Category: pandemic

Eric Clapton argues that pharmaceutical advertising hypnotized him into getting the covid jab that did him in

January 25, 2022 • 9:00 am

The more Eric Clapton opens his gob about vaccination, the dumber he looks. He would be well advised to shut up and play his axe.  While there is a minute possibility that Clapton did indeed get sick from his injection, I suspect that if he is now chronically ill, it may well be due to something else. But even if it was the jab that did him in, he has no business trying to persuade the world to avoid vaccination against Covid.There are enough data on immediate side effects to show that he is a real outlier and not the norm.  And the idea that he was hypnotized into getting the jab. . . . well, I have no words.

See the tweet at the bottom for what is also my reaction.

Below is the first part of a two-part interview of Clapton by “The real music observer”, David Spuria. (A second part is promised.) This one is eighteen minutes long, and prompted the NY Post article below it.

The most bizarre part of this video is Clapton’s claim that he was manipulated by Big Pharma advertising into getting a covid jab. The notes below, which are from the interview, were reprinted in the Post.

Eric Clapton’s career “had almost gone anyway” until his campaign against conventional medicine took off.

The 76-year-old musician went on the Real Music Observer YouTube channel to discuss how his life has changed since reluctantly taking AstraZeneca’s therapy in 2021. Clapton has since become outspoken about his anti-vaccination stance.

He claimed that he’d been duped into getting the COVID-19 jab by subliminal messaging in pharmaceutical advertising — and urged others not to fall for it.

“Whatever the memo was, it hadn’t reached me,” he said, referring to the “mass formation hypnosis” conspiracy theory, which gained traction in 2021 as part of anti-vaccine propaganda. (In related circles, it’s also been called “mass formation psychosis.”)

Credited to Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, the theory essentially points to a sort of mind control that has taken over society, allowing for unscrupulous leaders to easily manipulate populations into, for example, accepting vaccines or wearing face masks.

“Then I started to realize there was really a memo, and a guy, Mattias Desmet [professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium], talked about it,” Clapton continued. “And it’s great. The theory of mass formation hypnosis. And I could see it then. Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere.”

JAC: That is known in the trade as “confirmation bias.”

Clapton recalled “seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising,” he said.

His “preexisting condition”, which he claims caused him to get really sick after the jab, seems to be a bad back caused by a nerve inflammation. Well, perhaps. But to blame your taking the jab on subliminal manipulation—hypnosis, for crying out loud!—is risible.

:. 

More from The Post and the video, including his collaboration on anti-vax music with Van Morrison:

The former Cream guitarist also talked about his efforts with fellow British songwriter Van Morrison to speak up on behalf of other artists against vaccine requirements.

“My career had almost gone anyway. At the point where I spoke out, it had been almost 18 months since I’d kind of been forcibly retired,” he said, as pandemic restrictions shut down live events for months.

“I joined forces with Van and I got the tip Van was standing up to the measures and I thought, ‘Why is nobody else doing this?’ … so I contacted him.”

He said Morrison, 76, complained that he wasn’t “allowed” to freely object to vaccine requirements.

“I was mystified, I seemed to be the only person that found it exciting or even appropriate. I’m cut from a cloth where if you tell me I can’t do something, I really want to know why,” the “Cocaine” singer said.

He sounds calm and rational (the British accent helps), but what’s coming out of his mouth is nonsense. Now of course he has the right to say anything he wants, including his theory of “mass hypnosis”, but we can fault Clapton for trying to persuade others to avoid a preventive that has been shown to work. As he says, “I had a tool [his music], and I could do something about that” [i.e., promulgating his crazy views].

Click on the screenshot to read the Post article, though if you watch the 18-minute video above, you don’t really need to. 

I think this tweet is appropriate.

h/t: Barry

Bari Weiss: anti-vaxer?

January 22, 2022 • 11:30 am

In this segment of Bill Maher’s show last night, Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres from New York, Bari Weiss, and Maher discuss Covid-19, with the topic being “whether it’s time to move past Covid restrictions and get back to normal.” Weiss and Maher seem to say “yes,” while Torres urges caution. 

Bari Weiss declares that she’s “had it” with Covid, that masks don’t work, that you can be vaccinated and still get infected with omicron, that lockdowns cause suicide, that few children have died from Covid and that “it’s time to end it”, apparently meaning we no longer need to take precautions against Covid, including getting rid of masks, lockdowns, and vaccinations. She’s arguing, as Torres characterizes her view, that “the response to the disease has been worse than the disease itself.” But have 800,000 Americans committed suicide from Covid-induced depression? No: look at the data from StatNews:

Those of us who posited that suicide rates may actually decline during the pandemic were either dismissed or criticized. But we were right: Provisional data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that for the entire year of 2020 — when most lockdown procedures were put in place, many communities saw their highest rates of Covid-related deaths, and economic uncertainty was at its peak — suicide rates dropped by 3%.

For verification of this, see here and here (the latter is the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, which says that more data should be analyzed when it comes in later).

As for the efficacy of masks, the data summarizing their value can be seen at the CDC website, which actually gives data and doesn’t just say “wear masks”.

The gist of what she says here is that we shouldn’t have done anything about the pandemic. Maybe we would have had 2 millions deaths, but that’s just collateral damage.

Torres makes the point that nearly 100% the people in the hospital with Covid now are unvaccinated. They’re still dying, so how can you claim that vaccines don’t work? (The original clinical trials, of course, confirmed the efficacy of the vaccine.). As reader Paul wrote,

At least on COVID, Bari Weiss seems to have joined the other side. She and Bill seem to believe that the vaccine only protects the recipient against hospitalization and death and doesn’t help them avoid catching and passing on the disease. In general, Weiss seems to be positioning herself as a “media personality” rather than a writer, at least that’s my take.

Not only that, but she’s not even hewing to the data.  She’s come perilously close to being an anti-vaxer, if she isn’t one already.

In Weiss’s case, she hasn’t stayed in her ideological position while the left moved further left. No, she appears to be shifting to the right. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually she become a never-Trumper Republican. I hope not, but what she had to say in this short segment greatly disheartened me.  And so did Maher’s response.

Weiss, at least, owes America a clarification of what she means when she says, “it’s time to end it.” End WHAT?

 

You can order your free Covid test kits now

January 18, 2022 • 11:30 am

Although American households were supposed to order their 4 free Covid test kits beginning tomorrow, reader Paul, quick to the mark, found out that you can order them NOW.

Just go to this site (or click on the screenshot below), and enter your name and address after pressing the blue button. Check out (no charge), and you’ll immediately get a confirmation email from the USPS.

The details (remember, rapid antigen tests aren’t usually accepted for international travel):

  • Limit of one order per residential address
  • One order includes 4 individual rapid antigen COVID-19 tests
  • Orders will ship free starting in late January

DO IT NOW!  Thanks, Paul.

A funny title but a serious point about ivermectin and Covid-19

December 16, 2021 • 9:30 am

Reader Martim sent me a link to this article in The Economist, which is pretty much paywalled but includes a paragraph and two graphs you can see. Click on the screenshot below to see what’s viewable:

And the figures, which buttress the title’s assertion:

Just using Fisher’s Exact Test* on the directionality above (dots to left or right of line), the difference is not statistically significant, but it is in a suggestive direction. We need more data to see if this disparity is statistically significant and thus “real” (i.e. not produced by chance under an equal frequency null hypothesis).

Now this is basically all of the article I’m allowed to read, but it hints at why some studies may show a positive effect of Ivermectin on patients infected with Covid-19. To put it simply, worms are a “comorbidity”, that might be eliminated with ivermectin. If having worms makes raises your chances of dying or hospitalization from having the virus, then taking ivermectin could help save your life not by affecting the virus, but by ramping up your immune system after the worms have gone.  Ivermectin would not, then, be of any use in treating patients unless they’re known to be affected with roundworms. (Ivermectin helps get rid of roundworms that cause intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis, conditions that weaken your immune system.)

The graphs above suggest what one might predict: ivermectin would be more efficacious against Covid-19 in countries with a higher prevalence of worms, specifically the kind of worms killed by ivermectin. And that’s what the graphs show.

Of course, some of the studies above, both positive and negative, may already have been discredited by subsequent inspection (I haven’t checked), but I’m surprised that nobody has suggested this explanation before. (If they have, I haven’t seen it.)

In a month or two we should know the results of the properly conducted Oxford study on the effects of ivermectin on Covid-19 mortality. I’m almost positive that if the drug does have a positive effect on the disease, it will be minor—certainly much less than that of vaccination or the new Pfizer antiviral pill. But we will wait patiently. I tried to bet my doctor on 3:1 odds (if I won, I’d get $10, while if he won, and Ivermectin had a big positive effect, he’d get $30) that ivermectin wouldn’t show a greater preventive or curative effect than jabs and the new treatments, but he rejected that as a “sucker bet”!

UPDATE: I’ve just managed to subscribe for free and so have seen the rest of the article; it appears that some have considered worms as a comorbidity. A quote (emphasis is mine):

Yet ivermectin’s advocates insist that there is solid science demonstrating the drug’s efficacy. One well-documented website lists and links to 65 different papers on the subject, many of which, on the surface, seem to support this claim. Could this many studies all be wrong? Recent analysis by Avi Bitterman, a dermatologist in New York, and Scott Alexander, a prominent blogger, suggests that the answer is nuanced. Ivermectin probably does help one subset of covid-19 patients: those who are also infected by the worms it was designed to fight.

Wading through the papers whose methodologies appeared sound, Dr Bitterman noticed that the studies that looked best for ivermectin tended to cluster in regions with high rates of infections by strongyloides, a parasitic worm. Common in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America, strongyloides can cause, among other things, diarrhoea, fatigue and weight loss. However, they only pose a graver threat if their numbers grow out of control. Such “hyper-infection”, which is often fatal, becomes far more likely if a patient is receiving corticosteroids, which both suppress the immune system and appear to make female worms more fertile. And dexamethasone, a corticosteroid, is now a standard treatment for severe covid-19, because it prevents the immune system from going into overdrive and attacking the body’s own cells.

Building on observations by David Boulware, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, Dr Bitterman concluded that strongyloides may account for the conflicting results of studies about the effectiveness of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19. In trials conducted in countries where the parasites are common, many people could have both covid-19 and strongyloides infections. Covid-19 might already have weakened their bodies’ defences against the worms; treating the coronavirus with corticosteroids would let the parasites run wild.

In the groups who received ivermectin during trials, the drug would keep strongyloides in check. But patients in control groups would be left at the worms’ mercy. This would make it look as if ivermectin were preventing deaths caused solely by covid-19, when in fact it was preventing those caused by the parasites or by a combination of the two infections. This mechanism would explain why most studies conducted in places where strongyloides are rare showed no benefit from taking ivermectin. “Ivermectin doesn’t treat covid,” Dr Bitterman wrote. “It treats parasites (shocker) that kill people when they get steroids that treat covid.” He concluded that “taking strongyloides endemic populations, putting them into a control group with corticosteroids is a death sentence”.

In July 2020 a group of doctors argued in the Journal of the American Medical Association that it was “reasonable to consider presumptive treatment with ivermectin for moderate- to high-risk patients not previously tested or treated for strongyloides”, and said that the risk of infection by the worms in covid-19 patients should be “based on factors such as country of origin and long-term residence”. The World Health Organisation also recommends ivermectin in this context. However, most people in rich Western countries like America—where demand for ivermectin, driven by advocates on social media, is so high that some people have resorted to taking the equine version of the drug—do not fit this description. At least when treating patients who have never been to countries with widespread strongyloides, the evidence suggests that mainstream doctors in such places are right to avoid prescribing ivermectin.

None of this, of course, suggests that vaccinations are less efficacious than ivermectin in preventing death from the virus alone, much less, as Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying suggest, you’re better off not getting vaccinated than getting vaccinated. Just get tested for worms if you get covid and live in a roundworm-infested part of the world!

 

*Note that Fisher has been canceled.

More about ivermectin!

December 14, 2021 • 11:00 am

I feel bad for this man and his wife, but there’s a strong dose of irony in this story from USA Today (click on title below to read):

An excerpt:

Keith Smith, whose wife had gone to court to have his COVID-19 infection treated with ivermectin, died Sunday evening, a week after he received his first dose of the controversial drug.

He was 52.

Smith was in a hospital in Pennsylvania for nearly three weeks and had been in the hospital’s intensive care unit in a medically induced coma on a ventilator since Nov. 21. He had been diagnosed with the virus on Nov. 10.

His wife of 24 years, Darla, had gone to court to compel the hospital, UPMC Memorial, to treat her husband with ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that has not been approved for treatment of COVID-19.

York County Court Judge Clyde Vedder’s Dec. 3 decision did not compel the hospital to treat Keith with the drug, but it did allow Darla to have an independent physician administer it. He received two doses before Keith’s condition grew worse, and the doctor halted the treatment. . .

. . .Darla sued UPMC to treat her husband with ivermectin after reading about similar cases throughout the country, all filed by an attorney in Buffalo, N.Y. She was assisted by a group called Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which promotes the use of ivermectin in the treatment of the virus.

He received his first dose on Dec. 5, two days after Vedder’s decision in the court case. After Keith received a second dose, the doctor overseeing the drug’s administration – a physician not affiliated with UPMC – ended the treatment as Keith’s condition deteriorated.

Here’s a photo of Keith and Darla; note the caption (click photo to enlarge):

Now there may have been nothing that would save this man once he was infected, and, after all, this is only one anecdote, not a disproof of the claim (made, among others, by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying) that ivermectin is an efficacious preventive and cure for Covid-19. But I point out that we still have no good evidence that ivermectin can do either of these things, while we have strong evidence not only for the efficacy of vaccination (particularly with a booster), and now also for the new Prizer antiviral pill, which, if given within three days of the onset of symptoms, reduces the risk of hospitalization and death by 89%.  Even if ivermectin proves to have a marginal effect (and, given the studies, that’s the most it could have), it’s no match for existing treatments.

To see a summary of the “evidence”, read this short piece in Stat, a site for health and health-and-business related news (click on screenshot):

As I’ve already pointed out, many past studies purporting to show an effect of ivermectin were fatally flawed in different ways, including cases of apparent data-faking as well as post facto analysis without proper controls. Here’s a summary of the article above:

Where to look for higher quality data? A group called the Cochrane Collaboration spends its time conducting meta-analyses of the best-conducted clinical trials. After excluding dozens of ivermectin studies with “high risk of bias,” the collaboration left little room for optimism: “Based on the current very low- to low-certainty evidence, we are uncertain about the efficacy and safety of ivermectin used to treat or prevent Covid-19.” The group recommended that ivermectin use be restricted to clinical trials that might actually generate high quality data.

The World Health Organization and the Infectious Diseases Society of America concur. Even Merck, an ivermectin manufacturer, avers that there is “no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or efficacy in patients with Covid-19.” And just last weekend the FDA warned people not to use the drug as a treatment for Covid-19.

An FDA tweet. (Note: yes, people, I know that ivermectin has valid uses in humans for eliminating lice and parasites, so don’t bother to correct me. We’re talking about viruses here.)

Note that Stat reports that a properly designed study is in progress (my emphasis below).

Yet ivermectin boosters and merchants have convinced many to use this therapy for Covid-19, particularly in Latin America where its use is so widespread that researchers have had difficulty recruiting patients for trials of other potentially effective products. In June, YouTube suspended the account of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, for a week for spreading misinformation about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

I’ve also criticized Weinstein and Heying, who work in my own field, for not only denigrating vaccines, but pushing ivermectin. Those who heeded their advice have been put in danger.

The increased demand for the drug, combined with enhanced scrutiny from pharmacists, has caused shortages of veterinary formulations of the drug. Inevitably, a spike in calls to Poison Control Centers connected to the use of veterinary ivermectin has followed.

And the money paragraph:

The University of Oxford’s rigorously designed PRINCIPLE trial is now trying to determine if ivermectin actually benefits people with Covid-19. But until those results come in, I urge people to heed the lessons of hydroxychloroquine, bleach, and all the other purported Covid-19 cures: effective treatments will be identified through systematic scientific study, not by wishful thinking, fabrication, or miracles.

Remember the Hippocratic Oath’s dictum: “First, do no harm.”

If the Oxford study shows ivermectin has appreciable value in preventing or curing Covid-19, I will admit that I was wrong, though I reserve the right to judge whether such an effect is sufficiently strong to make the drug more valuable than current treatments.

Likewise, if the Oxford study shows very low or no value of ivermectin in preventing or curing Covid-19, I expect that Weinstein and Heying will issue a statement saying, “We were wrong. We may have put people in danger.”

But I can already say with assurance that anybody following their advice, dosing themselves with ivermectin and avoiding vaccination, is doing precisely the wrong thing.

It was inevitable . . .

December 1, 2021 • 2:15 pm

CNN and other sites report that the first infection with the multiply-mutant “Omicron” strain of coronavirus has been found in the U.S.

The United States’ first confirmed case of the Omicron coronavirus variant has been identified in California.

In a White House news briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the case was in an individual who traveled from South Africa on November 22 and tested positive for Covid-19 on November 29.

That individual, Fauci said, is self-quarantining and close contacts have tested negative for the coronavirus so far.

The person was fully vaccinated and is experiencing “mild symptoms, which are improving at this point,” Fauci said.

Asked by CNN whether that person had a booster shot, Fauci said, “To my knowledge, no.”

The hope, of course, is that the mutant, though a fast spreader, will trade that off against a milder illness. It’s clear this mutation spreads rapidly and looks as if it can sneak past existing vaccination, so let’s hope it doesn’t go for the whole trifecta.

Here’s a NYT figure showing the large number of mutations in the Omicron strain vs. the other strains.  The right figure shows the spike protein, the virus’s armament. Look at all those mutations!

 

Talking sense about the Omicron variant

December 1, 2021 • 12:00 pm

Reader Tom sent me this 19½-minute video about Omicron from health science expert and nurse John Campbell, who’s apparently been dispensing sound information on the coronavirus for a long time. Tom said this:

Dr. John Campbell has been my go-to-guy for the past 14 months on a nearly daily basis.  He’s lucid, authoritative, clear, concise and engaging, just a superb source of reasonable advice.

When I asked for more information because Campbell’s Wikipedia bio was scanty, Tom added this:

He’s had a YouTube channel since 2008 and is an evidence-based medicine proponent to the bone.  His videos are daily, usually about 20 minutes long and shot in a spare room of his home.  Just him wielding a sharpie, an overhead camera, printed sheets of the day’s topic and a calm, no nonsense discussion delivered in a clipped English accent.  No histrionics.  Like visiting a well-loved teacher during office hours.

Now remember, we know very little about this virus—neither about its infectivity or its virulence (which really encompasses severity and spreadability).  So take this with a grain of salt. However, Campbell readily admits our ignorance while claiming, with support, that this variant will be the dominant strain throughout the world.

He does sound a note of hope, i.e., the vaccinated, when infected with Omicron, seem to get generally mild cases, and hypothesis that its spreadability is negatively correlated with how sick it makes peope.

John also gives us a pessimistic timeline for a vaccination (early to mid-2022). He summarizes where all the cases are (everywhere), and the mortality rate (thankfully, zero).  Remember, it’s early days.

Chicago Tribune: No religious exemptions for vaccines

November 8, 2021 • 12:45 pm

This Chicago Tribune op-ed is unusual in that it proposes an ironclad rule: no religious exemptions from vaccination requirements. I happen to agree with that; my view is that the only exemptions from mandatory vaccination, where it is decreed for health reasons, should be ones for people whose lives or health are endangered by getting the injection. So good for author Steve Chapman!

Click to read. If you’re paywalled, make a judicious inquiry

Now I disagree with Chapman on one point: he thinks that people should be exempted from the Covid vaccination if they provide “persuasive evidence that they are acting on the iron imperatives of faith rather than personal whim.” But he does note that proving such evidence is very dicey, and that “the number of people who could legitimately qualify is too tiny to be worth the bother”. In the main then, we both think that you should not bother. No religious exemptions—only medical ones.

He makes several other points, some of which have been discussed here (I’ve added one or two myself). Direct quotes are in quotes:

1.) “No major faith bars its followers from being immunized against disease. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses, which rejects blood transfusions, and Christian Science, which discourages medical treatment, don’t forbid it.”

2.) “A lot of the holdouts have never claimed religious objections to other vaccines. Most, it’s safe to say, couldn’t articulate any halfway plausible rationale to refuse.”

3.)  All states have mandatory childhood vaccinations—sometimes more than a dozen shots—to attend public school.

4.) Some states do not allow religious exemptions for these childhood vaccinations; they include (this is a comprehensive list) Mississippi, West Virginia, California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York. There should be fifty states on that list.

5.) There is a reason for mandatory vaccination for both children and, for Covid, for adults. This is of course to protect us against a pandemic, and to protect you from infecting others who haven’t gotten the shot or can’t get the shot. In my view, there is no reasonable religious excuse that can override that. To a diehard atheist, saying that “my faith in God prevents me from considering the vaccine” sounds like “my faith in Santa Claus prevents me from considering the vaccine”.

6.) There is no stipulation in federal law that you are allowed to get an exemption because of religion. As Chapman notes:

“In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom doesn’t mean believers are exempt from laws that apply to everyone else.

To rule otherwise, the court said, would lead to ‘religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind — ranging from compulsory military service to the payment of taxes’ and, yes, ‘compulsory vaccination laws.’ The author of the court’s majority opinion? Conservative hero Antonin Scalia.”

Privileging faith over the common good doesn’t make sense. Matthew 22:21 says “”Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. The public well-being is Caesar’s. The idea that a delusion should make you exempt from things required by others does of course have purchase in other areas, for the U.S. is hyperreligious. But we have to think about how far we want to privilege faith while still allowing freedom of worship. We don’t allow people to beat up others because their faith decrees it. Why should we allow people to endanger others because their faith decrees it?