Saturday 31 December 2022

Something fishy... (the leitmotif of 2022)

Wajahat Ali, columnist on the New York Times and Daily Beast has a go at Florida governor Ron DeSantis, in his charmingly headlined “DeSantis’ Death Squad is Pushing Vaccine Bullshit to Win Over GOP” at the Daily Beast

In which he links to: “Two Years of U.S. Covid-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Millions of Hospitalizations and Deaths” at the Commonwealth Fund website (“ComFund”). 

Comments:

The killing argument: If you want to win an argument without having to make a case, just say your opponent  “wants to kill grandma”, or “kill thousands” or that his officials are “death squads”. Honestly, it’s powerful persuasion. Hard to argue against. You can use it for pretty much anything: “You want to go out -- so you plan on killing people with your car, then?” or: “you’re living, you’re breathing, you want to boil the earth with your CO2?”. It’s silly but powerful. 

The bullshit argument: “Vaccine bullshit”? I followed DeSantis through the pandemic, and he never was against vaccines. Florida is one of the highest in the country, in terms of vaccinated percentage. So that headline is itself “bullshit”.  *ADDED: See map of US vaccine % by state at the bottom.

Investigating vaccines: Wanting to have an investigation into vaccine roll out, and the role of the major Pharmas, strikes me as making sense. The pharmas have made billions, and need to be looked at, in terms of the connections with politics and what they did to get approvals. EG: the FDA in America, the body tasked with approving vaccines, gets nearly 90% of its operational funding from big pharma. Isn’t that something to look at? Also, what role did big pharma play in stopping the research into off-the-shelf medicines? Why is Ali against this? Because his paymasters, the New York Times, told him to be? 

The nonsense “study”: The “Study” Wajahat Ali links to is not a “study” but a blog post. I could just as well say that a blog post I did back in 2020, about the efficacy of lockdowns, was a “study”. It’s blog post! 

Circular data: Not only is the “study” just a blog post, but it connects to no outside source for data (at least my 2020 one did!). All the links at ConFund refer back to the very same blog post! This is extraordinary. It’s a sham. If the “findings” were the opposite of what the narrative requires (ie that vaccines are wonderful and effective), we can be sure that the criticisms of its procedural flaws would have been immediate and vicious. How do I know that? Because that was the section of Wajahat Ali and his fellow travellers, to research on off-label medicines. 

Take the fact that the “study” by the ComFund, a ludicrous, pathetic, false, self-referential, non-credible study, is quoted by Biden, by Fauci, by Colbert, by Ali, et. al. Shame on all of them. 

There’s a chart and a table on the site of the “study”. The reference link to both is: https://doi.org/10.26099/whsf-fp90

This link brings you straight back to the blog site! The root of the link is “doi.org”, a “digital object identifier", a bit like bitly.com. It’s a farce! It’s purely circular! I mean, my flabber is gasted at that. 

So, the figures quoted in the supposed “study” have no reference. But we can do some reverse engineering. The chart from the Commonwealth Fund site is:

Unvaccinated cases max per 100k = 550

And here is the chart from Our World in Figures, by the Oxford based research group for the same dates:

Maximum cases per 100k = 237

The ComFund have assumed -- repeat: assumed (for there is no data given) -- that the deaths absent vaccines would have been 550 per 100k. In reality -- in actual, real reality --  they were 237 per 100k, when the vaccination rate was still low. Thus: the number of those that would have been infected absent the vaccine is far lower than ComFund state.

We know from Pfizer themselves that they never even tested whether the vaccines were effective in stopping the spread.  We know, now, that that effectiveness approaches zero. 

Therefore the number of infections, absent a vaccine, would not have been the absurdly high figure used by ComFund, but much lower. And therefore counterfactual hospitalisations and deaths would also have been lower. Their counterfactual would not have been as extreme, as claimed above. 

Moreover, the amount of money ComFund claim has been “saved” is ludicrous. Using ComFund figures, they are $US62,000 per patient. But with so many in hospital, the marginal cost of an extra patient approaches zero.  There is no way the savings were in the “Trillions”. 

I’m not at all anti-vaccine. My family and I are all fully vaccinated. 

But I do take exception to people like Wajahat Ali, claiming the high ground, claiming to be for “the science” and then quoting unscientific, unverified “studies” to attack political opponents. Doing so on the bogus claim that he, Ali, and the Dems, are the ones “following the science”. Ali is either hypocritical or ignorant. In either case I call him out. 

That’s my final post for this year of 2022. And it’s on the theme of “something fishy”. Which, sadly, has been the case with a lot of the so-called “science” this year. All a bit fishy. 

And then at the end of the year we learn from Twitter Files that the FBI, the CIA and various of the mainstream media have been bed with big tech, including Facebook, to massage the message. To make sure that the plebs don’t hear what the elites don’t want them to, or don’t think they ought to hear. And all that has been dismissed as “conspiracy theory” is actually true. That’s all fishy  

They’re the ones that made all this fishy. 

Next year, the year of the Rabbit. Soft, fluffy, down a burrow. Maybe that’s where I’ll go. Or others should go? Who knows...

A peek ahead at tomorrow’s saying on my Christmas present calendar: “The world belongs to those who let go” by Lao Zi.  Letting go. That’s Wu Wei....

*ADDED:

Source: CDC via New York Times