Covid Studies 2022

 

Today's headline featured on the front page of the Connecticut Post, my local newspaper, read: “State lawmakers likely to extend mask rules.” An article followed indicating that the state legislature was about to approve the Governor’s mask mandates for another 60 days. 

 

Predictably the Governor, the legislators, and newspaper editors and writers are unaware of recent Covid scientific studies. Here is a list culled from recent articles I have read.

 

In a January 23 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Halperin, adjunct professor at the Gillings School of Gobal Public Health at the University of North Carolina noted the following studies.  

 

# 1: “A recent rigorous review by the University of Minnesota research group concludes: “we are well past the emergency phase of this pandemic, and it should be well-known by now that wearing cloth face coverings or surgical masks, universal or otherwise, has a very minor role to play….It is time to stop overselling their efficacy and unrealistic expectations about their ability to end the pandemic.

 

#2. The first large randomized community level study published last month in Science, found that while generic surgical masks provided a modest (about 10%) reduction in the risk of infection from Delta, cloth masks didn’t significantly reduce risk. Masks may be even less protective against an extremely contagious variant like Omicron….

 

Omicron doesn’t seriously threaten the vast majority of children; preliminary evidence  suggests much less risk for youth than from Delta. An increasing number of public-health experts…have called for ending school mask mandates soon.

 

#3. While a new CDC study finds that boosters substantially reduce the risk of infection as well as hospitalization from Omicron, countries like the U.K. and Israel that had widespread booster coverage before Omicron struck have also seen unprecedented surges in cases…. 

 

#4. The European Medicines Agency recently cautioned that repeated boosters may weaken the immune system over time.

 

#5. A recent Southern California study looked at more than 50,000 patients infected with the new variant. Not one required mechanical ventilation and only one died, compared with 14 deaths and 11 ventilations out of some 12,000 infected by the Delta variant during the same period….

 

#6. Health and Human Services Department data indicate the total number of patients in U.S. hospitals has hardly budged over the past six months….

 

#7. Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics  and Evaluation estimates in the Lancet that the number of Omicron deaths “seems to be similar in most countries to the level of a bad influenza season in northern hemisphere countries.”

 

In another op-ed published In the Wall Street Journal on 1/27/2022, Marty Makary, a Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine mentioned some other studies, including one conducted by himself and colleagues at Johns Hopkins. 

 

#1. Finally, last week the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination….

 

#2. The National Institute of Health repeatedly has dismissed  natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people, who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity from prior infection reduced the risk of infection  with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.

 

To summarize. The wearing of masks has been largely ineffective in stopping Covid in its various forms. Even Dr. Fauci admitted as much when he advised people to wear two masks. Moreover, as has been pointed out on this blog many times, most people from the President on down handle and wear them improperly. Just look at basketball coaches wearing their masks on their chin when they yell at their players. The wearing of masks has become a superstition designed to ward off evil spirits.

 

If we really want to follow the science, we might also conclude that Omicron is a blessing in disguise. Many of my family members had the Omicron virus over the holidays and they all survived with only cold or flu like symptoms. The latest science now  indicates that they will now be immune not only to Omicron but to other viruses in the future.

 

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Hall of Shame 2021

  

        

We are in the award season. There are the Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes and others where entertainment people appear dressed to the nines to pat each other on the back. Major League Baseball has just conducted its annual voting for its Hall of Fame. Time Magazine has recently named Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, as its 2021 Person of the Year.  

Since 2014, The Weekly Bystander has been nominating  qualified candidates for the  “Bystander Hall of Shame.” As usual there can be many nominees for 2021. New York seems to be a spawning ground for nominees starting with disgraced  former governor Andrew Cuomo, and his brother Chris Cuomo who lost his coveted post at CNN for ethics violations, both personal and journalistic.  Of course, former NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio has finally departed with the reputation as the worst mayor ever to serve in the Big Apple. 

But why bother with nominations when the clear winner for 2021 is President Joe Biden whose first year in office has been truly shameful. Actually, Biden has practically nominated himself. You may recall that during the 2020 Presidential debates he blamed President Trump for the Covid deaths of over 200,000 people, and insisted that “anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” 

 

A few weeks ago an editorial in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that there have been over 400,000 Covid related deaths during the first year of the Biden administration. Nevertheless, the President refuses to remove himself from office.

I am not blaming President Biden for the Covid deaths during his administration but his induction into the Hall of  Shame is due to his blaming others, and then not taking any responsibility himself. 

Just as shameful is his consistent refusal to give former President Donald Trump any credit for the development of the vaccines that he now believes should be mandated for every American.   It is as if Operation Warp Speed never existed. 

 

A few days ago he put the icing on the cake by claiming that dealing with the pandemic was not a matter for the Federal government but should be left to the states.

 

Blaming President Trump for Covid deaths will go down as one of the most shameful deeds  not only in Joe Biden’s long career, but also in the history of the USA. He could have gone a long way to heal the Nation’s divisions by awarding former President Trump and Vice-President  Mike Pence the Presidential Medal of Honor for their efforts in promoting the speedy development of the vaccines.

 

At a rare press conference yesterday, President Biden claimed that he had accomplished more in his first year in office than any other President in history. This rank hyperbole can only be viewed as a shameful attempt to cover a variety of misdeeds that would have led Democrats to impeach President Trump over and over again.

 

Who can forget the chaotic manner in which our troops withdrew from Afghanistan? Who can overlook the chaos on our southern border that Vice-President Kamala Harris was supposed to take care of? Policy mistakes and failures are not necessarily shameful, but failing to acknowledge that inflation exists or that the government has anything to do with it is shameful. President Biden wants to tax the rich, but inflation is a cruel tax on everyone, rich and poor.

 

Finally, President Biden came into office last year after winning a narrow victory in a hotly contested election. His party had a slim margin in the House of Representatives, and a 50/50 Senate.  He claimed that he wanted to heal and unify the Nation but then went on not to court the opposition but to vilify his opponents. Senator Mitch Mc Connell said after President’s Biden’s recent speech in Georgia that he did not recognize the man he had longed worked with in the Senate. It is hard to say whether the President’s failure to seek compromise is his fault or the fault of his handlers, but it is a shameful departure from the long course of  American politics.

 

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Ukraine Again

 

                                             

In March 2014 during the Administration of President Obama I wrote the following post on the Ukraine. Of course, I did not know how deeply then Vice-President Biden and his son were involved in the Ukraine. Nor could I have imagined how two years later a "Russian Collusion Hoax" that originated in the Presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, would dominate the news throughout the term of President Trump, and prevent him from making any progress with Russia. Nevertheless, much of what I wrote is still relevant in the current crisis in the Ukraine. 

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I still remember playing the game of “Risk” as a child more than 60 years ago. It was, and still is, a popular board game where the object was to conquer the world. It could be played by two or more combatants who initially drew cards containing the names of different countries or regions. Players would plant one of their armies on each country they had picked and then would proceed to attack neighboring countries by rolling dice.

Success with the dice was important but it was still a game of strategy. You could be cautious or daring and each strategy had its risks. It seemed to me at the time that it was better to control small areas, protect your home base, and marshal your forces together rather than spreading yourself too thin over the whole board.

Russia, for example, was so large that it was divided up into a number of regions with strange sounding names. Controlling that vast area was virtually impossible until you had gained an overwhelming superiority over your opponent. I distinctly remember that one of those regions was called Ukraine. It was completely land-locked and surrounded by a host of countries from which it could be easily attacked.

Today, I find it hard to believe that the Wall Street Journal, my favorite newspaper, is beating the drums for a very aggressive US posture on the Ukraine. It seems that not a day goes by without an editorial or an op-ed calling for the US to get involved in the Ukraine.  What kind of madness is this? The Ukraine is a next-door neighbor to Russia and we are about 6000 miles away. The Ukraine became an independent country with the break up of the Soviet Union only a short time ago.  Historically, it has always been dominated by its powerful neighbor to the East. 

Nevertheless, ever since it became an independent republic NATO and the European Union have been trying to incorporate the Ukraine into their orbit for what reason I cannot say. Both we and the Europeans have been thumbing their noses at the Russians and literally forcing them to take action. The Wall Street Journal always applauds when two companies bid against each other to acquire another company. Yet, when Russia outbid the Europeans for the Ukraine and its assets, the Journal cried foul. 

Now, the Journal and others demonize Vladimir Putin and call him a dictator. Yet since when have we opposed dictators, even those near our doorstep? We have allowed a brutal dictatorship in Cuba for over 60 years, and we will do nothing to topple the one that has ruled and ruined Venezuela for over a decade. We support practically every dictator on the continent of Africa.

Despite media attacks on Putin it would appear that both Russians and Ukrainians today enjoy a greater degree of freedom than at any time over the past 100 years. Recently former chess champion and political commentator Gary Kasparov wrote that the way to punish Putin was to threaten the investments of Russian millionaires in the West. Wealthy Russians did not buy luxury homes in New York and San Francisco during the Stalinist era. 

In another recent Journal op-ed Matthew Kaminski argued that the recent revolution in the Ukraine created an environment that was an embarrassment to the Russian dictator. He mentioned new Ukrainian leaders who wait on line like everyone else at airports, who take the subway to work, or who stand in line in the government cafeteria. Kaminski contrasted such leaders with those in repressive Russia, but when he returns home from Kiev, he will be hard pressed to find any American politicians flying economy or taking the subway to work. Is President Obama a dictator because he flies in luxury aboard Air Force One? I doubt if ultra liberal mayor Di Blasio takes the subway to work each day.

At about the same time I was playing “Risk” as a boy President Eisenhower warned against the military industrial complex in this Nation and also argued that this country should never get involved in a land war on the continent of Asia. We have repeatedly ignored this advice to our great harm. Now we are sending planes and war ships into Lithuania and the Baltic Sea right into Russia’s front yard.  This could be far more serious than the mess we have created in Afghanistan where all we had to deal with was neighboring Pakistan.

We cannot and should not be the world’s policeman. When we have tried we have often done more harm than good. We deposed a dictator in Iraq but does anyone know how many Iraqi lives were lost in the process? You could even argue that despite their obvious political differences, our last two Presidents have de-stabilized the entire Middle East. Do we want to do the same in the great borderland between Europe and Asia?  After all, what is NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, doing in the Ukraine? Any child looking at a “Risk” board would see that the Ukraine is far from the North Atlantic.

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Nature's Vaccine

Did you know that there could be a trillion coronaviruses in one saliva droplet? That’s 1,000,000,000,000 viruses in just one droplet. Not only does the number of these infinitesimally tiny viruses boggle the imagination, but also, they are continually reproducing and mutating. 

 

Considering the size of the microscopic virus, its journey across six feet from one human being to another is equivalent to a human space flight not just to the edge of the solar system, or even the edge of our galaxy, but to the very extremity of the universe. Moreover, the journey is filled with many dangers such as the ultraviolet rays of the sun.

 

The journey is so long and so dangerous that it requires human assistance. We enable the virus by constantly touching our noses and mouths and introducing the invading army into our bodies. Masks could help in this regard but since most of us use them improperly, they have obviously not stopped the virus.

 

Thank goodness we have an immune system that immediately springs into action when it detects the invading horde. Our mouths and nasal passages are full of warrior cells and bacteria without whose protection we would have long ago become extinct. 

 

When the coronavirus enters our system, the battle begins. Like any war it can cause great damage while it is waging. What we call symptoms--sniffles, coughing, fever, and fatigue-- are the results of the battle. We know by now that 99% of the time our immune system wins the battle. *

 

We also know that most of those who have died have been elderly. Some have suggested that our immune systems get weaker with age, but others have suggested that they get stronger after a lifetime of fighting various diseases, and that they produce an overly aggressive response to the invader that leads to inflammation, pneumonia, and death.

 

Last year I read an article that claimed that our immune system does not get weaker or stronger with age, but a factor that mitigates or controls the immune reaction does get weaker with age. It’s as if to prevent a Russian threat to the Ukraine, we launch a preventative nuclear strike.

 

Some scientists have argued that controlling the inflammatory response of our immune system against the virus is the way to handle the pandemic. Vaccines do not prevent us from getting infected but are designed as a kind of early warning system for the immune system, and thus prevent a deadly overreaction. **

 

In the opinion of my scientific advisor, a master biologist, the Omicron variant might be a blessing in disguise with the potential to be much more effective than any vaccine or booster. He had this to say in a recent email exchange in which he calls it "Nature's Vaccine."

 

The vaccines are RNA based which cause us to produce a protein (Spike Protein) which the Covid virus uses to attach to our cells.  However, a slight change in the spike protein due to a virus mutation could render the vaccine useless as we are seeing with Omicron.  I call Omicron "nature's vaccine" because our immune system will mount a response not only to the spike protein but to other vulnerable parts of the virus. This should produce long lasting immunity not only to Omicron but to similar Covid viruses.  So far, baring comorbidities, the Omicron seems to be mild, in fact, probably even milder than the booster vaccine!  It is more contagious and therefore probably will lead to herd immunity.  I do not buy the idea that the reason Omicron is milder is due to the fact that people have been vaccinated. To me, it is milder as the virus is going through evolution where it wants to remain "alive" and the best way to do that is not to kill its host.

Viruses have been manipulating human as well as all of the other organisms' DNA since life began on this planet. This manipulation has fostered the evolution of life on the  planet. Who knows? Covid-19 survivors and their offspring may now possess protection against an even more potentially lethal, future virus. Also, humans have over 140,000 different varieties of viruses living in our digestive system whose main purpose is to control the bacterial population of our digestive system which in turn is vital for well-being. We could not possibly survive or evolve without viruses.

 

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*Note: As of January 1, 2022, there were over 55,000,000 reported case in the USA, and 847,041 deaths from Covid. Dividing deaths by cases leads to a survival rate of over 98%. However, most authorities agree that many cases have not been reported. Even though some estimates have been higher, if we just multiply the number of cases by 2, the survival rate is over 99%.

 

** Note: See the call for “focused protection” in the Great Barrington Declaration by a team of scientists and medical professionals that has drawn support from all over the world. Focused protection means concentrating on treating those most at risk, and not trying to keep the young and healthy from merely getting sick with symptoms that are rarely more serious than flu or the common cold.