Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Thousands of Children Prescribed Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine for COVID: Study
Doctors prescribed ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine more than 4,400 times to children with COVID-19 during periods of time when the drugs were not recommended against the illness by authorities, according to a new study.
Doctors issued 813 prescriptions of hydroxychloroquine to minors with COVID-19 after the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society on Sept. 12, 2020, advised against using hydroxychloroquine outside of a clinical trial, researchers found. The recommendation came after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19.
Another 3,602 prescriptions of ivermectin for children with COVID-19 were issued after Feb. 5, 2021, when the Infectious Diseases Society of America released guidelines advising not to use ivermectin outside of a trial. The FDA later in 2021 urged people not to take ivermectin against COVID-19, although it has since been forced to rescind those warnings.
Dr. Julianne Burns, a clinical assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, and other researchers examined records from Komodo Healthcare Map, a health care claims database that Komodo Health says covers 330 million patients. They looked for children who had acute COVID-19 from March 7, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2022.
After excluding some children, including those who did not have continuous insurance coverage for at least one year prior to diagnosis, the researchers found approximately 4,480 prescriptions of “nonrecommended medications.”
All but a few dozen of the prescriptions were for ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
Both drugs are approved by the FDA, but not against COVID-19. Some agencies, groups, and doctors say the drugs should not be used against the illness, pointing in part to clinical trials that have found little or no evidence that they’re effective. Other organizations and doctors, though, say the drugs work against COVID-19, citing their own experience and other trials that found the drugs were beneficial. Off-label prescriptions are common in the United States.
Dr. Burns and the other researchers who conducted the new study, which was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ journal, said their findings showed “children were prescribed ineffective and potentially harmful medications for acute COVID-19 despite national clinical guidelines.”
The only data on effectiveness or lack thereof they cited was the FDA’s authorization revocation for hydroxychloroquine and the guidance from the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and Infectious Diseases Society of America. As for their safety description, they pointed to a federal advisory that found a 24-fold increase in ivermectin prescriptions and a five-fold increase during the same time of ivermectin-related calls to poison control centers.
Dr. Robert Apter, who was not involved in the study, highlighted how the study referred to potential issues but cited no evidence of actual issues from usage of the drugs against COVID-19.
“The fact that there was a report of increased calls to poison control centers about ivermectin doesn’t mean a thing. When something gets in the news and people are curious about it, they may call the poison control center,” Dr. Apter told The Epoch Times.
He said that the drugs “have a long history of safe use in children.”
Dr. Apter has prescribed treatments for thousands of COVID-19 patients and was one of the doctors who sued the FDA over its anti-ivermectin statements. He said he’s prescribed ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine for several teenagers who became so sick that their families became concerned. Those children improved quickly and there were no side effects, according to the doctor.
Dr. Burns did not respond to a request for comment.
The researchers said limitations to their study stemmed from their reliance on health care records, which can’t account for COVID-19 infections that were not reported to a health care provider and might contain mislabeled codes. Funding came from the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute. No conflicts of interest were listed.
A previous study, examining claims data from Dec. 1, 2020, through March 31, 2021, identified 128 prescriptions of ivermectin for children for non-parasitic infections, with researchers assuming the prescriptions were for COVID-19. That paper drew from IQVIA’s health claims database. The researchers also examined data from patients with Medicare Advantage insurance and found some ivermectin prescriptions, though none for children.
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UPenn Led Researchers Find Political Bias in Who Reports COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events
True, the COVID-19 pandemic became ultra-politicized but was this something that manifested in the reporting of injuries linked to the COVID-19 vaccines? Researchers affiliated with University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis sought to investigate.
Designing a cross-sectional study involving 620,456 adverse event reports, David A. Asch, M.D., MBA, Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, and the John Morgan Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and at The Wharton School, and colleagues at UPenn uncovered aw10% increase in state Republican voting was associated with a 5% increase in the odds that a COVID-19 vaccine adverse events would be reported, a 25% increase in the odds that a severe adverse event would be reported, and a 21% increase in the odds that any reported adverse event would be severe.
Interesting Data Points
With 620,456 adverse events (435,797 from women [70.2%]; mean [SD] age, 51.8 [17.7] years) linked to COVID-19 vaccination, the UPenn-based team found a 10% increase in state-level Republican voting associated with increased odds of adverse event reports (odds ratio [OR], 1.05; 95% CI, 1.05-1.05; P < .001). Looking at severe adverse event reports (OR, 1.25; 95% CI, 1.24-1.26; P < .001), plus the proportion of such adverse events reported as severe (OR, 1.21; 95% CI, 1.20-1.22; P < .001) such positive associations between political inclination and reports of COVID-19 vaccination adverse events are revealed in the table above against no associations between political inclination and reports of influenza AEs.
The authors also report the same pattern across all age strata in stratified analyses and in analyses less the District of Columbia, all sustained in the previously cited sensitivity analysis.
Summary
Does the association between observation and belief run both ways? Does the saying “seeing is believing” recognize that humanity’s individual experiences inform our sense of truth? Does “believing is seeing” recognize that human preconceptions control what we experience in the first place? Asch and his colleagues write, “In finding that Republican-inclined states show higher COVID-19 adverse event reporting than Democrat-inclined states, this study suggests that Republicans are more likely to perceive or report those adverse events and that Democrats are less likely to.”
Limitations
While vaccine reporting and political voting happen at an individual level, they are measured at the level of states, and the authors ponder the likelihood of their assumptions as not high.
Yet what’s interesting is that clearly, highly intelligent authors don’t educate the reader on the true limitations of a study such as this one. For example, such cross-sectional studies are unable to establish causality. While this class of study can certainly provide a snapshot of a population as a specific point in time, establishing cause-and-effect relationships between variables is very difficult.
Moreover, such studies are generally fixed in time, meaning they cannot capture changes in variables over time—in this latter case, longitudinal data is superior. What about any bias in sample selection? And then there is the reality that such studies can provide prevalence data but lack the ability to determine incidence. And there is the potential for confounding variables, and other limitations.
Despite these limitations, cross-sectional studies can help generate hypotheses, estimating prevalence, identifying associations between variables, and providing a snapshot of a population's characteristics at a specific point in time.
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Australia: Three years on from Covid lockdown protests Judge Liz Gaynor of the County Court slams police for responding with 'unjustified violence'
In a shock decision, a judge has ruled that Victoria Police used 'unlawful' and 'unjustified violence' on anti-lockdown protesters during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Judge Liz Gaynor of the County Court ruled the police were the 'aggressors' at a protest in Melbourne on May 29, 2021 which left a man with a dislocated arm.
Victoria had some of the world's strictest lockdown conditions at the time, including that people could only move within a 5kilometre area of their home for shopping or exercise, and the banning of public and private gatherings.
The May 29 gathering at Flagstaff Gardens saw police officers vastly outnumbering the 150 protesters who turned up, more than a dozen of whom were arrested for offences such as assault and breaching the chief health officer's directions.
Jason Reeves, Nicholas Patterson and Adam Roob were each thrown to the ground and arrested at the protest after being asked to leave, the Herald Sun reported.
Judge Gaynor said the men's arrests were unlawful and that they had done nothing to warrant the violent response captured on the police's body-worn cameras.
Mr Reeves was punched in the face by police and thrown to the ground, which the judge said was an 'immediate and violent' response.
Mr Patterson and Mr Roob said they tried to defend Mr Reeves and in doing so were pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground, with Mr Paterson's arm dislocated in the scuffle.
Mr Roob and Mr Patterson were in court for charges such as common law assault and assaulting an emergency worker on duty.
But the judge ruled that the police evidence was inadmissible because 'by their unlawful violence police instigated the response by the accused which underlies the charges they now face'.
Judge Gaynor said the police had several options to deal with the pair, such as issuing infringement notices or telling them they breaching restrictions and were to be placed under arrest.
'However, the police chose not to respond that way. I am satisfied that in arresting Mr Reeves, police used unnecessary and unwarranted force and violence.'
She said video of the group in the 30 minutes before the arrest did not indicate they would be violent and that she was 'satisfied that (police) were the aggressors in the situation and that they employed unjustified violence on Mr Reeves'.
The judge said the police did not speak to him and tell him he was under arrest or why he was arrested, but instead 'confronted, pushed, and attacked him before bringing him to the ground'.
She also found that Mr Paterson and Mr Roob 'were met with physical intervention'.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Technofascist Acts Against Health Freedom
I am not quite sure what to make of the article below by Maryam Henein. She seems to be an "alternative" person rather than a person with a science background but there is no doubt that censorship of Covid matters has been extreme. I am the most mainstream scientist you would meet. I even talk about such things as "an experiment-wise error-rate approach to significance testing". Yet Google have censored even me on occasions. So the advocacy of free speech by Maryam Henein is welcome.
How many of us in this Post-Truth world have been silenced? It hurts a bit more when your profession is to be a messenger, report, and alert.
I have been banned for life from PayPal, Amazon, Venmo, and Vimeo. I was scrubbed off Kiva and GoFundMe. My COVID-19 Vaccine Detox Guide to help injured people was removed from SmashWords and my entire profile.
Google buried my company, HoneyColony.com, and our Facebook ads were temporarily shut down while our data was wiped out. Chase debanked me. Media Matters and NBC Peacock smeared me in a horrendous series like Shadowland, where they assured me they’d feature my story but only discovered my person. You can watch my reaction to the series here.
In truth, I can write a whole series about technofascist acts in the health and wellness space.
In 2018, Care2, a site that “connects people with causes,” closed down its “Healthy Living and Causes” sections. They claimed this was to ‘sharpen its focus on advocacy work and nonprofit partners.” They could have archived the stories but deleted THOUSANDS of informative articles about alternative health instead. Poof. Gone. Vaporized.
While putting together my presentation for Anarchapulco Reborn X 2024, titled Health Censorship In An Age of Technofascism & How To Navigate for Truth, it occurred to me that they knew the Rona Regime was coming, and they scrubbed the articles because they did NOT want those locked down at home to educate themselves.
“I know it’s super frustrating to see content that you’ve written disappear,” one of their old editors wrote. Super frustrating? I’d never had my content deleted. Now five years later, i am a seasoned censored pro.
As Mercola wrote:
“It’s a frightening future. Big Tech has joined the movement, bringing in a global concentration of wealth to eliminate competition and critical voices—voices that bring awareness . . . .as our rights, freedoms, and competition erode into a fascist sunset, all disguised as a means to protect you from ‘misinformation.’”
Chet Bowers, who first used the word ‘technofascist’ asks:
“Will enough of the public recognize the dangers that lie ahead, and will they be able to articulate the importance of what is being lost, including how what is being lost undermines the diversity of common cultural experiences that are more ecologically sustainable?
The most critical question is whether there will be resistance to how everyday lives are being increasingly monitored, motivated to pursue the increasingly narrow economic agenda of the emerging techno-fascist culture and stripped of historical values and identity?”
In “1984,” the torture is too much. Winston, the main character, betrays his lover, Julia, in exchange for his own life. She does the same.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” Orwell writes.
In 2019, I asked If we would stand up for rights for health, freedom, and sovereignty. Or sit back and play with our phones while we lose our rights and are forcefully stuck with needles?
Unfortunately, we know the answer by now. Maybe next time, it will be different???
“Anytime you are truly free, there is a cost to pay,” Dr. Cornel West told Joe Rogan.
I agree, but the alternative is ghastly. I don’t believe we have to be slaves to Big Brother. Speak out and share. Tend to your gut and your brain with micronutrients and access the cleanest food. De-Google your life and use other search engines like QWANT.
As Orwell says, “Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.”
https://principia-scientific.com/part-3-terrifying-technofascist-acts-against-health-freedom/
****************************************************The Tide Turns: Research on COVID Vaccine Harms, Once a Taboo Subject, Now Appearing in Some Medical Journals
By Joe Wang
When COVID-19 took the world by storm in early 2020, I mostly relied on reading Nature Medicine, The Lancet, and a few other medical journals to learn the latest on this new disease.
In March 2020, I read an article published in Nature Medicine titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” with great interest. Written by California-based Scripps Institute’s Kristian Andersen and four other well-known professors, it said SARS-CoV-2 binds to human cells much better than any computer programs predicted, and concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”
Having been a scientist with the world’s largest vaccine company for more than 10 years, I took issue with this claim.
In a May 2022 commentary titled “Pandemic Lessons Learned: Scientific Debate Silenced, With Deadly Consequences” I wrote: “If SARS-CoV-2 infects people better than your computer predicts, then the only conclusion you can draw is that your computer sucks. How did these world-renowned scientists get the basic logic so wrong? And how did the prestigious publication Nature Medicine not catch that? Did anyone even read the paper before publishing it, not to mention peer review it?”
The Andersen article’s conclusion, as it turned out, was a complete flip-flop on Andersen’s Jan. 31, 2020, email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in which he wrote that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” referring to the coronavirus.
The Fauci emails were made public in June 2021 via Freedom of Information Act requests.
Nevertheless, the Nature Medicine paper became the authority on the origin of COVID. It essentially excluded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Dr. Fauci from any responsibility for the emergence of the virus. Any attempts to investigate or explore other possibilities were labelled conspiracy theories.
Andersen, and the article itself, were the subject of a U.S. Congressional Hearing by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in June 2023. The debate on how COVID originated is still ongoing today.
The Lancet and the Daszak Statement
Andersen and Nature Medicine weren’t the only ones trying to please the CCP and Fauci.
On Feb. 18, 2020, The Lancet, another top medical journal, published a political statement with no science in it. It was organized by Peter Daszak from EcoHealth Alliance, which was the middleman for channeling Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a U.S. Congress report released on May 1 of this year.
The Daszak et al. statement dismissed as a conspiracy theory any suggestion that COVID was not of natural origin.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” they wrote. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”
The Tune Is Set
The Daszak statement, along with the Andersen article, set the tune for the officially accepted narrative. The narrative then expanded from “a natural origin of the virus” to “a COVID vaccine will flatten the curve and save the world.” Scientists, doctors, and journal editors who dared to challenge the narrative were cancelled and/or labelled conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers.
It has been four years and six months since the world first encountered SARS-CoV-2. Despite the claims by famous scientists like Fauci and Andersen, and despite the countless efforts by top virologists and public health professionals, evidence that the virus originated naturally has not been found.
More and more people now believe that the virus was leaked or escaped from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, and published such research in Nature Medicine in 2015, with NIH funding acknowledged.
The lab origin is no longer a conspiracy theory. The U.S. Energy Department and the FBI both now believe that the virus was more likely leaked from a lab than having developed naturally.
Encouraging Developments
Since the pandemic, The Epoch Times and NTD have been publishing documentary films on COVID origin and vaccine injuries. The first such documentary, Joshua Philipp’s “Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus,” was viewed over 100 million times on different platforms combined. However, such reports are rarely seen in other legacy media.
It has also been a taboo subject for scientific research and publication, but that may be starting to change.
Recently, I wrote a commentary about a new paper by five Japanese scientists that was published on Cureus, a peer-reviewed medical journal owned by the Springer Nature Group, the same company that owns Nature and Nature Medicine.
The scientists analyzed data collected from the entire 123 million Japanese population and concluded that the majority of the 115,799 excess deaths in 2022 was not due to COVID infection but rather vaccination, in particular the third COVID shot.
I was pleasantly surprised that a once-taboo subject was now published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, especially a member journal of the Springer Nature Group.
In another positive development, this month the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (IJBM) published a paper titled “Review: N1-methyl-pseudouridine: Friend or foe of cancer?” linking a key ingredient in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine with cancer development.
IJBM is owned by the Dutch academic publishing company Elsevier, which also owns renowned publications like The Lancet, Cell, and ScienceDirect.
May the Force Be With the Editors-in-Chief
In the spring of 2022, when more scientists started to challenge the accepted narratives and seek the truth, I co-wrote the commentary “May the Force Be With Them: Scientists Fight Back.”
At that time, these brave scientists needed all the help they could get. For example, when a journal published a well-researched, well-written, and fact-based scientific paper on the safety concerns of the mRNA vaccines, the editor-in-chief of that journal was ousted.
The journal was Food and Chemical Toxicology, another Elsevier publication, and the editor-in-chief was Dr. José Luis Domingo.
Two years later, I’m optimistic that the IJBM editors-in-chief won’t face the same treatment as Dr. Domingo.
Why? I believe the tide has turned.
A recent New York Times article on COVID vaccine injuries is also an encouraging sign. It cites the Food and Drug Administration’s former acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock as saying the injuries are “serious” and “life-changing,” and “should be taken seriously.”
“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.”
Among the reported injured is the editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine, Dr. Gregory Poland. He has been suffering from tinnitus since his first shot. The Centers for Disease Control didn’t take his report on his personal experience seriously. He told the NY Times that he did not “get any sense of movement (from the CDC).”
“If they have done studies (on vaccine injury), those studies should be published,” Dr. Poland added.
The journal Vaccine is also an Elsevier publication, and as the editor-in-chief, Dr. Poland is well positioned to offer his encouragement on vaccine injury studies.
Yes, I believe the tide has turned.
However, as of today, the Daszak statement is still on The Lancet website and the Andersen paper is still on Nature Medicine.
I wonder when the Lancet and Nature Medicine will have the courage to retract them? And when will these two eminent journals start publishing research on COVID vaccine injuries?
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Monday, May 13, 2024
COVID-19 Medical Freedom Warriors Seek to Use the Courts to Take on Vaccines
The undoubted bad behavior of governments during the pandemic has undermined their authority and tends to hand authority to the courts, which may not always be very friendly to personal liberty
While numerous bills were introduced in state legislatures prior to the pandemic challenging state vaccine requirements, politicization of vaccines has intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic. As politicians and in some cases, state health officials make moves to cater to angry, at times conservative or medical freedom-focused populations reacting to what many felt were overreaching COVID-19 pandemic programs, the health crisis led to a notable surge in vaccine-related litigation across America. To some extent, the vaccine policy area has moved from lawmaking and legislators into the courts, but TrialSite notes legislation continues to play a key role in vaccination policy. However, could litigation increasingly constrain what public health-minded legislatures can do to protect the public with vaccination schemes statewide?
SCOTUS shoots down some federal mandates
Since COVID-19 TrialSite reports on a growing presence of the courts as a source of power and vaccine policy---for example, profound issues related to vaccine science and public health powers may now be settled more by judges than by legislatures or public health experts via administrative actions.
An area with precedent, over a century of settled law confirms the constitutionality of state vaccine mandates—however, these increasingly may fall into question as dissenting justices of the US Supreme Court could lean toward undoing such legal tenets.
The highest court in America heard cases pertaining to federal and employer powers to compel vaccination, and in some cases shot down presidential edict during the pandemic on grounds of constitutionality, or lack thereof. More on that below.
CICP backlogged
A major thrust involving a confluence of forces, from traditional anti-vaxxers to newbies in the health freedom movement, to groups with claims such as the COVID-19 vaccine injured, targets the lower courts. In these forums, could some conservative-minded appellate judges possibly make moves to grind down liability protections for vaccine manufacturers? Meanwhile, political pressure against vaccine liability protection may grow, given the huge backlogs linked to the U.S Countermeasure Injury Compensation Program (CICP), established to compensate persons injured by COVID-19 countermeasures (vaccines).
How many are injured from COVID-19 vaccines?
TrialSite has reported on the appalling state of those programs, an utter failure leaving possibly tens of thousands of people with nowhere to turn. Some medical freedom movement figures claim the figure of COVID-19 vaccine injured to be in the many millions. TrialSite has estimated the number to be between a quarter-of-a-million to about two million people nationwide grappling with some set of challenges impacting quality of life. To put these figures in context, about 230 million people in the U.S. were deemed fully vaccinated during the pandemic.
With no end in sight, litigation could represent profound challenges for what government health agencies refer to as vaccine confidence or the lack thereof. Even public health itself during the pandemic, due in part to politicization from all sides, but also a range of behavior from over-reach to incompetence on the part of the government, has led to even questions about the legitimacy of public health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP itself).
Does Jacobson v. Massachusetts stand the test of time?
Could the result of all of this be seismic changes in law around the country?
For example, states’ traditional rights to mandate vaccination could be under fire given the backlash against vaccination since COVID-19. For example, with the intense array of rules, mandates and the like emerging during the pandemic, now numerous lawsuits play out, reaching the highest levels including the Supreme Court.
In fact, on that topic, several cases have made their way to the high court, and the justices, conservatively leaning, have demonstrated a proclivity for revisiting past policies promulgated at the state level. Laws under the gun include Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1906) and Zucht v. King (1922)—both cases affirming a state’s ability to use its police powers to compel vaccination.
While Jacobson didn't touch on religion exemption cases working their way up, the highest courts are looking at these issues. Known as the COVID-19 Bar, the milieu of lawyers involved with challenging what’s known as the COVID regime, they suggest that Jacobson was decided in an era when the Supreme Court was upholding forced sterilization laws, and the eugenics movement sought to perfect the human race with unbridled and faith in science as an example of a different point of view.
Is Gorsuch a Justice to watch?
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative-minded judge nominated by former President Donald Trump has expressed particularly more radical views when considering the mainstream medical and health policy establishment’s paradigm.
For example, Gorsuch has voiced agreement with expanding religious exemptions to immunization requirements, plus went on the record about COVID-19 public health actions stating they were, “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
Moreover, in another case, Gorsuch suggested that public health actions need a material check on powers, lacking any imminent disease threat.
However, if such a ruling were ever to become reality the public health establishment would argue that this would undermine the ability of states’ public health agencies to strive for and maintain herd immunity against vaccine-preventable diseases, not to mention stopping outbreaks.
Importantly, in Zucht v. King (1922), the Supreme Court ruled that public schools can constitutionally exclude unvaccinated students, even when there isn't an outbreak of a particular illness. The 9–0 decision was made on November 13, 1922, after the case was argued on October 20, 1922.
But what if Gorsuch and others became a majority on this matter? Could they eventually overturn Zucht? That would dramatically change the face of public health in the United States. Will Gorsuch find the opportunity, based on mounting litigation working its way up the lower courts and above thanks to conflicting decisions—to apply his thinking which could literally eliminate modern public health powers?
What’s the status of religious exemption cases?
In Mississippi last year, a judge at the federal court level ordered the state to allow religious exemptions to immunization requirements. The result? What essentially is the upending of a 44-year-old state law established at the Supreme Court level, ruling that a lack of those exemptions does not violate religious freedom? How? By placing such religious freedom beliefs of a minority over more far-reaching public health interests.
In the above case, it was reported in the Mississippi Free Press on September 29, 2023, that the state’s attorney general would not oppose the ultimate decision favoring the anti-vaccine—or some might say pro-freedom litigants.
While such decisions may lead to less vaccination with traditional childhood scheduled immunizations, meaning diseases such as the measles could rise, public health agencies are also concerned about more systematic efforts of religious-focused anti-vaccine groups use of the topic as a front to systematically attack tried and true vaccination programs more broadly.
Ongoing litigations threaten federal powers
To many persons in what is broadly referred to as the medical freedom movement, President Joe Biden’s proclamations in August 2021 were an affront on freedom. A milieu of actions, from mandates to policies to bolster COVID-19 immunization rates, Biden’s administration took this approach despite the fact that the federal government traditionally wields little power involving healthcare laws. Rather, these laws fall under the state and local jurisdiction.
Biden’s actions generated resistance across a range of interests, including TrialSite. While this media is not “anti-vaxx” or even part of a “medical freedom movement,” we simply reported on the contradictions in the series of mandates and requirements Biden announced. One challenge was that by that point in time, the unfolding science was evident, that the COVID-19 vaccines did not stop viral transmission. Since they were not sterilizing vaccines and the durability of the vaccines was mediocre to say the least (e.g. waning in protection as quickly as in 90 days) the impetus to compel vaccination seemed a real stretch. After all these “vaccines” behaved more like temporary therapeutics.
Biden tapped into and exploited a collection of laws, powers and policies, from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) contingencies for accepting federal health-related money to the Occupational Safety and Health Act involving government contractors to military personnel. The White House’s moves were challenged, with the Supreme Court ultimately diverging on the Biden mandates. While the Medicare requirement was kept, the Supreme Court shot down the other Biden mandates.
But even the CMS ruling, that contractors or organizations funded with CMS monies needed to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine, was ultimately terminated by the Biden administration itself. Was this move by Biden further evidence of a strengthening of the medical freedom movement?
Other upending of the public health system?
Attorneys favoring universal vaccination and robust public health authority express concern about recent court decisions. In one case, a New York judge rejected standard government vaccination policy because the COVID-19 vaccine failed to stop all viral transmission. Public health advocates fret that such decisions inhibit the exercise of public health authority on what they would argue were based on faulty premises. While not all vaccines fully stop transmission, they tend to certainly slow the spread, along with contributing to substantially lower morbidity and mortality rates. With courts intervening, inhibiting the public health authority to achieve its aims not only threatens the public health but also the balance of powers in the United States.
Supreme Court ruling tosses out “de minimus” standard
Has the medical freedom movement’s backlash to COVID-19 impacted what’s been an accepted authority on behalf of an employer to mandate vaccination on the job? Absolutely! See SCOTUS’ Groff v. DeJoy in 2022. In this case, the court clarified the undue hardship legal standard by addressing various lower court tests developed over the last 50 years that evaluated undue hardship in terms of whether an accommodation imposed “more than de minimis costs” or “substantial costs or expenditures” to the employer.
Based on this decision, employers must now prove “substantial increased costs” rather than the de minimis cost standard. We see a mounting number of cases driven by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) involving numerous cases targeting employers due to the denial of religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccines. Will employers face more aggressive EEOC enforcements involving refusal to grant mandate exemptions? Some experts believe so.
What about the PREP ACT?
Importantly, manufacturers who marketed countermeasures during the pandemic (and after) benefit from broad liability waivers granted to vaccine makers such as Pfizer and Moderna, thanks to the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act). The presumption here is that any and all vendors involved with the development and administration of COVID-19 countermeasures benefit from universal liability protection by the government, again thanks to this legislation. But the emergence of some lawsuits has spooked government, industry, and other attorneys representing the countermeasure value chain. For example, in a handful of cases, the courts of appeal ruled that the PREP Act was not meant to preempt state tort claims, given that the emergency act fails to offer adequate judicial alternatives for injured plaintiffs.
Courts suggest ways around PREP Act
For example, ruling that the PREP Act wasn’t meant to fully supersede state law claims, the Third, Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth federal circuit courts have suggested that the PREP Act cannot completely preempt state law claims, thus allowing these claims at the state level to proceed. So, for example, negligence/willful negligence, or wrongful death, or perhaps some form of fraud could trigger state-based actions, meaning a federal action might be avoided in association with the case. TrialSite is currently tracking this topic. In one major case, M.T. v. Walmart Stores, Inc. invoking the PREP Act led to the ruling that this Act fails to afford an acceptable judicial alternative for injured parties.
In another major test, however, the Court of Appeals of Kansas found that the PREP Act does in fact preempt vaccine-related tort claims. As mentioned above, TrialSite has reported on emerging judicial conflict at the level of the federal appeals court, meaning the high likelihood of litigation over the PREP act.
Could Pfizer, Moderna, or even health systems that administered the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines confront hostile courts in the future? Any litigation that makes it through the seemingly impenetrable wall of PREP Act could open up discovery and a process not conducive to pharmaceutical industry innovation, especially if product liability claims breached such a legislatively constructed fortress.
Do we have the right to refuse?
With a marked rise in vaccine litigation post the COVID-19 pandemic and a fledgling medical freedom movement—which generally refers to a range of beliefs and activities advocating for individuals to have autonomy and choice regarding their own medical decisions, a host of issues, such as the right to refuse certain medical treatments or interventions; or for that matter, the right to choose alternative or complementary therapies, will increasingly confront courts at all levels.
Medical Freedom Movement’s future
Over a century of case law and precedent, involving an incrementally evolving, empowered public health reality could be under assault, or at least under fire, from a growing cadre of interests interested in the right to make informed decisions about one's own health care without undue interference or coercion. Ironically at least some stakeholders within the medical freedom movement take a staunchly anti-abortion stance, which has been embraced as part of the women’s freedom movement over the past decades. Will the medical freedom movement, often intersecting with debates around vaccine mandates, medical privacy, informed consent, and governmental or institutional policies that affect individual health choices, accelerate post-COVID-19, or on the other hand, slow down as the populace tires of anything and everything COVID-19?
Personal autonomy versus public health
Proponents argue that individuals should have the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies and health care without interference from external authorities, while critics may raise concerns about public health implications and the potential for misinformation to influence decision-making. This latter point of view raises serious concern about some of the court decisions made during the COVID-19 pandemic period. They view such decisions as a step backward from modernity. The medical freedom movement reflects broader discussions about personal autonomy, individual rights, and the balance between personal choice and public health considerations in the realm of medicine and healthcare, and no doubt the courts will continue to be where the parties clash.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Sunday, May 12, 2024
Why Major Ivermectin Clinical Trials Need to be Questioned--Investigated
There were four large randomized, ivermectin trials I have exhaustively analyzed, likely more than any human--TOGETHER from McMaster University in Canada, COVID-OUT in University of Minnesota, ACTIV-6 sponsored by NIH and run by Duke and PRINCIPLE run by Oxford.
Note that my findings are in the context of a clear information war that unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic against ivermectin. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently lost a lawsuit, as front-line doctors challenged the agency’s unethical, illicit behavior during the pandemic.
In the aggregate, tens of billions of dollars of potential profits were within reach of pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic. A system with biases and importantly, pecuniary interests heavily influence paradigms and strategies for combating pandemics. During the unprecedented federal takeover of medicine during the pandemic, government actors clearly favored branded and expensive drugs over economically accessible generic combinations, as the latter would not drive exorbitant profits. This is the context for which a handful of key ivermectin studies were designed and executed.
After an exhaustive review of these studies, what follows are key points of concern, discrepancies and other issues that I have found, and thus raise substantial doubt about the outcomes announced. While my findings are not published nor peer-reviewed, I invite anyone interested to review and verify for themselves. My findings reveal a disturbing set of patterns that suggest that these clinical trials were designed with failure in mind. But importantly, review and come to your own conclusions.
1. All these clinical trials as if synchronized gave patients within 23% of the same dose. The dose was 42% of the average recommended cumulative dose of the front-line physicians who were arguably the top front-line physicians prescribing the drug off-label during the pandemic. Known as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, these physicians aligned with providers from Australia and Eastern Europe to Bangladesh and India; from Nigeria and Latin America to Zimbabwe and Peru, forming a community-centric, bottom-up, patient-centric approach to rapid, early treatment often in combination with doxycycline and zinc during the worst pandemic in a century.
The world’s top ivermectin experts, at least during the pandemic, ironically first learned about ivermectin’s use around the world via TrialSite News The FLCCC is of course, not an acknowledged evidentiary reference body, nonetheless the group kept the spirit of the local community physician, seeking what’s right for the patient alive and well during the unprecedented pandemic, with its federally-driven, top-down, truly unorthodox approach to medicine.
The FLCCC physicians were so influential that the ACTIV-6 investigators consulted with them via online communication, but the latter failed to heed their advice. An investigator from one of these studies claimed on Twitter (now X) that the FLCCC said that their dosing was perfectly reasonable. This is not a factual statement, as proven by the FLCCC website and Dr. Pierre Kory’s Twitter page.
The point here is to emphasize the influence of the FLCCC and its ivermectin-based protocols, irrespective of whether its’ recommendations were included by federal authorities or medical bodies during the pandemic—which they were not.
2. All the trials gave ivermectin on an empty stomach when the blood level is 157% higher when the typical dose that they used, 30 mg, is given with a fatty meal. This regimen markedly differed from what the physician experts in the field recommended at the time.
3. TOGETHER, ACTIV-6 and PRINCIPLE all limited the dose by weight for no medical reason. Overweight patients who were at higher risk, had their dose limited the most, which made no sense.
4.All the trials gave ivermectin late, at an average of 4.9 days of symptoms. Paxlovid is usually given in one to two days. What we found is that there was a regular and systematic pattern of not only underdosing the drug but having the drug taken when it was frankly, too late.
5. The NIH-sponsored ACTIV-6 ivermectin trial gave 37% of the FLCCC recommended cumulative dose on an empty stomach and got it to patients at an extremely late six days on average. 75% of the patients would not have been candidates for Paxlovid, meaning the trial looked at from this lens was all but designed to fail. 75% of the patients would not have been candidates for Paxlovid, meaning the study wasn’t enrolled with the right participants.
6. Ivermectin would be declared effective if it showed at least a 95% chance of benefit in the entire 1591 patients or in any of the analyses every 300 patients. Yet as will be shown, when the data demonstrated a positive impact, nothing was done.
7. Despite the undertreatment and late treatment, ivermectin evidenced a 98% chance of benefit, so the investigators changed the primary endpoint from 14 days to 28 days, which is unethical. It showed a 91% chance of benefit, which was not statistically significant. The investigators said that ivermectin could not be recommended. Any normal person would have been happy to take a cheap, safe drug if it had a 91% chance to help them.
8. The investigators never reported any of the interim analyses because that would have revealed significant benefit at 900 patients. Ivermectin was effective for the first 900 patients who had over 90% Delta. It is highly likely that ivermectin would also have shown benefit at 600 patients. The actual data from the trial is needed to prove this. It could be obtained by a subpoena from the House Select Subcommittee on the COVID-19 pandemic or in discovery in targeted litigation.
9.Ivermectin should have been declared effective in the initial ACTIV-6 trial, later called ACTIV-6 400. As suggested above, at certain points the data suggested efficacy.
10. Early intervention with combinations such as ivermectin with doxycycline and zinc could have helped alleviate some of the suffering during the pandemic. I am a retired physician, and it is my opinion that had ivermectin been declared effective as it should have been by December 2021, hundreds of millions to billions of people around the world could have received and benefited from the drug. In the U.S., about 200 million people fell ill to COVID-19 since Dec 2021, and in my opinion, the information war launched against ivermectin by the U.S. FDA and to some extent, NIH caused tremendous unnecessary harm to Americans and others worldwide.
TrialSite chronicled extensively public health initiatives involving the combination of ivermectin, doxycycline and zinc in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh for example, where the battle against Delta was so successful that even the World Health Organization issued a press release to celebrate the turning around of the COVID-19 [Delta] surge during the spring to summer of 2021.
Read “Uttar Pradesh going the last mile to stop COVID-19” by the WHO---they report on the entire public health initiative, only omitting the medicines used in the local home medical kit---which of course included ivermectin. See the link.
Let's do a proper comparison. In my opinion, a large, randomized trial of ivermectin at an appropriate dose versus Paxlovid or molnupiravir in patients with COVID-19 for five days or less would settle the issue once and for all. A recent study revealed Paxlovid isn’t even effective against placebo in healthy people, and molnupiravir is avoided by most doctors now.
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AstraZeneca Covid vaccine withdrawn over side effects but ‘fear more deadly’
I have doubts about whether ANY of the Covid vaccines was of net benefit but if we accept that AstraZeneca was of net benefit, the observations below are reasonable
A leading infectious diseases physician says overblown fears about the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine probably caused more deaths than the vaccine’s rare adverse side effects.
The response comes as the vaccine was withdrawn globally after the manufacturer admitted it can cause rare blood clots.
The Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical producer withdrew the vaccine globally on Tuesday.
It comes after Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Authority discontinued use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in April last year.
On April 30 this year, AstraZeneca conceded the vaccine, sold under the name Vaxzevria, can cause fatal blood clots.
The admission came through court documents in a British class action lawsuit that sought £100m ($190m) for almost 50 victims of AstraZeneca vaccine side effects.
The application to withdraw the vaccine was made on March 5 and came into effect on May 7.
“I can see why it’s recalled because it does have probably a death rate of about 1 in 100,000 people from this clotting disorder,” the ANU’s Professor Peter Collignon said.
“But having said that, there are deaths associated with every drug and every vaccine we have – even aspirin, if you take it regularly, about 1 in 100,000 people per year die from that.
“One of the things that this side effect induced back in 2021, in my view, was the fear and the publicity about the adverse effect caused more deaths than the actual vaccine did. If you were an 80-year-old and got Covid, you had a 1 in 10 chance of dying. Yet, if you had this vaccine, you had a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying from the effect of a complication. Yet, there were a lot of people, because we had zero Covid at the time, who said, ‘oh no, I’ll wait because the Pfizer vaccine’s better’.”
The TGA provisionally approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for use for people aged 18 and over as a primary course from February 15, 2021 and as a booster from February 8, 2022. In the same period, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were recommended over the AstraZeneca vaccine.
In June 2021, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation recommended that Australians over the age of 60 avoid taking Vaxzevria.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Friday, May 10, 2024
More censorship from Google
My article on this blog: "Key Ingredient in Pfizer and Moderna COVID Shots Aids Cancer Development, New Study Shows" has been deleted by Google. As host of Blogspot, they can do that. It appeared on May 1st and reported a study by an international group of authors that appeared in an academic journal. So it is a surprising bit of censorship. The article is still online at the site I got it from:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/key-ingredient-in-pfizer-and-moderna-covid-shot-aids-cancer-development-new-study-shows-5638998
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Thursday, May 09, 2024
New Study From Czech Republic Confirms Covid Vaccines Have Around Zero Efficacy Against Death
Dr. Eyal Shahar
In 2021, we were flooded with visuals showing us how effective the mRNA vaccines were against death from Covid.
We saw, for example, that the Covid mortality graph of those who completed the two-dose protocol was substantially lower than that of the unvaccinated. To strengthen the point, we were shown a consistent pattern across age groups or after age adjustment.
Much of this was an illusion. Back then, they did not display comparable graphs for non-Covid deaths. If they did, we would have seen that the vaccinated also fared better on non-Covid mortality. Of course, no one expects these vaccines to prevent death from cancer, heart disease, stroke and so on.
The pseudo-effectiveness of Covid vaccines against death from unrelated causes is not a new observation. The same kind of pseudo-effectiveness was discovered long ago for the flu vaccines. It is called the ‘healthy vaccinee effect’.
For various reasons unrelated to the vaccines, people who are vaccinated have better background health on average than people who are not, and therefore they are less likely to die from ‘anything’, including flu and Covid. Vaccinated or not, they would have had lower Covid mortality than their unvaccinated counterparts.
When we try to estimate the effect of Covid (or flu) vaccines, the healthy vaccinee effect becomes the healthy vaccinee bias, a source of distortion that must be removed. (Conversely, we may call it the ‘unhealthy unvaccinated’ bias.) Research on this topic has been sparse, however.
Neither the pharmaceutical industry nor public health officials have had an interest in discovering that common vaccines were not as effective as they claimed them to be, or perhaps not effective at all.
A recent study from the Czech Republic has made significant contributions to the scientific literature on Covid vaccines and the healthy vaccinee effect. First, the authors observe the phenomenon in an additional country, lending support to its universal nature. Second, they provide clear evidence that those who chose (or were coerced) to be vaccinated were indeed healthier.
Third, they show that the phenomenon is consistent along the sequence of doses, as was evident in U.K. data for booster doses: those who continued to the next dose were healthier than those who did not. Lastly, they demonstrate that the observed pattern in their data can be reproduced by simulated data when a vaccine has no effect and only the healthy vaccinee effect is operating. It is worth reading the paper in full, whether or not you are a science specialist.
What was done in the study?
The authors computed rates of all-cause death in periods of Covid waves and in periods of low (almost no) Covid deaths. The latter are essentially rates of non-Covid death, which means that any ‘effect’ of the Covid vaccines during these periods is a pseudo-effect: it is the healthy vaccinee phenomenon alone. In each period, they compared the mortality rate between the unvaccinated and various groups of vaccinated people.
I will discuss one key topic: the pseudo-effect of the two-dose protocol, starting four weeks after the second dose when people are considered fully protected. To focus on that group versus the unvaccinated, I added oblique arrows to Figure 2. Notice that these bars show rates, not counts, of deaths in a period with low Covid deaths (green panel). Again, although these are deaths from any cause, 99.7% were not related to Covid. Therefore, they may be considered rates of non-Covid death, and that’s what I will call them.
In each age group, the rate of non-Covid death in the effectively vaccinated (yellow) is much lower than the rate in the unvaccinated (black). Of course, that’s a pseudo-effect of the vaccines. That’s the healthy vaccinee effect, or bias when trying to estimate the true effectiveness against Covid death.
The authors kindly provided their data, which are summarised in my table for the low-Covid period.
As you can see from the computation, the ‘bias factor’ (last row) is simply the inverse of the pseudo-effect of vaccination. It tells us how much more likely the unvaccinated are to die ‘in general’, as compared with those who completed the two-dose protocol at least four weeks earlier. Formally, it should be called the bias correction factor, but we’ll keep it short.
My next table compares the results from the Czech Republic to data from the U.K. and the U.S. in similar age groups (my computation from the available data).
Notably, the bias factor in data from different countries and cultures varies in a narrow range: between 2 and 3.5. It is lower in the oldest age group but is still at least 2. Overall, the unvaccinated are two to three times more likely to die from various causes than the fully vaccinated.
Other data indicate that the gap narrowed over time (because unvaccinated survivors were ‘healthier’ as time went on and some of the less healthy died), but it lasted months, not a few weeks. When a third dose was introduced, the healthier moved to the three-dose group, leaving behind a sicker group of ‘only two doses’.
As a result, the two-dose group now appeared to have higher mortality than the unvaccinated. This observation was mistakenly interpreted as evidence of vaccine-related deaths (which unquestionably happened).
To remove the healthy vaccinee bias, we multiply the biased rate ratio of Covid death by the bias factor, as explained elsewhere. For example, if the biased rate ratio of Covid death is 0.4 (60% ‘vaccine effectiveness’) and the bias factor is 2.5, the correct effect on Covid death is 0.4 × 2.5 = 1, which is 0% vaccine effectiveness.
I will conclude with another example of the healthy vaccinee bias and the true effectiveness after correction.
A study of U.S. veterans presented survival graphs of fully vaccinated and unvaccinated elderly people following a PCR test (figure below). I will consider a death following a positive PCR as ‘Covid death’ and a death following a negative PCR as ‘non-Covid death’.
It is just an approximation, of course, but that’s all we can get from the paper to distinguish between the two types of death. Studies of Covid vaccines rarely report data on non-Covid death by vaccination status, so we often have to derive such data from whatever is provided.
I visually estimated the risk of death at three time points, where the survival probabilities for a pairwise comparison were close to the marks on the Y-axis (2% intervals). My rough estimates are summarised in the busy table below.
As you can see, correcting for the healthy vaccinee bias has changed estimates of effectiveness from around 70% to around 10%. And that’s not the only bias in observational studies of Covid vaccines. Differential misclassification of the cause of death is another strong bias. Would any effectiveness have remained if all the biases could have been removed? Were lives indeed saved by these vaccines?
Let me end with a comment not on Covid vaccines, but on flu vaccines.
If you look at the U.S. CDC website, you will find data on the effectiveness of the flu shot each year. Usually, it does not exceed 50% in the elderly (a risk ratio of 0.5). By now, you should be able to compute the correct effectiveness, say, with a bias factor of 2.
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The Predictable Wastes of COVID Relief
If you ever had the vague sense that COVID relief funding worked in a manner akin to U.S. aid packages in failed Middle Eastern dictatorships, your instincts weren’t wrong.
First off, there were cases of just outright fraud nearing the $200 billion mark with drug gangs and racketeers collecting COVID unemployment benefits from the U.S. government, with some recipient fraudsters not even having the common decency of being honest American fraudsters.
Even worse, though, were some legitimate uses of COVID funds that actually counted as legitimate despite being laughably frivolous or clearly unrelated to nominal goals connected to public health or helping communities deal with the economic impact of the virus—or, more accurately, the lockdowns.
One of the most should-be-satirical-but-actually-real examples of a legitimate use of COVID cash was a researcher at North Dakota State University being awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation through a grant funded at least in part through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to aid her in her 2023 efforts to reimagine grading in the name of equity. (If none of that makes sense, please don’t hurt yourself with mental pirouettes.)
Other more mundane projects pertained to prisons and law enforcement using COVID relief money for purposes that extended well-beyond simply paying salaries or keeping the lights on. In 2022 The Appeal and The Marshall Project reported on how large sums of COVID money went to prison construction and expansion projects and to outfit police departments with new weaponry, vehicles, and canines. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement or our prison system, these probably did little to stop the spread of COVID or keep out-of-work bartenders afloat while public health bureaucrats consulted horoscopes or goat entrails or their equally useful models to divine the proper time to let businesses reopen safely at half-capacity to diners willing to wear a mask between bites but too afraid to leave their homes.
Yet, of course, that didn’t stop people from trying to make the case that these expenditures absolutely were essential to slowing the spread. Often coming off like precocious children explaining to their parents how a new puppy would help teach them responsibility or an overpriced pair of sneakers would facilitate their social-emotional development by ensuring the cool kids would like them, local sheriffs and city managers were reported as claiming prison expansions could help prisoners social distance from each other, new tasers would help officers social distance from suspects, and new vehicles would allow officers to take their cars home with them rather than share one with another officer who might end up contaminating it with their COVID cooties.
But even worse than the funds that were outright plundered or just snatched up as part of a cash grab were those that were used on projects that helped further erode the freedoms of American citizens.
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities, purchasing or licensing gunshot detection systems, automatic license plate readers, drones, social media monitoring tools, and equipment to hack smartphones and other connected devices.
Sometimes EPIC reported that this was done with little, if any, public debate over the civil liberties and privacy concerns inherent to these tools. In one case from a town in Ohio, approval for ARPA-funded ALPRs—cameras that can create a searchable, time-stamped history for the movements of passing vehicles—came after only a 12-minute presentation by their police chief.
Similarly, schools also likely used money from ARPA, as well as the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, for their own surveillance purposes, although documentation of how schools used their COVID money is said to be somewhat spotty at best.
Vice News in 2021 reported how Ed Tech and surveillance vendors such as Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and SchoolPass marketed their products as tools to help reduce the spread of COVID and allow schools to reopen safely.
Some attempts such as Vice’s description of SchoolPass presenting ALPRs as a means to assist with social distancing come off like police departments explaining the social distancing benefits of tasers.
Others, however, such as Motorola plying schools with lists of behavioral analysis programs that “monitor social distancing violations” and room occupancy while “automat[ing] the detection of students who are not wearing face masks,” seem to offer a glimpse of the dystopian future into which we are heading—as do the other surveillance tools bought with COVID cash.
Maybe at some point Disease X, about which our ruling class has been warning us, will hit and the additional drones, ALPRs, and social media monitoring tools bought by the law enforcement agencies reported on by EPIC will be used to monitor adults for social distancing violations and automatically detect who isn’t wearing a mask. Maybe those tools will just be used to keep a digital notebook of the daily activities of everyone while police reassure us that they promise only to look at it when they really really need to.
In either case, though, if you currently have the vague sense that post-COVID America is a little more like a Chinese surveillance state than in the Before Times, your instincts are dead-on.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-predictable-wastes-of-covid-relief/
*************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Wednesday, May 08, 2024
Large 4.1m FDA Study Confirms small but significant Myocarditis/Pericarditis and Seizure Safety Signals in Young People
The results depend heavily on diagnostic accuracy, which can certainly not be assumed
Researchers from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as well as major pharmacy retail chains, payers and data-based companies investigated whether statistical signals detected health outcomes post-vaccination with ancestral COVID-19 vaccine in children aged 6 months to 17 years. Part of an active safety monitoring program involving COVID-19 vaccination, a bid to detect rare outcomes not identified in clinical trials involved researchers from the FDA, CVS Health/Aetna Blue Bell, Optum Epidemiology (part of UnitedHealthcare), IQVIA, Acumen LLC and Carelon Research led by Patricia C. Lloyd, Ph.D., ScM of the FDA.
An FDA-sponsored clinical trial with results published in the journal JAMA Network, the cohort study evaluated 21 prespecified health outcomes post-exposure before early 2023 to Pfizer (BNT162b2), Moderna (mRNA-1273), or Novavax (NVX-CoV2373) ancestral monovalent COVID-19 vaccines in children aged 6 months to 17 years by applying a near-real-time monitoring framework using healthcare data from three commercial claims databases in the US (Optum [through April 2023], Carelon Research [through March 2023], and CVS Health [through February 2023]).
Lloyd and colleagues analyzed and reported on increased rates of each outcome after vaccinations were compared with annual historical rates from January 1 to December 31, 2019, and January 1 to December 31, 2020, as well as between April 1 and December 31, 2020. The study involved 4,102,016 vaccinated enrollees aged 6 months to 17 years. 2,058,142 (50.2%) of the total were male, and 3,901,370 (95.1%) lived in an urban area.
Thirteen of 15 sequentially tested outcomes failed to meet the threshold for a statistical signal. However, as was reported on with the group’s preprint, statistical signals were detected for myocarditis or pericarditis after BNT162b2 vaccination in children aged 12 to 17 years plus seizure after vaccination with BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 in children aged 2 to 4 or 5 years.
Conducting a post hoc sensitivity analysis, the study team reported that the statistical signal for seizure was observed only after exposure to the Moderna vaccine (mRNA-1273) when 2019 background rates were selected; no statistical signal was observed when 2022 rates were selected.
Real-Word Data
This study team tapped into what is known as a form of real-world data, from commercial administrative health claims including Optum (UnitedHealth and affiliated health plans), Carelon Research (Elevance Health, formerly Anthem, and affiliated health plans), and CVS Health (Aetna and affiliated health plans).
These databases contain longitudinal medical and pharmacy claims data supplemented with vaccination data from participating local and state Immunization Information Systems. Such sources are nationally representative of the commercially insured population aged 0 to 64 years and provide comprehensive capture of medical services submitted for insurance reimbursement.
Other factors make this a robust study. Broad geographical coverage across 3 commercial health insurance databases with vast representation across America. The commercial data (claims) were supplemented with immunization information systems data plus medical records reviews.
Findings
An FDA statistician since 2021, corresponding author Patricia C. Lloyd, and colleagues report on the study involving 4,102,016 vaccinated individuals aged 6 months to 17 years, with 3,920,563 (95.6%) receiving BNT162b2 vaccination, 174,427 (4.3%) receiving mRNA-1273, and 53 (<0.1%) receiving NVX-CoV2373.
As depicted above, a total of 8,444,?355 ancestral monovalent COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered to young people, including 8,121,591 BNT162b2 doses (dose 1: 3,843,778; dose 2: 3,235,442, dose 3 or monovalent booster: 1,033,036, and unknown or unclear: 9335), 322,628 mRNA-1273 doses (dose 1: 173,857; dose 2: 140,734; dose 3 or monovalent booster: 5284; and unknown or unclear: 2753) administered to children aged 6 months to 17 years, as well as 136 NVX-CoV2373 doses (dose 1: 63; dose 2: 43; dose 3 or monovalent booster and unknown or unclear: 30) administered to children aged 12 to 17 years.
Sequential Testing
Of the established 15 outcomes that the study team sequentially tested, two (2) outcomes met the statistical threshold for a signal, including myocarditis or pericarditis in children aged 12 to 15 years and 16 to 17 years, and seizure in children aged 2 to 4 or 5 years.
The study team found statistical signals for myocarditis or pericarditis during the primary analysis after Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) COVID-19 vaccination among children aged 12 to 15 years and 16 to 17 years in all three commercial databases.
The authors report dose-specific statistical signals for 1 or more definitions of the outcomes detected in children aged 12 to 17 years after dose 1, dose 2, and dose 3 of BNT162b2 vaccine in at least 1 of the 3 databases. See eTable 8 in Supplement 1.
According to Lloyd and colleagues:
“In the primary analysis, seizure met the statistical threshold for a signal in children aged 2 to 4 years after BNT162b2 vaccination in all 3 databases and in children aged 2 to 5 years after mRNA-1273 vaccination in 2 of the 3 databases. Dose-specific statistical signals for seizure were detected in 2 of the 3 databases after dose 1 and dose 2 BNT162b2 vaccination in children aged 2 to 4 years and after dose 2 of mRNA-1273 vaccination in children aged 2 to 5 years.” Again, see eTable 8.
Signal Characterization
The authors report 72 observed seizure cases among children aged 2 to 4 or 5 years; 51 (70.8%) of these cases met the definition of febrile seizures. Lloyd and the team found no differences in rates of seizure by sex. Based on the timing of cases, the team reports no indication of substantial clustering with cases distributed across the 0- to 7-day risk window; 23 (31.9%) of the seizure cases occurred within the 0- to 1-day period after COVID-19 vaccination. The median (IQR) time between vaccination and diagnosis of seizure was 2 (1-5) days.
Selection of comparator rates impacted statistical signals for seizure. For instance, when evaluating annual background rates of seizure demonstrates rates used in the primary analyses (2020) were lower than rates in 2022 and 2019.
“Background rates in 2022 and 2019 ranged from approximately 2.2 to 2.4 times and 1.7 to 1.9 times the 2020 rates, respectively, across 3 databases.”
As mentioned at the onset, “the post hoc sensitivity analysis, using 2022 background rates as the comparator in sequential testing, did not identify any statistical signals for seizure in any databases. Using 2019 background rates as the comparator resulted in a statistical signal for seizure after primary series vaccination with mRNA-1273 in 2 of the 3 databases and after dose 2 vaccination with mRNA-1273 in 1 of the 3 databases.”
Is the incidence of myocarditis considered rare?
Yes. The authors report a rate of reported mean incidence of 39.3 cases per 1 million vaccine doses administered in children aged 5 to 17 years within 7 days after BNT162b2 vaccination according to two CDC separate studies. However, TrialSite notes that some studies suggest the rates are higher.
What about the rate of myocarditis and pericarditis outcome measured in the inpatient and emergency department settings?
In the 1 to 7 days window post the COVID-19 jab, the team reports an observed rate of 27.0 inpatient or emergency department cases per million doses in days 1 to 7 after the primary series in children aged 12 to 15 years and 38.2 cases per million doses after the primary series in children aged 16 to 17 years. There was a lack of any myocarditis/pericarditis signal in children aged 12 and under.
A new seizure signal was reported.
Lloyd and co-authors report that such a seizure signal in children aged 2 to 4 or 5 years has not been previously reported for this age group in active surveillance studies of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
The authors point to reports in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which is a “passive reporting system” with “limitations,” hence the data there was all but ignored. TrialSite suggests there very well may be more signals buried in VAERS, but this must be proven in rigorous study.
But the authors point to only 8 identified seizures in VAERS after approximately 1 million mRNA vaccinations through August 2022, in children aged 6 months to 5 years. They note that out of all those, 8 of the seizures were afebrile.
Do the FDA-sponsored authors suggest interpreting the seizure data with caution?
Yes. They call for more robust epidemiologic study. We at TrialSite concur. How can the CDC relentlessly push for young people to continuously get the latest booster with such data available? Especially so, given the risk-benefit analyses continuously change given pre-existing infection, milder Omicron variants, etc.
Study Limitations
Like all such observational studies, the limitations must be understood. TrialSite bulletizes for summary.
Near-real-time surveillance method, which may be sensitive to comparator rate selection and does not include controlling for bias and confounding
The study only includes data from a commercially insured pediatric population and may not be nationally representative—meaning the generalizability could be quested despite the broad coverage
Here, small counts of NVX-CoV2373 prevented evaluation of most demographic factors due to privacy concerns
The authors report that they could not conduct medical record review for all outcomes included in the study due to resource, time, and legal constraints. For the myocarditis or pericarditis outcome, they reviewed medical records of a subset of identified cases of myocarditis or pericarditis that were obtained from the medical professionals.
2020 background rates as the historical comparator for the seizure analysis because this period was marked by behavioral shifts during the early pandemic that may have caused a sustained decrease in the underlying outcome rates. Hence the study team compared both prepandemic and peripandemic periods across data partners when selecting historical rates and generally selected the lower rate as the historical comparator.
For the Novavax vaccine, only 53 children aged 12 to 17 years who received at least 1 dose of NVX-CoV2373 and 4266 children aged 5 to 17 years who received at least 1 dose of mRNA-1273.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Tuesday, May 07, 2024
The British government downplayed 'gobsmacking' Covid lab leak information amid resistance from scientific advisers, sources claim
The UK Government downplayed the 'high likelihood' that Covid-19 emerged from a lab leak in China because of resistance from scientific advisers, it was claimed yesterday.
US officials shared their views on the origin of the virus in a call with other members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
But the 'lab leak' theory was downplayed in Britain because of resistance from government scientists who favoured the idea that Covid 'jumped the species barrier' from animals to humans, according to US sources.
Taking part in the January 2021 phone call were Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump's secretary of state, and the UK's then foreign secretary Dominic Raab and their counterparts.
The call – previously reported by The Mail on Sunday – was 'open', meaning unencrypted, in the hope the Chinese government would intercept the call, it is claimed.
The allegations, made by unnamed officials speaking in The Sunday Telegraph yesterday, are likely to increase calls to open the Covid Inquiry to the question of where the virus originated.
One US source who worked on the intelligence said: 'We saw several pieces of information and thought they were gobsmacking.
'They obviously pointed to the high likelihood that this was indeed a lab leak.'
An intelligence dossier revealed the Chinese military worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the years leading up to the pandemic, and some lab researchers fell sick shortly before the virus was first recorded nearby.
Other revelations showed Chinese scientists carried out 'gain of function' research, whereby a virus is genetically manipulated to show different behaviour, such as becoming more infectious, or to become infectious against different species.
The UK Government, including Boris Johnson, initially rejected the claim that Covid had been created by scientists, saying in June 2021: 'The advice that we have had is that it doesn't look as though this disease of zoonotic origin came from a lab.'
Two former officials said the evidence was not taken seriously because ministers saw lab leak claims as a 'radioactive American political issue' that was discredited by public disagreement between government scientists and Mr Trump.
One official said: 'Once the thing became fundamentally political, the ability to pursue it internationally really just collapsed because no one else was interested in touching it.
'I think [Five Eyes] were kind of annoyed by the way the issue had become treated in US politics.'
The two sources cited by The Sunday Telegraph both separately named Sir Jeremy Farrar, then a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, as a key opponent of the lab leak theory in the UK Government.
Sir Jeremy and 26 other scientists rejected the lab leak theory in February 2020, signing a statement which said: 'We stand together to condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.'
While many scientific experts say an animal-to-human interaction is the most likely cause of the first infection, some figures, most notably Michael Gove, say the virus was 'man-made'.
Mr Gove told the Covid Inquiry in November there was a 'significant body of judgement that believes that the virus itself was man-made – and that presents its own set of challenges'.
Both the FBI and US Department of Energy have said they believe a lab leak is the most likely cause of the disease. UK ministers are facing calls to widen the Covid Inquiry to include an investigation into the origins.
A UK Government spokesman said: 'There are questions that need to be answered about the origin of Covid-19, not least so we can ensure we are better prepared for future pandemics.
'The UK supports the World Health Organisation in its study of the origins. It is important China and other countries co-operate fully.'
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Thousands Demonstrate Against the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty in Japan
While dozens of U.S. senators representing the entire Senate Republican Conference called on the Biden administration to reject the World Health Organization (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR) treaty, few Americans actually went to the level of protest. That was different in Japan last month, when protestors took to the streets. On April 13, 2024, thousands of demonstrators assembled across Japan to voice their opposition to the proposed pandemic treaty by the WHO’s IHR.
The protest which spanned the streets of Ikebukuro, Tokyo, to the Higashi-Ikebukuro Central Park, reflected growing concern that infectious diseases and public health are becoming tools used to justify the adaptation of an overly controlling surveillance system for governments. The demonstrators in Japan also expressed concerns over health officials overstepping their boundaries, plus their ties to multinational pharmaceutical companies. This reflects a growing sense of disenfranchisement.
TrialSite previously reported on the 7th meeting of the WHO Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) that took place between November 6 and December 6, 2023, in a bid to fine-tune the proposed pandemic treaty.
The INB recently held its 8th and 9th INB meetings between February and March 2024. The final result of this treaty is yet to be decided as the INB plans to converge one last time from April 29 to May 10, 2024, to resume its negotiations on finalizing the pandemic treaty. However, some individuals supporting the demonstration in Japan have claimed that Japanese lawmakers are uninformed about the details of their country's proposal to the WHO regarding the pandemic treaty and revisions to the IHR. They emphasize the perceived lack of transparency in the process and have voiced these concerns.
How it began
The protests began on the streets of Tokyo, Japan, and were fueled by concerns raised by civil vaccine critic groups. As details of the treaty emerged, these groups sounded alarms over potential threats to Japanese sovereignty. Some individuals who addressed the crowd during the pre-demonstration include Toshie Ikeda, a member of the Hino City Council. Speakers including Professor Masayasu Inoue, a Professor Emeritus of Osaka City University Medical School and Chikatsu Hayashi, a modern history researcher, addressed the crowd before the demonstration. Their talks explored the relationship between global health organizations and the pharmaceutical industry. Inoue expressed concern about weaponizing health information in a way he likened to “a third world war.”
Professor Inoue called for public resistance to the introduction of genetic vaccines. He also alleged that the WHO receives funding from pharmaceutical companies and private foundations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Hayashi, in his address, emphasized the importance of taking a proactive stance against what he perceived as potential threats to individual freedoms, using the metaphorical term “stopping the third atomic bomb with our hands.”
What were the protesters calling for?
Some demonstrators demanded that the government inform the public about the pandemic treaty and IHR, stating that they wouldn’t agree to the WHO holding people as what they perceived to be “health hostages.” They added that they won’t tolerate all policies that ignore vaccine damage. These protesters alleged that the Health Minister, Keizo Takemi, was guiding the medical association to a “history of vaccines.”
Aside from the transparency concerns by the Japanese people, these demonstrators also raised concerns about two key issues: a reported rise in excess mortality and the need for more transparency regarding the side effects of vaccines. The organizers aimed to have about 100,000 protesters present for this rally. They rallied against the use of genetic vaccines for influenza and also the development of what they termed “dangerous replicon vaccines.”
Effects of the vaccines in Japan
As in many other countries, there are conflicting views on the effects of the vaccines in Japan. Did the COVID-19 vaccines fulfill their intended purpose of safeguarding public health or cause more harmful effects than beneficial ones? A 2023 study published in Nature evaluated the effect of the COVID-19 vaccines in Japan in 2021. It asserts that the COVID-19 vaccination program was effective, reducing the death rates by 97%, compared to what they could have been without the vaccines. The study also revealed that the timing of opening up vaccination to a wider population and those who received it played a significant role in reducing the disease burden.
However, some studies have shown that COVID-19 vaccines increased the risks for myocarditis and pericarditis in adolescent and young adult males. In October 2022, TrialSite reported a study on vaccine safety that showed that the COVID-19 vaccines increased myocarditis risks by four times. An opinion piece on TrialSite also reported a study on the death of a 14-year-old Japanese girl post-vaccination. The researchers attributed her death to myocarditis and pericarditis.
A cause for alarm?
The protests in Japan against the WHO's proposed pandemic treaty and the IHR reveal a growing concern and distrust among certain groups regarding the influence of global health organizations and their perceived ties with the pharma industries. The demonstrators' demands for transparency raise questions about the decision-making processes involved in the treaty negotiations.
The recent move by the entire Senate Republican Conference called for the Biden administration to withdraw its support for the two international agreements on the table at World Health Assembly seeking greater authority for what is perceived as a dysfunctional and even captured WHO.
While the intentions behind the pandemic treaty and IHR may be rooted in a desire to improve global preparedness and response to future health emergencies, the government cannot easily dismiss the concerns expressed by street level protests in Japan either. The perception that these health regulations can threaten individual freedoms and national sovereignty needs to be addressed.
Regarding the effects of vaccines, studies have shown high efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines in reducing mortality rates. However, reports of increased risks of myocarditis and pericarditis among certain age groups cannot be ignored.
As the negotiations for the pandemic treaty and IHR revisions continue, the officials involved may need to consider the voices of all stakeholders and concerned citizens.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Monday, May 06, 2024
Australia: Hundreds of patients died after catching COVID in Victorian hospitals, new data shows
When Dean's* father was rushed to hospital with a bad case of gastro in February, he assumed he'd be back on his feet in a few days.
Instead, he caught COVID, probably in the emergency department at the Monash Medical Centre, a major hospital in Melbourne's south-east. His 79-year-old dad became so unwell, so quickly, that Dean — who visited him in the infectious diseases ward wearing an N95 mask — was terrified he wouldn't survive.
"He was as sick as I'd ever seen him," said Dean, who was shocked that his father's COVID infection seemed to trigger symptoms of Huntington's Disease, a neurodegenerative condition he'd been diagnosed with many years earlier. "I'd say it was very touch-and-go. I've seen people with cancer a few days before they've died, and there was a look in his eye and he was completely emaciated. He couldn't speak, couldn't communicate — he was just croaking."
Dean was also shocked that most of the hospital staff were wearing surgical masks, some on their chin. It bothered him, he said, because surgical masks are much less effective at preventing COVID transmission than N95 respirators. "No one seemed to give a hoot about protecting themselves or the patients," he said. "From what I know about COVID, I believe all the staff in an infectious diseases ward should be wearing respirators … the fact that it is not standard is just bamboozling."
But perhaps he shouldn't have been so surprised. For months doctors and public health experts have been warning that too many patients are catching COVID in Australian hospitals with sometimes devastating consequences — though timely statistics are difficult to access because health departments do not publish them.
Now, new data shows thousands of patients caught COVID in Victorian public hospitals in the past two years — and hundreds died — fuelling concerns that hospitals are not taking strong enough precautions against airborne viruses, and calls for stronger leadership from the Department of Health.
Almost one in 10 patients who caught COVID in hospital died
Documents obtained by ABC News under Freedom of Information laws reveal at least 6,212 patients caught COVID in hospital in 24 months — 3,890 in 2022 and 2,322 in 2023. Of those, 586 died — almost six per week, on average — with men dying at a higher rate than women (11 per cent vs 8 per cent).
Though hospital-acquired infections and deaths declined in 2023 — in line with COVID mortality trends in the broader community — the proportion of patients who died after catching the virus in hospital hardly budged, dropping from about 10 per cent in 2022 to about 9 per cent in 2023.
It comes following the release of new research that shows screening hospital patients for COVID and staff wearing N95 masks can substantially reduce infections and deaths, saving the health system potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in the long term. Experts say the findings should spark a paradigm shift in the way hospitals approach COVID infection prevention — that's if the latest indicators of illness and death don't.
Too many patients are catching COVID in hospitals, doctors say
Hospitals have become a strange new battleground in the fight against COVID, with doctors and public health experts concerned that too many patients are catching the virus — and an alarming number are dying — as a result of inadequate infection control.
"The numbers indicate that there is a big problem here — these infections and deaths are potentially preventable," said Associate Professor Suman Majumdar, chief health officer for COVID and health emergencies at the Burnet Institute. "We're talking about a specific setting where people are sicker, more vulnerable and more at risk. We need to drastically reduce the risk of people catching COVID in hospital when they don't come in with it. I think we can all agree we can do better — that should be the starting point."
Alarmingly, the proportion of hospitalised COVID patients who caught the virus in public hospitals was much higher last year than in 2022 — up from 13 per cent to 20 per cent, on average — coinciding with a reduction in COVID screening and healthcare worker mask use across the state. Most Victorian hospitals began scaling back infection prevention measures in late 2022, when pandemic public health orders were revoked.
Now, because hospitals determine their own COVID policies, there is wide variation in how they approach the issue. For instance, in the past fortnight several health services — including St Vincent's in Melbourne and Barwon Health — announced they were no longer requiring staff to wear masks in clinical areas because community transmission had fallen (the latest available data shows it's increasing). Others dropped masking and scaled back testing months ago, while some still insist on routine testing and surgical mask use in particular wards.
With golden staph, 'we aim for zero'
"There's no consistency between health services," said Stéphane Bouchoucha, president of the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control and associate professor in nursing at Deakin University. "And there doesn't seem to be leadership from the Department of Health, saying, 'We want to reduce COVID infections in healthcare, therefore … we need to do universal testing, we need to mandate N95 masks for healthcare workers'."
As for the number of people catching COVID in hospital, Dr Bouchoucha said: "I think any hospital acquired infection is concerning". There isn't an "acceptable" number of golden staph or tuberculosis infections — "we aim for zero", he said. "So why don't we do that with COVID?"
He's not the only one asking that question. Staphylococcus aureus or golden staph bloodstream infections can be life-threatening, which is why hospitals track and report them and aim to prevent them using hand hygiene strategies — it's part of hospital accreditation standards and there are targets in every state. But there are no targets or reporting requirements for COVID, Dr Majumdar said.
As a point of comparison, he said, there are about 600 staph aureus bacteraemia infections in Victoria each year, with a similar death rate to COVID hospital-acquired infections. "So why aren't we applying the same mindset and measures for airborne infections such as COVID and influenza?"
At the hospital level, there are several possible answers. Many health services, under huge financial pressure, have rolled back COVID mitigations to try and save money — sometimes against the advice of their own infection prevention leads. Many hospital executives also subscribe to the myth that COVID is "just a cold" and does not warrant taking serious action against, while others have acted on complaints that staff are "sick of wearing" masks.
"Many people are telling me they're tired of wearing masks and some patients are saying they're tired of seeing their carers in masks, as well," Professor Rhonda Stuart, director of public health and infection prevention at Monash Health, told staff at an employee forum in February.
Professor Stuart pointed to a UK study that found removing a surgical mask wearing policy in some hospital wards did not significantly affect the rate of nosocomial COVID infections, or those caught in hospital. "I think we're starting to see that possibly happening across Monash at the moment," she said — "that maybe masks aren't making the difference in hospital-acquired infections".
Testing and N95s save lives and money
But the findings of a new preprint study pose a serious challenge to that claim. For the study, researchers from the Burnet Institute and the Victorian Department of Health, which funded it, used a mathematical model to simulate outbreaks in a hospital with various combinations of interventions in place: different kinds of masks worn or admission testing performed.
They also calculated the statewide financial costs of each intervention — N95 vs surgical masks, PCR vs rapid antigen testing (RAT), and patient bed costs and staff absenteeism — as well as the health outcomes for infected patients.
How scientists are protecting themselves from COVID
Three of Australia's leading COVID-19 experts share their personal safety strategies and reflect on what must happen if we're to blunt the growing health crisis the pandemic is causing — and prepare for the next one.
The results were striking: compared to staff wearing surgical masks and not screening patients on admission, the combination of wearing N95 masks and testing patients using RATs was the cheapest, saving an estimated $78.4 million and preventing 1,543 deaths statewide per year. Staff wearing N95s and screening patients with PCR tests was the most effective option, saving $62.6 million and preventing 1,684 deaths per year.
In other words, testing and wearing N95s to detect and prevent COVID can save lives and money because it reduces the costs of keeping patients in hospital for longer and replacing furloughed staff.
"I think it provides a very persuasive rationale that doing small things to reduce infections can add up to big positive impacts and cost benefits," said Dr Majumdar, a co-author of the study. "It then becomes an issue of how practical it is for hospitals to implement these interventions and change behaviours. We know improving ventilation, testing and wearing masks has been effective during the pandemic, so I don't think there's an argument to say it's not feasible or not worth figuring out how to do."
The Victorian Department of Health did not respond directly to questions about whether it would be acting on the study's findings, or if it was comfortable with current rates of illness and death in hospitals. "Since the pandemic began we have assisted health services to respond to increased impacts of COVID-19 — a roadmap to guide hospital responses was introduced and has remained in place since June 2022," a Department spokesperson said. "Modelling is one of many tools used when developing and evaluating healthcare policy."
Managing 'masking fatigue'
But hospitals don't always follow that "roadmap". Associate Professor Caroline Marshall, head of the Royal Melbourne Hospital's Infection Prevention and Surveillance Service, said her hospital uses a "hierarchy of controls" to prevent COVID transmission — strategies honed in the grim early years of the pandemic when patients and staff were infected in dizzying numbers.
Today, every patient is screened for COVID on admission with a PCR test — which few hospitals still do. COVID patients are generally cared for in single-bed negative pressure rooms by staff in N95 masks. Air purifiers are stationed around the hospital, an old building with not-so-great ventilation.
"To me … any sort of nosocomial infection is a disaster," Dr Marshall said. "So we do our utmost and we're not always successful, but we do as much as we reasonably can [to prevent them] based on the evidence we have and the factors we have to take into account."
One of those factors is the impact of masking on healthcare workers, who Dr Marshall said are "sick of wearing" N95 respirators because they're uncomfortable. At the moment Royal Melbourne Hospital staff must wear surgical masks in clinical areas unless they're caring for COVID, transplant or haematology patients, when N95s are required.
The decision to use surgical masks is influenced by a few things, Dr Marshall said, including the prevalence of COVID in the community, the severity of circulating variants, population levels of immunity and a new tolerance for risk among staff. "If a staff member wants to wear one for whatever reason, they can," she said. "But I think the reality is, at a practical level, you cannot continue to get staff to wear N95 masks forever."
Other infection prevention control experts disagree. For Dr Bouchoucha, masking fatigue is a challenge to be "managed", not succumbed to — including because addressing healthcare workers' concerns about respirator use improves compliance and patient safety. "It's definitely something to take into account," he said. "But we can mitigate it."
Catching COVID made Ruby sick and derailed her care
Many patients feel similarly. When Ruby* caught COVID in hospital earlier this year, she was fully prepared to feel terrible for a few days — but she didn't expect it to completely derail the care she was there to receive.
Ruby was admitted to Upton House, the adult psychiatric unit at Box Hill Hospital, in late January after experiencing family violence and a decline in her mental health. When she tested positive to COVID a few days later, she wasn't surprised: other patients with COVID were allowed to roam freely through the ward without masks, she said, and staff were either in surgical masks — many "below their nose" — or no masks at all.
"It made me really sick," said Ruby, who suffered mostly from gastrointestinal symptoms, brain fog and low mood. "I was pissed off that I'd caught COVID but I didn't realise it would affect my care as much as it did, and I was really shocked at the drop-off in psychiatric support as soon as I had it."
The exterior sign of the Box Hill Hospital, underneath which a bush of white flowers blooms next to a concrete staircase.
Ruby wasn't surprised when she tested positive to COVID during her admission at Box Hill Hospital.(ABC News: Patrick Rocca)
A doctor who prescribed Ruby antivirals dramatically reduced her dose of psychiatric medication without consulting her, she said, which triggered unpleasant side effects. Having COVID also meant her psychiatrist visited her less frequently than he was supposed to, she said, and if she went to the nursing station to ask for paracetamol, she was instructed just to go back to her room. "I also wasn't allowed to go to the kitchen for meals and my food was generally brought to me an hour late, cold, without cutlery," she said. "So most of the time I didn't eat."
Ruby was relieved to be discharged even though she was "in limbo" psychiatrically — feeling much worse than when she arrived — and still testing positive to COVID. "I can't imagine how hard it is to work in a psychiatric unit," she said, adding that the nursing staff were clearly very busy. "But there was a total lack of empathy and then as soon as I had a medical problem [COVID], absolutely no attention or compassion. Something as simple as not being able to get any Panadol was almost traumatic — even though I was in there for more severe trauma issues."
Long COVID will take your health, your wealth — then it will come for your marriage
Long COVID is not just destroying people's health. Behind closed doors, in homes across Australia and abroad, it is irreversibly changing relationships — sometimes for the better, too often for worse.
A spokesperson for Eastern Health told ABC News they were unable to comment on Ruby's case but said if a COVID outbreak occurs, "additional measures are put in place including requirements to wear N95 masks, reduced movement and access to certain wards and clinical areas, increased hand hygiene, taking breaks outside and meeting virtually where possible."
Monash Health also would not address specific questions about Dean's father's admission. "Monash Health provides N95 and surgical masks as part of its infection prevention precautions to protect its patients, visitors and staff," a spokesperson said. "Monash Health cares for COVID-positive patients … in single rooms with negative pressure or negative flow, in addition to requiring staff and visitors to wear appropriate PPE including N95 masks."
At least that's not what Dean observed. He's still upset that the hospital didn't alert him when his father tested positive to COVID, and that his dad blamed himself for catching it in the emergency department in the first place.
"In the whole time of his admission I only saw one staff member … wearing a respirator — I felt overdressed," Dean said. "I'm just horrified that vulnerable people go into a place where they expect to be safe and cared for but are given something that, in this case, potentially nearly kills them and there's no apology — not even acknowledgement."
ABC News requested interviews with infection prevention and control experts at Western Health, Barwon Health and Alfred Health — all declined.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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