Category: CDC
CDC Confirms Extremely Low COVID-19 Death Rate
Memento Mori: Fear in the Age of Coronavirus | Intellectual Takeout
Some perspective…
[In late 1968]…the Hong Kong Flu was sweeping through the country, eventually killing around 100,000 Americans, most of them over the age of 65, at a time when the United States had more than 100 million fewer people than it does today.
Life went on as usual. Schools, churches, and businesses remained open. Neighbors held backyard barbeques, Scout troops continued meeting, we shook hands and shared hugs
When we compare ourselves to the British who endured the torments of the Blitz or to the Americans who seemed almost oblivious to the Hong Kong Flu, why are we so terrified of this virus?
I ask these questions sincerely and without rancor, and have no real answers, only conjecture.
Perhaps our 24-hour news cycle has inflamed our apprehensions.
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/memento-mori-fear-in-the-age-of-coronavirus/
COVID-19 Among Workers in Meat and Poultry Processing Facilities ― 19 States, April 2020 |CDC.gov/mmwr
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6918e3.htm
Let’s get this under control and protect workers for sure. But this is also an ideal opportunity to get some very important data regarding factors which influence spread within these meat plants and within homes/contacts of these infected workers.
We desperately need data to validate the reliability of various antibody tests on the market, those approved, waived and unapproved. I would encourage local/state governments to partner with universities to acquire this vital information.
And these cluster outbreaks are a perfect setting to get more information regarding true number of asymptomatic cases, how long people are pre-symptomatic and timing of immune responses to infection.
Crucial Facts About COVID-19: Transmissibility, Death Rates, and Raw Numbers – Foundation for Economic Education
“…elderly people and those with chronic ailments are extremely vulnerable to COVID-19. Furthermore, the disease is highly transmissible, which means it could spread like wildfire and overwhelm hospitals without extraordinary measures to contain it. This would greatly increase its death toll.
However, such precautionary measures often have economic and other impacts that can cost lives, and overreacting can ultimately kill more people than are saved.”
The facts show that:
- The death rate for people who contract COVID-19 is uncertain but is probably closer to that of the seasonal flu than figures commonly reported by the press.
- The average years of life lost from each COVID-19 death are significantly fewer than common causes of untimely death like accidents and suicides.
- The virus that causes COVID-19 is “very vulnerable to antibody neutralization” and has limited ability to mutate, which means it is very unlikely to take lives year after year.
- If 240,000 COVID-19 deaths ultimately occur in the United States, the virus will rob about 2.9 million years of life from all Americans who were alive at the outset of 2020, while accidents will rob them of about 409 million years—or about 140 times more than COVID-19.
https://fee.org/articles/crucial-facts-about-covid-19-transmissibility-death-rates-and-raw-numbers/
FDA to Study Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 | MedPage Today
The drug is currently approved for malaria and also for rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, which is its main use in the U.S. It’s therefore available to be prescribed off-label, and some clinicians have already said they’re using it on COVID-19 patients. But neither Hahn nor other task force members addressed whether enough hydroxychloroquine is on hand to treat large numbers of coronavirus cases. Convalescent plasma is another treatment the FDA is considering for COVID-19, said FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD.
Convalescent plasma and the immune globulin that it contains is another possible treatment the agency is considering, Hahn added. “FDA’s been working for some time on this,” he said. “If you’ve been exposed to coronavirus and you’re better — you don’t have the virus in your blood — we could collect the blood, concentrate that and have the ability, once it’s pathogen-free, to give that to other patients, and the immune response could potentially provide a benefit to patients. That’s another thing we’re looking at; over the next couple of weeks, we’ll have information and we’re really pushing hard to try to accelerate that.” Such treatments have been effective in Ebola, for example.
Source: FDA to Study Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 | MedPage Today
Behind the Veil: Conflicts of Interest and Fraud in Medical Research
If there is a violation, the FDA classifies it in one of two ways: Voluntary action indicated (VAI) means the inspectors have found violations, but the problems aren’t serious enough to require sanction. Official action indicated (OAI) means that the inspectors have found violations significant enough to warrant official action.
Siefe and his assistants used the Freedom of Information Act to request information from the FDA, and supplemented that data with Google searches of the FDA database. They found 57 clinical trials that were directly linked to an OAI inspection.
The misconduct identified by the FDA in these cases included:
- Falsification or submission of false information
- Underreporting of adverse events
- Failure to follow the investigational plan or other violations of protocol
- Inadequate record keeping
- Failure to protect the rights, safety, and welfare of patients
- Use of experimental compounds in patients not enrolled in trials
- Failure to supervise clinical investigations properlyThe 57 trials Seife identified were in turn linked to 78 research articles published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. 96 percent of these articles failed to mention the violations identified by the FDA inspection—despite the fact that in the majority of cases the inspection was completed at least 6 months before the article was published.
via Behind the Veil: Conflicts of Interest and Fraud in Medical Research.
Anti-Vaccine Fanatics Kill – Ben Shapiro – Page full
Unsurprisingly, older Americans believe that children should be vaccinated against diseases like measles, mumps and whopping cough, by a 73 percent to 21 percent margin. Americans 18-29, by contrast, believe by a 43 percent to 42 percent plurality that government should not mandate such vaccinations.
That’s because young people don’t remember a time when such diseases claimed lives. They don’t remember a time when the vast majority of Americans weren’t vaccinated. Older people do. Many of them lost loved ones to polio and measles and mumps and rubella. In 1952, over 3,000 Americans died of polio and well over 21,000 were left with mild or severe paralysis. Thanks to Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine, there have been zero cases of natural polio in the United States since 1979.
The same is true of measles. According to Dr. Mark Papania of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 90 percent of Americans suffered from the measles by age 15 before widespread vaccination beginning in 1962. From 1956 to 1960, he reports, “an average of 542,000 cases were reported annually.” That included 450 deaths per year, as well as 150,000 cases of respiratory complications and 4,000 cases of consequent encephalitis per year, many of which resulted in later death. Then mandatory vaccination kicked in. Until a major upswing in 2014, we averaged less than 100 cases of measles per year in the United States since 2000.
The point of mandatory vaccinations is not merely to protect those who are vaccinated. When it comes to measles, mumps and rubella, for example, children cannot be vaccinated until 1 year of age. The only way to prevent them from getting diseases is to ensure that those who surround them do not have those diseases. The same is true for children with diseases like leukemia, as well as pregnant women. Herd immunity is designed to protect third parties.
But Americans have short memories and enormous confidence in junk science. Parents will ignore vaccinations but ensure that their kids are stocked up with the latest homeopathic remedies, Kabbalah bracelets and crystals. St. John’s wort, red string and crystals all existed before 1962. They didn’t stop the measles. Vaccination did.
