Part the First: Retrospective Notes on a Pandemic. BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, has recently published two interesting pieces on COVID-19. The first is an analysis by Anthony Costello, who was previously Director of Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health at the World Heath Organization: UK decision not to suppress covid raises questions about medical and scientific advice. Dr. Costello focuses on the United Kingdom, but his analysis applies to all countries that had the means to suppress the pandemic but did not. In the aftermath of a deadly pandemic, reasoned discussion of what was done and more importantly, not done, has been rare. I am not an infectious disease expert or an epidemiologist, but I have been adjacent to both disciplines for my entire career in biomedical science. I was asked in the spring of 2020 how long I thought COVID-19 would last. My answer was “three years, if we suppress spread of SARS-CoV-2.” I was dead wrong, but suppression might have worked. As Costello begins:
Early in the covid pandemic, evidence emerged from several East Asian countries that suppression could lead to successful control. Yet the UK did not adopt the approach. Suppression aims to avoid national lockdowns and maintain economic activity for most of the population by introducing surveillance systems to bring new outbreaks under control quickly, thus reducing the reproductive rate of infection (R0) to below 1 and causing the epidemic to wither. In May 2020, Jeremy Hunt, then chair of the health and social care select committee, criticised UK government advisers for failing to recommend a response focused on suppression of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from early in the pandemic, calling it “One of the biggest failures of scientific advice to ministers in our lifetimes.” Why was suppression not recommended, and what can be done to improve advice in future? (emphasis added here and below)
In my view, which is similar to the conclusion here, the response to COVID-19 failed to recognize SARS-CoV-2 as something “new,” although SARS and MERS were clear messages from 2002 and 2012, respectively (and as noted in Links yesterday, nine cases of MERS have recently appeared, with two deaths). In the UK strategy followed what might be done during an influenza epidemic (as we whistle past the graveyard about bird flu). From the article:
All pandemics are different, but SARS CoV-2 had an R0 value more similar to the coronavirus SARS-CoV-1 than to influenza. Influenza spreads too fast to be controlled by testing and contact tracing, but coronaviruses have longer incubation periods and potentially can be suppressed, as evidence from early in the pandemic showed. Several East Asian states avoided prolonged national lockdowns with responses focused on suppression initiated early in the pandemic.
Experts had dealt with two previous coronavirus epidemics: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002-04 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), first reported in 2012. Two papers after the SARS outbreak showed that coronavirus infections, with slower transmission rates and longer incubation periods than influenza, could be suppressed.
One paper… showed that isolation and contact tracing could bring about control even if asymptomatic transmission was as high as 40% of all transmission. At the start of the epidemic in Wuhan, R0 for SARs-CoV-2 was estimated to be close to 3, similar to that seen in the SARS outbreak, indicating that similar suppression measures might have worked. (Another) paper, concluded that coronavirus epidemics require a different approach (using isolation and quarantine measures) to control than pandemic influenza.
In the early days of COVID-19, community health workers, including physicians, were called upon to respond in China, Japan, and Korea. They held the line for as long as they could in a world where most of the “Global North” thought of other things. This was also a teachable moment for the medical students in my tutorial groups in February and March of 2020. They learned very quickly they had signed up to be those who run toward a pandemic instead of away. A few were recalcitrant, which is worrying. According to this article, in the UK “750,000 people, many with health skills, responded to a call for volunteers. Most were never used in any capacity and none to support case finding. The government could have redeployed environmental health officers, sexual health contact tracers, or medical students to case finding and contact tracing but did not do so.” The result was that:
Over the next three years, death rates in China, Japan, and South Korea were five times lower than in the UK (fig 2). Demographics seem insufficient to explain these huge differences: Japan and South Korea had similar gross domestic products (GDP), life expectancy, and age profiles to the UK. Had the UK followed the same strategy and achieved the same excess cumulative death rate by March 2024 as South Korea, 69 instead of 344 deaths per 100,000, it might have prevented up to 180,000 UK deaths.
The US response was different, but not better. The US medical establishment was not particularly useful from the beginning of the pandemic. But in my view the conclusions are inescapable. Suppression of SARS-CoV-2 could have worked, but that very notion has been flushed down the memory hole. Finally:
The UK was once rated the second-best country (after the US) in the world for pandemic preparedness. Covid-19 caused over 230,000 civilian deaths, three times the number during the Blitz. The root failure of the UK response to covid was a strategy devised in January and February 2020. Yet the four chief medical officers in their 2023 technical report for future advisers maintain that their recommendation to “contain, delay, research, and mitigate” was broadly correct, and the report does not recognise suppression successes that led to much better survival rates and lower economic damage in other states.
Five years on, many of the people who developed the UK’s flawed response are still in post; they have not changed their views on suppression, and little has been done to improve government pandemic advice committees or to introduce detailed governance rules for the UK’s future pandemic response and resilience. The covid inquiry and the UK medical establishment should properly critique this public health failure.
Ditto for the United States. In the US, one of the chief advocates of the “Let ‘er rip!” strategy, so that in a matter of months herd immunity would be reached and the pandemic would become a thing of the past, is now Director of the National Institutes of Health. Jay Bhattacharya, MD-PhD (MD but never a physician and the PhD is in Economics), is a principal author of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). The GBD still seems to be policy, even though, and I repeat myself to the point of irritation, durable immunity to coronaviruses, either through prior infection or vaccination remains a noble but unattained goal for at least eighty years. Thus, based on the settled science of coronavirus pathobiology, herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 was an unlikely possibility. One may well wonder if this continuing asininity has deeper political and economic roots. And contrary to what Matt Taibbi seems to believe, Jay Bhattacharya was never “censored.” His “Merchant of Doubt” libertarianism was skewered by scientists paying attention, though.
Part the Second: The People’s Attitudes to Government and Healthcare Administrators Changed During the Pandemic. This report (paywall) is also from the UK, but the message travels well:
News reports about politicians and government officials ignoring guidelines during the pandemic was a turning point for many people, the UK covid inquiry heard.
The underlying document is here. The following is a good summary:
- Many contributors (to the survey) felt the guidelines around testing were initially clear, but confusion grew over time due to changing rules and lack of awareness about contact tracing.
- People were left confused by changes to official government guidance about when to test and self-isolate. Uncertainty about the rules in place at any one time meant that some people decided to do what they thought was appropriate regardless of whether or not it aligned with the rules.
- Some contributors described how their awareness and confidence in knowing when to test grew over time as a result of having symptoms and experiencing the virus or hearing about the experiences of others with Covid-19. However, some contributors also told us that they were confused about knowing the difference between symptoms of Covid-19 and other similar illnesses, such as colds and the flu.
- Contributors described difficulties accessing or keeping up with information about testing. This included people who did not use the internet and people whose first language was not English.
- Some contributors explained how they had found contact tracing information unclear, that it was hard to understand the purpose of it and to follow the guidance correctly.
- Few people seemed aware of the financial and practical support that was available when self-isolating.
The US responses to COVID-19 were different but the results of a US Covid Inquiry would be similar. From the beginning according to our healthcare leaders, COVID-19 was nothing more than a cold from which recovery was just a matter of time. No, not really. I don’t know how many colds I have had in this long life, but I never lost my sense of smell because of one (after the nasal congestion went away). Neither I nor any friends of family ever suffered from “Long Cold” for years after. No one ever died of Long Cold as far as I know, but I had two friends who died of COVID-19 sequelae. I received two COVID-19 shots (Pfizer/BioNTech) and so far I have not had COVID-19, as far as I know. But I have avoided crowded indoor spaces to the extent possible while remaining perfectly happy. Several coworkers have gotten multiple booster shots and have had COVID-19 multiple times. And contrary to President Biden, the COVID-19 vaccines did not work as he said they would.
Through all this, scientists, including many friends and colleagues, marvel that they are losing respect they have not already squandered? Can my colleagues and I get it back? Only if we start telling the disinterested “truth” as we understand it. Stranger things have happened, perhaps.
Part the Third. Pathogenic Bacteria Can Eat Plastic and Form Stronger Biofilms. To which one can only reply, what took them so long? As Ian Malcolm/Jeff Goldblum put it, “Life, uh, finds a way.” As an aside, I generally do not read much science fiction, but Michael Crichton had a way with the biological form of the genre, beginning with The Andromeda Strain. Jurassic Park was a good read and better movie (to me) but required even more suspension of disbelief than The Da Vinci Code (I would nevertheless recommend in the illustrated version, which I picked up from a Remainder Table).
Actually, it has been known for some time that bacteria will “learn” to eat plastic. They are versatile organisms and given time they will evolve to eat what is available. They like sugar, starch, fat, and protein just like us, but they can get by on little and are very patient. A current paper is Cell Reports tells us that Pseudomonas aeruginosa clinical isolates can encode plastic-degrading enzymes that allow survival on plastic and augment biofilm formation (open access but very technical). From the Summary/Abstract:
Multiple bacteria encoding plastic-degrading enzymes have been isolated from the environment. Given the widespread use of plastic in healthcare, we hypothesized that bacterial clinical isolates may also degrade plastic. This could render plastic-containing medical devices susceptible to degradation and failure and potentially offer these pathogens a growth-sustaining substrate, enabling them to persist in the hospital-built environment. Here, we mined the genomes of prevalent pathogens and identified several species encoding enzymes with homology to known plastic-degrading enzymes. We identify a clinical isolate of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that encodes an enzyme that enables it to degrade a medically relevant plastic, polycaprolactone (PCL), by 78% in 7 days. Furthermore, this degradation enables the bacterium to utilize PCL as its sole carbon source. We also demonstrate that encoding plastic-degrading enzymes can enhance biofilm formation and pathogenicity. Given the central role of plastic in healthcare, screening nosocomial bacteria for plastic-degrading capacity should be an important future consideration.
Or in bullet points:
- Clinical isolate of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA-W23 can degrade a medically relevant plastic
- Encodes novel polyesterase Pap1, which is responsible for plastic-degrading activity
- aeruginosa PA-W23 can use plastic as a carbon source to grow
- Pap1 can influence virulence phenotypes, such as biofilm formation, in the presence of plastic
Why is this important? P. aeruginosa infections typically occur in healthcare settings and are often resistant to antibiotics. From CDC:
Some types are resistant to nearly all antibiotics, including carbapenems, known as multidrug-resistant (MDR) P. aeruginosa. In 2017, MDR P. aeruginosa caused an estimated 32,600 infections among hospitalized patients and 2,700 estimated deaths in the United States.
Pathogenic bacteria are also very good at building their environment in the form of biofilms, where they can effectively hide from antibiotics. Biofilms form on surgical implants and catheters, making chronic infections difficult to treat. P. aeruginosa is often the culprit.
Will these latest “superbugs” eventually cause widespread problems? Probably not, but it is important that biomedical science stays ahead of them. Sixty years ago, it was generally believed (but not by disinterested microbiologists) that infectious diseases were becoming a thing of the past. Our misuse of antibiotics proved that notion false with the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Sir Alexander Fleming predicted this would happen if penicillin were misused, especially as it was in the United States beginning in the 1950s. In the 1960s the standard of care for viral infections of my very good group of family doctors included oral penicillin. I went to the library and looked up the pill in the Physician’s Desk Reference, now available online. The budding biologist in me was puzzled at this practice. Except for secondary bacterial infections during a viral infection (which may have contributed to the virulence of the 1918 flu pandemic), antibiotics are not recommended for the common cold and similar illnesses. But they were (over)used. Now they are an essential ingredient in animal feed used in CAFOs. To the unthinking technologist, can implies ought and often leads to novel problems.
In my view, the likelihood that we will stay ahead of bacteria during the current attack on American science is small. The common answer to the contrary is that Big Pharma will do the work. No, probably not. A good friend and colleague who left academia to work in Biotech eventually took his research to Big Pharma. He was never able to talk to me in detail about his work, but it was on the development of a completely new approach to antibiotics. This was an exciting time for him. He was working with some of the best scientists and scientific workers with no constraints on resources. The Big Pharma corporation that had bought the “intellectual property” and lured him in nevertheless pulled the plug, because they apparently decided there was no upside to their “investment.” If the drugs cured intractable bacterial infections, no matter how much they cost per course they would be a financial loss. My friend retired to a house with a view in the mountains. Is this a true story? Undoubtedly. Granted, it is only one story. But has it happened before, and will it happen again? Undoubtedly.
Part the Fourth. The Secretary of Health and Human Services Speaks. Or as STAT+ puts it, In combative hearings, Kennedy defends HHS cuts, backtracks – and lashes out (paywall, but you can get the photograph at the link; I do not know if it was taken during the May 14 hearing). The gist:
In hours of combative congressional hearings Wednesday, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. swung between defending sweeping changes at his agency and backtracking on aspects of a reorganization he nevertheless said would be “painful.”
He repeatedly cast doubts on reports about negative impacts of the changes, often calling them a “canard.” For instance, he claimed that amid sweeping cuts to his agency, “we did not fire any working scientists.”
His statement before the Senate HELP Committee seems to contradict news reports and former agency staff, who say deep funding cuts have halted scientific research and clinical trials across the country.
One employee at the National Institutes of Health told STAT they were “100% sure” Kennedy’s assertion was false. Another person recently employed at the agency said they knew of “plenty of scientific staff” who had been among the nearly 20,000 employees HHS is shedding. FDA food scientists were fired, though some were later rehired, and support staff let go. Scientists who relied on nearly $2 billion in NIH grants have lost that money.
I would point out here that “working scientists” do not get much done when those who staff their laboratories and provide institutional and administrative support that make research possible go missing.
Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) asked the Secretary about the “continuation of minority health programs (and) Kennedy pointed to a program that was terminated because it had elements of DEI — though he committed to supporting other kinds of minority health programs.” As they say in these parts, “Yeah, right.” The largest blemishes on American healthcare are the wide disparities in outcomes depending on socioeconomic factors. If noticing the obvious is “DEI,” then there is no dealing with these people.
Regarding Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), the former practicing physician who clinched the nomination of RFKJr as Secretary of Health and Human Services:
And after Kennedy misrepresented vaccine safety testing standards, Cassidy fact-checked him, pointing out that rotavirus, measles and HPV vaccines were evaluated against placebos, and others were tested against previous versions of the vaccine.
And:
In some cases, Kennedy told lawmakers that what appeared to be cuts were actually shifts of agency functions into the new Administration for a Healthy America — an explanation several Democrats found unsatisfying. (HHS hasn’t laid out official plans for AHA, and its funding level isn’t yet clear.)
For instance, he told senators that the CDC branch that worked on Alzheimer’s disease would be folded into the AHA. “A lot of the reports that whole divisions have been liquidated were just wrong,” Kennedy said.
Will the Administration for a Healthy America become another very powerful but faux government department like DOGE? If so, perhaps they can use the book written by our future Surgeon General as a guide to make America healthy again, while recommending glucose monitors from Levels, the company founded by her and her brother, and cookbooks that require organic radishes and certified free-range, pasture-raised chicken and wild Atlantic salmon. It will be difficult to find and pay for these in the food deserts of America, where health outcomes are “problematic.”
Anyway, regarding the Secretary’s dissembling, a 50% budget cut forced on the largest and most productive biomedical science organization in the world, albeit one that could use several improvements, necessarily pushes thousands of our scientists into the outer darkness. Mostly, it seems, because their research does not align with Administration “priorities.” This is a new thing in American biomedical science. The same thing is happening to the National Science Foundation, the other crown jewel of American science. Trofim Lysenko has been mentioned here before and in Links on Wednesday, May 14th. History rhymes yet again? It would seem so.
See you next week, with good things about current science, if all goes according to plan.
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Re: Plastic-munching bacteria.
“Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters.” By Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis
Available on Amazon.
Also mentioned in the novel that KGL mentioned – “The Andromeda Strain.” At one point it mutated to eat plastic and a fighter crashed flying though the infected area as the pilot reported all the plastics in his cockpit crumbling. The mutated Andromeda then attacked the plastic door and hatch seals within the Wildfire facility nearly triggering a nuclear self-destruct.
Nice reminder! I’d forgotten that bit – and I’ve re-read that book more than a few times.
It was one of my first experiences I can recall regarding, “Wait, this movie is so much NOT like the book….”
tested against previous version of the vaccine is not remotely a placebo test
This has been covered here and elsewhere. A true placebo group included in the testing of a new version of an existing vaccine is unethical. The placebo group would be knowingly exposed to a pathogen to which an existing vaccine could be administered, but is not; which is obviously beyond the pale.
I would be very careful about using verbiage like “unethical” or “beyond the pale”.
There are multiple problems going on here all at once. First of all, right off the bat, you simply cannot properly assess safety issues when comparing any product with another “like” product. It really must be a true placebo. When this is done, well-trained clinicians should automatically know that they are giving something that has not been tested for safety. I know, I was on an IRB for decades. I will also in another paragraph share with you how this procedure spectacularly backfired on Pharma in a non-vaccine trial.
The thing that concerns me most about this entire thing is how intensely allergic Pharma is to do ANY head to head trials on any products other than vaccines. The reason is very simple – If a head to head trial would have been done back in the day with amlodipine vs nifedipine for BP – one of the companies would have had their product instantly torpedoed. They do not do these because they have a protection racket going on. Unfortunately, some of the vaccine trials I have been involved with on IRB have actually been way way more than just a “new version”……is it really appropriate to compare a vaccine for one virus with a placebo that is a virus in a completely different family? They add this or that adjuvant, or this or that agent – and almost always – these are paired in the trials with “placebo” compounds that not every time but almost always are among the most troublesome safety problems in the group. I will just say that over the years, you learn many of the tricks of manipulation that are done with these trials – and after a while, you get to the point you do not want to take anything.
The example of the time it backfired would have been when the earliest VIOXX trials – and even some of the later ones put their products up against placebos like naprosyn or ibuprofen. These two are not in the same class even though they are all NSAIDS. It was “unethical” to give an arthritis patient sugar pills. It turns out that VIOXX, depending on the dosage used, had better efficacy than some of the NSAIDS. Interestingly, and I remember this conundrum going on for years, the naprosyn and ibuprofen arms had unexpected safety results – they “protected” against MI. There was much strum and drang for months about this – like how could that be happening – how is it we never knew this before. Well it turned out because of subterfuge that was only uncovered after thousands of deaths, that was NOT the correct result – what was happening was the VIOXX was actually causing all kinds of heart attacks and strokes.
In medical research trials on human subjects – nothing is ever considered “unethical” of “beyond the pale” if it is completely and totally disclosed to the subjects and you as the IRB and the investigator can know this has been done. And then that the IRB is following every subject every step of the way. It has only been in the past few years that Pharma has reached the pinnacle of subverting subject and indeed population safety by things they have done. These placebo trials are one way – another way that is even more insidious was the dissolution of the placebo groups in the COVID studies – because we would not want to “knowingly expose them to COVID without being protected by the vaccine” – it did not matter that it was still experimental and that safety data would have been absolutely critical to many questions we have now.
Pharma manipulation of these trials is a thing. I have witnessed it my entire professional life.
Thank you, IM Doc, for this exploration. So Marku52 is likely more right than I am. It seems likely this only skimmed the surface, too, and though it might be seen as a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation, perhaps it’s more like well designed studies are hard and take a depth of expertise developed by years of training and experience. Further, and unfortunately, human nature being what it is there are many ways to tweak things for the benefit of a few and the cost to the many. And what was actually done is highly suspect.
To be able to ‘listen’ to your discussion of the ins and outs of this is a privilege, and this kind and quality of commentary is why I read this blog every day.
In passing, I was prescribed Vioxx early on in the life of the medication, but had an immediate allergic reaction – whole body rash and itching – the first day. I immediately suspected something, called the doctor’s office who got me on steroids to suppress the symptoms. One Vioxx pill. Never again. Could have been worse. Yes, the likelihood of a 30-something seeing MI issues was not high but I wouldn’t want to have been the rarity.
For those who came in late: MI = “myocardial infarction” = heart attack
Late to the party here but additional thanks. Re the opener on suppression versus “let her rip” one could point out that the eventual US solution was to pretend that the vaccine was suppression and make it a universal requirement. In other words Big Pharma was running the show via Trump and then Biden.
So if the discussion here is about ethics then surely a great deal of attention should be given to our profit driven version of medicine which has likely killed more people than Covid ever did. And there’s still the question of how many people the vaccine has killed or will kill.
The excess death rate continues unabated and the notion that it results from an ineffective and dangerous vaccine delivery system is dismissed without adequate study. As was the need for vaccines at all, in so far as Ivermectine was, and is, an effective counter measure, contradicted by a fatally flawed Sept. of 2023 study that is accepted as the gold standard by people incapable of overcoming their profit driven biases. I’m 71 , proudly unvaccinated, who remained outside of closed in offices and mostly outside when socially mingling during the harrowing days of 2020. Ivermectin paste (yes, horse paste known to me and accessible through large animal veterinarians) quickly suppressed and within a week eradicated the only severe cold (as measured by my partner’s untreated version caught at the same time in 2025) that I experienced through the whole shit show of unethical, fear and profit driven responses suggested by so-called scientific and bureaucratic policymaking disasters that littered the landscape with unnecessary deaths.
I’ll tread carefully here.
I am on amlodipine for high blood pressure. Is there a source of information I can use to “do my due diligence?” (Feel free to admonish me concerning my perceived lack of “faith” in my medical practitioners and their motives for various and sundry prescriptions.)
Thank you for telling truth to finance.
Do these plastic eating bacteria “eat” or damage plastic components of implants into humans? Inquiring minds want to know.
More importantly, do they form unsterilisable antibiotic-resistant biofilms on reusable medical devices / instruments, e.g. laparoscopes? Which would lead to cross-infection with every procedure. I doubt anybody is checking….
Wikipedia says sort of. Polycaprolactone has been know to be biodegradable; Wikipedia cites a paper from 2009. It works well in 3d printing, which could be useful. It can be combined with other materials which are more resistant. Being biodegradable means it gets used in timed-release applications.
Turns out this article does not push my hot button which is: we have these “forever plastics” which would seem to be excellent forms of sequestered carbon, and we’re hell-bent on getting bacteria to break them down. WTH?
I think the additional atmospheric carbon that would be produced through biodegradation of polymers produced from fossil carbon feedstocks is not significant compared with other sources of CO2.
Synthetic polymers in the environment cause other problems which are the reason for the interest in degradable formulations.
What we need, I think, is a “circular economy” plastics life cycle that could convert discarded plastics back into the feedstocks from which new plastics are made. I think that is not a simple problem to solve, however.
recycling plastics isnt great. the process of melting down polymers degrades them, making them less usable. and its pretty energy costly. not just the cost of melting down the plastics, but of separating the plastics, etc. i believe lego tried making recycled bricks but they were so much more expensive than normal bricks that they shut down the program.
The UK handled the pandemic badly as Boris Johnson he was in charge and was in favour of letting the virus sweep through the population, casualties be damned-
‘Well it’s a very, very important question, and that’s where a lot of the debate has been and one of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures’
This is what they wanted and this is what they got, not that Boris will ever be held accountable for his part in this fiasco here. The full interview-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOHiaPwtGl4 (18:03 mins)
A suppression strategy depends not only on the virus having a long incubation period during which non-symptomatic transmission rates are low, but also having available an effective test with appropriate type I and type II errors as well as testing infrastructure. If “the medical/public health system” is waiting on symptoms to manifest, it does not matter how long the incubation period is. A screening test which produces a result quickly is required and that test cannot produce high rates of false positives or false negatives. If creating and deploying a screening test takes too long to accomplish during a rapidly developing epidemic, the disease-spread scales beyond the practical limits of a bureaucratic effort to implement contact tracing and local lock-down protocols.
In the U.S., the technical inability of the CDC to produce and deploy a screening test with appropriate protocols early on tended to prejudice a suppression policy. That failure of technical competence should not be overlooked in recounting the history. It wasn’t the last failure of technical competence.
Australia had severe lockdowns and testing early, yet still ended up with 1000 deaths per million. They had a 30% over average in All Cause Mortality by January 2022. This was almost equal to the US. In fact ACM has been almost 10% over average since September 2021. Denis Rancourt has a paper which contradicts the C-19 storyline. His claim is that our response was part of the problem.
https://denisrancourt.substack.com/p/there-was-no-pandemic
I have to agree given that there are some doctors that early on treated C-19 and lost minimal patients. Our Health Ministry basically said if you had C-19 to stay home and go to hospital when you couldn’t breathe. Oh, and take Tylenol.
Excess deaths around the world are still above what is expected especially in highly vaccinated populations. This should be the opposite after a pandemic, as death rates should drop. Why?
Note: I used Our World in Data for my numbers.
Much poorer Thailand had 350 deaths per million. But you can see a doctor for 30 baht, the equivalent of $1.
Thailand also had SARS-1, so they took masking and isolating seriously.
True, but they still had huge increase in excess deaths. It was 36% by the end of August 2021 according to OWiD. It is still near 10% by end of 2023. This ties in with this post concerning vaccine testing with placebo. ACM needs to be considered. Sure a vaccine may help with symptoms or even prevent a particular virus but without comparing ACM between vaccine and placebo we can’t be sure there is value. Sharyl Attkision on Jimmy Doré is a good take on vaccination. Apparently the flu vaccine had no discernible effect on ACM. I started down this rabbit hole when I noticed that my flu vaccinated coworkers were still coming down with flu -my employer encouraged flu vaccines for all. That was 15 years ago and I tried to find any study that showed positive efficacy to no avail. I also saw I think on Vejon Health YouTube channel a European doctor claiming that the measles vaccine actually had a positive effect on ACM and the MMR vaccine had a negative effect. Will try to dig up the studies.
I personally know no one that was ever hospitalized or died from C-19 yet my daughter her husband both had adverse reactions and now my 35 year old son twice vaccinated is complaining of having brain fog and being lethargic. He has had C-19 twice, both after vaccination.
See my FOIA request from last year
FOI HTH-2024-42317 – HSIAR
It asks for hospitalizations of under 40 year olds for cardiac related issues. 2023 showed an increase of almost 70% over 2017-20 average. You can see a significant increase starting in 2022
This is shifting grounds of the argument. We were comparing Australia to Thailand as an example of much much much better performance of SE Asia generally. The latter is not disputable in terms of death and case counts.
And you can’t explain SE Asia v. Thailand with vaccination rates or types. FFS. Thailand has 77.8% with two dose v. over 95% over 12 as fully vaccinated in Australia. Thailand was mainly AstraZeneca:
I have to respectfully disagree Yves, it Is you who shifted the grounds of argument, (I prefer to call this a discussion). My post was pointing out how even though some countries did well against Covid yet ACM still increased. You pointed out how Thailand and East Asia did even better than Australia against this disease, but All Cause Mortality was comparable across the board. What do you think the metric should be, Covid deaths or ACM?
I don’t care if you post my response but hope you see my point.
You did not have ACM in your original argument. The use of ACM WAS shifting grounds.
Yves, this is my first sentence in this thread, “ Australia had severe lockdowns and testing early, yet still ended up with 1000 deaths per million. They had a 30% over average in All Cause Mortality by January 2022.”
Please, I don’t want to turn this into an argument let’s just agree to disagree on this one…..:-)
True but ACM peaked at 36% above average in August 2021 and averaged 10% up to end of 2023. Same in many other countries. Back to placebo controlled vaccine studies, looking at ACM needs to be done. Some vaccines have been shown to have positive effect on ACM, others have not. I suspect that these mRNA vaccines will prove to be the later.
This is shifting grounds of the argument, which is bad faith argumentation. We were talking about death levels pop-wise and using Thailand as an example that SE Asia did WAY better than much richer Australia. Now you haul out another metric, which in no way disproves the original point.
I don’t think I was shifting the argument, I am pointing out that countries that seemed to do well against Covid still three years later had excessive death rates including Thailand. Bulgaria being poor and 30% vaccination rate had excessive deaths in 2020-21 and has had a ACM just under average since May 2022. This was intended to point out as IMDoc said about placebo testing of vaccines. With the mRNA the only control group now are the unvaccinated. If ACM goes up even though the disease being vaccinated for goes down where is the benefit?
A paper in Nature, which even shows the excess death rate per state in Thailand, disagrees with your claims:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-85324-4
From the Nature article, The excess death in Thailand was high in both pandemic and post-pandemic periods as indicated by the p-score (5.24% vs. 5.26%). It was clear from OWiD page that information from Thailand was sporadic during that period. This article supports that. Here is another take from previously mentioned Denis Rancourt which includes Thailand and focus on ACM: https://correlation-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023-09-17-Correlation-Covid-vaccine-mortality-Southern-Hemisphere-cor.pdf
It is long but detailed. Indicates that until vaccine rollout excess deaths in Thailand and Australia were absent. This has been peer reviewed.
This is again straw manning. My point was Thoiland’s death count was lower than Australia’s. It remains relatively low compared to other advanced countries. I never made any absolute claims.
Here is the April 17, 2020 Unherd interview with Dr. Johan Giesecke, the former state epidemiologist of Sweden. It made an impression on me at the time. His opinion, which can be summed up in the phrase, ‘You can’t keep it out,’ may not be popular on these pages, and was very unpopular in the world when it was issued. However, I think one can reasonably argue that he was correct.
As I recall, and its been five years since I listened to it, he addresses the question of whether we could do China like lockdowns with a curt: ‘That’s not possible in a democratic society.’
https://unherd.com/newsroom/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/
A year after this interview, Unherd did a follow up interview, in which Dr. Giesecke cheerfully admitted to being mistaken on many topics. Had they waited another year or two for another interview, he might well have retracted his mea culpas.