I hope we can win back the trust of the vaccine skeptics. The best analogy to understand them came from Scott Alexander in his long Ivermectin post: imagine aliens come to earth and want to put a chip in your brain... do you trust them enough to let them? The scientific establishment has lost the trust of many people who now view them akin to a potentially hostile alien invasion force.
It’s easy to see why. The medical establishment should have stuck to medicine, not social science. A decade ago, the AMA advised doctors to start asking patients about gun ownership as part of their risk assessment. They’d have been better off asking how many ice cream scoops or televisions were in the house.
That's fine rhetoric but the truth beyond that is that in the future we need institutions so what's more important is having institutions. If you want to burn down and recreate from scratch. Fine. But don't give oxygen to people who think we don't need institutions
If you are a young man, age 16-35 or so, you should absolutely not take a Covid vaccine. The demonstrated risk for myocarditis is higher _for that particular cohort_ than the potential for complications for Covid itself.
We don't know how many died from COVID because the numbers were irretrievably tainted by the fact that hospitals got paid to attribute non-COVID deaths to COVID.
1. Risk for Covid complications was overwhelmingly concentrated in the sick/infirm, and that strongly correlates with age.
2. If you are 80 and take an experimental treatment and it turns out to have serious complications, well, how much longer were you going to live anyway?
So what conclusion can you draw about a country that demanded that college students, young and healthy, be vaccinated while leaving the elderly in places like India and Brazil to die?
It was never feasible but in a perfect universe the US would have vaccinated the elderly, told the young to just go ahead and live their lives, and then take all of the doses saved in that manner and shipped them overseas to places like India where they could be used to treat cancer patients and the very old.
I for one thought it was disgustingly selfish and inhumane to waste vaccines on the young and healthy while poor brown people died overseas.
Fuck poor brown people overseas. Let them pay for their own drugs. But, in the case of the COVID "vaccine" no one needed it. Still, if anyone in India wanted it let them pay for it.
Well, then, put those unused doses up for sale for overseas buyers. Regardless my point is that shooting them into the veins of young college kids was useless at best and actively harmful at worst.
The problem is that after the first round of tests looking at moderate to moderately severe symptoms (nowhere near lethality) in a mostly youngish population, there were no further randomized control trials on the lethality of Wuhan Corona Virus in the population most at risk. IE the 70+ poor dears.
What one could see that over the 3 years of the pandemic, viral lethality dropped, viral infectiousness went up, and efficacy of vaccination on infectiousness dropped.
Comparing the vaccinated to unvaccinated also became more and more difficult, because the most vulnerable were also the most immunized. This of course is exactly something that can produce paradoxic effects, if immunization is no longer highly effective...
It sounds like you're trying to make a very nuanced point, which is fine. But I think it is necessary for us to also state clearly whether we think the vaccine saved many elderly lives or not. reality and science are complex and messy but I don't think it's helpful or smart to deny simple realities in favor of making and more nuanced. We can do both acknowledge simple truths and talk about more nuanced issues as well
THIS is what is infuriating. You want to talk nuance NOW that questions are being asked. Did you stand up and say no one should be fired for not taking the shot? Did you stand up and say young people in general and young men in particular should NEVER be pressured to take the shot to do things like go to university? Now that the time of ruthless blanket diktats is over you want "nuance" and "it's complicated" back?
The jabs apparently provide an ephemeral heads-up to the benefit of the immune systems of elderly and co-morbid individuals. The vaccine did not suppress the virus. You could still get, transmit, be hospitalized, and die from Covid. As such it did not provide a public health benefit, only a private benefit to a cohort of at risk individuals. The vaccine was "leaky," and propagandized as 95 point bazillion percent " effective," whatever that meant.
We would have gotten the same and probably better results just by having everybody lose 20 lbs.
Speaking of, I haven't seen any PSAs or commercials with recommendations for better indoor humidity, ventilation, individual hydration, and outdoor exercise. Lots of pill pushing though.
Torin your question ignores the fact that covid vaccines were forced on many young men. THAT (among other things) is why the scientific establishment's reputation is in tatters. No one is suggesting "the science" has contributed nothing good. What we have noticed is how many scientists egged on -- or simply quietly looked at their feet during -- a harmful, authoritarian mass hysteria.
The total number of increased deaths due to Covid was not a a very large number for males 16-35 even though men died at a higher rate due to Covid-19 than women. However, very few males aged 16-35 die each year. Claiming there was not risk was wrong or that the risks from blood clots was higher since there is no proof.
We know that the risk to young people in general from Covid was very, very low.
We know there is a non-zero risk of complications like myocarditis, especially in young men.
We are also talking about a treatment that went through a vastly abbreviated testing process.
If you're a GP or medical professional are you warranted in advising your young, male patients that they don't need to be vaccinated? Definitely.
If you're a GP or medical professional are you negligent if you recommend boosters for your young, male patients in light of what we know about the virus and natural immunity at this point? Well, I wouldn't want to be your patient.
Dude, you should read the text for figure 3 carefully: From 2019 to 2020, death rates increased for each age group 15 years and over. Rates increased 20.8% for age group 15–24 (from 69.7 deaths per 100,000 population in 2019 to 84.2 in 2020), 23.8% for 25–34 (128.8 to 159.5), 24.5% for 35–44 (199.2 to 248.0), 20.7% for 45–54 (392.4 to 473.5), 17.6% for 55–64 (883.3 to 1,038.9), 17.4% for 65–74 (1,764.6 to 2,072.3), 16.0% for 75–84 (4,308.3 to 4,997.0), and 15.0% for 85 and over (13,228.6 to 15,210.9) (Figure 3). Rates for age groups 1–4 and 5–14 did not change significantly from 2019 to 2020.
The highest RELATIVE increase in mortality was in the 25-44 yo category. That were NOT the Covid deaths… These were also NOT the vaccine deaths, as vaccines only became available to that group around June 2021...
It started before Covid. I think it started when people who were themselves vaccinated as children grew up. They didn’t remember suffering with measles or hear about iron lungs for polio victims.
It will swing back only after there are more deaths from vaccine preventable diseases. There was one death of an unvaccinated child from measles a few days ago.
Covid isn't a vaccine-preventable disease, neither is the flu. The viruses that cause them are highly mutable unlike, say, the polio virus, so they're always chasing and pushing the viruses from behind.The Covid vaccines were obsolesced after the Omicron strain showed up. That's why nobody's still lining up for their Covid shot every four months.
Love it. Anonymous scientists sent it to you? The block quote seems to suggest you excerpted it from something, but the "proposed title" suggests otherwise.
“Optimists predicted that a remedy for COVID could soon be found in the United States. By the end of 2020, these observers were vindicated by Operation Warp Speed…”
The optimists were right, remedies for COVID were soon found. But the remedies were not the mRNA vaccines; they were HCQ and Ivermectin. The response of the NIH, CDC, FDA, and other alphabet agencies was to denigrate these two repurposed medications. In the case of HCQ, the Lancet published a bogus study penned by a science fiction author and a porn actress, an article that was later retracted but not before the damage was done. In the case of both drugs, tests were performed that were designed to fail. Ivermectin was attacked as for horses although its developers were awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine. Hoax’s were publicized, such as the one in Oklahoma that gunshot victims weren’t being treated at a local hospital because it was filled with patients suffering from Ivermectin use side effects. This despite the FDA’s own previous
ranking of medicine toxicity that placed ivermectin as less dangerous as Tylenol.
Why? Because as long as there were no effective treatments for COVID the experimental vaccines could be granted Emergency Use Authorizations.
I write this as a person who participated in the Pfizer trial and was relieved to know at the time (from second injection side effects and a lab test for antibodies) that I was in the vaccine arm of the trial. I naively trusted government health officials. As Pierre Kory, only of the early promoters of Ivermectin said on the Dark Horse podcast concerning the war on Ivermectin, “No matter how cynical you become, you’re naive.”
We now know that the vaccine was neither safe nor effective. It stopped neither infection nor transmission. Claims that it reduced hospitalization and fatalities are based on post-vaccine rollouts at a time when new variants were becoming less virulent. Even if allowing for that the hospitalization and death rates were reduced, the reduction doesn’t seem to be worth the risks associated with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
And that’s just the vaccines. The alphabet agencies were pushing the shut downs, “social distancing,” masks, surface cleaning, etc. with no benefits whatever for protection against COVID but with terrible economic, social, mental health, and educational results. And all the while denying the lab leak origin of the virus. Finally Nicholas Wade’s long article in the WSJ broke the agencies (Collins, Fauci, etc.) imposed censoring of the truth.
Is DOGE going too far? Perhaps, but I’m not familiar enough with the DOGE related alphabet agencies’ actions to have an opinion. I do know this: once stung, twice cautious.
I agree with a lot of what you write here but I very much doubt that HCQ and Ivermectin were good remedies. They might have done a little, but if they were very effective it would show up in studies and it didn't. And fine, you can posit corruption in the studies, but the fact remains that you have no good proof in a positive way (unless you do, which I would like to see). The sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of treatments don't do much so from a Bayesian point of view merely contradicting the incompetent public health officials isn't likely to lead to a correct answer.
I look at that page, the list at the bottom, and I think, doesn't the fact that so many random things show efficacy in pooled studies give you pause when considering the efficacy shown here for ivermectin? I get it, Ivermectin is cheap but this looks like the kind of random distribution you would get if you tested everything and none of them had any real effect. I can't tell what 60% improvement means for Ivermectin. I can't tell what the methodology was for the pooled studies. These aren't technical quibbles. Most studies are crap (an assertion I assume you accept when it comes to the studies that show the vaccines worked :))
Ivermectin is a Nobel Prize-winning wonder drug that kills parasites, such as those that cause the horrible tropical disease river blindness. Why expect it to work on a virus? Granted, it would be nice if by some miracle it did, but why have faith in it?
Scott Alexander read through a stack of studies on ivermectin and covid and concluded that it might do to a little good for covid in the Third World, but that's where the least reliable studies are from. If it does some marginal good in the tropics, it's probably from reducing tropical parasite burden, which can't hurt, on covid patients, not from doing any directly related to covid.
The more reliable and first world the study, the less evidence there is that ivermectin did any good outside the tropic.
It's not impossible but its mechanism of action has no obvious way to affect a virus so it would be a heck of a coincidence. We don't have a lot of antivirals and those we do have are not as impressive as their antibacterial counterparts, so I am especially skeptical that an anti-parasite drug is randomly super effective against COVID19 (which BTW is not real and was the result of a lab leak from indirectly funded US gain of function research so Bill Gates could inject us all with microchips and lock us down so Amazon and Netflix would make more money but commercial real estate would be fucked. It all makes sense if you think about it ).
There are a lot of unanswered questions about the pandemic. Why, that first summer when 90 percent plus of the vulnerable had at least one vaccination, was there no noticeable decline the the mortality rate? Why did we never see a rebound in excess deaths? That is, if a lot more people died than expected for two years, shouldn't we see a lot fewer than expected for the next few years? Why did excess deaths continue in many countries after the pandemic was officially done?
I don't know. These could have simple statistical explanations but it's almost like everyone is embarrassed by how they behaved and just want to forget the whole thing.
Are there by this point any really strong studies of whether even N95 masks do much good as defense against being infected by others?
I presume they make infections less likely because they make people less inclined to socialize because of their unpleasantness, and socializing is, sadly, the main way covid spreads, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about.
Do masks do any good to keep you from infecting others when you have covid?
As you say, the world seems to have gotten bored with these topics (after all, they are pretty boring) and passed on.
I suggest that you read The War Against Ivermectin by Dr. Pierre Kory. He lists many of the studies and also goes into detail concerning the dirty actions taken by the alphabet health agencies, the journals, and Big Pharma to squelch the use of Ivermectin and a host of other early treatments, some of which were later adopted by the health establishment. He’s not a crackpot. He was a med school instructor who literally wrote the book on the use of ultrasound as an emergency department analytical tool. He has testified before Congress and has paid a high price for his advocacy for early treatments, Ivermectin, supplements, etc.
Just remember, the same agencies and individuals who were attacking Ivermectin were the same agencies and individuals who were calling the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory. That should at least give pause to those who would pull a Gell-Mann turn and believe them concerning Ivermectin and HCQ after being so wrong about everything else.
Alexanders read through of Covid studies was very poorly done, till he eventually retracted it. This guy thoroughly demolished Scott's IVM stuff, over the course of 17 lengthy pieces.
In East Asia HQC was administered as a post-exposure prophylactic for individuals in high risk groups. Somehow, like in the game of telephone, that was garbled as it made its way to the West and it ended up being administered to people with full blown Covid.
What underwent clinical trials in the West wasn't what should have been tested.
I’ve never been called feline feces before, but I’ll not reciprocate.
Here’s a report that concludes that the COVID vaccines were less effective in preventing infection or transmission of the Delta variant. So we’re supposed to believe that it was less effective in preventing infection but more effective in preventing hospitalization and death? And what mechanism would produce those results? Delta was more contagious but less virulent than alpha. That’s what viruses do as a general rule. That, plus the reality that many of the more vulnerable had died in 2020 and early 2021, while the vaccine rollout was just getting underway, show that the vaccine was not the only cause of the lower case fatality rates taking place at that time.
But now it’s 2025, and the CDC and the vaccine companies are still pushing the vaccines, even for babies as young as six months old, an age group with a close to zero fatality rate from COVID, despite the growing body of evidence concerning vaccine injuries. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has become endemic and mutated/evolved to the point that it has a seasonal flu like risk profile.
As a human guinea pig, I received two injections in September, 2020. I haven’t received any since and have no intention of ever getting one again. My physician has quit asking me about boosters. But that’s me. If you want to obey the CDC and Pfizer, by all means, keep it up.
I know there is a popular blogger, podcaster, whatever who calls himself Cat Turd. I have never read, watched, listened, etc. to any of his content. Your attempts to connect me to him are a form of guilt by association and ad hominem argument, both of which are logical fallacies.
I have learned to distinguish between the data and findings of studies and their recommendations, which are often influenced by outside forces. Also, a study penned in 2021 would not be informed by the still growing body of evidence concerning COVID vaccine harm. Like many other things in life, medications and vaccines should be evaluated on a risk/benefit basis. Because it was rushed to market, we are still learning about the risks while the rewards are diminishing because the virulence of COVID is diminishing. Yet the CDC is still recommending shots and boosters for populations with next to zero vulnerability to the disease.
I called you a cat turd because your arguments are on the same intellectual level as catturd. If it's lying on the ground looking like a cat turd and stinking up the place I'm gonna call it a cat turd.
"I have learned to distinguish between the data and findings of studies and their recommendations, which are often influenced by outside forces"
Nah, if you didn't data and findings of the study you'd just say we can't "trust" the "system" blah blah blah.
According to a recent interview on Steve Hsu's substack, the Covid virus in its highly infectious form was actually created in a lab in Montana (!), which then shipped it to a lab in Wuhan (not the one we hear about all the time, but another across town) from which it escaped. All the same suspects at NIH, UNC, etc (Fauci, et al) were still involved, but the details are a little different. It's quite a detective story. Here is the link: https://stevehsu.substack.com/p/jim-haslam-covid-origins-and-coronavirus
We have "medical science" these days permanently mutilating children (and adults) in Frankenstein-like procedures all for $$$$ and bizarre medical G*d-complexes.
We had medical science cheerleading the firing of people en masse from 2021-202r for refusing the shot, despite the disease having a 99% recovery rate and no long term date on the vaccine's safety. All while "medical science" got extraordinarily rich and powerful.
We have medical science hooking more than half the country on extremely powerful drugs for their "mental health", turning them into either zombies or hyperactive psychos, all while pocketing $$$ from Big Pharma for doing so..
For adults who woke up during the COVID-19 crisis, "medical science" will forever seem like an evil, corrupt, money-grubbing fraudulent industry.
Sounds very reasonable. However, the problem is that by now many biomed scientists have leftist to extreme-leftist leanings. Given a chance, they will import these politics into any new situation.
I'm all for making examples of the worst offenders. And punishing all of the lesser offenders, too.
But I would be fine with abolition of NIH, instead of reform. NIH is doomed to remain corrupt, or corruptible, as long as it's giving out free money extracted from taxpayers. No reform will ultimately succeed.
My first thought was that the authors shared this essay with Steve, prior to shopping it to various Op-Ed pages. This Substack would be a trial balloon.
On further reflection, that scenario is unlikely. NYT, WaPo, etc. want original contributions. Beyond that, Steve's context and the accolades of his commenters are unlikely to be seen as positives by this cohort of newspaper editors.
Is today's post the final destination? Or a free-standing website, along the lines of "The Great Barrington Declaration"?
I would really like to know about those effective Covid therapies. When I came down with Covid symptoms and went to get tested, a doctor came into the room fully masked and garbed, gloved, face shield, swabbed my nostril, and told me to go home and they'd post the lab results on my patient portal (positive, BTW). I didn't even get one of those handouts telling me to rest and drink fluids.
In New York City they were crowding waiting rooms with the healthy worried and the actually sick. People were put on respirators--a highly morbid and injurious procedure--for the sole indicator of "contagion control." I consider medicine a wholly captured institution at this point. The tort system, insurance, patent incentives, and government funding have warped it.
From what I've seen of university grants they're mostly to keep PhD candidate and postdocs employed.
Does anybody seriously think without the NIH nobody will pay for medical research?
There's something I am missing here: Bioweapon research ought to be treated like nuclear weapon research. There ought to be an international convention about it and an international institution which controls it, all over the world.
The last people I trust are the kind of people who engage in writing and promoting international conventions, such as those who claim ad nauseum that Israel is committing genocide.
I hope we can win back the trust of the vaccine skeptics. The best analogy to understand them came from Scott Alexander in his long Ivermectin post: imagine aliens come to earth and want to put a chip in your brain... do you trust them enough to let them? The scientific establishment has lost the trust of many people who now view them akin to a potentially hostile alien invasion force.
It’s easy to see why. The medical establishment should have stuck to medicine, not social science. A decade ago, the AMA advised doctors to start asking patients about gun ownership as part of their risk assessment. They’d have been better off asking how many ice cream scoops or televisions were in the house.
Yes, and that is partly the fault of the right for not investing enough in institutional power.
The right lost institutional power before it even knew it was in a fight. Long before I was born.
These are our nation and these are our institutions. Warts and all we move forward
Who's the head of HHS right now?
Or the NIH for that matter?
No, they are no longer "our" institutions. They are captured by Deep State globalists. Burn them to the ground.
That's fine rhetoric but the truth beyond that is that in the future we need institutions so what's more important is having institutions. If you want to burn down and recreate from scratch. Fine. But don't give oxygen to people who think we don't need institutions
If you are a young man, age 16-35 or so, you should absolutely not take a Covid vaccine. The demonstrated risk for myocarditis is higher _for that particular cohort_ than the potential for complications for Covid itself.
Ok. Were covid vaccines great for the elderly?
The recovery rate for COVID-19 was better than recovery rate for the flu. And we still don't know the long-term effects of the clot shot.
Try again.
What are your numbers for total US citizens who die from the flu each year versus covid?
We don't know how many died from COVID because the numbers were irretrievably tainted by the fact that hospitals got paid to attribute non-COVID deaths to COVID.
> Were covid vaccines great for the elderly?
Yes! Per Slaw above, I see no advantage for healthy young men to take this vaccine. But that is a different question.
Yes. Let's break this down.
1. Risk for Covid complications was overwhelmingly concentrated in the sick/infirm, and that strongly correlates with age.
2. If you are 80 and take an experimental treatment and it turns out to have serious complications, well, how much longer were you going to live anyway?
So what conclusion can you draw about a country that demanded that college students, young and healthy, be vaccinated while leaving the elderly in places like India and Brazil to die?
It was never feasible but in a perfect universe the US would have vaccinated the elderly, told the young to just go ahead and live their lives, and then take all of the doses saved in that manner and shipped them overseas to places like India where they could be used to treat cancer patients and the very old.
I for one thought it was disgustingly selfish and inhumane to waste vaccines on the young and healthy while poor brown people died overseas.
Fuck poor brown people overseas. Let them pay for their own drugs. But, in the case of the COVID "vaccine" no one needed it. Still, if anyone in India wanted it let them pay for it.
Well, then, put those unused doses up for sale for overseas buyers. Regardless my point is that shooting them into the veins of young college kids was useless at best and actively harmful at worst.
Was India going to give Pfizer a guarantee that Pfizer was going to be granted immunity for claims resulting from harm done by the drug?
The problem is that after the first round of tests looking at moderate to moderately severe symptoms (nowhere near lethality) in a mostly youngish population, there were no further randomized control trials on the lethality of Wuhan Corona Virus in the population most at risk. IE the 70+ poor dears.
What one could see that over the 3 years of the pandemic, viral lethality dropped, viral infectiousness went up, and efficacy of vaccination on infectiousness dropped.
Comparing the vaccinated to unvaccinated also became more and more difficult, because the most vulnerable were also the most immunized. This of course is exactly something that can produce paradoxic effects, if immunization is no longer highly effective...
It sounds like you're trying to make a very nuanced point, which is fine. But I think it is necessary for us to also state clearly whether we think the vaccine saved many elderly lives or not. reality and science are complex and messy but I don't think it's helpful or smart to deny simple realities in favor of making and more nuanced. We can do both acknowledge simple truths and talk about more nuanced issues as well
THIS is what is infuriating. You want to talk nuance NOW that questions are being asked. Did you stand up and say no one should be fired for not taking the shot? Did you stand up and say young people in general and young men in particular should NEVER be pressured to take the shot to do things like go to university? Now that the time of ruthless blanket diktats is over you want "nuance" and "it's complicated" back?
The jabs apparently provide an ephemeral heads-up to the benefit of the immune systems of elderly and co-morbid individuals. The vaccine did not suppress the virus. You could still get, transmit, be hospitalized, and die from Covid. As such it did not provide a public health benefit, only a private benefit to a cohort of at risk individuals. The vaccine was "leaky," and propagandized as 95 point bazillion percent " effective," whatever that meant.
We would have gotten the same and probably better results just by having everybody lose 20 lbs.
Speaking of, I haven't seen any PSAs or commercials with recommendations for better indoor humidity, ventilation, individual hydration, and outdoor exercise. Lots of pill pushing though.
The diabetic should lose weight but the elderly were vulnerable because they were old not fat
You're at yet greater risk if you're fat in addition to old and the US has an unhealthy amount of fat old people.
Lots more old people died even though they have a similar obesity rates as the non-elderly. Tm because, it was their age rather than their obesity.
Torin your question ignores the fact that covid vaccines were forced on many young men. THAT (among other things) is why the scientific establishment's reputation is in tatters. No one is suggesting "the science" has contributed nothing good. What we have noticed is how many scientists egged on -- or simply quietly looked at their feet during -- a harmful, authoritarian mass hysteria.
The death rate in very age group went up in 2020 and 2021 due to Covid-19.
That's not what I said.
The total number of increased deaths due to Covid was not a a very large number for males 16-35 even though men died at a higher rate due to Covid-19 than women. However, very few males aged 16-35 die each year. Claiming there was not risk was wrong or that the risks from blood clots was higher since there is no proof.
We know that the risk to young people in general from Covid was very, very low.
We know there is a non-zero risk of complications like myocarditis, especially in young men.
We are also talking about a treatment that went through a vastly abbreviated testing process.
If you're a GP or medical professional are you warranted in advising your young, male patients that they don't need to be vaccinated? Definitely.
If you're a GP or medical professional are you negligent if you recommend boosters for your young, male patients in light of what we know about the virus and natural immunity at this point? Well, I wouldn't want to be your patient.
Exactly. A lot of youngish people were dying due to enhanced rate of traffic accidents and homicides post George Floyd
Not true at all.
Look at table 3 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db427.pdf
One can also look up motor vehicle fatalities by years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
A change of 2k from 2019 to 2020.
And the homicide rate changes by a total of less than 6k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
Dude, you should read the text for figure 3 carefully: From 2019 to 2020, death rates increased for each age group 15 years and over. Rates increased 20.8% for age group 15–24 (from 69.7 deaths per 100,000 population in 2019 to 84.2 in 2020), 23.8% for 25–34 (128.8 to 159.5), 24.5% for 35–44 (199.2 to 248.0), 20.7% for 45–54 (392.4 to 473.5), 17.6% for 55–64 (883.3 to 1,038.9), 17.4% for 65–74 (1,764.6 to 2,072.3), 16.0% for 75–84 (4,308.3 to 4,997.0), and 15.0% for 85 and over (13,228.6 to 15,210.9) (Figure 3). Rates for age groups 1–4 and 5–14 did not change significantly from 2019 to 2020.
The highest RELATIVE increase in mortality was in the 25-44 yo category. That were NOT the Covid deaths… These were also NOT the vaccine deaths, as vaccines only became available to that group around June 2021...
It started before Covid. I think it started when people who were themselves vaccinated as children grew up. They didn’t remember suffering with measles or hear about iron lungs for polio victims.
It will swing back only after there are more deaths from vaccine preventable diseases. There was one death of an unvaccinated child from measles a few days ago.
Covid isn't a vaccine-preventable disease, neither is the flu. The viruses that cause them are highly mutable unlike, say, the polio virus, so they're always chasing and pushing the viruses from behind.The Covid vaccines were obsolesced after the Omicron strain showed up. That's why nobody's still lining up for their Covid shot every four months.
In an incredible six weeks, that might be the most incredible thing I’ve seen yet.
Child in Texas dies of measles. Vaccine skeptic RFK Jr is now the Secretary of Health.
Incredible!
Love it. Anonymous scientists sent it to you? The block quote seems to suggest you excerpted it from something, but the "proposed title" suggests otherwise.
I thought for a minute that the NYT was admitting NIH culpability--your interjection was confusing because I didn't see the comma.
It was the strong-arming of so many possible non-vax treatments that pissed me off. Their motives were too clear.
They had four years to make changes the easy way. This is an admission they weren't going to make any.
“Optimists predicted that a remedy for COVID could soon be found in the United States. By the end of 2020, these observers were vindicated by Operation Warp Speed…”
The optimists were right, remedies for COVID were soon found. But the remedies were not the mRNA vaccines; they were HCQ and Ivermectin. The response of the NIH, CDC, FDA, and other alphabet agencies was to denigrate these two repurposed medications. In the case of HCQ, the Lancet published a bogus study penned by a science fiction author and a porn actress, an article that was later retracted but not before the damage was done. In the case of both drugs, tests were performed that were designed to fail. Ivermectin was attacked as for horses although its developers were awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine. Hoax’s were publicized, such as the one in Oklahoma that gunshot victims weren’t being treated at a local hospital because it was filled with patients suffering from Ivermectin use side effects. This despite the FDA’s own previous
ranking of medicine toxicity that placed ivermectin as less dangerous as Tylenol.
Why? Because as long as there were no effective treatments for COVID the experimental vaccines could be granted Emergency Use Authorizations.
I write this as a person who participated in the Pfizer trial and was relieved to know at the time (from second injection side effects and a lab test for antibodies) that I was in the vaccine arm of the trial. I naively trusted government health officials. As Pierre Kory, only of the early promoters of Ivermectin said on the Dark Horse podcast concerning the war on Ivermectin, “No matter how cynical you become, you’re naive.”
We now know that the vaccine was neither safe nor effective. It stopped neither infection nor transmission. Claims that it reduced hospitalization and fatalities are based on post-vaccine rollouts at a time when new variants were becoming less virulent. Even if allowing for that the hospitalization and death rates were reduced, the reduction doesn’t seem to be worth the risks associated with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
And that’s just the vaccines. The alphabet agencies were pushing the shut downs, “social distancing,” masks, surface cleaning, etc. with no benefits whatever for protection against COVID but with terrible economic, social, mental health, and educational results. And all the while denying the lab leak origin of the virus. Finally Nicholas Wade’s long article in the WSJ broke the agencies (Collins, Fauci, etc.) imposed censoring of the truth.
Is DOGE going too far? Perhaps, but I’m not familiar enough with the DOGE related alphabet agencies’ actions to have an opinion. I do know this: once stung, twice cautious.
I agree with a lot of what you write here but I very much doubt that HCQ and Ivermectin were good remedies. They might have done a little, but if they were very effective it would show up in studies and it didn't. And fine, you can posit corruption in the studies, but the fact remains that you have no good proof in a positive way (unless you do, which I would like to see). The sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of treatments don't do much so from a Bayesian point of view merely contradicting the incompetent public health officials isn't likely to lead to a correct answer.
Erik's remarks are sensible and well-founded. I concur.
Results of over 5,000 studies regarding various medications and supplements given as early treatments for COVID:
https://c19early.org/
I look at that page, the list at the bottom, and I think, doesn't the fact that so many random things show efficacy in pooled studies give you pause when considering the efficacy shown here for ivermectin? I get it, Ivermectin is cheap but this looks like the kind of random distribution you would get if you tested everything and none of them had any real effect. I can't tell what 60% improvement means for Ivermectin. I can't tell what the methodology was for the pooled studies. These aren't technical quibbles. Most studies are crap (an assertion I assume you accept when it comes to the studies that show the vaccines worked :))
Ivermectin is a Nobel Prize-winning wonder drug that kills parasites, such as those that cause the horrible tropical disease river blindness. Why expect it to work on a virus? Granted, it would be nice if by some miracle it did, but why have faith in it?
Scott Alexander read through a stack of studies on ivermectin and covid and concluded that it might do to a little good for covid in the Third World, but that's where the least reliable studies are from. If it does some marginal good in the tropics, it's probably from reducing tropical parasite burden, which can't hurt, on covid patients, not from doing any directly related to covid.
The more reliable and first world the study, the less evidence there is that ivermectin did any good outside the tropic.
It's not impossible but its mechanism of action has no obvious way to affect a virus so it would be a heck of a coincidence. We don't have a lot of antivirals and those we do have are not as impressive as their antibacterial counterparts, so I am especially skeptical that an anti-parasite drug is randomly super effective against COVID19 (which BTW is not real and was the result of a lab leak from indirectly funded US gain of function research so Bill Gates could inject us all with microchips and lock us down so Amazon and Netflix would make more money but commercial real estate would be fucked. It all makes sense if you think about it ).
There are a lot of unanswered questions about the pandemic. Why, that first summer when 90 percent plus of the vulnerable had at least one vaccination, was there no noticeable decline the the mortality rate? Why did we never see a rebound in excess deaths? That is, if a lot more people died than expected for two years, shouldn't we see a lot fewer than expected for the next few years? Why did excess deaths continue in many countries after the pandemic was officially done?
I don't know. These could have simple statistical explanations but it's almost like everyone is embarrassed by how they behaved and just want to forget the whole thing.
Are there by this point any really strong studies of whether even N95 masks do much good as defense against being infected by others?
I presume they make infections less likely because they make people less inclined to socialize because of their unpleasantness, and socializing is, sadly, the main way covid spreads, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about.
Do masks do any good to keep you from infecting others when you have covid?
As you say, the world seems to have gotten bored with these topics (after all, they are pretty boring) and passed on.
I suggest that you read The War Against Ivermectin by Dr. Pierre Kory. He lists many of the studies and also goes into detail concerning the dirty actions taken by the alphabet health agencies, the journals, and Big Pharma to squelch the use of Ivermectin and a host of other early treatments, some of which were later adopted by the health establishment. He’s not a crackpot. He was a med school instructor who literally wrote the book on the use of ultrasound as an emergency department analytical tool. He has testified before Congress and has paid a high price for his advocacy for early treatments, Ivermectin, supplements, etc.
Just remember, the same agencies and individuals who were attacking Ivermectin were the same agencies and individuals who were calling the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory. That should at least give pause to those who would pull a Gell-Mann turn and believe them concerning Ivermectin and HCQ after being so wrong about everything else.
Alexanders read through of Covid studies was very poorly done, till he eventually retracted it. This guy thoroughly demolished Scott's IVM stuff, over the course of 17 lengthy pieces.
https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-less-than-you-needed
In East Asia HQC was administered as a post-exposure prophylactic for individuals in high risk groups. Somehow, like in the game of telephone, that was garbled as it made its way to the West and it ended up being administered to people with full blown Covid.
What underwent clinical trials in the West wasn't what should have been tested.
"Claims that it reduced hospitalization and fatalities are based on post-vaccine rollouts at a time when new variants were becoming less virulent."
False. Cat turds should go back to the Unz Review and stay there.
I’ve never been called feline feces before, but I’ll not reciprocate.
Here’s a report that concludes that the COVID vaccines were less effective in preventing infection or transmission of the Delta variant. So we’re supposed to believe that it was less effective in preventing infection but more effective in preventing hospitalization and death? And what mechanism would produce those results? Delta was more contagious but less virulent than alpha. That’s what viruses do as a general rule. That, plus the reality that many of the more vulnerable had died in 2020 and early 2021, while the vaccine rollout was just getting underway, show that the vaccine was not the only cause of the lower case fatality rates taking place at that time.
But now it’s 2025, and the CDC and the vaccine companies are still pushing the vaccines, even for babies as young as six months old, an age group with a close to zero fatality rate from COVID, despite the growing body of evidence concerning vaccine injuries. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has become endemic and mutated/evolved to the point that it has a seasonal flu like risk profile.
As a human guinea pig, I received two injections in September, 2020. I haven’t received any since and have no intention of ever getting one again. My physician has quit asking me about boosters. But that’s me. If you want to obey the CDC and Pfizer, by all means, keep it up.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891
From the very paper you cite:
"This finding would support efforts to maximize vaccine uptake with two doses among vulnerable populations."
Typical cat turd behavior.
I know there is a popular blogger, podcaster, whatever who calls himself Cat Turd. I have never read, watched, listened, etc. to any of his content. Your attempts to connect me to him are a form of guilt by association and ad hominem argument, both of which are logical fallacies.
I have learned to distinguish between the data and findings of studies and their recommendations, which are often influenced by outside forces. Also, a study penned in 2021 would not be informed by the still growing body of evidence concerning COVID vaccine harm. Like many other things in life, medications and vaccines should be evaluated on a risk/benefit basis. Because it was rushed to market, we are still learning about the risks while the rewards are diminishing because the virulence of COVID is diminishing. Yet the CDC is still recommending shots and boosters for populations with next to zero vulnerability to the disease.
I called you a cat turd because your arguments are on the same intellectual level as catturd. If it's lying on the ground looking like a cat turd and stinking up the place I'm gonna call it a cat turd.
"I have learned to distinguish between the data and findings of studies and their recommendations, which are often influenced by outside forces"
Nah, if you didn't data and findings of the study you'd just say we can't "trust" the "system" blah blah blah.
According to a recent interview on Steve Hsu's substack, the Covid virus in its highly infectious form was actually created in a lab in Montana (!), which then shipped it to a lab in Wuhan (not the one we hear about all the time, but another across town) from which it escaped. All the same suspects at NIH, UNC, etc (Fauci, et al) were still involved, but the details are a little different. It's quite a detective story. Here is the link: https://stevehsu.substack.com/p/jim-haslam-covid-origins-and-coronavirus
Ron Unz also covered it in written form at https://www.unz.com/runz/five-years-and-thirty-million-deaths/
It's 12700 words, but you can skip all the intro background and start about a third of the way in: https://www.unz.com/runz/five-years-and-thirty-million-deaths/#haslam-s-exoneration-of-china-for-creating-covid
More Unz garbage.
Garbage.
That is great advice. I hope the administration follows that advice.
Very measured and reasonable, almost like Steve wrote it himself.
We have "medical science" these days permanently mutilating children (and adults) in Frankenstein-like procedures all for $$$$ and bizarre medical G*d-complexes.
We had medical science cheerleading the firing of people en masse from 2021-202r for refusing the shot, despite the disease having a 99% recovery rate and no long term date on the vaccine's safety. All while "medical science" got extraordinarily rich and powerful.
We have medical science hooking more than half the country on extremely powerful drugs for their "mental health", turning them into either zombies or hyperactive psychos, all while pocketing $$$ from Big Pharma for doing so..
For adults who woke up during the COVID-19 crisis, "medical science" will forever seem like an evil, corrupt, money-grubbing fraudulent industry.
Sounds very reasonable. However, the problem is that by now many biomed scientists have leftist to extreme-leftist leanings. Given a chance, they will import these politics into any new situation.
I'm all for making examples of the worst offenders. And punishing all of the lesser offenders, too.
But I would be fine with abolition of NIH, instead of reform. NIH is doomed to remain corrupt, or corruptible, as long as it's giving out free money extracted from taxpayers. No reform will ultimately succeed.
Can we repost this letter?
Yes.
> Here’s an opinion piece by anonymous scientists
My first thought was that the authors shared this essay with Steve, prior to shopping it to various Op-Ed pages. This Substack would be a trial balloon.
On further reflection, that scenario is unlikely. NYT, WaPo, etc. want original contributions. Beyond that, Steve's context and the accolades of his commenters are unlikely to be seen as positives by this cohort of newspaper editors.
Is today's post the final destination? Or a free-standing website, along the lines of "The Great Barrington Declaration"?
Inquiring readers want to know!
It's written by a small number of college professors in the hard sciences.
I would really like to know about those effective Covid therapies. When I came down with Covid symptoms and went to get tested, a doctor came into the room fully masked and garbed, gloved, face shield, swabbed my nostril, and told me to go home and they'd post the lab results on my patient portal (positive, BTW). I didn't even get one of those handouts telling me to rest and drink fluids.
In New York City they were crowding waiting rooms with the healthy worried and the actually sick. People were put on respirators--a highly morbid and injurious procedure--for the sole indicator of "contagion control." I consider medicine a wholly captured institution at this point. The tort system, insurance, patent incentives, and government funding have warped it.
From what I've seen of university grants they're mostly to keep PhD candidate and postdocs employed.
Does anybody seriously think without the NIH nobody will pay for medical research?
There's something I am missing here: Bioweapon research ought to be treated like nuclear weapon research. There ought to be an international convention about it and an international institution which controls it, all over the world.
The last people I trust are the kind of people who engage in writing and promoting international conventions, such as those who claim ad nauseum that Israel is committing genocide.
It's interesting to see you trying to come to grips with this.