Tips for Thought (December 2021)

Research News

Accounting for Pandemic: Better Numbers for Management and Policy

Numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths have played a pivotal role in forming social opinion and support for policy decisions about the 2020-21 SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic.

This CONVIVIUM article raises critical questions on some of the most widely-used indicators, such as the case fatality rate, derived from these numbers, recommending replacing them with information based on regular stratified statistical sampling, coupled with diagnostic assessment.

Some implications for public health policies and pandemic management are developed, opposing individualistic and holistic approaches: the former aiming to track and control individual behaviour (and then advocating for draconian measures such as lockdowns and forced vaccination for all); the latter aiming to understand the whole of pandemic as a social phenomenon, then advocating for focused protection of vulnerable people based upon a holistic understanding

Interested readers can access CONVIVIUM full content?for free:?Simply go to LOG IN and enter the passcode?BEPress2021?in the "Do you have a passcode?" window.

What about it?

Understanding Relative and Absolute Risk Reduction

If you buys a national lottery ticket, you get an infinite relative probability to win as compared to the case in which you did not buy it. But this does not change the fact that you still have a virtually null absolute probability to get the jackpot...

This was the logic behind the so-called-now-'vaccine' trials, approved on the basis of their relative probability to reduce the?#covidー19?virus impact, without assessing the absolute risk reduction and the adverse events occurrence by age class and other conditions

The PANDA article above provides further analysis on this important and neglected matter.

Herd Immunity

What do you mean by herd immunity? Immunity does not imply eradication of virus circulation and then zero cases. It modestly means that the virus circulation has become endemic, while the population has reached a sufficient level of protection through natural immunities (by general immune defence, or recovery from infection), vaccination and therapies. UK is likely to have reached that level long ago, and so did other European countries... Living with the?#covidー19?virus implies accepting that people will keep living with and dying for this and other diseases. Or shall we lock-up in our own homes until we reach collective immortality?

The ancients understood immunology better than public health authorities these days.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War (~400 BC), the Greek historian Thucydides wrote of a great plague that hit Athens in the middle of its war with Sparta. It killed a quarter of the inhabitants of Athens before the disease burned out (presumably because herd immunity hit). Here is the key passage from Book 51:?

“…more often the sick and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension. For no one was ever attacked a second time, or not with a fatal result. All men congratulated them, and they themselves, in the excess of their joy at the moment, had an innocent fancy that they could not die of any other sickness.”

Following the ancient greeks, we may therefore congratulate unvaccinated people who afford the risk and likely recover from the disease: They help all of us getting rid of it... Vaccination may be reserved to vulnerable people who are willing to take it by informed consent on its carefully assessed benefits and risks.

Vaccination Efficacy

Norman Fenton?and?Martin Neil?develop and visualise a statistical illusion which occurs when comparing evolving relative rates of mortality between vaccinated and unvaccinated people (both classes being evolving within the same population over time), showing a striking parallel with real data from UK over 2021. Accordingly, the relative efficacy of vaccination may result to be illusory, and even serious adverse effects from vaccination may be hiding behind the fallacious comparison.

One of the key numbers deployed worldwide for vaccination marketing purpose appears to be a biased public health indicator. Is it time to abandon it and seek for more reliable indicators?

Jason Oke and?carl Heneghan?point to the seasonal effect on comparing relative mortality rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated, since vaccination campaigns occurred over time with very low impact before April 2021 in UK. They conclude that measuring the effects of vaccines using population data is not straightforward. It can produce misleading results and inherent biases, which are difficult to spot, particularly if an important confounder such as the seasonal effect is overlooked.

To be sure, the UK authorities have at least the decency to disentangling vaccination status since the first dose injection while somehow excluding unrelated deaths.

On misleading numbers driving unhealthy public policies, see:?https://lnkd.in/eXBWVcGt

Transparency

Four days after the Pfizer vaccine was approved for ages 16+, 'Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency' submitted?a Freedom of Information Act Request to the FDA for all of the data within Pfizer’s?#covidー19?vaccine biological product file. They have now?sued?the FDA for not releasing the data. Court documents and productions of Pfizer’s documents from the FDA are released on its website.

Public Health Policy

Public health keeps redefining itself as the main gate for experimenting unproved technologies on mass scale, possibly enabling developing countries to become the living laboratory for them.

"However, some risks exist, for example, with germline and heritable human genome editing, which alter the genome of human embryos and could be passed on to subsequent generations, modifying descendants’ traits," the WHO report warns. We shall definitely assess those risks as well as we have carefully assessed genetically-engineered vaccines in response to the?#covidー19?pandemic.

According to the scare and persuade (and mandate) strategy which has been in place since 2020, we expect fear-spreading to scary people about genetic defects, nudges to persuade them to accept human genome editing, and authoritarian measure to force the reluctant into them. Shall we?