Category: pandemic

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?

It must be the full moon

November 5, 2021 • 8:25 am

Yep, the wackos are out: here’s a comment I got (but didn’t post) on my piece “Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying go unvaccinated for Covid, take and promote Ivermectin instead“. It’s from one Stephanie, who won’t be posting here again:

I have ivermectin and didn’t get it at an animal feed shop. It’s for human beings, prescribed by a human internist that treats Covid patients (a real living MD). He also prescribes it to ease vaccine side-effects. It helped mine, I had my period for months after the Moderna shot, along with neuropathy in my right arm which prevented me from working for 2 weeks. I did not follow up with a second dose and will not until at least third generation vaccines are available.You are a dangerous person and I challenge your view, your vaccine indoctrination. There are safe, healthy options for All and instead of promoting health, an MD’s ability to practice and prescribe, you support a billionaire class who wants you hooked into a booster program. You’re the laughable one, the one that should be shamed but you’re so insecure, you point at Bret and Heather

No control in her assertion of “it helped mine”, of course, and if she listened to Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying she wouldn’t have gotten the shot in the first place. If ivermectin is a “safe and healthy option,” why did she get a jab?

I stand by what I said: there is no convincing evidence that Ivermectin is either a palliative, a cure, or a preventive for Covid 19, much less a reliever of symptoms from the vaccination. There are mixed results from some studies of the drug, but those are almost all retrospective analyses, have pathetically small sample sizes, and many lack real controls.

We will have more definitive data in a couple of months. But regardless of that, we know that the shots are powerfully effective in preventing Covid, and, if you get it anyway, you get a milder case. Faced with the assurance of that result contrasted with our ignorance about Ivermectin, which simply cannot have as powerful a result as the vaccines, you’d simply be dumb to forego up the shots (which Weinstein and Heying have been urging; neither is vaccinated) and take a medicine designed for roundworms and head lice.

It’s not me who’s the dangerous person.

Kamala Harris gets an improperly administered Covid booster

November 1, 2021 • 1:00 pm

Kamala Harris got her booster shot for the Moderna vaccine on Saturday. Although at age 57 she’s below the normal age limit for getting a booster (65+), she’s eligible since she’s considered “at risk” because her duties place her in contact with many people, including Uncle Joe.

Watch the short video below and see how she gets the shot: in particular, notice how the guy pinches her arm before sticking the needle into the raised-up skin. That’s WRONG!

 

Well, actually, it’s not wrong for her, but neither is it the right way to inject vaccine into a healthy person when the vaccine is, like the Covid jab, supposed to be injected intramuscularly.  Here’s part of an article from KOLD.com in Tucson, Arizona: Click on screenshot below to read the whole thing.

Here’s the salient bit:

We asked Tucson family physician Dr. Cadey Harrel to show us the proper way to administer a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

Harrel said instead of pinching the skin, she spreads the skin to create a flat surface when injecting an intramuscular vaccine.

Following our investigation, the KOLD Investigates Team received an email from Dr. Nimrod Rahamimov at the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariyya, Israel.

Rahamimov is the head of the Department of Orthopedics and Spine Surgery at the Galilee Medical Center.

Rahamimov said he noticed people’s arms being pinched as COVID-19 vaccines were administered. He searched the medical literature and scholarly articles for any information on concerns of improper COVID mRNA vaccine administration.

“There was absolutely nothing,” Rahamimov said.

So, he expanded his search, which can be read HERE.

“I was Googling to see if it was mentioned anywhere else and I fell on your story,” Rahamimov said.

Rahamimov said Harrel’s demonstration is correct, but he wanted to find out what would happen if the vaccine was administered into a pinched arm. His hypothesis was that skin bunching might prevent the needle from reaching the muscle, instead, injecting the vaccine into subcutaneous fat.

To put this theory to the test, Rahamimov recruited 60 volunteers, both males and females.

And the results of the test are below in a paper in Vaccine by Dr. Rahaminov and his colleagues (click on screenshot; access is free).

The upshot is that if you have too much fat on your arm, pinching may cause the needle to not penetrate the muscle below the fat sufficiently to give a good injection. 10% of the people in the trial were in danger of such an outcome, and Americans in general have a high incidence of obesity. Now Kamala isn’t fat—in fact, I think she’s athletic—but in either her case nor in the case of overweight people there should be NO PINCHING. As they say below in the paper “pinching is recommended only in patients with suspected lower muscle mass.”  That’s not Kamala, so the doctor that gave her the well-publicized injection set a bad example. To wit:

We have found that in 6/60 (10%) of our study population, skin bunching can create a skin-to-muscle distance of 20 mm or greater, leading to insufficient muscle penetration concerns. 5/6 (83.33%) of these subjects had a BMI greater than 30. Searching the PubMed and Google scholar databases, we have not found another study describing the differences in skin-to-muscle distance when bunching the skin over the injection site or if the needle is directed at a different angle than 900. Using real-time sonography we were able to visualize this substantial difference and quantify it.

Ten out of the sixty subjects (10–60, 16.6%) were obese, having a BMI of 30 or more. As having a skin-to-deltoid distance of 20 mm or more strongly correlated with obesity, and the obesity rate in the Israeli general population is 23.2% for men and 29% for women, our study under-represented this group, hence it is reasonable to assume that more than 10% of the general population will have an injection depth of 20 mm or more if their skin is bunched while receiving their vaccination. In countries where obesity is more prevalent – these differences may be even higher.

. . . Muscle bunching is indeed recommended only in patients with suspected lower muscle mass, but in common practice this recommendation is difficult to implement for two reasons: BMI is not always calculated, especially in mass-immunization efforts such as the current pandemic, and because muscle bunching requires anatomical understanding and some practice to do correctly. The two radiologists performing the measurements in our study found that even when done under US control, some practice and repeated attempts were needed to actually bunch the deltoid muscle. We feel that the vaccine provider in the field, sometimes a person with only basic training, will find this task beyond their skill set.

. . . Our study’s main significance is in the multipliers. Although the immune effects of inadequate IM penetration while receiving an mRNA vaccine have not been clinically studied, and the concern is valid in a relatively small number of patients, multiplying this small effect by the large numbers expected to receive mRNA vaccines raises concerns that many millions of people will be under-vaccinated globally, especially in countries where obesity is prevalent. In countries opting for a one-dose regimen, the effect might be more profound as there is no “second chance” if the first was indeed mis-administered.

The lesson for you: they should NOT pinch your skin up when they give you your jab unless for some reason they think you have poor muscle mass and are not obese.

I’m not a doctor—I just play one in college—but I thought this was fun to point out.

 

Advice from my primary care doc: Should you get a booster? If so, which one?

October 25, 2021 • 10:45 am

If you’re contemplating getting a booster shot, as I did (the Pfizer), you should read this blog post by Dr. Alex Lickerman, my primary care doc who has, as you may know, written a whole series on Covid-19 for the layperson.  This is post #16.  Click on the screenshot below to read his booster take and see links to the other posts.  NOTE: Alex has kindly agreed, as he often does, to answer readers’ questions about Covid, so fire away in the comments section below.

Here’s the intro, the short take, and then below I’ll list the topics he takes up:

In this post, we explore the pros and cons of getting a third booster shot (or second booster shot if you got the J&J vaccine) against COVID-19. As usual, if you’re less interested in how we got to our conclusions than you are in the conclusions themselves, feel free to skip to the BOTTOM LINE in each section and the CONCLUSION at the end.

Question: Should you get a third booster shot?

Answer: It depends on how likely you are to have a bad outcome if you contract COVID-19 as well as your specific goals in getting vaccinated.

The topics of the post:

ESTIMATES OF CONTINUING VACCINE EFFECTIVENESS

WHAT DOES WANING EFFECTIVENESS MEAN IN THE REAL WORLD?

BENEFITS OF A THIRD SHOT

RISKS OF A THIRD SHOT

WHAT THIRD SHOT SHOULD YOU GET?

I got my booster because I’m older and thereby in the ‘at risk’ group, but I’m also going to Antarctica on a ship for a month in March, and wanted the extra protection.  Note: Alex also recommends in his post which of the possible boosters will boost you the most. But you’ll have to see that for yourself.

Eric Clapton breaks my heart for the fourth time, bankrolling an anti-vaxer band

October 11, 2021 • 11:30 am

Well, call me stupid, but I thought that Eric Clapton’s musical genius would extend into other areas, too. Thus I was gobsmacked when he became an ardent antivaxer, letting me down three times by opposing antivaccination restrictions, opposing the shot itself (though he got two AstraZeneca jabs), and releasing two anti-vax songs, “This Has Gotta Stop” and “Stand and Deliver,” the latter with Van Morrison.

Now, as Rolling Stone reports (click on screenshot below), Clapton is funding a band, Jam for Freedom. whose sole purpose appears to be to oppose vaccination:

Eric Clapton not only donated more than $1,300 to a GoFundMe posted by a vaccine skeptical music group, but he also lent the “pro-medical choice” band his family’s personal Transporter van to use for touring around the country, Rolling Stone reports. A musician for the group Jam for Freedom, known for songs with lyrics like, “You can stick your poison vaccine up your arse,” told the magazine that when he saw the donation he thought he was being tricked, until he received a text from the 76-year-old singer-songwriter himself. “It was something complimentary, along the lines of, ‘Hey, it’s Eric—great work you’re doing,’” McLaughlin said. Though he declined to say how much, McLaughlin also told the magazine that Clapton gave them more money to buy a new van and said he might play with the group in the future.

Clapton apparently is becoming (or always was, but kept it quiet) a conservative, and maybe even a racist.  There were those comments at a concert in 1976, which I didn’t know about until they surfaced recently. The magazine reports those, too:

In the summer of 1976, Dave Wakeling thought he knew Clapton, too. Wakeling, who’d go on to found the English Beat, one of the U.K.’s pioneering ska bands, was 20 that year, and such a big Clapton fan that he’d once hitchhiked from his Birmingham home to London to see Clapton’s band Blind Faith in Hyde Park.

But when he saw Clapton at the Odeon theater in Birmingham in August 1976, Wakeling was gob-smacked. A clearly inebriated Clapton, who unlike most of his rock brethren hadn’t weighed in on topics like the Vietnam War, began grousing about immigration. The concert was neither filmed nor recorded, but based on published accounts at the time (and Wakeling’s recollection), Clapton began making vile, racist comments from the stage. In remarks he has never denied, he talked about how the influx of immigrants in the U.K. would result in the country “being a colony within 10 years.” He also went on an extended jag about how “foreigners” should leave Great Britain: “Get the wogs out . . . get the coons out.” (Wog, shorthand for golliwog, was a slur against dark-skinned nonwhites.)

“As it went on, it was like, ‘Is this a joke?’ ” Wakeling recalls. “And then it became obvious that it wasn’t. . . . It started to form a sort of murmur throughout the crowd. He kept talking, and the murmurings started to get louder: ‘What did he fucking say again?’ . . . We all got into the foyer after the concert, and it was as loud as the concert: ‘What is he fucking doing? What a cunt!’ ”

When Clapton voiced support onstage for the conservative British flamethrower and fascist Enoch Powell, a prominent anti-immigration politician who had given his polarizing “rivers of blood” speech on the topic in Birmingham in 1968, Wakeling was particularly offended. Thanks to white and black workers toiling together in its factories, Wakeling had sensed that Birmingham had become more integrated in recent years.

Make this breaking my heart for the fifth time.

Clapton later tried to explain away those comments, saying they weren’t really racist, but his excuse isn’t very convincing (read the piece).

Finally, Clapton vowed that he would never play in a venue that required vaccination, and is scheduling his tours according to that dictum:

Clapton recently embarked on a U.S. tour booked in red states despite surging transmission numbers and death rates — and at venues that largely don’t require proof of vaccination. In the process, this Sixties icon, who embraced the sex, drugs, and rock & roll lifestyle as much as anyone in his generation, has drawn praise from conservative pundits. In Austin, he posed for backstage photos with Texas’ anti-vax-mandate Gov. Greg Abbott, known for his attacks on abortion and voting rights. The sight of Clapton in backstage photos with the notorious governor amounted to a deal killer for some: “I just deleted all my Clapton songs,” went one comment on Abbott’s Twitter feed, along with, “A Kid Rock type with better guitar skills. Done with him.”

However, as Rolling Stone reports in a separate article, Clapton broke that vow, too, playing a venue on Sept. 18 that mandated testing or jabs:

He broke that absurd promise by playing Smoothie King, which, according to its website, is following New Orleans regulations that require all ticketholders 12 and above, as well as staff and participants, to either prove they have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine or provide a negative test taken within 72 hours. Moreover, they must wear a mask while not eating or drinking.

Well, fine, though it does show that he isn’t holding to his convictions.

What happened to Clapton? The Rolling Stone piece above is long and detailed, and advances some ideas that you’ll want to read if you’re a Clapton fan.