It's quite incredible the cognitive dissonance shown in this article. I couldn't help but hear the "vaccines are safe and effective" mantra spewing as I was reading the article.
1) These are NOT vaccines, as they do not resemble any previous vaccines in history. Calling them a vaccine is a red herring. Because people "know" vaccines are safe, and this is a vaccine, so it's got to be safe right? The right term is THERAPY, not vaccine.
2) VAERS data is up 100x (or more) the combined data for every other vaccine in history. I'm going to assume you'll chalk this up to "just a coincidence".
3) There's a not-so-surprising correlation between high vaccination rate and high case rate. The more a country has been vaccinated, the more cases it has had. That's because vaccination lowers your immune system making you far more prone to being infected.
4) Gee, I wonder how come you did not mention the fact, which is an outright scam, that to be put in the "vaccinated" pile you must have finished a full vaccination course (14 days). So if after the first does you die, you're still considered an "unvaccinated" death. You're going to tell me this is all fair and square, right?
And then we come to the final point: all said and done, the vaccine is supposed to make less people DIE, right? That's the end goal. Yet there's been MORE deaths WITH the vaccine, than WITHOUT, when comparing e.g 2020s to 2021. Excess mortality is through the roof. That can't possibly be the vaccine, correct? Which have a 95% efficacy rate? Ah sorry, it's 75%... Oops, actually 50%... actually, for Omicron is more like 35%.
Regarding Malone, I don't care what he says. The data is out there for all to see. I believe the earth is round no matter who tells me that information, because the source of the information does not change the fact. So get a grip...
There’s so much incorrect in this comment that I just don’t want to go over it point by point. What DO we agree on? “The data is out there for all to see.”
We agree on that. And yet you’re peddling absolutely false nonsense. It’s quite tiring.
you obviously graduated from the university of google. People with an actual science education like me go down your list and keep muttering wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Go play in the street and leave your betters alone.
To add to your 4th point, the Great Barrington Declaration group of multi-disciplinary experts state that the data is looking like you have a higher chance of catching COVID if vaccinated.
Likewise, there's a Canadian group of lawyers who published their concerns in their Free North Declaration - to try to make Canadians realize laws are being broken and due process isn't being followed.
(It's easy to find both declarations via searching for their names)
P.s. The only ultra-confident/arrogant person seems to be the author of this article, and where on the quick skim I did misrepresent and mischaracterize Dr. Malone's stances; he doesn't claim to be the "one and only" inventor of mRNA technology - but he discovered the mechanism and had the first 10-11 patents related to it; people improve on inventions all the time, does that make them the inventor - maybe of specific techniques, but you're not innovating to develop techniques without knowing the foundational work. The irony too, that the author doesn't actually make links/citations to Dr. Malone stating certain things; most hit pieces I've seen just link to other hit pieces that make non-direct source citations as well - an interesting strategy and sad state of affairs that society in general takes someone's word as fact without linking to evidence, so long as it fits with the [mainstream] narrative they've been indoctrinated with.
Yes! Also, I've been looking at the data coming out of the UK/Scotland from the last few weeks (links below). Why are their numbers showing that the majority of people in the hospital and dying from covid are "vaccinated," while all we hear about in the US is how the "unvaccinated" are overwhelming the hospitals--without any data to back that up? What is going on here?
Thanks for the link. It's interesting to note that her chart on the UK was based on data gathered from May through December 2021 (critical care admissions by vaccination status). The data coming out of the UK *now* (weekly) looks much different (see pages 39 - 41 of the UK report, link above). She also doesn't show Scotland's breakdown (see my links above). Also, thought you might be interested to see this recent large, peer-reviewed study that shows a 44% reduction in infection when Ivermectin in used prophylactically: https://www.cureus.com/articles/82162-ivermectin-prophylaxis-used-for-covid-19-a-citywide-prospective-observational-study-of-223128-subjects-using-propensity-score-matching
So you're saying that the data coming out of the UK now (and how new is it, like Jan 1 - when? today?) is vastly different from what happened from May-December 2021? I've found her stuff to be very trustworthy and accurate.
Re ivermectin as a prophylactic -- bad idea, but in any case, Cadeglani is doing some incredibly unethical work ("incredibly unethical" doesn't begin to describe it) and he shouldn't be giving any medications to any patients at all. Apparently anything goes in Brazil. https://forbetterscience.com/2021/07/21/frontiers-in-homicidal-quackery/
Part of your criticism about Malone having baited the public with his own version of fear porn is based on his criticism of the Federal govt “pulling all of the regular monoclonals”. You go on to describe how this began on Dec. 29 and was retracted on Dec. 31, but Malone's statement took place on Dec. 30, and his criticism was fairly described at the time. In all fairness, it is your criticism of his criticism that is taken out of context.
And yet, if the decision was made on Dec 29, and he was speaking on Dec. 30, fully knowing that people were pushing back against it, and discussions were being had, there was NO need to portray this as a reason to panic, right? There was NO reason to imply that people weren't getting needed medicines and this was some kind of evil, manufactured crisis right? The medicines were still on the shelves one day later. And the very next day common sense prevailed and the decision was reversed.
He spun this up, he used it as an occasion to scare people, when that was completely not called for.
Rogan: "So are you saying, are you implying that perhaps one of the reasons why they're removing monoclonal antibodies is to enhance the amount of people that are sick?"
Malone: "I'm saying it is in the spectrum of the range of possible just the same as the withholding of early treatments is inexplicable."
That is so completely not called for, unless your goal is to scare and mislead people.
I can easily imagine a reputable, measured scientist being interviewed by Rogan saying, "I have concerns with the recent decision to pause shipments of certain monoclonal antibodies. I think it's misguided and a bad call. Certain mAbs don't help against omicron, but there are a lot of patients with delta who _can_ benefit from those treatments. There's been some pushback, though, like from Governor DeSantis, so hopefully this decision will be reversed soon." She could also tell listeners whom to contact, and how, to register their concern and apply pressure.
So much for the decision being reversed as you asserted. They have now pulled the EUA on the two monoclonal antibodies, while 1/4 of cases in Illinois are still susceptible to these products and the only remaining monoclonal AB is in such short demand that no one will receive it and these were the only early treatment protocols available at all to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death. So when Dr. Malone decries this action by the regulatory bodies, as he did when it was only being considered, will you once again criticize him for being too early, or for having waited too long.
Your statement just above also states that his assertion that "in the spectrum of the range of possible just the same as the withholding of early treatments is inexplicable" is to scare or mislead people. People should be scared when the only early treatment protocol being permitted is removed from the board because some people will become more ill without these products than they would have with them. And as we can see, he wasn't misleading people as you asserted when he warned of these products being removed from ready access, but rather, it would seem, you were misleading people that these products were not going to be removed from ready access.
If "they" have done this, is it because they want to kill people, as Malone would have you believe, or is it because a month ago De Santis had a decent point that we still had a lot of delta patients (who could benefit from those drugs) and now that another month has gone by more than 99% of our cases are omicron, and everyone agrees that those drugs are ineffective against omicron, so it makes sense to put a stop to those drugs for now (until such time as a variant appears that they work against)?
In other words, decisions change when conditions change. No one is trying to kill you, but Malone has still got you in the grasp of his scary false reality.
Everyone agrees? Really? When 1/4 of cases in Illinois alone are still Delta? I suspect that the objections of Malone, McCullough,, Kory and others would suggest your assertion of unanimous support to withdraw the monoclonals as transparently false.
Mismanagement of the virus response has led to the 2021 number of deaths to be increased over 2020 and it is not fear porn to suggest that such mismanagement costs lives. Malone's statement simply states that it is inexplicable as to why they would not treat the ill when they need treatment. It is a fair point regardless of your dislike of the man.
If a quarter of the cases in Illinois are still delta, I hope their governor will protest, as DeSantis did a month ago and got a swift reversal.
People make dumb decisions all the time. I’m simply suggesting that the government is not trying to kill anyone, as Malone keeps implying, insisting and fear mongering (see that ridiculous recent Rumble video he did. Lies from start to finish.
I think the government’s pandemic response has been atrocious. Atrocious!! I am no fan of our government’s handling. I will say, though, that they are not deliberately keeping antibodies from sick and dying people. Why would they?
I am no fan of the government’s response, but I’m even less of a fan of that con man who is riling people up in the exact wrong direction.
Malone was far more careful in his language in the beginning of his protest against the covid response. The mass formation psychosis and “they” talk all started more recently. Sorry I couldn’t get through your whole article as it reads like an Atlantic hit piece. I did try. Best of luck to you.
Thanks! Yeah it’s pretty long. And thanks for stopping by and sharing your perceptions of an earlier, saner Malone. That’s interesting. He seemed kind of wacky the first time I heard him speak too, but maybe I caught him too late. I think it was on Bret’s podcast (before I couldn’t take the covid craziness anymore and stopped watching Bret, even though he seems like a decent human being).
Agreed. I've been happy to see Dr. Malone's development in this regard: speaking more passionately (less "like a scientist") about the handling of the covid debacle. I imagine that would happen to a person whose life's work and character have been denigrated and smeared, just like this author attempts to do.
He’s apparently very good at what he does (manipulating people and being persuasive with emotional appeals). Why should he mess with a winning formula?
If I got three shots, I'd probably excuse myself by crying too. Lancet and BMJ are the good guys and incorruptible. You probably haven't read about any of their botched studies.
The vaccine cheerleaders were apparently so eager for such a report that they didn't notice that it was brought to them by a completely meaningless study. But even this is not unprecedented. For example, remember Donald Trump recommending hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a cure for COVID? Everyone laughed at him and the media around the world printed articles to the point of exhaustion about what a delusional man he is. There was a great demand among progressives of all countries for the result that "HCQ doesn't work". Lo and behold, a few weeks later, an article did indeed appear in the prestigious Lancet showing, in a huge multicentre study (almost 100,000 patients!), that HCQ not only doesn't work, but actually increases the likelihood of heart problems. The article hit the "political-academic demand" perfectly. The results went around the world, many HCQ studies were immediately stopped on the basis of it, and the authors of the Lancet study became global celebrities.
A few weeks later, however, the paper was quietly retracted because it was found to be a colossal fraud. In the meantime, quite a bit of evidence has indeed been bought that HCQ is not a miracle cure for COVID, but the falsified articles have at least slowed down and invalidated the research.
A few weeks later, however, the article was quietly retracted because it was found to be a colossal fraud. In the meantime, quite a bit of evidence has been accumulated that HCQ is not a miracle cure for COVID, but the falsified articles have minimally slowed and invalidated the research.
I point out that sooner or later, our high tolerance for fraud in science is going to come back to bite us and kill a lot of people. That the US CDC of all places would be drowning in the murky waters of "fake science", however, is something I wouldn't dream of.
One of the dumbest long things I’ve ever read, and couched in some of the loftiest, most condescending language I’ve run into recently.
The heart of your your case boils down to: Malone doesn’t act like a scientist or doctor. Whew, I find that devastatingly convincing. Not.
Even so: Are you not aware that among scientists and doctors flashing credentials is as common as shaking hands? “How seriously should I take you?” is a question they’re forever implicitly testing each other with, and are responding to.
Also: how can you be unaware of how common powerful egos (to the point of arrogance) are among the science-and-medicine crowd? Once you remove these people from their faculty-club debate settings and get a drink or two in them, you’d be amazed by what comes out of them. As someone who’s known and interviewed a fair number of scientists and doctors, I find that Malone’s informality, frankness, directness and self-confidence don’t set off alarm bells in me. On the contrary, they inspire confidence in me. In fact, I find him, by comparison to most scientists and medical persons, remarkably un-arrogant. Could be wrong, of course. But still: tastes in manner and tone of voice will differ, of course, but so much in any case for the first half of your piece.
As for your beefs with Malone on a few matters of fact, I suggest you get a little more familiar than you apparently are with the dissident position on a lot of these questions. There are thousands of doctors and scientists (not to mention sensible, bright people generally) who are on the Malone side of these debates. Many have found ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine helpful, for instance. Many others have found the establishment response to the COVID crisis to be peculiar, bizarre and even sinister. Fwiw, I’m a retired researcher and reporter, and in this case my own alarm bells have been set off by Fauci, Daszak and the CDC a lot more often than they have been by the likes of Dr. Malone.
No idea why you felt the need to expend such time and energy defending the establishment position here, come to think of it. Aren’t you aware that the establishment already has a lot of people on their payroll doing p-r for them?
Re something so basic as "Many have found ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine helpful, for instance."
Yes, and many people have found homeopathy and religion helpful too, but neither of those things will cure your viral disease.
There are research studies. There are data and meta-analyses. You can read those, or you can just use common sense and ask yourself why, if it's pure evil, if it's true that "they" are keeping HCQ and IVM from the public, why is it not also true that "they" stop people from being prescribed dexamethasone? Common sense.
So, you can either debunk him through actually reading and understanding research, or you can debunk him through basic common sense, but you can't defend him by saying "Some people are helped by those drugs, though" when that doesn't match the data.
As the old saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.
That's not how reality works.
Fauci, Daszak and the CDC share plenty of blame. Notice what I'm not saying. I'm not saying "Listen to Fauci, Daszak and the CDC."
I'm saying listen to scientists -- real scientists, doing real science -- who are not part of the politicized public narrative.
I'm saying look at the actual data, some of which I provided you via links.
I'm saying, and this is a critical point: the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
I'm saying it can be a completely true statement that Fauci, Daszak and the CDC suck.
But also: It's not necessarily true that every guy who tells you "Fauci, Daszak and the CDC suck" (1) has your best interests at heart or (2) is a truth-teller with regard to other matters.
Sometimes, the person who agrees with you, who wants to make it "you and me, we're this special little club who understand the Truth, we're the ones with special knowledge and insight, it's us against the evil evil world, maaaaan" is a con man and a liar.
No one needs to be part of a special little group to get it right. You just need the time to read and evaluate information. If people don't have the particular background to read and evaluate certain types of information, there's no shame in that, because none of us knows everything. But if people "know what they don't know," they can be a bit more vigilant in protecting themselves against con men and their manipulative language, which is why I bothered with all that stuff. Not everyone can (or wants to) evaluate the medical literature. But everyone can be alert to emotional manipulation and recognize when they're being played.
Ah, 21, I'm afraid pushing back against misinfo is a sisyphean task, as so many of the comments here show.
But then you yourself dispense some of your own, with your 99% confidence level in the lab-leak hypothesis.
Your arguments for lab-leak remind me of Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, which I read as a teenager and was totally convinced by. The pyramids couldn't possibly have been built by people with method X or Y or Z, therefore space aliens must have helped!
The 99%, you will recall, is not something I promoted in my article as Truth. Had I done that, I would have had to provide evidence for how I came to that number. That "99%" was me responding, directly to your question, about what my gut feeling was based on the available evidence and my understanding of it. I don't understand how anyone can look at the genome and say anything other than the furin cleavage site was inserted. People did that. In a lab. Very little doubt. Almost no doubt.
There's just no rational way to explain it otherwise, given the information we have.
Is it possible that Hamlet could have been written in the context of an an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters? Yes, it's possible.
Is it possible that you will roll a die right now and get 10 sixes in a row? Yes it's possible, but on average that will take you more than 15 years of continuous rolling to accomplish (where you must complete each set of ten rolls, and where each roll takes 1 sec, and yes that's a very rough estimate).
Is it possible those 12 base pairs (4 amino acids) are all neatly naturally inserted into the genome and _with no mutations on either side_? Yes it is possible, but...extremely unlikely. Everyone can intuit how unlikely a monkey typing Hamlet is, or rolling 10 sixes in a row. It's harder to intuit how unlikely that furin cleavage site is. It's not "just a mutation and mutations happen all the time." Similarly, Hamlet isn't written when "the monkey just typed a Q, and monkeys hit typewriter keys all the time" and 10 sixes in a row are not in the same ballpark as "I rolled a six on my first try and people roll sixes all the time, so ten in a row probably won't take that long." It's not in the same ballpark.
If you ask me, who wrote Hamlet, a guy or a monkey, I'd tell you: Based on my existing imperfect knowledge of the world, a guy wrote it. I wasn't there. I didn't see him write it. There's no video. There's no hard drive with time stamps. MAYBE a monkey wrote it. Extremely unlikely.
Maybe a furin cleavage site just appeared fully formed. Extremely unlikely.
If you want to explain the genome to me in such a way that a natural origin makes enough sense to merit more than a 1% degree of likelihood, I'm open to hearing it.
I don't have the expertise to estimate the probability that "a furin cleavage site just appeared fully formed", and I don't believe you do either; perhaps no one does. In the metaphor, it depends on how many monkeys with typewriters are out there typing. Each covid-infected person carries an estimated one to one hundred billion virus particles; that's a lot of monkeys typing. In evolution theory, the question of how "organs of extreme perfection" (like eyes) evolved goes back to Darwin. And the accepted answer is that, while it was extremely unlikely, there were enough rolls of the dice for it to have happened. So just saying the probability of a single event is very small is not enough; we also need to know how many of those events took place. And you have offered no estimate of that.
Some people have offered estimates of that, although they’re a little silly because it isn’t just a random mutation, it’s a large insertion. Most of those randomly mutated viruses would fail.
And it came bam out of nowhere, unlike Darwin, where there are intermediate life forms with cells that respond to light, creatures with eye-like things. We have no viral intermediates. It appeared on the scene adapted for humans and ready to party.
I don’t know _exactly_ how likely it is that the insertion just happened, correct. I know it is extremely, extremely unlikely. And I know that the lab had a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses in 2018. And then in 2019 a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site appeared in that city. It doesn’t take a genius.
For now, the battle between two theories rolls onward. As a friend said to me recently, “Why does it seem like we have to pick a side?” Both camps share a desire to understand the origins in order to prevent the emergence of the next pandemic. But, between them, there are some differences of emphasis.
The lab leakers tend to be more interested in biosecurity, transparency, and human hubris. They exhibit an admirable drive to follow the money, to upend centralized power, to overturn academic hierarchy, and to expose the injustices of oppressive governments. Some are China hawks. By and large, they have not done virus-hunting field or lab work.
On the natural-origin side, most people have done the kind of field and lab work that the W.I.V. pursued—and are regularly bowled over by nature’s endless diversity. They believe in scientific precedent, as opposed to uncertainties that have yet to be resolved. Many people in this camp have devoted their careers to conservation, biodiversity, and public health, and have been warning about a future pandemic for years. Spillovers most often happen because of land-use change, or human encroachment into previously wild places, which is happening on pretty much the entire planet, but particularly in areas that are developing rapidly, like south China and southeast Asia.
More than one virologist reminded me that nature is the best bioterrorist. It’s far more creative than humans are. With enough time, evolution is capable of anything we can imagine, and everything we can’t. “If you look at a platypus, you can very clearly realize that that’s not something somebody would have designed, right?” Andersen said. “Because it’s too absurd. It’s a bit of a disaster. But it works pretty well.” It occupies its own ecological niche. Some of the notable features of sars-CoV-2, Andersen said, make it “the platypus of coronaviruses.”
Still, humans have changed the equation. Calling viruses zoonotic obscures the role we play in their evolution, whether in the wilderness, a wet market, or a lab. What is an ecological niche when humans have their hands in everything? Nature’s staggering diversity includes human nature. Somehow, sars-CoV-2 found its ecological niche in us.
You ask: "if it's true that "they" are keeping HCQ and IVM from the public, why is it not also true that "they" stop people from being prescribed dexamethasone?" There's a good reason for this. Dexamethasone is used on very sick patients in hospital; it doesn't compete with the vaccines. HCQ and IVM work best for prophylaxis or early stage use, so they are in closer competition with the vaccines.
If the whole point were some diabolical plot to manipulate people to take vaccines (by whom? For what purpose?), then the specter of more and more people dying in hospitals would be a great motivator.
The number of lives that have been saved with dexamethasone would be bad for the vaccine biz. “Oh if I get sick, I’ll probably be fine now with some cheap steroids. I’ll take my chances.”
The fact is, the version of “reality” that Malone is peddling is nonsensical on every level.
Also, dexamethasone is an established treatment for cytokine storm; it's not really a repurposing, it would be more difficult to argue against it. The "diabolical plot" does indeed seem to be to manipulate people to take vaccines, as a step towards vaxpasses and a China-style social credit system. There are all sorts of details that I think would be difficult to explain without that; the initial plans to vaccinate the vulnerable expanding step by step to the whole population (indeed at one point, the whole world!), the disparaging of natural immunity, WHO changing the international death certificate criteria only for COVID in a way that increased the number of recorded COVID deaths, the few African leaders who rejected inappropriate pandemic responses who then either died suddenly in hospital or were the target of foreign mercenaries (successful in Haiti, unsuccessful in Madagascar), the bizarre suggestion from the WHO that Europe should consider mandatory vaccinations, the heavy censorship, the relentless distorted media coverage that according to polls left people thinking that COVID had a fatality rate resembling smallpox or ebola. It can be easier to spot the authoritarianism in countries other than one's own; if you look at what's been happening in Russia, for example, they too have vaxpasses and vaccine mandates of various kinds all of which are deeply unpopular with the Russian people, it's not like the US where it's become a party political issue with a large constituency thinking it's just fine.
Let me rephrase then (and get more detailed, for those who are interested). Oncologists have often used dexamethasone to treat hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis; rheumatologists treat macrophage activation syndrome using methylprednisolone. So it was not thought desirable at first to treat a cytokine storm caused by a respiratory ***infection*** (versus a cancer, or an autoimmune condition) with a drug that decreases the immune response (as steroids do) because it might tend to create the risk of secondary infections.
So...yeah it needed to be researched. Whether you call that "repurposing" or not, well we can quibble. But the point stands: it was a cheap drug, used newly for covid, and it saved a bunch of lives, and the evil people at Big Pharma were not trying to stop anyone from using a cheap drug that saved lives.
I don't think anyone believes that covid has a fatality rate of ebola. You're talking about people who don't exist: setting up straw men. We give polio vaccines to all kids. Do you know how many kids are paralyzed with polio if they get polio? One in 200. Ho-hum, by your standards that would be not a big deal.
In my County approximately 1.5% of the known cases die of covid. So someone is three times as likely to die if they get covid, than they are likely to be paralyzed if they get polio.
Pre-omicron (and we know omicron is sending more kids to the hospital, not fewer), about as many kids had died annually of covid as died per year of measles before we introduced a measles vaccine.
So by any of the metrics and judgments we currently use for vaccinating against a disease and taking it seriously, covid is ***at least as*** dangerous to children, and ***much more dangerous*** to adults.
It doesn't need a fatality rate of ebola to be taken seriously.
Not a straw man: this international opinion poll https://www.kekstcnc.com/insights/covid-19-opinion-tracker-edition-4 consistently found average estimates of death rates two orders of magnitude higher than reality, after months of media coverage (p24 of the PDF). I'm not suggesting that COVID doesn't need to be taken seriously, just that the media coverage has been very misleading if it has left people with such a distorted view.
Ok, I definitely need to get writing today. I'll try to have my piece out by this weekend, and I will cite this piece. This is definitely a topic that interests me. I have a piece on my substack and another one coming in a few days, though neither are terribly interesting (the next one is a workplace advice column) just trying to start the habit.
The edgy stuff is catnip for some people. I see this with a bunch of other things: the keto diet, sports, identity politics. Constant posturing edginess instead of providing the evidence.
Great article btw, and anyone who disagrees is paid off, duh.
Kudos for writing a refutation of Malone's claims, rather than just yelling "misinformation" and calling for him to be shut down. I will leave it to others to argue whether or not the refutation is successful. It strikes me that the "pro/anti Malone/Fauci/vax" space is already pretty crowded (and pretty entrenched).
It seems to me that Team Mainstream has run afoul of Carl Sagan's observation that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. When you are turning people's lives upside down, you should be prepared to clearly explain why it must be done, and why there are no alternatives. Appeals to "a volatile, changing situation" do not inspire much confidence. And especially not when what actually happens turns out to be substantially different from what was predicted. Public health officials should look in the mirror if they wonder why people like Malone can claim a large audience. If he is selling "bullshit" and people are buying, it is a failure of the public health establishment.
I look forward to more commentary on our society, where we are, how we got here, and where we are going.
Thanks Heyjude for your always thoughtful commentary! I appreciate your input!!
Re: “Public health officials should look in the mirror if they wonder why people like Malone can claim a large audience. If he is selling "bullshit" and people are buying, it is a failure of the public health establishment.”
💯💯💯
This is such an important point.
There is so much disdain in the mainstream for misinformation, so much effort to dismiss it or shut it down— and yet, if the mainstream’s messages were reasonable and compelling, they’d win the day, and there would be no need or even any temptation to shut anyone down.
I believe this so strongly that I also believe: anytime someone in power thinks that silencing or dismissing their critics is a good idea or an effective solution, they should stop and ask themselves:
“In what ways am I failing horribly, and how can I do better?”
I was in the biomed research business for 25 years, and the comms/messaging really is terrible. But the main reason for that is the media: a recent PhD or even a grad student could tell the (not very bright) news anchors what's wrong with the misinformation, but a) it would take 20 minutes, and b) they want the big famous names, not the post-doc who has the time to invest in a detailed debunking.
Fauci & Wallensky have more important things to do, and frankly their disdain for this misinformation is entirely appropriate. Americans are almost as a rule utterly stupid, worthless morons.
I would agree with you, to a point, that a case can be made that "disdain is appropriate" -- and indeed, if we had reliable, trustworthy people in charge, who were also better communicators, they could simply say "don't listen to that guy -- what he says is trash" -- because to explain _why_ it's trash takes a very long time, especially to the lay public.
However, in a context where people rightly don't trust the people in charge, and in a context where most _don't_ have a science education (meaning that Robert Malone and his blah blah blah sounds as credible to them as a more reliable source of information), it's understandable that people think the leaders are being dishonest with them (true) and therefore, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- and they conclude that people are are nefariously picking on (or "trying to censor") their beloved and trusted Dr. Malone. Meanwhile Malone, for his part, does his best to frighten people and cause them to distrust anyone but himself and a few selected others, so he can scoop up people's blind trust for himself. It's quite a disgusting game.
So I understand your point -- I don't disagree that the media problem won't go away, either, for the reason you described, and I understand those barriers to communication -- and yet, here we are: People don't trust anything they hear, or they misplace their trust in someone who is being blatantly dishonest.
I wouldn't call Americans utterly stupid, worthless morons, though. ;)
I was having a snit with that final zinger, unfortunately. The media is a huge part of the problem, but I have to admit that if science education was better, science literacy would be better, and science communication would be less fraught.
But I get it, science is hard to learn and hard to teach. I love it but I'm in the minority, Which is why communication is key. Once I'm finally world dictator, the top researchers & administrators will research and administer - and the PhDs/MDs who are really great communicators will be nominal "Directors" while in fact being spokespeople.
The CDC/NIH need a couple Carl Sagans at the helm, that would rock.
Here's good science, by good scientists (same team just published in Nature, though this study is still pre-print), showing that mRNA vaccination is more likely vs covid infection to cause myocarditis that hospitalizes/kills you: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full
The authors conclude: “ Despite more myocarditis events occurring in older persons, the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years, where the risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection were similar. ”
The risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection are similar. That’s why I say that a parent might land on either side, pro or con.
According to the authors with the Pfizer vaccine you have an extra 3 events in a million doses for the first dose and an extra 12 events in a million doses for the second. Compare that to an extra 7 events in a million infections for getting Covid in this age group (presumably a first infection; they don’t have data for rates after a second infection, which Id guess are higher.
Rates are higher with the Moderna vaccine, so I’d avoid that one, if I had a young son. I’d choose Pfizer.
For me as a parent (and again, I understand why some rational people might decide against it for their teen boys), I’d come down on the side of the vaccine because
1. The risks are small.
2. The risks (and the authors agree) are similar to vaccine versus infection. (Is 3 versus 7 versus 12 in a million a significant difference? Do you feel much more hopeful about winning a prize if your chances are 3 in a million versus 12 in a million? Nah.)
3. There are many other risks of covid, many of which are unknown. The chance of long covid is not small. The chance of neurological problems, brain fog, kidney damage, blood pressure issues, diabetes —-there’s a long, long list of the risks of being infected with this thing, and the long term risks are not known yet.
My personal assessment, which is not an endorsement nor is it to be construed as advice, is that for my family, the risk of the vaccine is smaller than the risk of infection; and the benefits of the vaccine are greater than the benefits of skipping it.
Thanks for sharing the article. I’m looking forward to see if it’s published. The biggest takeaway for me is that the Moderna vaccine seems much more risky for the under 40 men.
Despite your cautionary wording, "the risk of the vaccine is smaller than the risk of infection" is a huge understatement, because of your point #3. Point #3 risks are MUCH higher than a few in a million. I know you know this.
But Team Conspiracy has already seized on this paper (written in the usual incomprehensible med-speak style) as a reason to risk covid over a vaccine.
Well, I don’t know what people have seized on, but I do know a lot of times the papers don’t say what people seem to think they say! ;)
Yes, the differences (in my estimation) are bigger than I portrayed above. Sometimes my strategy, if I’m hoping to come to an agreement with people, is to undersell it, you know?
Not in the sense of being disingenuous (because obviously: here I am saying it openly, so I’m not hiding my rhetorical strategies) but in the sense that someone who believes the vaccines are unacceptably dangerous might not be convinced by me saying “The vaccines are really a lot better than infection!” But they right respond a bit to me laying it out side by side and saying “I think the evidence comes down on the side of the vaccine.” Which I’m being sincere about by the way.
But I do agree with you that the case is even stronger than that.
Yep, for me long covid alone is enough of a concern that I had no issue with encouraging my sons (18 and 22) to get taxed, and even to boost with Moderna, heaven help me. Younger son had Pfizer 2x; older one got J&J (with massive reaction - high fever), Moderna boost 7 months later, exposure the very next day, another big fever, now in fine health. And this is, of course, also anecdotal! But I'm a risk-averse person, a reluctant gambler, a highly science-literate person (with a Ph.D. dissertation in the social history of medicine). I'm in fact the kind of person who might fall into Malone's orbit. I watched the whole damn three hours where Bret Weinstein interviewed Malone, who looked super-reasonable compared to the venture capitalist who kept yelling and interrupting.
I've come to the considered conclusion: Robert Malone is indeed full of shit. Thanks for this analysis, Salonnierre.
Thank you, Patty! Oh yes Malone looked reasonable in that interview by comparison with the yeller!! I’m really happy your sons were vaxxed “without incident” and thriving. I do understand people’s concern about kids but it seems wise to choose the vaccine considering all the other possible effects of infection. My family have all done well with the vaccine too.
anyone with a science education has no trouble reading this paper. It's not meant to be a press release or addressed to a lay audience. Usually Nature will include a brief half page summary for non-specialists in the front 'news' section, but I haven't subscribed in a while and can't check
My conclusion is simpler (and I'm also a parent for what it's worth).
Myocarditis from COVID is mainly confined to people >= 40 years old.
Myocarditis from VACCINES is mainly confined to mRNA vaccines in males < 40. For this age cohort:
- Pfizer carries more risk than covid infection does (though the risk is comparable, and we are indeed only talking about myocarditis), and
- Moderna is an order of magnitude worse than both Pfizer and covid infection.
Quoting from the article: “However, the risk of myocarditis following vaccination is consistently higher in younger males, particularly following a second dose of RNA mRNA-1273 vaccine.”
So,
- If you’re >= 40 and vaccine shopping, ignore this
- If you’re < 40 and male, definitely don’t get Moderna, and you might be better off with a non-mRNA shot
- If you’re <40 and female, you probably want to get an mRNA shot: myocarditis doesn’t seem to be a risk for you, and there is evidence that you face a higher risk of blood clots with J&J and AZ vs mRNA shots
For other readers: The article is digestible, and if you don’t want to read, Figure 1 tells you what you need to know.
Regarding children, the analysis isn’t granular enough for me to comment.
That’s a fair and concise summary and it’ll be interesting to see whether this is ultimately published, whether others find the same effects, similar effect sizes, etc
One thing that the author of this piece misses, I think, is that for many people it’s completely irrelevant that many scientists are looking into incidence of myocarditis among young men or into whether vaccination soon after recovering from a Covid infection is a good idea. Why? Because, in the midst of uncertainty on these questions, many Americans are still finding themselves compelled to get the vaccine themselves or to have their male children vaccinated, and face dire consequences for doing the very risk-weighing our author recommends. And the folks compelling them are citing The Science as the basis for doing so. The author suggests that parents of boys and young men themselves are correct to weigh the risks of the vaccines, but she fails to confront the fact that many literally cannot do this because the decision has been taken from them by authorities imposing a vaccine mandate. From their perspective, it is patently obvious that their concerns aren’t being taken seriously in a way that actually makes a difference for them. Is it any wonder the my start looking to folks like Dr Malone for answers? And should it surprise anyone that the fact that there are scientists looking into these issues would be small consolation?
I laughed when I realized that all that this meant -
'Keep in mind Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.” This is a long one.'
- is that the comments refuting the bullshit in this article would be a magnitude longer than the article itself [I bet the author didn't extrapolate to apply it to themself; just because something is long doesn't mean it's correct or more correct, I guess that fits in a similar vein of size doesn't matter if you don't know how to use it], if anyone's going to bother wasting so much time - though a few people were compelled enough to pick a few specific points to counter.
Interesting, I have had my suspicions as well. I still think he has a lot of interesting things to listen to but when people flock around an expert like he is a god, it makes me stand back and think. Whether it is Fauci or Malone, these people shouldn't be idolised but instead listened to and their information debated.
The public health establishment lost my confidence when they promoted "contact tracing" as a way to contain infection. They recommended states and cities hire armies of contact tracers. This is what works, we were told.
Yes, it works to contain Ebola in African villages. A contact disease that kills so quickly it will usually burn itself out.
How could anyone believe that contact tracing would work on an airborne virus in NYC? Yet there was Andrew Cuomo in his inspiring briefings selling exactly that, at the behest of public health officials. I know that my state did scramble to hire thousands of contact tracers, as did many others.
I know that data can change the picture when dealing with a new phenomenon. But this was known to be an airborne respiratory virus from very early on. How was contact tracing ever a serious recommendation for containment?
Hypothetically if everyone who possibly could stay home actually _stayed_ home (and the government, like other governments, paid people to stay home); if we’d brought people home but then stopped travel in or out; and if we had well-trained contract tracers — well that could have worked to keep cases very low. Contract tracing works if cases are low and people are well trained — and if you stay vigilantly on top of it.
Look at South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, and New Zealand.
We’ve had 1 in 390 of our population die of covid so far. Very densely populated Japan has had 1 in 7000 of their population die.
What did they do differently? They followed guidance cooperatively, even though it wasn’t fun. The cooperated with masking and contract tracing and staying the heck home when they’re sick.
So I don’t think the problem is that contact tracing doesn’t work.
The problem is that slapdash contact tracing by minimum-wage poorly trained workers (when contact tracing requires training and skills) — in the American context of “You won’t tell ME what to do! I want to go to Target! I have plans for Disneyland! I prefer to see people’s faces! I LIKE going to bars!” simply won’t work.
Cooperative-minded cultures that value the well-being of the group are at a strong advantage during a pandemic compared with individual-minded cultures that value personal freedom even when hundreds of thousands of extra people will die.
I’m all for personal freedom, but dammit, sometimes we have to change gears when the situation calls for it. Flexibly changing gears is not “tyranny”; it’s common sense. If we’d had an effective leader at the beginning of this thing, who refused to politicize the pandemic and brought all Americans together for a common goal (similar to post-Pearl Harbor), the outcome might have been very different. Instead it’s become this political nightmare of Democrats versus Republicans, and they’re all —and I do mean all— spouting nonsense that harms us ALL.
We need some adults in charge. We don’t have any.
Each type of culture has pros and cons. Our type of culture is deadly in a pandemic. “Every man for himself” doesn’t work well in hard times.
Anyway in the right context, contract tracing works for covid. (Also I just edited for typos!)
Lots of "ifs" there. Shouldn't the public health officials have been aware of the pitfalls?
I still have a hard time believing that a contact tracing interview in NYC that begins "I got on the subway and rode for 15 min" has any chance of containing a respiratory virus, even with trained epidemiologists taking the call. But we spent millions on it.
The confidence intervals are all over the place: to include some of that stuff gives the impression that they just aren’t serious about what they’re doing.
Like anyone, I have limited time to read journal articles, and I tend to focus on the reviews and meta-analyses. That’s what I did with the early treatments.
I don’t begrudge anyone who still wants to do research on IVM and HCQ but I’ll be very surprised if anyone finds an effect at this point.
Hundreds of studies have found an "effect" and whether it be 66% (IVM on average) or 34% (Fluvoxamin on average) or 25% (HCQ on average) reduction in death/severity, given the well-known safety profiles of each of those drugs (and others) I can't see any good reason other than pharmaceutical profit margins for them to be repressed as they have been. Especially given that they are literally rationing the approved and patented alternatives (in some places apparently based on race rather than clinical need). And I further can't really take anyone seriously who hand waves that kind of evidence away, given the incredibly high stakes, a 66% drop in deaths given tens of millions of severe cases is a potentially a massive number of people being impacted.
Fluvoxamine is indeed promising. I wish the same were true for the other two meds. I take HCQ already and would've loved a two-fer.
A great Twitter follow is Dr. David Bouleware, an infectious disease doctor-researcher at the University of Minnesota. He has been open-minded about repurposed drugs and seems to have *very* little ego invested in being right or wrong.
I've followed the studies and the ones on ivermectin are pretty flawed. The best explanation I've seen for ivermectin showing some results in some trials is that it reduces the burden of parasitic diseases where those are common. Logically that would contribute to better odds when infected with a virus.
Ivermectin is a safe drug. I don't think much harm will accrue from an individual taking it (as long as they're careful about dosage). The harm comes when influencers tout it instead of other measures that are proven to reduce the chances of severe covid, such as vaccination.
I'm no shill of Big Pharma; I think Merck's drug is less promising than fluvoxamine according to the available evidence, with a much more concerning safety profile. Paxlovid, OTOH, looks pretty good. We do need widely available therapeutics. We're not anywhere close to that point yet, and even Paxlovid is pricey enough that insurance may well decline to cover it for middle-aged people without massive risk factors for severe covid.
Myself, I'll try to get my hands on fluvoxamine if (okay, when!) covid catches up with me.
Thanks that's all helpful. I'd be curious to hear what are the flaws with the IVM studies, taken as a whole (i.e. not the worst of the 75 listed there, but the best, or a meta of the best: https://c19ivermectin.com/. Paxlovid seems to have the highest efficacy of anything yet, but as a new product, I'd be worried about the safety profile if I was in otherwise not really in a high-risk group.
I hate the argument: "The harm comes when influencers tout it instead of other measures that are proven to reduce the chances of severe covid, such as vaccination." That is, in my humble opinion, infantilizing people. We're in a freakin' worldwide pandemic killing millions, affecting the lives of billions in a severe way, make everything accessible and affordable, put out good credible information about the known methods of reducing severe disease and death, and let adults make adult decisions. Don't play games trying to "nudge" people to do the "right" or "best" thing for themselves, particularly when you know there are profit motives at play that incentive powerful actors to sway people one way versus the other.
I'm wondering why you chose the Roman et al meta-analysis for IVM? When I last checked it was the only meta-analysis to come out negative, and it was only able to do that by switching the treatment and control arms of Niaee et al. This was later corrected, but only in the body of the paper; that change should have made the conclusion positive, but the conclusion was left unchanged, presumably so that people could continue to cite the paper as evidence for lack of efficacy. They also claimed to include all non-prophylaxis RCTs but they omitted some positive RCTs without explanation. It should really have been retracted. https://ivmmeta.com/#roman
The author is not just a medical writer; he is a professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University.
The problem is, medical journals -- especially with the ivermectin issue (or anything related to covid, where things are published at the speed of light) have a lot of old, or corrected, or need to be corrected articles. A lot of the "research" is simply biased. Some of the research, for ivermectin specifically, was fraudulent.
So you can find things that look like covid might work.
But here as of November is Salzberg's assessment of the state of ivermectin research. It doesn't work. No one wants to prevent a cheap, useful drug from being used (again, look at the corticosteroids, which are saving lots of lives).
And .com sites are just not reliable sources of medical data.
Thank you, Salzberg cites two pieces of original research to support his claim that IVM doesn't work.
The first piece is a preprint by Hill et al, following up on some of their earlier research which by now is rather out of date, only covering a small number of the RCTs now available. In particular I'd mention the decently-sized Seet et al prophylaxis RCT which was published since Hill's original analysis and which showed 50% efficacy from just one dose; a remarkable performance for a drug that "doesn't work". The Hill et al preprint essentially says that trials assessed as high quality when using Cochrane risk of bias criteria don't show efficacy. Let's look at those four "high-quality" trials:
* Lopez-Medina showed somewhat better outcomes in the treatment arm but the results were not statistically significant because it was severely underpowered; you would not expect a trial like that to show a meaningful effect however wonderful IVM was and it's not evidence that IVM is of low efficacy.
* The Zoni paper (lead author is actually Vallejos) was also very underpowered. Also not evidence of low efficacy.
* Fonseca paper (lead author is actually Bermejo Galan) was about late stage treatment which is not what ivermectin is normally advocated for.
* The Kirti paper (lead author is actually Ravikirti) showed far better outcomes in the treatment arm but it was too small a trial to establish statistical significance.
So the Hill analysis does nothing to show that IVM is of low efficacy; it just provides a list of "high quality" trials that are either underpowered or not relevant. Salzberg is not an objective reviewer if he claims it shows that IVM doesn't work; the difference between an underpowered result and a negative result is basic and it's something an objective reviewer would have highlighted when writing for a general audience.
The second piece of research that Salzberg cites is an article in The Atlantic (I note what you say about dot com sites and medical data!) by a researcher who has audited some of the IVM studies. This kind of audit is potentially very valuable. However the author provides no links to his work and I wasn't able to find any links, for example on his blog; this is uncharacteristic of a researcher who claims to be interested in audit and transparency. He only names one of the studies he found issues with. This is a shaky foundation on which to base a claim that IVM doesn't work.
You’re obviously an intelligent person who is very invested in spinning this a certain way. It’s hard to believe you’re in earnest, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Anyone can say any study whose results they don’t like is “underpowered” —in fact that’s kind of a running joke, right?
But if Lopez Medina give 400 people ivermectin and there are no differences between groups, whether in how quickly the survivors recover nor in the number of people who die in each group, that means, essentially, that ****your drug doesn’t work****.
If you want to finesse it and say, well if we made those groups really really really big, we could find a “statistical difference” then at some point that’s meaningless.
That’s why the “underpowered” claim is such a joke.
It’s kind of like those studies that showed a potential health benefit in resveratrol (found in red wine) but to get enough to make a difference you’d need to drink 200 bottles a day or something ridiculous.
So I suppose hypothetically if you make your studies larger and larger and larger, you might find some “statistically significant difference” in something, someday, statistically (but not real-world-meaningfully) in favor of ivermectin, in a “you just need to drink 200 bottles of wine per day to see this effect in humans” kind of way.
But in that case, if a well-controlled study of four hundred people is “underpowered” to detect just how amazing your miracle drug is, it’s not really a miracle drug is it? So let’s move on to treatments that do work.
If ivermectin is a “miracle drug” the differences should appear in a group of 400.
Then there’s the revised Hill et al, finally published after removing the fraudulent data and reanalyzing. Spoiler: No, ivermectin doesn’t work.
And yet you come back here and you insist that the well-done studies aren’t big enough, and you wave away the outright fraud.
And why _is_ there such a degree of fraud surrounding this miracle drug (the Egyptian falsifier; the guy in the Brazil who gave his “control group” a toxic stew; etc.)? Why are people falsifying the data if this drug works great and people could make a name for themselves by doing honest research?
Everything about this just stinks. When you encourage people to forego the best imperfect things we have to offer (including imperfect vaccines) in favor of a treatment that simply doesn’t work, you’re harming people who don’t know better and who will be impressed by the fancy way you seem to speak about it.
It's quite incredible the cognitive dissonance shown in this article. I couldn't help but hear the "vaccines are safe and effective" mantra spewing as I was reading the article.
1) These are NOT vaccines, as they do not resemble any previous vaccines in history. Calling them a vaccine is a red herring. Because people "know" vaccines are safe, and this is a vaccine, so it's got to be safe right? The right term is THERAPY, not vaccine.
2) VAERS data is up 100x (or more) the combined data for every other vaccine in history. I'm going to assume you'll chalk this up to "just a coincidence".
3) There's a not-so-surprising correlation between high vaccination rate and high case rate. The more a country has been vaccinated, the more cases it has had. That's because vaccination lowers your immune system making you far more prone to being infected.
4) Gee, I wonder how come you did not mention the fact, which is an outright scam, that to be put in the "vaccinated" pile you must have finished a full vaccination course (14 days). So if after the first does you die, you're still considered an "unvaccinated" death. You're going to tell me this is all fair and square, right?
And then we come to the final point: all said and done, the vaccine is supposed to make less people DIE, right? That's the end goal. Yet there's been MORE deaths WITH the vaccine, than WITHOUT, when comparing e.g 2020s to 2021. Excess mortality is through the roof. That can't possibly be the vaccine, correct? Which have a 95% efficacy rate? Ah sorry, it's 75%... Oops, actually 50%... actually, for Omicron is more like 35%.
Regarding Malone, I don't care what he says. The data is out there for all to see. I believe the earth is round no matter who tells me that information, because the source of the information does not change the fact. So get a grip...
There’s so much incorrect in this comment that I just don’t want to go over it point by point. What DO we agree on? “The data is out there for all to see.”
We agree on that. And yet you’re peddling absolutely false nonsense. It’s quite tiring.
Your best answer is no answer? I guess that tells it all, doesn't it? Everything I said is easily verifiable.
You do you. It’s verifiable that ice cream consumption is correlated with outdoor muggings too. You believe what you wish.
you obviously graduated from the university of google. People with an actual science education like me go down your list and keep muttering wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Go play in the street and leave your betters alone.
To add to your 4th point, the Great Barrington Declaration group of multi-disciplinary experts state that the data is looking like you have a higher chance of catching COVID if vaccinated.
Likewise, there's a Canadian group of lawyers who published their concerns in their Free North Declaration - to try to make Canadians realize laws are being broken and due process isn't being followed.
(It's easy to find both declarations via searching for their names)
P.s. The only ultra-confident/arrogant person seems to be the author of this article, and where on the quick skim I did misrepresent and mischaracterize Dr. Malone's stances; he doesn't claim to be the "one and only" inventor of mRNA technology - but he discovered the mechanism and had the first 10-11 patents related to it; people improve on inventions all the time, does that make them the inventor - maybe of specific techniques, but you're not innovating to develop techniques without knowing the foundational work. The irony too, that the author doesn't actually make links/citations to Dr. Malone stating certain things; most hit pieces I've seen just link to other hit pieces that make non-direct source citations as well - an interesting strategy and sad state of affairs that society in general takes someone's word as fact without linking to evidence, so long as it fits with the [mainstream] narrative they've been indoctrinated with.
Yes! Also, I've been looking at the data coming out of the UK/Scotland from the last few weeks (links below). Why are their numbers showing that the majority of people in the hospital and dying from covid are "vaccinated," while all we hear about in the US is how the "unvaccinated" are overwhelming the hospitals--without any data to back that up? What is going on here?
https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/10930/21-12-22-covid19-winter_publication_report.pdf
https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11054/22-01-07-covid19-winter_publication_report.pdf
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1045329/Vaccine_surveillance_report_week_1_2022.pdf
Check out Katelyn Jetelina’s substack where she lays things out with graphs. See for example https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-jan-18
And you can go to those sources and look at the data yourself.
Thanks for the link. It's interesting to note that her chart on the UK was based on data gathered from May through December 2021 (critical care admissions by vaccination status). The data coming out of the UK *now* (weekly) looks much different (see pages 39 - 41 of the UK report, link above). She also doesn't show Scotland's breakdown (see my links above). Also, thought you might be interested to see this recent large, peer-reviewed study that shows a 44% reduction in infection when Ivermectin in used prophylactically: https://www.cureus.com/articles/82162-ivermectin-prophylaxis-used-for-covid-19-a-citywide-prospective-observational-study-of-223128-subjects-using-propensity-score-matching
So you're saying that the data coming out of the UK now (and how new is it, like Jan 1 - when? today?) is vastly different from what happened from May-December 2021? I've found her stuff to be very trustworthy and accurate.
Re ivermectin as a prophylactic -- bad idea, but in any case, Cadeglani is doing some incredibly unethical work ("incredibly unethical" doesn't begin to describe it) and he shouldn't be giving any medications to any patients at all. Apparently anything goes in Brazil. https://forbetterscience.com/2021/07/21/frontiers-in-homicidal-quackery/
Yes, check out the data. Also, this is interesting data analysis: https://metatron.substack.com/p/alberta-just-inadvertently-confessed?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email
Oh gosh it’s presented in very disingenuous ways. Exhausting to think about replying, tbh.
Part of your criticism about Malone having baited the public with his own version of fear porn is based on his criticism of the Federal govt “pulling all of the regular monoclonals”. You go on to describe how this began on Dec. 29 and was retracted on Dec. 31, but Malone's statement took place on Dec. 30, and his criticism was fairly described at the time. In all fairness, it is your criticism of his criticism that is taken out of context.
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/yah-it-happened?justPublished=true
And yet, if the decision was made on Dec 29, and he was speaking on Dec. 30, fully knowing that people were pushing back against it, and discussions were being had, there was NO need to portray this as a reason to panic, right? There was NO reason to imply that people weren't getting needed medicines and this was some kind of evil, manufactured crisis right? The medicines were still on the shelves one day later. And the very next day common sense prevailed and the decision was reversed.
He spun this up, he used it as an occasion to scare people, when that was completely not called for.
Rogan: "So are you saying, are you implying that perhaps one of the reasons why they're removing monoclonal antibodies is to enhance the amount of people that are sick?"
Malone: "I'm saying it is in the spectrum of the range of possible just the same as the withholding of early treatments is inexplicable."
That is so completely not called for, unless your goal is to scare and mislead people.
I can easily imagine a reputable, measured scientist being interviewed by Rogan saying, "I have concerns with the recent decision to pause shipments of certain monoclonal antibodies. I think it's misguided and a bad call. Certain mAbs don't help against omicron, but there are a lot of patients with delta who _can_ benefit from those treatments. There's been some pushback, though, like from Governor DeSantis, so hopefully this decision will be reversed soon." She could also tell listeners whom to contact, and how, to register their concern and apply pressure.
But instead, we had this drummed up fear.
So much for the decision being reversed as you asserted. They have now pulled the EUA on the two monoclonal antibodies, while 1/4 of cases in Illinois are still susceptible to these products and the only remaining monoclonal AB is in such short demand that no one will receive it and these were the only early treatment protocols available at all to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death. So when Dr. Malone decries this action by the regulatory bodies, as he did when it was only being considered, will you once again criticize him for being too early, or for having waited too long.
Your statement just above also states that his assertion that "in the spectrum of the range of possible just the same as the withholding of early treatments is inexplicable" is to scare or mislead people. People should be scared when the only early treatment protocol being permitted is removed from the board because some people will become more ill without these products than they would have with them. And as we can see, he wasn't misleading people as you asserted when he warned of these products being removed from ready access, but rather, it would seem, you were misleading people that these products were not going to be removed from ready access.
If "they" have done this, is it because they want to kill people, as Malone would have you believe, or is it because a month ago De Santis had a decent point that we still had a lot of delta patients (who could benefit from those drugs) and now that another month has gone by more than 99% of our cases are omicron, and everyone agrees that those drugs are ineffective against omicron, so it makes sense to put a stop to those drugs for now (until such time as a variant appears that they work against)?
https://abc7.com/monoclonal-antibody-treatments-fda-antibodies-regeneron-treatment-eli-lilly/11507608/
In other words, decisions change when conditions change. No one is trying to kill you, but Malone has still got you in the grasp of his scary false reality.
Everyone agrees? Really? When 1/4 of cases in Illinois alone are still Delta? I suspect that the objections of Malone, McCullough,, Kory and others would suggest your assertion of unanimous support to withdraw the monoclonals as transparently false.
Mismanagement of the virus response has led to the 2021 number of deaths to be increased over 2020 and it is not fear porn to suggest that such mismanagement costs lives. Malone's statement simply states that it is inexplicable as to why they would not treat the ill when they need treatment. It is a fair point regardless of your dislike of the man.
If a quarter of the cases in Illinois are still delta, I hope their governor will protest, as DeSantis did a month ago and got a swift reversal.
People make dumb decisions all the time. I’m simply suggesting that the government is not trying to kill anyone, as Malone keeps implying, insisting and fear mongering (see that ridiculous recent Rumble video he did. Lies from start to finish.
I think the government’s pandemic response has been atrocious. Atrocious!! I am no fan of our government’s handling. I will say, though, that they are not deliberately keeping antibodies from sick and dying people. Why would they?
I am no fan of the government’s response, but I’m even less of a fan of that con man who is riling people up in the exact wrong direction.
Malone was far more careful in his language in the beginning of his protest against the covid response. The mass formation psychosis and “they” talk all started more recently. Sorry I couldn’t get through your whole article as it reads like an Atlantic hit piece. I did try. Best of luck to you.
Thanks! Yeah it’s pretty long. And thanks for stopping by and sharing your perceptions of an earlier, saner Malone. That’s interesting. He seemed kind of wacky the first time I heard him speak too, but maybe I caught him too late. I think it was on Bret’s podcast (before I couldn’t take the covid craziness anymore and stopped watching Bret, even though he seems like a decent human being).
Agreed. I've been happy to see Dr. Malone's development in this regard: speaking more passionately (less "like a scientist") about the handling of the covid debacle. I imagine that would happen to a person whose life's work and character have been denigrated and smeared, just like this author attempts to do.
He’s apparently very good at what he does (manipulating people and being persuasive with emotional appeals). Why should he mess with a winning formula?
If I got three shots, I'd probably excuse myself by crying too. Lancet and BMJ are the good guys and incorruptible. You probably haven't read about any of their botched studies.
The vaccine cheerleaders were apparently so eager for such a report that they didn't notice that it was brought to them by a completely meaningless study. But even this is not unprecedented. For example, remember Donald Trump recommending hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a cure for COVID? Everyone laughed at him and the media around the world printed articles to the point of exhaustion about what a delusional man he is. There was a great demand among progressives of all countries for the result that "HCQ doesn't work". Lo and behold, a few weeks later, an article did indeed appear in the prestigious Lancet showing, in a huge multicentre study (almost 100,000 patients!), that HCQ not only doesn't work, but actually increases the likelihood of heart problems. The article hit the "political-academic demand" perfectly. The results went around the world, many HCQ studies were immediately stopped on the basis of it, and the authors of the Lancet study became global celebrities.
A few weeks later, however, the paper was quietly retracted because it was found to be a colossal fraud. In the meantime, quite a bit of evidence has indeed been bought that HCQ is not a miracle cure for COVID, but the falsified articles have at least slowed down and invalidated the research.
A few weeks later, however, the article was quietly retracted because it was found to be a colossal fraud. In the meantime, quite a bit of evidence has been accumulated that HCQ is not a miracle cure for COVID, but the falsified articles have minimally slowed and invalidated the research.
I point out that sooner or later, our high tolerance for fraud in science is going to come back to bite us and kill a lot of people. That the US CDC of all places would be drowning in the murky waters of "fake science", however, is something I wouldn't dream of.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scandal-what-went-wrong--67955
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22446-z
One of the dumbest long things I’ve ever read, and couched in some of the loftiest, most condescending language I’ve run into recently.
The heart of your your case boils down to: Malone doesn’t act like a scientist or doctor. Whew, I find that devastatingly convincing. Not.
Even so: Are you not aware that among scientists and doctors flashing credentials is as common as shaking hands? “How seriously should I take you?” is a question they’re forever implicitly testing each other with, and are responding to.
Also: how can you be unaware of how common powerful egos (to the point of arrogance) are among the science-and-medicine crowd? Once you remove these people from their faculty-club debate settings and get a drink or two in them, you’d be amazed by what comes out of them. As someone who’s known and interviewed a fair number of scientists and doctors, I find that Malone’s informality, frankness, directness and self-confidence don’t set off alarm bells in me. On the contrary, they inspire confidence in me. In fact, I find him, by comparison to most scientists and medical persons, remarkably un-arrogant. Could be wrong, of course. But still: tastes in manner and tone of voice will differ, of course, but so much in any case for the first half of your piece.
As for your beefs with Malone on a few matters of fact, I suggest you get a little more familiar than you apparently are with the dissident position on a lot of these questions. There are thousands of doctors and scientists (not to mention sensible, bright people generally) who are on the Malone side of these debates. Many have found ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine helpful, for instance. Many others have found the establishment response to the COVID crisis to be peculiar, bizarre and even sinister. Fwiw, I’m a retired researcher and reporter, and in this case my own alarm bells have been set off by Fauci, Daszak and the CDC a lot more often than they have been by the likes of Dr. Malone.
No idea why you felt the need to expend such time and energy defending the establishment position here, come to think of it. Aren’t you aware that the establishment already has a lot of people on their payroll doing p-r for them?
Thanks for stopping by.
Re something so basic as "Many have found ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine helpful, for instance."
Yes, and many people have found homeopathy and religion helpful too, but neither of those things will cure your viral disease.
There are research studies. There are data and meta-analyses. You can read those, or you can just use common sense and ask yourself why, if it's pure evil, if it's true that "they" are keeping HCQ and IVM from the public, why is it not also true that "they" stop people from being prescribed dexamethasone? Common sense.
So, you can either debunk him through actually reading and understanding research, or you can debunk him through basic common sense, but you can't defend him by saying "Some people are helped by those drugs, though" when that doesn't match the data.
As the old saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.
That's not how reality works.
Fauci, Daszak and the CDC share plenty of blame. Notice what I'm not saying. I'm not saying "Listen to Fauci, Daszak and the CDC."
I'm saying listen to scientists -- real scientists, doing real science -- who are not part of the politicized public narrative.
I'm saying look at the actual data, some of which I provided you via links.
I'm saying, and this is a critical point: the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
I'm saying it can be a completely true statement that Fauci, Daszak and the CDC suck.
But also: It's not necessarily true that every guy who tells you "Fauci, Daszak and the CDC suck" (1) has your best interests at heart or (2) is a truth-teller with regard to other matters.
Sometimes, the person who agrees with you, who wants to make it "you and me, we're this special little club who understand the Truth, we're the ones with special knowledge and insight, it's us against the evil evil world, maaaaan" is a con man and a liar.
No one needs to be part of a special little group to get it right. You just need the time to read and evaluate information. If people don't have the particular background to read and evaluate certain types of information, there's no shame in that, because none of us knows everything. But if people "know what they don't know," they can be a bit more vigilant in protecting themselves against con men and their manipulative language, which is why I bothered with all that stuff. Not everyone can (or wants to) evaluate the medical literature. But everyone can be alert to emotional manipulation and recognize when they're being played.
Ah, 21, I'm afraid pushing back against misinfo is a sisyphean task, as so many of the comments here show.
But then you yourself dispense some of your own, with your 99% confidence level in the lab-leak hypothesis.
Your arguments for lab-leak remind me of Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, which I read as a teenager and was totally convinced by. The pyramids couldn't possibly have been built by people with method X or Y or Z, therefore space aliens must have helped!
I'm enjoying the FdB cinematic universe
Not really a fair comparison Mark, though, is it.
The 99%, you will recall, is not something I promoted in my article as Truth. Had I done that, I would have had to provide evidence for how I came to that number. That "99%" was me responding, directly to your question, about what my gut feeling was based on the available evidence and my understanding of it. I don't understand how anyone can look at the genome and say anything other than the furin cleavage site was inserted. People did that. In a lab. Very little doubt. Almost no doubt.
There's just no rational way to explain it otherwise, given the information we have.
Is it possible that Hamlet could have been written in the context of an an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters? Yes, it's possible.
Is it possible that you will roll a die right now and get 10 sixes in a row? Yes it's possible, but on average that will take you more than 15 years of continuous rolling to accomplish (where you must complete each set of ten rolls, and where each roll takes 1 sec, and yes that's a very rough estimate).
Is it possible those 12 base pairs (4 amino acids) are all neatly naturally inserted into the genome and _with no mutations on either side_? Yes it is possible, but...extremely unlikely. Everyone can intuit how unlikely a monkey typing Hamlet is, or rolling 10 sixes in a row. It's harder to intuit how unlikely that furin cleavage site is. It's not "just a mutation and mutations happen all the time." Similarly, Hamlet isn't written when "the monkey just typed a Q, and monkeys hit typewriter keys all the time" and 10 sixes in a row are not in the same ballpark as "I rolled a six on my first try and people roll sixes all the time, so ten in a row probably won't take that long." It's not in the same ballpark.
If you ask me, who wrote Hamlet, a guy or a monkey, I'd tell you: Based on my existing imperfect knowledge of the world, a guy wrote it. I wasn't there. I didn't see him write it. There's no video. There's no hard drive with time stamps. MAYBE a monkey wrote it. Extremely unlikely.
Maybe a furin cleavage site just appeared fully formed. Extremely unlikely.
If you want to explain the genome to me in such a way that a natural origin makes enough sense to merit more than a 1% degree of likelihood, I'm open to hearing it.
I don't have the expertise to estimate the probability that "a furin cleavage site just appeared fully formed", and I don't believe you do either; perhaps no one does. In the metaphor, it depends on how many monkeys with typewriters are out there typing. Each covid-infected person carries an estimated one to one hundred billion virus particles; that's a lot of monkeys typing. In evolution theory, the question of how "organs of extreme perfection" (like eyes) evolved goes back to Darwin. And the accepted answer is that, while it was extremely unlikely, there were enough rolls of the dice for it to have happened. So just saying the probability of a single event is very small is not enough; we also need to know how many of those events took place. And you have offered no estimate of that.
Some people have offered estimates of that, although they’re a little silly because it isn’t just a random mutation, it’s a large insertion. Most of those randomly mutated viruses would fail.
And it came bam out of nowhere, unlike Darwin, where there are intermediate life forms with cells that respond to light, creatures with eye-like things. We have no viral intermediates. It appeared on the scene adapted for humans and ready to party.
I don’t know _exactly_ how likely it is that the insertion just happened, correct. I know it is extremely, extremely unlikely. And I know that the lab had a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses in 2018. And then in 2019 a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site appeared in that city. It doesn’t take a genius.
I recommend this article for a more measured analysis:
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
The last few paragraphs:
For now, the battle between two theories rolls onward. As a friend said to me recently, “Why does it seem like we have to pick a side?” Both camps share a desire to understand the origins in order to prevent the emergence of the next pandemic. But, between them, there are some differences of emphasis.
The lab leakers tend to be more interested in biosecurity, transparency, and human hubris. They exhibit an admirable drive to follow the money, to upend centralized power, to overturn academic hierarchy, and to expose the injustices of oppressive governments. Some are China hawks. By and large, they have not done virus-hunting field or lab work.
On the natural-origin side, most people have done the kind of field and lab work that the W.I.V. pursued—and are regularly bowled over by nature’s endless diversity. They believe in scientific precedent, as opposed to uncertainties that have yet to be resolved. Many people in this camp have devoted their careers to conservation, biodiversity, and public health, and have been warning about a future pandemic for years. Spillovers most often happen because of land-use change, or human encroachment into previously wild places, which is happening on pretty much the entire planet, but particularly in areas that are developing rapidly, like south China and southeast Asia.
More than one virologist reminded me that nature is the best bioterrorist. It’s far more creative than humans are. With enough time, evolution is capable of anything we can imagine, and everything we can’t. “If you look at a platypus, you can very clearly realize that that’s not something somebody would have designed, right?” Andersen said. “Because it’s too absurd. It’s a bit of a disaster. But it works pretty well.” It occupies its own ecological niche. Some of the notable features of sars-CoV-2, Andersen said, make it “the platypus of coronaviruses.”
Still, humans have changed the equation. Calling viruses zoonotic obscures the role we play in their evolution, whether in the wilderness, a wet market, or a lab. What is an ecological niche when humans have their hands in everything? Nature’s staggering diversity includes human nature. Somehow, sars-CoV-2 found its ecological niche in us.
You ask: "if it's true that "they" are keeping HCQ and IVM from the public, why is it not also true that "they" stop people from being prescribed dexamethasone?" There's a good reason for this. Dexamethasone is used on very sick patients in hospital; it doesn't compete with the vaccines. HCQ and IVM work best for prophylaxis or early stage use, so they are in closer competition with the vaccines.
That makes zero sense. Literally. None.
If the whole point were some diabolical plot to manipulate people to take vaccines (by whom? For what purpose?), then the specter of more and more people dying in hospitals would be a great motivator.
The number of lives that have been saved with dexamethasone would be bad for the vaccine biz. “Oh if I get sick, I’ll probably be fine now with some cheap steroids. I’ll take my chances.”
The fact is, the version of “reality” that Malone is peddling is nonsensical on every level.
Also, dexamethasone is an established treatment for cytokine storm; it's not really a repurposing, it would be more difficult to argue against it. The "diabolical plot" does indeed seem to be to manipulate people to take vaccines, as a step towards vaxpasses and a China-style social credit system. There are all sorts of details that I think would be difficult to explain without that; the initial plans to vaccinate the vulnerable expanding step by step to the whole population (indeed at one point, the whole world!), the disparaging of natural immunity, WHO changing the international death certificate criteria only for COVID in a way that increased the number of recorded COVID deaths, the few African leaders who rejected inappropriate pandemic responses who then either died suddenly in hospital or were the target of foreign mercenaries (successful in Haiti, unsuccessful in Madagascar), the bizarre suggestion from the WHO that Europe should consider mandatory vaccinations, the heavy censorship, the relentless distorted media coverage that according to polls left people thinking that COVID had a fatality rate resembling smallpox or ebola. It can be easier to spot the authoritarianism in countries other than one's own; if you look at what's been happening in Russia, for example, they too have vaxpasses and vaccine mandates of various kinds all of which are deeply unpopular with the Russian people, it's not like the US where it's become a party political issue with a large constituency thinking it's just fine.
Let me rephrase then (and get more detailed, for those who are interested). Oncologists have often used dexamethasone to treat hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis; rheumatologists treat macrophage activation syndrome using methylprednisolone. So it was not thought desirable at first to treat a cytokine storm caused by a respiratory ***infection*** (versus a cancer, or an autoimmune condition) with a drug that decreases the immune response (as steroids do) because it might tend to create the risk of secondary infections.
So...yeah it needed to be researched. Whether you call that "repurposing" or not, well we can quibble. But the point stands: it was a cheap drug, used newly for covid, and it saved a bunch of lives, and the evil people at Big Pharma were not trying to stop anyone from using a cheap drug that saved lives.
I don't think anyone believes that covid has a fatality rate of ebola. You're talking about people who don't exist: setting up straw men. We give polio vaccines to all kids. Do you know how many kids are paralyzed with polio if they get polio? One in 200. Ho-hum, by your standards that would be not a big deal.
In my County approximately 1.5% of the known cases die of covid. So someone is three times as likely to die if they get covid, than they are likely to be paralyzed if they get polio.
Pre-omicron (and we know omicron is sending more kids to the hospital, not fewer), about as many kids had died annually of covid as died per year of measles before we introduced a measles vaccine.
So by any of the metrics and judgments we currently use for vaccinating against a disease and taking it seriously, covid is ***at least as*** dangerous to children, and ***much more dangerous*** to adults.
It doesn't need a fatality rate of ebola to be taken seriously.
Not a straw man: this international opinion poll https://www.kekstcnc.com/insights/covid-19-opinion-tracker-edition-4 consistently found average estimates of death rates two orders of magnitude higher than reality, after months of media coverage (p24 of the PDF). I'm not suggesting that COVID doesn't need to be taken seriously, just that the media coverage has been very misleading if it has left people with such a distorted view.
Ok, I definitely need to get writing today. I'll try to have my piece out by this weekend, and I will cite this piece. This is definitely a topic that interests me. I have a piece on my substack and another one coming in a few days, though neither are terribly interesting (the next one is a workplace advice column) just trying to start the habit.
The edgy stuff is catnip for some people. I see this with a bunch of other things: the keto diet, sports, identity politics. Constant posturing edginess instead of providing the evidence.
Great article btw, and anyone who disagrees is paid off, duh.
I did lol at “anyone who disagrees is paid off, duh”!
Kudos for writing a refutation of Malone's claims, rather than just yelling "misinformation" and calling for him to be shut down. I will leave it to others to argue whether or not the refutation is successful. It strikes me that the "pro/anti Malone/Fauci/vax" space is already pretty crowded (and pretty entrenched).
It seems to me that Team Mainstream has run afoul of Carl Sagan's observation that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. When you are turning people's lives upside down, you should be prepared to clearly explain why it must be done, and why there are no alternatives. Appeals to "a volatile, changing situation" do not inspire much confidence. And especially not when what actually happens turns out to be substantially different from what was predicted. Public health officials should look in the mirror if they wonder why people like Malone can claim a large audience. If he is selling "bullshit" and people are buying, it is a failure of the public health establishment.
I look forward to more commentary on our society, where we are, how we got here, and where we are going.
Thanks Heyjude for your always thoughtful commentary! I appreciate your input!!
Re: “Public health officials should look in the mirror if they wonder why people like Malone can claim a large audience. If he is selling "bullshit" and people are buying, it is a failure of the public health establishment.”
💯💯💯
This is such an important point.
There is so much disdain in the mainstream for misinformation, so much effort to dismiss it or shut it down— and yet, if the mainstream’s messages were reasonable and compelling, they’d win the day, and there would be no need or even any temptation to shut anyone down.
I believe this so strongly that I also believe: anytime someone in power thinks that silencing or dismissing their critics is a good idea or an effective solution, they should stop and ask themselves:
“In what ways am I failing horribly, and how can I do better?”
I was in the biomed research business for 25 years, and the comms/messaging really is terrible. But the main reason for that is the media: a recent PhD or even a grad student could tell the (not very bright) news anchors what's wrong with the misinformation, but a) it would take 20 minutes, and b) they want the big famous names, not the post-doc who has the time to invest in a detailed debunking.
Fauci & Wallensky have more important things to do, and frankly their disdain for this misinformation is entirely appropriate. Americans are almost as a rule utterly stupid, worthless morons.
I would agree with you, to a point, that a case can be made that "disdain is appropriate" -- and indeed, if we had reliable, trustworthy people in charge, who were also better communicators, they could simply say "don't listen to that guy -- what he says is trash" -- because to explain _why_ it's trash takes a very long time, especially to the lay public.
However, in a context where people rightly don't trust the people in charge, and in a context where most _don't_ have a science education (meaning that Robert Malone and his blah blah blah sounds as credible to them as a more reliable source of information), it's understandable that people think the leaders are being dishonest with them (true) and therefore, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- and they conclude that people are are nefariously picking on (or "trying to censor") their beloved and trusted Dr. Malone. Meanwhile Malone, for his part, does his best to frighten people and cause them to distrust anyone but himself and a few selected others, so he can scoop up people's blind trust for himself. It's quite a disgusting game.
So I understand your point -- I don't disagree that the media problem won't go away, either, for the reason you described, and I understand those barriers to communication -- and yet, here we are: People don't trust anything they hear, or they misplace their trust in someone who is being blatantly dishonest.
I wouldn't call Americans utterly stupid, worthless morons, though. ;)
I was having a snit with that final zinger, unfortunately. The media is a huge part of the problem, but I have to admit that if science education was better, science literacy would be better, and science communication would be less fraught.
But I get it, science is hard to learn and hard to teach. I love it but I'm in the minority, Which is why communication is key. Once I'm finally world dictator, the top researchers & administrators will research and administer - and the PhDs/MDs who are really great communicators will be nominal "Directors" while in fact being spokespeople.
The CDC/NIH need a couple Carl Sagans at the helm, that would rock.
Yes indeed!!!
Here's good science, by good scientists (same team just published in Nature, though this study is still pre-print), showing that mRNA vaccination is more likely vs covid infection to cause myocarditis that hospitalizes/kills you: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full
The authors conclude: “ Despite more myocarditis events occurring in older persons, the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years, where the risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection were similar. ”
The risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection are similar. That’s why I say that a parent might land on either side, pro or con.
According to the authors with the Pfizer vaccine you have an extra 3 events in a million doses for the first dose and an extra 12 events in a million doses for the second. Compare that to an extra 7 events in a million infections for getting Covid in this age group (presumably a first infection; they don’t have data for rates after a second infection, which Id guess are higher.
Rates are higher with the Moderna vaccine, so I’d avoid that one, if I had a young son. I’d choose Pfizer.
For me as a parent (and again, I understand why some rational people might decide against it for their teen boys), I’d come down on the side of the vaccine because
1. The risks are small.
2. The risks (and the authors agree) are similar to vaccine versus infection. (Is 3 versus 7 versus 12 in a million a significant difference? Do you feel much more hopeful about winning a prize if your chances are 3 in a million versus 12 in a million? Nah.)
3. There are many other risks of covid, many of which are unknown. The chance of long covid is not small. The chance of neurological problems, brain fog, kidney damage, blood pressure issues, diabetes —-there’s a long, long list of the risks of being infected with this thing, and the long term risks are not known yet.
My personal assessment, which is not an endorsement nor is it to be construed as advice, is that for my family, the risk of the vaccine is smaller than the risk of infection; and the benefits of the vaccine are greater than the benefits of skipping it.
Thanks for sharing the article. I’m looking forward to see if it’s published. The biggest takeaway for me is that the Moderna vaccine seems much more risky for the under 40 men.
Despite your cautionary wording, "the risk of the vaccine is smaller than the risk of infection" is a huge understatement, because of your point #3. Point #3 risks are MUCH higher than a few in a million. I know you know this.
But Team Conspiracy has already seized on this paper (written in the usual incomprehensible med-speak style) as a reason to risk covid over a vaccine.
Well, I don’t know what people have seized on, but I do know a lot of times the papers don’t say what people seem to think they say! ;)
Yes, the differences (in my estimation) are bigger than I portrayed above. Sometimes my strategy, if I’m hoping to come to an agreement with people, is to undersell it, you know?
Not in the sense of being disingenuous (because obviously: here I am saying it openly, so I’m not hiding my rhetorical strategies) but in the sense that someone who believes the vaccines are unacceptably dangerous might not be convinced by me saying “The vaccines are really a lot better than infection!” But they right respond a bit to me laying it out side by side and saying “I think the evidence comes down on the side of the vaccine.” Which I’m being sincere about by the way.
But I do agree with you that the case is even stronger than that.
Yep, for me long covid alone is enough of a concern that I had no issue with encouraging my sons (18 and 22) to get taxed, and even to boost with Moderna, heaven help me. Younger son had Pfizer 2x; older one got J&J (with massive reaction - high fever), Moderna boost 7 months later, exposure the very next day, another big fever, now in fine health. And this is, of course, also anecdotal! But I'm a risk-averse person, a reluctant gambler, a highly science-literate person (with a Ph.D. dissertation in the social history of medicine). I'm in fact the kind of person who might fall into Malone's orbit. I watched the whole damn three hours where Bret Weinstein interviewed Malone, who looked super-reasonable compared to the venture capitalist who kept yelling and interrupting.
I've come to the considered conclusion: Robert Malone is indeed full of shit. Thanks for this analysis, Salonnierre.
Thank you, Patty! Oh yes Malone looked reasonable in that interview by comparison with the yeller!! I’m really happy your sons were vaxxed “without incident” and thriving. I do understand people’s concern about kids but it seems wise to choose the vaccine considering all the other possible effects of infection. My family have all done well with the vaccine too.
anyone with a science education has no trouble reading this paper. It's not meant to be a press release or addressed to a lay audience. Usually Nature will include a brief half page summary for non-specialists in the front 'news' section, but I haven't subscribed in a while and can't check
My conclusion is simpler (and I'm also a parent for what it's worth).
Myocarditis from COVID is mainly confined to people >= 40 years old.
Myocarditis from VACCINES is mainly confined to mRNA vaccines in males < 40. For this age cohort:
- Pfizer carries more risk than covid infection does (though the risk is comparable, and we are indeed only talking about myocarditis), and
- Moderna is an order of magnitude worse than both Pfizer and covid infection.
Quoting from the article: “However, the risk of myocarditis following vaccination is consistently higher in younger males, particularly following a second dose of RNA mRNA-1273 vaccine.”
So,
- If you’re >= 40 and vaccine shopping, ignore this
- If you’re < 40 and male, definitely don’t get Moderna, and you might be better off with a non-mRNA shot
- If you’re <40 and female, you probably want to get an mRNA shot: myocarditis doesn’t seem to be a risk for you, and there is evidence that you face a higher risk of blood clots with J&J and AZ vs mRNA shots
For other readers: The article is digestible, and if you don’t want to read, Figure 1 tells you what you need to know.
Regarding children, the analysis isn’t granular enough for me to comment.
That’s a fair and concise summary and it’ll be interesting to see whether this is ultimately published, whether others find the same effects, similar effect sizes, etc
How much did you get for this article?
One thing that the author of this piece misses, I think, is that for many people it’s completely irrelevant that many scientists are looking into incidence of myocarditis among young men or into whether vaccination soon after recovering from a Covid infection is a good idea. Why? Because, in the midst of uncertainty on these questions, many Americans are still finding themselves compelled to get the vaccine themselves or to have their male children vaccinated, and face dire consequences for doing the very risk-weighing our author recommends. And the folks compelling them are citing The Science as the basis for doing so. The author suggests that parents of boys and young men themselves are correct to weigh the risks of the vaccines, but she fails to confront the fact that many literally cannot do this because the decision has been taken from them by authorities imposing a vaccine mandate. From their perspective, it is patently obvious that their concerns aren’t being taken seriously in a way that actually makes a difference for them. Is it any wonder the my start looking to folks like Dr Malone for answers? And should it surprise anyone that the fact that there are scientists looking into these issues would be small consolation?
This pisses me all the way off.
I laughed when I realized that all that this meant -
'Keep in mind Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.” This is a long one.'
- is that the comments refuting the bullshit in this article would be a magnitude longer than the article itself [I bet the author didn't extrapolate to apply it to themself; just because something is long doesn't mean it's correct or more correct, I guess that fits in a similar vein of size doesn't matter if you don't know how to use it], if anyone's going to bother wasting so much time - though a few people were compelled enough to pick a few specific points to counter.
Thanks for making the effort to write this piece. It was an enjoyable and informative read.
Interesting, I have had my suspicions as well. I still think he has a lot of interesting things to listen to but when people flock around an expert like he is a god, it makes me stand back and think. Whether it is Fauci or Malone, these people shouldn't be idolised but instead listened to and their information debated.
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/
The public health establishment lost my confidence when they promoted "contact tracing" as a way to contain infection. They recommended states and cities hire armies of contact tracers. This is what works, we were told.
Yes, it works to contain Ebola in African villages. A contact disease that kills so quickly it will usually burn itself out.
How could anyone believe that contact tracing would work on an airborne virus in NYC? Yet there was Andrew Cuomo in his inspiring briefings selling exactly that, at the behest of public health officials. I know that my state did scramble to hire thousands of contact tracers, as did many others.
I know that data can change the picture when dealing with a new phenomenon. But this was known to be an airborne respiratory virus from very early on. How was contact tracing ever a serious recommendation for containment?
Hypothetically if everyone who possibly could stay home actually _stayed_ home (and the government, like other governments, paid people to stay home); if we’d brought people home but then stopped travel in or out; and if we had well-trained contract tracers — well that could have worked to keep cases very low. Contract tracing works if cases are low and people are well trained — and if you stay vigilantly on top of it.
Look at South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, and New Zealand.
We’ve had 1 in 390 of our population die of covid so far. Very densely populated Japan has had 1 in 7000 of their population die.
What did they do differently? They followed guidance cooperatively, even though it wasn’t fun. The cooperated with masking and contract tracing and staying the heck home when they’re sick.
So I don’t think the problem is that contact tracing doesn’t work.
The problem is that slapdash contact tracing by minimum-wage poorly trained workers (when contact tracing requires training and skills) — in the American context of “You won’t tell ME what to do! I want to go to Target! I have plans for Disneyland! I prefer to see people’s faces! I LIKE going to bars!” simply won’t work.
Cooperative-minded cultures that value the well-being of the group are at a strong advantage during a pandemic compared with individual-minded cultures that value personal freedom even when hundreds of thousands of extra people will die.
I’m all for personal freedom, but dammit, sometimes we have to change gears when the situation calls for it. Flexibly changing gears is not “tyranny”; it’s common sense. If we’d had an effective leader at the beginning of this thing, who refused to politicize the pandemic and brought all Americans together for a common goal (similar to post-Pearl Harbor), the outcome might have been very different. Instead it’s become this political nightmare of Democrats versus Republicans, and they’re all —and I do mean all— spouting nonsense that harms us ALL.
We need some adults in charge. We don’t have any.
Each type of culture has pros and cons. Our type of culture is deadly in a pandemic. “Every man for himself” doesn’t work well in hard times.
Anyway in the right context, contract tracing works for covid. (Also I just edited for typos!)
Lots of "ifs" there. Shouldn't the public health officials have been aware of the pitfalls?
I still have a hard time believing that a contact tracing interview in NYC that begins "I got on the subway and rode for 15 min" has any chance of containing a respiratory virus, even with trained epidemiologists taking the call. But we spent millions on it.
I completely agree that it was poorly done and therefore a waste of money.
I really appreciate what you're doing, but it's not credible to me to hand wave off off-patent early treatments: https://c19early.com/.
The confidence intervals are all over the place: to include some of that stuff gives the impression that they just aren’t serious about what they’re doing.
Like anyone, I have limited time to read journal articles, and I tend to focus on the reviews and meta-analyses. That’s what I did with the early treatments.
I don’t begrudge anyone who still wants to do research on IVM and HCQ but I’ll be very surprised if anyone finds an effect at this point.
Hundreds of studies have found an "effect" and whether it be 66% (IVM on average) or 34% (Fluvoxamin on average) or 25% (HCQ on average) reduction in death/severity, given the well-known safety profiles of each of those drugs (and others) I can't see any good reason other than pharmaceutical profit margins for them to be repressed as they have been. Especially given that they are literally rationing the approved and patented alternatives (in some places apparently based on race rather than clinical need). And I further can't really take anyone seriously who hand waves that kind of evidence away, given the incredibly high stakes, a 66% drop in deaths given tens of millions of severe cases is a potentially a massive number of people being impacted.
Fluvoxamine is indeed promising. I wish the same were true for the other two meds. I take HCQ already and would've loved a two-fer.
A great Twitter follow is Dr. David Bouleware, an infectious disease doctor-researcher at the University of Minnesota. He has been open-minded about repurposed drugs and seems to have *very* little ego invested in being right or wrong.
I've followed the studies and the ones on ivermectin are pretty flawed. The best explanation I've seen for ivermectin showing some results in some trials is that it reduces the burden of parasitic diseases where those are common. Logically that would contribute to better odds when infected with a virus.
Ivermectin is a safe drug. I don't think much harm will accrue from an individual taking it (as long as they're careful about dosage). The harm comes when influencers tout it instead of other measures that are proven to reduce the chances of severe covid, such as vaccination.
I'm no shill of Big Pharma; I think Merck's drug is less promising than fluvoxamine according to the available evidence, with a much more concerning safety profile. Paxlovid, OTOH, looks pretty good. We do need widely available therapeutics. We're not anywhere close to that point yet, and even Paxlovid is pricey enough that insurance may well decline to cover it for middle-aged people without massive risk factors for severe covid.
Myself, I'll try to get my hands on fluvoxamine if (okay, when!) covid catches up with me.
Thanks that's all helpful. I'd be curious to hear what are the flaws with the IVM studies, taken as a whole (i.e. not the worst of the 75 listed there, but the best, or a meta of the best: https://c19ivermectin.com/. Paxlovid seems to have the highest efficacy of anything yet, but as a new product, I'd be worried about the safety profile if I was in otherwise not really in a high-risk group.
I hate the argument: "The harm comes when influencers tout it instead of other measures that are proven to reduce the chances of severe covid, such as vaccination." That is, in my humble opinion, infantilizing people. We're in a freakin' worldwide pandemic killing millions, affecting the lives of billions in a severe way, make everything accessible and affordable, put out good credible information about the known methods of reducing severe disease and death, and let adults make adult decisions. Don't play games trying to "nudge" people to do the "right" or "best" thing for themselves, particularly when you know there are profit motives at play that incentive powerful actors to sway people one way versus the other.
I'm wondering why you chose the Roman et al meta-analysis for IVM? When I last checked it was the only meta-analysis to come out negative, and it was only able to do that by switching the treatment and control arms of Niaee et al. This was later corrected, but only in the body of the paper; that change should have made the conclusion positive, but the conclusion was left unchanged, presumably so that people could continue to cite the paper as evidence for lack of efficacy. They also claimed to include all non-prophylaxis RCTs but they omitted some positive RCTs without explanation. It should really have been retracted. https://ivmmeta.com/#roman
Here you go -- here it is in plain unambiguous terms.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2021/11/01/ivermectin-still-doesnt-treat-covid-19/?sh=73eddb323837
The author is not just a medical writer; he is a professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University.
The problem is, medical journals -- especially with the ivermectin issue (or anything related to covid, where things are published at the speed of light) have a lot of old, or corrected, or need to be corrected articles. A lot of the "research" is simply biased. Some of the research, for ivermectin specifically, was fraudulent.
So you can find things that look like covid might work.
But here as of November is Salzberg's assessment of the state of ivermectin research. It doesn't work. No one wants to prevent a cheap, useful drug from being used (again, look at the corticosteroids, which are saving lots of lives).
And .com sites are just not reliable sources of medical data.
Thank you, Salzberg cites two pieces of original research to support his claim that IVM doesn't work.
The first piece is a preprint by Hill et al, following up on some of their earlier research which by now is rather out of date, only covering a small number of the RCTs now available. In particular I'd mention the decently-sized Seet et al prophylaxis RCT which was published since Hill's original analysis and which showed 50% efficacy from just one dose; a remarkable performance for a drug that "doesn't work". The Hill et al preprint essentially says that trials assessed as high quality when using Cochrane risk of bias criteria don't show efficacy. Let's look at those four "high-quality" trials:
* Lopez-Medina showed somewhat better outcomes in the treatment arm but the results were not statistically significant because it was severely underpowered; you would not expect a trial like that to show a meaningful effect however wonderful IVM was and it's not evidence that IVM is of low efficacy.
* The Zoni paper (lead author is actually Vallejos) was also very underpowered. Also not evidence of low efficacy.
* Fonseca paper (lead author is actually Bermejo Galan) was about late stage treatment which is not what ivermectin is normally advocated for.
* The Kirti paper (lead author is actually Ravikirti) showed far better outcomes in the treatment arm but it was too small a trial to establish statistical significance.
So the Hill analysis does nothing to show that IVM is of low efficacy; it just provides a list of "high quality" trials that are either underpowered or not relevant. Salzberg is not an objective reviewer if he claims it shows that IVM doesn't work; the difference between an underpowered result and a negative result is basic and it's something an objective reviewer would have highlighted when writing for a general audience.
The second piece of research that Salzberg cites is an article in The Atlantic (I note what you say about dot com sites and medical data!) by a researcher who has audited some of the IVM studies. This kind of audit is potentially very valuable. However the author provides no links to his work and I wasn't able to find any links, for example on his blog; this is uncharacteristic of a researcher who claims to be interested in audit and transparency. He only names one of the studies he found issues with. This is a shaky foundation on which to base a claim that IVM doesn't work.
You’re obviously an intelligent person who is very invested in spinning this a certain way. It’s hard to believe you’re in earnest, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Anyone can say any study whose results they don’t like is “underpowered” —in fact that’s kind of a running joke, right?
But if Lopez Medina give 400 people ivermectin and there are no differences between groups, whether in how quickly the survivors recover nor in the number of people who die in each group, that means, essentially, that ****your drug doesn’t work****.
If you want to finesse it and say, well if we made those groups really really really big, we could find a “statistical difference” then at some point that’s meaningless.
That’s why the “underpowered” claim is such a joke.
It’s kind of like those studies that showed a potential health benefit in resveratrol (found in red wine) but to get enough to make a difference you’d need to drink 200 bottles a day or something ridiculous.
So I suppose hypothetically if you make your studies larger and larger and larger, you might find some “statistically significant difference” in something, someday, statistically (but not real-world-meaningfully) in favor of ivermectin, in a “you just need to drink 200 bottles of wine per day to see this effect in humans” kind of way.
But in that case, if a well-controlled study of four hundred people is “underpowered” to detect just how amazing your miracle drug is, it’s not really a miracle drug is it? So let’s move on to treatments that do work.
If ivermectin is a “miracle drug” the differences should appear in a group of 400.
Then there’s the revised Hill et al, finally published after removing the fraudulent data and reanalyzing. Spoiler: No, ivermectin doesn’t work.
And yet you come back here and you insist that the well-done studies aren’t big enough, and you wave away the outright fraud.
And why _is_ there such a degree of fraud surrounding this miracle drug (the Egyptian falsifier; the guy in the Brazil who gave his “control group” a toxic stew; etc.)? Why are people falsifying the data if this drug works great and people could make a name for themselves by doing honest research?
Everything about this just stinks. When you encourage people to forego the best imperfect things we have to offer (including imperfect vaccines) in favor of a treatment that simply doesn’t work, you’re harming people who don’t know better and who will be impressed by the fancy way you seem to speak about it.