied by mild symptoms.
The waning of the vaccine’s effectiveness continues to become more pronounced, especially among older ages (vaccinated earlier, and more frail).
Important to note that although the waning of vaccine effectiveness against infection by now is relatively well established.
What is less well established is:
The vaccine effectiveness against *transmission* wanes by the same rate as vaccine effectiveness against *severe disease*. The reason we saw the former drop to zero, and the latter holding strong, was because it started at a higher level. Data from PHE shows this, as does the recent study I linked to last week from Sweden.
It’s also clear from the UK data that the vaccine effectiveness against infection not only drops to zero, but also turns negative. What isn’t clear is whether this is a property of vaccine-induced immunity, or some statistical artefact (or both).
The UK Health Security Agency publishes a weekly update which they call “vaccine surveillance” where they publish stats on vaccine effectiveness. @eugyppius goes over the latest figures, and how they show a negative vaccine effectiveness against infection (in other words being vaccinated is associated with higher odds of getting infected) in the article below.
Unsurprisingly these data caused a stir within the UK government apparatus. One reason might be that with every passing week the data are getting worse for the pro-vaccine lobby. This led the head of the Office of Statistics Regulation (a UK regulatory body) to pen an open letter to the ONS urging them to provide the reader with more context. However, what context should be provided exactly? @eugyppius1 comments on that open letter:
“This is not just about the choice of denominator. It is about recognising that the comparison of case rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated groups is comparing datasets with known differences – including, potentially, the greater propensity of people who are vaccinated to come forward for tests. So the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon, not just a feature of how well vaccines work. I do not think your surveillance report goes far enough in explaining this crucial point.”
Emphasis mine again. Humpherson [head of ORS] has no idea what behavioural factors might be at issue. He is just throwing random ideas at the wall, here. And notice how he slithers from what is “potentially” true to totally unqualified and unsupported assertions about is true (“the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon”). Maybe the higher unvaccinated death rates also “reflect a behavioural phenomenon“ and are “not just a feature of how well vaccines work.” As long as we are allowed to speculate baselessly, let’s do it in both directions.
To be fair, vaccine effectiveness is a very crude metric to be using anyway. It’s not a metric that tells you anything about the inherent properties of the vaccine. It’s a metric that is calculated at the population level without controlling for anything but vaccination status and degree of illness.
This opens the door for many possible confounders. Fundamentally, you’re not comparing groups that are otherwise equal. The vaccinated and the unvaccinated differ in many ways, including average health. And this shows up as an artefact in many calculations. @OS51388957 lays out this argument here.
Something weird is going on
There’s an emerging hypothesis that goes something like this:
We’re seeing an increase in non-COVID deaths and severe disease (often cardiac related) across the Western world
This can be deduced from
Excess death reporting
News reports of individual cases
Because 1. and 2. cannot be attributed to COVID and they weren’t occurring before, the spike vaccines are the most likely culprit.
This argument, if true, points at a very uncomfortable truth. It’s so uncomfortable, in fact, that simply stating it sounds alarmist.
Uncomfortable Hypothesis: The spike vaccines are causing a surge in disease and death equal to or larger than the amount of COVID deaths.
If true, it would mean the medical establishment is severely mistaken. They are mistaken in not acknowledging this signal, not investigating it, and not linking it to the vaccines. What’s more they would be complicit in the deaths of thousands, if not millions of people around the world.
Sounds too unlikely to be true, right?
Let’s look at some of the evidence and how it’s being presented.
You’ve got Alex Berenson, who’s been banned from Twitter, but has been highlighting data points such as the following.
German excess all cause mortality has seen a ~10% rise after accounting for COVID deaths. Is that all due to a backlog caused by the pandemic? Seems high.
A staged increase in all cause mortality is observable in data from Scotland. Which, to be fair, could be explained by the waning effectiveness of the vaccines and their staged roll out.
An analysis based on all cause mortality data by vaccination status from the UK Office for National Statistics shows that the mortality for the 10-59 age group (a much larger age group than is typically useful to look at), starts to increase right about when the vaccination campaign started. Whereas the the all-cause mortality for the unvaccinated starts to bend downwards around the same period.
It looks weird, but this might be an artefact of simply starting with such a large age group to begin with. The 10-59 age group among vaccinated will be weighted much more towards older ages, and weaker immune systems, then the 10-59 group among the unvaccinated. And this weighting might shift as you move through the vaccination campaign.
I agree with @OS51388957 we need more granular statistics to interpret the data. At the same time the UK can be applauded for being one of the most forthcoming when it comes to data on the pandemic. I know of no other country that publishes all cause mortality by vaccination status. Bravo.
Here’s a report from a German outlet where they’ve tabulated a long list of athletes that have suddenly died or become seriously ill since May 2021.
This looks very weird to me. It’s also a type of data set which is hard to compare with previous years because there aren’t much of these tabulations around. But on the face of it, it seems very weird.
Then from Australia, where there’s almost no COVID cases, hospitals around the country are reportedly overrun. And they don’t really understand why.
Western Australian Premier in this interview says:
Look our hospitals are under enormous pressure. This is the same in Tazmania, South-Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Enormous pressure. This is something no one has ever seen before, the growth in demand in our hospitals. Why it is, is hard to know. Except there is some evidence that there’s some delayed reaction to COVID. But there is huge numbers of people coming through the doors.
That is a bit strange considering Western Australia has almost no COVID cases.
I would have to conclude there’s definitely something weird going on. Some reports cite shitty evidence, some are too alarmist, but some are actually alarming and I don’t see an obvious explanation for them. I think it’s plausible that the spike vaccines are causing a bunch of weird and serious, often cardiac related, problems in the vaccinated. It’s also not the only explanation, but it’s the most plausible one I’ve heard so far.
I’m seeing some initial signals that this is now being taken a bit more seriously.
Pfizer whistleblower
The BMJ, a prestigious medical journal, published an investigation involving a whistleblower who had worked within the Pfizer trials that had gotten the company the emergency approval they needed for the vaccines. Some highlights:
But Jackson has told The BMJ that, during the two weeks she was employed at Ventavia in September 2020, she repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns, and data integrity issues.
Documents show that problems had been going on for weeks. In a list of “action items” circulated among Ventavia leaders in early August 2020, shortly after the trial began and before Jackson’s hiring, a Ventavia executive identified three site staff members with whom to “Go over e-diary issue/falsifying data, etc.”
Don’t expect any mainstream outlet to pick up this story. The story has actually died a fairly silent death already. No statement yet from the New England Journal of Medicine, the prestigious journal that published the trial results.
@NickHudsonCT seems to expect a bigger backlash from this though. We’ll have to see.
Pfizermectin
Great intro into Pfizer’s new COVID pill from @GoodKingElliot
Misc
Crypto
Great thread 👇
Central bank balance sheets are highly correlated with the S&P 500. Easy money inflates the stock market.