I think the core problem is some people see themselves as immune to the herd mentality of mainstream consensus but they are really just oppositional to it. This does not free you from the bias, it just takes it and multiplies it by -1.
I don't read Bret so I don't know exactly what his stance on the vaccines is, but I am pretty sure they have been wildly overhyped. Early promises of making you immune, just one or two shots then you are done, herd immunity, etc. have all proven quite false, and now the sketchy data practices and sharing is coming to light, the CDC is taking down previous claims that the internally manufactured spike proteins don't last in your system (on the quiet, no less), is actively ignoring adverse reaction data (which suggest extremely high risks by vaccine standards), and data coming out of Europe that suggest that the vaccines offer some protection when you get COVID but also make it more likely that you do get it multiple times... at this point I am more inclined to think that Emily Oster is being too sanguine about things, too blindly trusting of US official numbers perhaps, than to think other people are too skeptical. (Leaving open the possibility that Bret W. thinks the vaccines will turn you into a lizardman or something... I have seen too much crazy from others to assume he isn't without reading all of his work :) )
I get the impression that the rational-normie grouping fixated on the early big claims, suemmed up as "the vaccines are safe and effective". Then they allowed the meaning of that rubric to erode without recognising the important of that.
Weinstein and wife have been more clear eyed. They began as cautiously optimistic on the prospect of vaccines, and became more and more alarmed as information materialised.
The IDW emerged because they challenged consensus on a variety of topics and were willing to do so publicly. The fact that their ideas remain counter-consensus (hasn't aged well judged by whom?) is not surprising. As someone who listens to Brett's weekly podcast and reads everything here (going back to Econlog), perhaps I'm under-exposed to consensus thinking. But I find it hard to disagree with Weinstein's factual assertions about the efficacy of the vaccines. Whether there is a big pharma-big government-big media conspiracy is open for debate. I tend to favor incompetence over conspiracy to explain how big organizations work, but its a special kind of incompetence that yields record profits from a mandated medical procedure that has proven ineffective in preventing infection.
We need people who push back on consensus regularly, even if they are only correct a portion of the time. It just puts the work back on the reader to sift through the noise for the signal. What is our alternative source of signal currently?
There isn't any evidence they have reduced deaths or infection fatality rates. The IFR peaked in April of 2020, a year before the vaccines were rolled out, and has been steadily falling ever since. The really unsurprising reasons for this is that we got a lot better at treating those seriously ill with the disease, and that the absolutely most vulnerable died in the first two waves, the second of which crested weeks before the vaccines were available to the public. The evidence for this is all around us- where the deaths are highest today is in those places that successfully avoided those first two waves before getting vaccines.
What's your theory as to how it could be physically possible for someone to have B cell activation against the virus from vaccination and yet not be protected against severe disease? That's contrary to our whole model of the immune system.
I don't have a theory, I just know it has been shown to be the case that COVID can kill you with vaccination and even after previous infection. If this weren't true, there wouldn't be 400-500 people dying in the US every day from COVID.
Of course it can happen. Some people have poor B cell response for one thing. The question is how often, and the randomized data (as opposed to the confounded data you list above) is unequivocal that vaccination helps a lot with mortality compared with being immunologically naive. (It probably doesn't help as much as previous infection, which is one of the main confounders in non-RCT numbers like the ones you've cited).
The data doesn't show what you claim, David. Mortality from COVID has fallen dramatically for all classes- both the vaccinated/previously infected, for those unvaccinated and uninfected. This drop happened starting the early Summer of 2020, and is probably due to the virus progeny being less lethal as time has gone on, and that we no longer try to intubate every poor soul who shows up at the hospital with an oxgenation level under 85%.
You ask for theory, so here is mine- the vaccines people are taking are for viruses that no longer exist in the population, and haven't existed since about Spring 2021. The virus mutates too rapidly, and whatever B-cell activation you have is no longer effective at stopping infection, hospilization, or death vs someone with naive immunity. This will become just like the flu vaccines- always a day late and a dollar short. I won't be taking any of these vaccines given that they don't actually work for very long if at all, just like I don't take any of the flu vaccines either.
And all the data since that time shows no statistically significant benefit to being vaccinated vs unvaccinated in regards to death and hospitilizations.
Indeed. I've been following Justin Murphy's trajectory for example. He began as a leftist academic in the UK but is now a techno libertarian accelerationist obsessed with productivity hacks and often clickbaity.
The general mindspace of the non mainstream intelligent white guy seems to drift toward whatever is hot in Austin.
Hoffer wrote that, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." The incentives cause convergent evolution to grift, a carcinization where the crab is audience capture, relentless self-promotion, and an always-be-closing approach to selling the latest snake oil, riding the current events news cycle for 'donations', and generally separating fanboy fools from their money as much as possible as often as possible.
The only reason IDW had a different failure mode is because they had a different source of funding.
Good points. One aspect that triggers “carcinization” must be a kind of one-hit-wonder-itis, where the performer feels trapped into becoming a caricature of themselves at the moment that propelled them to fame.
Eventually when that novelty wears off there is a downward spiral of mediocrity since the performer was optimizing for a local peak and not continuing the global search for better ideas.
It's usually not a very conscious process. "Follow the Incentives" - the game matters more than the player. The people who fail to optimize, for whatever reason, whether consciously or not, simply drop out of the game. We get what the game forces us to get.
The evidence against the effectiveness of Ivermectin seems to be extremely low quality. Scott Alexander's post about Ivermectin is extremely tendentious and flawed. I highly recommend reading Alexander Marinos' Substack posts where he goes into this in detail (https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-corrects-error-ivermectin?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F11624209-alexandros-marinos&utm_medium=reader2). Scott Alexander applies the wrong statistical techniques to aggregate the trial data, the correct technique finds that the affect of Ivermectin to treat COVID is statistically significant. Scott even acknowledges this error but amazingly, refuses to update his conclusion. This is only the most egregious of a litany of errors that are made in Scott Alexander's Ivermectin post. I recommend taking a second look at the data on Ivermectin.
The vaccines were wildly over-hyped. Their deadliness might be wildly exaggerated too, but the VAERS data is data, even if it might be corrupted in both directions. I predicted in April of 2020 that vaccines, even if one could be developed and deployed by the end of 2020, would not stop COVID. I wrote then that the virus would be endemic just like every other respiratory virus in history. These viruses simply mutate far too quickly for any vaccination program to be successful at eradication, and eradication is what was promised by people like Fauci, Birx, and Wallensky. The only real plan that can succeed is to learn better at treating the sick's symptoms that lead to disability and death, and hope the virus isn't evolutionarily pressured to evolve into more deadly strains.
We will almost certainly see another big late Fall/Winter wave this year, and I predict that deaths will again cross 2000/day in the US, but hopefully that number will be a little lower than it was last Winter, and lower again in the Fall/Winter 2023/24.
I'd bet against 2k+, although I wouldn't bet the farm. We didn't exceed that number by very much this year. Now almost everyone has some B and T cell immunity from vaccines and/or previous cases at this point, and it seems almost impossible for future variants to evade those. Also a big fraction of the most susceptible people have died of it already.
I'd say over 1k is 90 percent likely this winter, but over 2k I'd put at maybe 30 percent.
The mistake these hard-IDW guys made is a classic one: assuming that because the mainstream narrative is crappy or wrong in some respect, the anti-mainstream views must be right.
A key thing to get through one's head is that establishment elites could be 90 percent full of shit, and yet the rebel dissenters themselves be 99 percent full of shit. Perhaps nobody has a good handle on what's going on, but usually on questions of fact the elite consensus represents at least one mostly defensible response to the evidence.
It's usually easy to point out some places where the elites are far off base, but much harder to do a better job yourself. To do better, you have to incorporate the well-evidenced aspects of the mainstream picture. I think of this as the Zvi Mowshowitz way of doing business, although it bears mentioning that even ZM was not always right.
That is the big epistemic lesson of the pandemic IMO.
I suggest you take a look at Alexandros Marinos's public peer review of Scott Alexander’s essay on ivermectin. I have gone back and forth on this, first agreeing with Scott but now not so sure. It certainly seems like it's still up for debate, and if Bret turns out to be right on this, that gives him a pretty good track record on his covid predictions.
Bret thinks ivermectin works as a prophylactic. There's no way he's right about that even if it's a decent acute treatment. Also there's no way he's right about vaccines being bad except perhaps for a fairly circumscribed subpopulation
This note about Sam Harris, IDW star, supporting an unfree and unfair pre-election censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop info "because of Trump", does seem to be anti-rational.
I guess it depends on their success would be categorised. Shapiro, the Weinsteins, Peterson, Douglas Murray, supported by Rogan as a kind of hinge, emerged in response to it becoming increasingly difficult to publicly utter things which were uncontroversial until five minutes earlier. I don't know if you can draw a straight line from them to the likes of Shellenberger, Loury, Christakis, McWhorter, basically half of Lex Fridman and Rogan's guests nowadays, but it seems to me that IDW-type material is much, much more easy to access than was the case before they emerged. Not that that seems to have arrested the capture of the institutions by their opponents.
Bret original opposition to the evolving crazy "woke" behavior took academic courage that seems lacking in most of our institutions. However, his expansion into areas far from his areas of competence were sure to get him into trouble. His rhetorical skills improved over time in the spotlight as it seems to do with most people, but his scientific base didn't expand.
Everyone who knew something about biology and evolution knew that the the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolution would be driven by increasing transmission. It may be questionable whether a virus is dead or alive (could just exist as active or inactive), but the "prime directive" it must follow for existence is "survival and growth". As virus, especially RNA virus, can have very high mutation rates with the survivors evolving better transmission capability, it will happen. Once the host is dead and isn't breathing, transmission rates go to zero fairly rapidly with this virus so increasing virulence isn't an advantage but creating more virus in the host may help the spread but a byproduct may be higher virulence. If the virus doesn't have high numbers the asymptomatic host may not efficiently transfer the virus to others.
Predicting evolution towards better transmission is obvious, but evolution for lower virulence and mortality rate is complex takeoffs that can't be predicted. We also have more people primed immune systems both the easy way with a vaccine and a hard-way (much higher risk) by actual infection that prevents serious infection and death. We also had a lot of the co-morbidity people removed from the population (a million or so of very high risk people). We don't really know whether it is evolving to lower virulence or we are just seeing immunity impacts and lost of the most susceptible people.
His lack of STEM knowledge and breath left me cold, when he got into my playground.
His brother is much stronger in his thinking in several STEM areas, but these aren't general areas that create large fan bases.
I've long felt that the assessment of Covid treatments has been distorted by the great misunderstanding of the actual mortality risk of Covid. The perception being that Covid has a high risk of hospitalization and death. Reality being that it is low in both regards. Why does this matter?
From the beginning of Covid we heard of doctors and clinics claiming that in their treatment of Covid ZERO patients had died. At the same time we heard reports of thousands dying in hospitals and nursing homes. What gives?
(1) The clinics found a cure for Covid
(2) Hospitals are killing patients and calling it a Covid death
(3) People are dying (which happens in hospitals and nursing homes) and those deaths are being labeled as Covid for reasons.
As studies have come back showing there are no miracle Covid pills, we need to rule out (1). That leaves (2) and (3) and neither of these reasons should make us feel good. Either hospital protocols are deadly or hospitals and nursing homes are practicing deception.
I think clinics having patients of a lower risk profile is real. But this points to the question of the actual risk of Covid to the general population.
In my church community of several thousand people, apparently two died with Covid. One was unexpected - a 40 year old man. The other was not surprising - a 70 year old man, lifetime smoker. But that's it! One unexpected death out of 2000 people over the course of two years. At the same time, we had a 65 year old church member die of a heart attack and an 80 year old die of cancer. People die and more people died in this sub-population of something other than Covid. And yet, all that mattered in our community was stopping Covid and pretending we could do it.
So fully half the mortality in the subpopulation you're talking about was from the virus and half of that was a person whose life expectancy would otherwise have been 30+ years? That's worse than average for the broader population if anything. If I thought it was more of a killer than heart disease I'd be more concerned, not less
But it wasn't much of a killer! The oldest members of our congregation are alive and well. The unhealthiest are alive and still not so healthy.
The point is not that Covid was harmless. It is that it is so not harmful that figuring out what keeps people safe from it is very, very hard. How hard? The vaccine trials did not even use death as an endpoint in their studies. And for children, they resorted to testing the presence of antibodies as it simply wasn't feasible to show that the vaccine kept children safe - ALL CHILDREN ARE STATISTICALLY SAFE from Covid.
Of course I agree about children. I'm simply pointing out that even your anecdata don't suggest that the virus is "not much of a killer," unless you think that heart disease, AKA the leading cause of death, is *really* not much of a killer.
Is there any vaccine trial that has ever used death as an endpoint? I don't think it's the done thing. Data was collected on their effect on death risk of course.
We all have a risk of dying. We each have a 99.99% chance of dying before we turn age 100. We could live every day afraid of being hit by any number of fatal issues. Or we could live.
The actual illness of Covid was fatal to some, but to the vast majority it was not. 995 out of 1,000 survived and for those under 60 it was like 9995 out of 10,000.
The risk of heart disease is real. But a cursory glance shows people far prefer to enjoy a robust diet than to fret over heart disease. But with Covid we decided we had to be hysterical. One of the great ironies is the hysteria itself proved deadly.
Back to my original point. Clinics showed successful treatments for Covid, compared to other medical centers. This was either because those treatments worked, or Covid was not as deadly as advertised.
I think the core problem is some people see themselves as immune to the herd mentality of mainstream consensus but they are really just oppositional to it. This does not free you from the bias, it just takes it and multiplies it by -1.
I don't read Bret so I don't know exactly what his stance on the vaccines is, but I am pretty sure they have been wildly overhyped. Early promises of making you immune, just one or two shots then you are done, herd immunity, etc. have all proven quite false, and now the sketchy data practices and sharing is coming to light, the CDC is taking down previous claims that the internally manufactured spike proteins don't last in your system (on the quiet, no less), is actively ignoring adverse reaction data (which suggest extremely high risks by vaccine standards), and data coming out of Europe that suggest that the vaccines offer some protection when you get COVID but also make it more likely that you do get it multiple times... at this point I am more inclined to think that Emily Oster is being too sanguine about things, too blindly trusting of US official numbers perhaps, than to think other people are too skeptical. (Leaving open the possibility that Bret W. thinks the vaccines will turn you into a lizardman or something... I have seen too much crazy from others to assume he isn't without reading all of his work :) )
I get the impression that the rational-normie grouping fixated on the early big claims, suemmed up as "the vaccines are safe and effective". Then they allowed the meaning of that rubric to erode without recognising the important of that.
Weinstein and wife have been more clear eyed. They began as cautiously optimistic on the prospect of vaccines, and became more and more alarmed as information materialised.
The IDW emerged because they challenged consensus on a variety of topics and were willing to do so publicly. The fact that their ideas remain counter-consensus (hasn't aged well judged by whom?) is not surprising. As someone who listens to Brett's weekly podcast and reads everything here (going back to Econlog), perhaps I'm under-exposed to consensus thinking. But I find it hard to disagree with Weinstein's factual assertions about the efficacy of the vaccines. Whether there is a big pharma-big government-big media conspiracy is open for debate. I tend to favor incompetence over conspiracy to explain how big organizations work, but its a special kind of incompetence that yields record profits from a mandated medical procedure that has proven ineffective in preventing infection.
We need people who push back on consensus regularly, even if they are only correct a portion of the time. It just puts the work back on the reader to sift through the noise for the signal. What is our alternative source of signal currently?
effective at reducing deaths is enough
There isn't any evidence they have reduced deaths or infection fatality rates. The IFR peaked in April of 2020, a year before the vaccines were rolled out, and has been steadily falling ever since. The really unsurprising reasons for this is that we got a lot better at treating those seriously ill with the disease, and that the absolutely most vulnerable died in the first two waves, the second of which crested weeks before the vaccines were available to the public. The evidence for this is all around us- where the deaths are highest today is in those places that successfully avoided those first two waves before getting vaccines.
What's your theory as to how it could be physically possible for someone to have B cell activation against the virus from vaccination and yet not be protected against severe disease? That's contrary to our whole model of the immune system.
I don't have a theory, I just know it has been shown to be the case that COVID can kill you with vaccination and even after previous infection. If this weren't true, there wouldn't be 400-500 people dying in the US every day from COVID.
Of course it can happen. Some people have poor B cell response for one thing. The question is how often, and the randomized data (as opposed to the confounded data you list above) is unequivocal that vaccination helps a lot with mortality compared with being immunologically naive. (It probably doesn't help as much as previous infection, which is one of the main confounders in non-RCT numbers like the ones you've cited).
The data doesn't show what you claim, David. Mortality from COVID has fallen dramatically for all classes- both the vaccinated/previously infected, for those unvaccinated and uninfected. This drop happened starting the early Summer of 2020, and is probably due to the virus progeny being less lethal as time has gone on, and that we no longer try to intubate every poor soul who shows up at the hospital with an oxgenation level under 85%.
You ask for theory, so here is mine- the vaccines people are taking are for viruses that no longer exist in the population, and haven't existed since about Spring 2021. The virus mutates too rapidly, and whatever B-cell activation you have is no longer effective at stopping infection, hospilization, or death vs someone with naive immunity. This will become just like the flu vaccines- always a day late and a dollar short. I won't be taking any of these vaccines given that they don't actually work for very long if at all, just like I don't take any of the flu vaccines either.
In Slovakia, after the vaccines were introduced, among those hospitalized with Covid, the ones with vaccines died far less than those without.
This wasn't a good study - but it was a strong relationship in the data.
And all the data since that time shows no statistically significant benefit to being vaccinated vs unvaccinated in regards to death and hospitilizations.
you lose the social circle that blocks you from going nuts. a feedback mechanism holding your sanity in place.
being in academy protects you in this sense. it's peer pressure to have at least defensible views.
once you're "our of the system" you lose this protection, and sanity/quality peer pressure.
Moreover, you intentionally learn to "ignore the crowd" which weakens your mental defences.
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing.
Indeed. I've been following Justin Murphy's trajectory for example. He began as a leftist academic in the UK but is now a techno libertarian accelerationist obsessed with productivity hacks and often clickbaity.
The general mindspace of the non mainstream intelligent white guy seems to drift toward whatever is hot in Austin.
Hoffer wrote that, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." The incentives cause convergent evolution to grift, a carcinization where the crab is audience capture, relentless self-promotion, and an always-be-closing approach to selling the latest snake oil, riding the current events news cycle for 'donations', and generally separating fanboy fools from their money as much as possible as often as possible.
The only reason IDW had a different failure mode is because they had a different source of funding.
Good points. One aspect that triggers “carcinization” must be a kind of one-hit-wonder-itis, where the performer feels trapped into becoming a caricature of themselves at the moment that propelled them to fame.
Eventually when that novelty wears off there is a downward spiral of mediocrity since the performer was optimizing for a local peak and not continuing the global search for better ideas.
It's usually not a very conscious process. "Follow the Incentives" - the game matters more than the player. The people who fail to optimize, for whatever reason, whether consciously or not, simply drop out of the game. We get what the game forces us to get.
‘…the virus would evolve to be less deadly but more contagious.’
Slight adjustment…
… the virus would evolve to be less deadly THEREFORE better adapted to transmission. How all endemic evolve.
The evidence against the effectiveness of Ivermectin seems to be extremely low quality. Scott Alexander's post about Ivermectin is extremely tendentious and flawed. I highly recommend reading Alexander Marinos' Substack posts where he goes into this in detail (https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-corrects-error-ivermectin?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F11624209-alexandros-marinos&utm_medium=reader2). Scott Alexander applies the wrong statistical techniques to aggregate the trial data, the correct technique finds that the affect of Ivermectin to treat COVID is statistically significant. Scott even acknowledges this error but amazingly, refuses to update his conclusion. This is only the most egregious of a litany of errors that are made in Scott Alexander's Ivermectin post. I recommend taking a second look at the data on Ivermectin.
The vaccines were wildly over-hyped. Their deadliness might be wildly exaggerated too, but the VAERS data is data, even if it might be corrupted in both directions. I predicted in April of 2020 that vaccines, even if one could be developed and deployed by the end of 2020, would not stop COVID. I wrote then that the virus would be endemic just like every other respiratory virus in history. These viruses simply mutate far too quickly for any vaccination program to be successful at eradication, and eradication is what was promised by people like Fauci, Birx, and Wallensky. The only real plan that can succeed is to learn better at treating the sick's symptoms that lead to disability and death, and hope the virus isn't evolutionarily pressured to evolve into more deadly strains.
We will almost certainly see another big late Fall/Winter wave this year, and I predict that deaths will again cross 2000/day in the US, but hopefully that number will be a little lower than it was last Winter, and lower again in the Fall/Winter 2023/24.
I'd bet against 2k+, although I wouldn't bet the farm. We didn't exceed that number by very much this year. Now almost everyone has some B and T cell immunity from vaccines and/or previous cases at this point, and it seems almost impossible for future variants to evade those. Also a big fraction of the most susceptible people have died of it already.
I'd say over 1k is 90 percent likely this winter, but over 2k I'd put at maybe 30 percent.
The mistake these hard-IDW guys made is a classic one: assuming that because the mainstream narrative is crappy or wrong in some respect, the anti-mainstream views must be right.
A key thing to get through one's head is that establishment elites could be 90 percent full of shit, and yet the rebel dissenters themselves be 99 percent full of shit. Perhaps nobody has a good handle on what's going on, but usually on questions of fact the elite consensus represents at least one mostly defensible response to the evidence.
It's usually easy to point out some places where the elites are far off base, but much harder to do a better job yourself. To do better, you have to incorporate the well-evidenced aspects of the mainstream picture. I think of this as the Zvi Mowshowitz way of doing business, although it bears mentioning that even ZM was not always right.
That is the big epistemic lesson of the pandemic IMO.
I suggest you take a look at Alexandros Marinos's public peer review of Scott Alexander’s essay on ivermectin. I have gone back and forth on this, first agreeing with Scott but now not so sure. It certainly seems like it's still up for debate, and if Bret turns out to be right on this, that gives him a pretty good track record on his covid predictions.
Bret thinks ivermectin works as a prophylactic. There's no way he's right about that even if it's a decent acute treatment. Also there's no way he's right about vaccines being bad except perhaps for a fairly circumscribed subpopulation
This note about Sam Harris, IDW star, supporting an unfree and unfair pre-election censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop info "because of Trump", does seem to be anti-rational.
https://www.based-politics.com/2022/08/18/anti-trump-writer-sam-harris-admits-the-media-tried-to-swing-election-for-biden-and-actually-defends-it/
Censoring the truth about bad news on one candidate means the election is NOT 100% "free and fair".
This immoral censorship, alone, is enough to base a claim that "the election was stolen".
Trump is speaking the truth when he says "the election was stolen".
Or ... selective censorship is not "stealing" the election?
I guess it depends on their success would be categorised. Shapiro, the Weinsteins, Peterson, Douglas Murray, supported by Rogan as a kind of hinge, emerged in response to it becoming increasingly difficult to publicly utter things which were uncontroversial until five minutes earlier. I don't know if you can draw a straight line from them to the likes of Shellenberger, Loury, Christakis, McWhorter, basically half of Lex Fridman and Rogan's guests nowadays, but it seems to me that IDW-type material is much, much more easy to access than was the case before they emerged. Not that that seems to have arrested the capture of the institutions by their opponents.
> Not that that seems to have arrested the capture of the institutions by their opponents.
It was the seed of the the new institutions that are just beginning to sprout.
In this sense, the splintering us good; ii t was the seed of a lawn, not a single tree.
Bret original opposition to the evolving crazy "woke" behavior took academic courage that seems lacking in most of our institutions. However, his expansion into areas far from his areas of competence were sure to get him into trouble. His rhetorical skills improved over time in the spotlight as it seems to do with most people, but his scientific base didn't expand.
Everyone who knew something about biology and evolution knew that the the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolution would be driven by increasing transmission. It may be questionable whether a virus is dead or alive (could just exist as active or inactive), but the "prime directive" it must follow for existence is "survival and growth". As virus, especially RNA virus, can have very high mutation rates with the survivors evolving better transmission capability, it will happen. Once the host is dead and isn't breathing, transmission rates go to zero fairly rapidly with this virus so increasing virulence isn't an advantage but creating more virus in the host may help the spread but a byproduct may be higher virulence. If the virus doesn't have high numbers the asymptomatic host may not efficiently transfer the virus to others.
Predicting evolution towards better transmission is obvious, but evolution for lower virulence and mortality rate is complex takeoffs that can't be predicted. We also have more people primed immune systems both the easy way with a vaccine and a hard-way (much higher risk) by actual infection that prevents serious infection and death. We also had a lot of the co-morbidity people removed from the population (a million or so of very high risk people). We don't really know whether it is evolving to lower virulence or we are just seeing immunity impacts and lost of the most susceptible people.
His lack of STEM knowledge and breath left me cold, when he got into my playground.
His brother is much stronger in his thinking in several STEM areas, but these aren't general areas that create large fan bases.
TCS Daily! Takes me back :)
Oh wow it is still up and it hasn’t changed a bit!
I've long felt that the assessment of Covid treatments has been distorted by the great misunderstanding of the actual mortality risk of Covid. The perception being that Covid has a high risk of hospitalization and death. Reality being that it is low in both regards. Why does this matter?
From the beginning of Covid we heard of doctors and clinics claiming that in their treatment of Covid ZERO patients had died. At the same time we heard reports of thousands dying in hospitals and nursing homes. What gives?
(1) The clinics found a cure for Covid
(2) Hospitals are killing patients and calling it a Covid death
(3) People are dying (which happens in hospitals and nursing homes) and those deaths are being labeled as Covid for reasons.
As studies have come back showing there are no miracle Covid pills, we need to rule out (1). That leaves (2) and (3) and neither of these reasons should make us feel good. Either hospital protocols are deadly or hospitals and nursing homes are practicing deception.
Perhaps the clinics in question had small numbers of patients, and/or low risk patients?
I think clinics having patients of a lower risk profile is real. But this points to the question of the actual risk of Covid to the general population.
In my church community of several thousand people, apparently two died with Covid. One was unexpected - a 40 year old man. The other was not surprising - a 70 year old man, lifetime smoker. But that's it! One unexpected death out of 2000 people over the course of two years. At the same time, we had a 65 year old church member die of a heart attack and an 80 year old die of cancer. People die and more people died in this sub-population of something other than Covid. And yet, all that mattered in our community was stopping Covid and pretending we could do it.
So fully half the mortality in the subpopulation you're talking about was from the virus and half of that was a person whose life expectancy would otherwise have been 30+ years? That's worse than average for the broader population if anything. If I thought it was more of a killer than heart disease I'd be more concerned, not less
But it wasn't much of a killer! The oldest members of our congregation are alive and well. The unhealthiest are alive and still not so healthy.
The point is not that Covid was harmless. It is that it is so not harmful that figuring out what keeps people safe from it is very, very hard. How hard? The vaccine trials did not even use death as an endpoint in their studies. And for children, they resorted to testing the presence of antibodies as it simply wasn't feasible to show that the vaccine kept children safe - ALL CHILDREN ARE STATISTICALLY SAFE from Covid.
Of course I agree about children. I'm simply pointing out that even your anecdata don't suggest that the virus is "not much of a killer," unless you think that heart disease, AKA the leading cause of death, is *really* not much of a killer.
Is there any vaccine trial that has ever used death as an endpoint? I don't think it's the done thing. Data was collected on their effect on death risk of course.
We all have a risk of dying. We each have a 99.99% chance of dying before we turn age 100. We could live every day afraid of being hit by any number of fatal issues. Or we could live.
The actual illness of Covid was fatal to some, but to the vast majority it was not. 995 out of 1,000 survived and for those under 60 it was like 9995 out of 10,000.
The risk of heart disease is real. But a cursory glance shows people far prefer to enjoy a robust diet than to fret over heart disease. But with Covid we decided we had to be hysterical. One of the great ironies is the hysteria itself proved deadly.
Back to my original point. Clinics showed successful treatments for Covid, compared to other medical centers. This was either because those treatments worked, or Covid was not as deadly as advertised.
Econlog OG checking in...