We've survived 2024, but excess mortality compared to pre-pandemic rates is quite high for young adults (18-44), and in school-aged kids, it continues to increase year over year, with 2024 the deadliest year since the pandemic began. 1 in 15 people in the US is immunocompromised (possibly two kids per class), and getting a simple virus could be much more dangerous for them. It's safe to say that we'd still be wise to take some precautions to prevent harm to one another.
Gregory Travis's graph above clarifies the benefits of wearing masks for anyone that cares about reducing childhood mortality rates. Lockdowns were lifted in most places in the US in August 2020, but the mortality rate decreased substantially below baseline in 2021 because of masks until the just before school started. In January 2021, Biden called for compliance with the CDC in respect to wearing masks, at the lowest mortality point on the graph, but in April 2021, he started suggesting that people who are vaccinated didn't need to wear one, and in May 2021, the CDC dropped mask recommendations. Remember when Biden said those fully vaxxed earned the right to greet others with a smile?? In July 2021 the WHO started using the term "breakthrough infection" when people got Covid after being vaccinated -- until it became too common to maintain that farce, and the excess mortality of children started rising. If it's just a spurious correlation, what else could have caused that dramatic fall in deaths for the exact period that kids wore masks in class?
In Ontario, we were still being told that "vaccine effectiveness is about 60-80% for preventing symptomatic Covid-19.... reduce asymptomatic infection by up to 90% which will have an important role in reducing transmission" in August 2021. We knew for sure, by November 2021, that vaccinations did little to stop transmission, but that original public health message was never corrected. That's when the public found out at least (those who read science journals), but it's likely that those in power knew much earlier.
In an interview today, Dr. Arijit Chakravarty encouraged us to keep trying to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as he ranted against the normalization of infectious disease:
"What we have done is take something that should never have established itself in human communities in the first place and have built a public health consensus around the concept of repeated mass infection. So, yes, this is what failure looks like. ... Conflating the idea of coexistence with nature with coexistence with pathogens is a dangerous mess—it will take years to undo this. Honestly, we haven’t had attitudes like this about infections since before biblical times. ... Public health should have been out there saying, 'These are the risks of getting COVID. These are the repeated risks of COVID,' for which the science is extremely unambiguous. (There are tens of thousands of papers on these topics). ... Both public health and politicians have served as cheerleaders for an infectious disease that has clear-cut long-term consequences."
Beyond the deaths and disabilities, he talked of three other risks: a much deadlier variant, a greater health crisis from Covid weakening people's immune systems, and intrinsic virulence increasing.
"Meanwhile, you have all this wishful thinking that viruses always evolve to become milder (they do not). That immunity is building up in the population (it is not). Or that somehow pretending like the whole thing is done has made the state of the pandemic better. That’s like—you’re sitting in your house and watching TV, and you smell something burning and you say, 'I’m just going to finish watching my TV show, I’m not going to worry about that burning smell, or the smoke.' Maybe you’ll be fine. Or maybe you won’t. ... It has been well-documented that the virus can make its way into pretty much every tissue. These have many long-term consequences that are subtle but have huge implications. First, brain infections have been documented. Cardiac risk has been documented. There is a two-fold elevated cardiac risk shown to persist for at least three years. You can also make a case that SARS-CoV-2 infections are directly carcinogenic."
He also takes down the lockdown obsession:
"Literally the lockdowns they called overreaction looked like a 30% decrease in people using public transit for three months. You must squint your eyes to see the drop in the number of people going into restaurants, number of people going into retail stores. You have to squint to see it. And it was literally for only a few months. And now, these legendary lockdowns which somehow happened without any of us noticing them are being blamed for all the deaths and illnesses the virus has caused. Given this revisionist history, the narrative that’s being put on the table is that somehow these people were right all along; that it was absolutely the right thing to allow everybody to get infected repeatedly. When the bill comes due on all this, there will be no accountability because this will take a while to play out and all these people will be gone by then. This is a difficult virus from a public health perspective, but public health couldn’t have handled it worse. Although it remains a solvable problem, the way it was addressed has undermined the ability of public health to do anything useful at this point, given the current leadership and controls over public health as they stand. They are doing nothing except reminding us to wash our hands and not eat raw eggs."
Then he does a thorough explanation of how Covid increases the likelihood of cancer before he gets to the ridiculous notion of immunity debt:
"I’m not sure who exactly it was—one of those 'infectophile' physicians—who went out in public a while back and said 'immunity debt' is going to last for a generation. Hats off to them. It’s clever, right? Because they know what’s happening and they’re already clearing out that wiggle room for themselves for a generation. Presumably by that time, they will have retired and be laughing all the way to the bank. If you can find a mechanism that would explain why if you don’t go to your local bar for six months it could cause immune dysfunction for the rest of your life I’d love to hear it. I haven’t read that paper yet. There are no papers on immunity debt from before the pandemic started. The concept started in 2021 and has been promoted by people like Alasdair Munro, who is a clinical research fellow in pediatric infectious diseases in the UK who has made a name for himself publishing this kind of stuff. There’s always going to be scientists who are willing to corrupt themselves by making statements that everybody else can point to when they have vested interests. ... We are seeing more and more infections of various types. There are published studies that show that the total number of infections, different kinds of outbreaks, infectious disease outbreaks, have risen dramatically in recent years. And those papers, written by the likes of Munro and his ilk, will then quickly ascribe it to immunity debt. Again, because there are one or two of those “fact-free” papers out there that lie at the bottom of this sort of rotten pseudo-scientific edifice that people point to and say this is immunity debt. The actual mechanistic pieces of immunity debt, however, these people are not working on elucidating."
On bird flu: (ETA: The BC teen with bird flu, a 13-year-old girl, is no longer in critical condition. She was taken off oxygen after being in hospital for two months.)
"H5N1 in dairy herds is really bad news. I think it’s unconscionable that they allowed this to happen, because they are essentially incubating a pandemic potential virus at scale, in multiple different live subspecies. However, I couldn’t predict for you when that pandemic would explode. It could explode tomorrow. It could explode six or 12 years from now. The fact that we are pretending like this is not a thing to me is just jaw-dropping. There are whole plans around influenza pandemics. Governments have spent millions of dollars on preparing for the next influenza pandemic plans. What I never realized was that once they made these plans, they said, 'Problem solved! We know what to do. We’re not going to do it, but we made the plan.' I find that remarkable. The surveillance situation is just beyond bizarre. The idea that they are allowing the virus to spread among cattle, poultry and humans and see what will happen is terrifying. ... What I find remarkable is not that this pandemic is imminent. It is that they have created conditions that make a pandemic not only plausible, but likely. And then they have also gutted the public health infrastructure such that their plan on paper is not worth the ink they used. The whole thing is just a joke—I think we are worse off today than we were in 1918."
Finally, he gets to some solutions:
"The first obstacle we must deal with is the idea of pandemic denialism. We are like lemmings at this point. There is no real appreciation at the public level for the scale of threat we are facing. The first thing that public health would need to do, long before we get to nasal vaccines, is to stop the lying. We need to tell people why it’s bad to get Covid repeatedly. Tell people why Covid can shorten one’s lifespan. I think most people who are alive today will face the reality that Covid is a contributing factor to their death. Do people know this? You have a 65-fold increased risk of a heart attack on day zero of Covid if you are vaccinated (the number is approximately double that if you’re not). It is very likely Covid can contribute to cancer. Covid decreases your overall immune responsiveness. It’s very likely that Covid causes 50 other things. You can build these cases from literature. In fact, there are so many papers on Covid that people can’t keep ahead of it, there are literally hundreds of thousands of papers on this topic. But I’ve never seen such a wide disconnect between what the public thinks and what science says. Covid is not inconsequential, and our public health leadership has been complicit, actively participated in making people believe it’s just another run-of-the-mill respiratory virus. And that is problematic too. If people really understood the science behind all this, they would have a very different attitude. ... The second point is if you want to control this virus, you have to deal with the threat that it represents. And the threat that it represents principally is the fact that it is evolving extremely rapidly. That rapid evolution creates a massive tail risk which is a mass death event very quickly and with very little warning. That risk, the possibility of such a turn of events, must be addressed even if it makes people uncomfortable. ... This whole idea that somehow repeated waves of infection will make things better flies in the face of any rational science. ...
The good thing about Covid is that it has a lot of evolutionary vulnerabilities. So, if you really want to slow down the evolution of SARS-CoV-2, and if you set that as the public health objective, it’s quite doable. ... What you want to do is to stop those large evolutionary jumps for SARS-CoV-2. And the one obvious way you can do it is limiting onward spread and developing combination treatments specifically for long-term infections. ... Use a multipronged approach to reduce global viral load. Having more viruses around, at a global level, is a terrible idea because you’ve created a situation where there are probably more particles of this virus than of any other pathogen that humans have. On any given month there are hundreds of millions of people infected with trillions of viral particles. That is a recipe for disaster. If you really want to bring the global viral load down, of course, then the most obvious way is to improve indoor air quality. It’s been well demonstrated by a lot of people that indoor air quality alone would get rid of a large chunk of the total viral load. It doesn’t have to get rid of spread as long as it brings the total viral load down. You can also do this by using other kinds of engineering controls such as monitoring air quality in a room. Much of that technology exists today. There are also far-UVC lamps that can be employed. Deploying HEPA filters, you could probably up the indoor air quality in every building in the US for the cost of an aircraft carrier. Sell a couple of aircraft carriers and upgrade indoor air quality. It’s expensive, but it’s on that scale that it’s doable. ... You could do a lot better with scheduling the existing vaccines you have. Our paper shows that if you dose more frequently, you probably end up with higher concentrations of neutralizing antibodies, which would make it more difficult to get infected. Our prediction was that three or four doses a year could help prevent infections. But those studies on different vaccine schedules are not being done. I think the most important point is you want to maximize the diversity of neutralizing antibodies. What we did with Operation Warp Speed was the single stupidest thing we could have ever done, which is we concentrated all our efforts on targeting a single spike protein which we then targeted with antibodies. But this was the one thing that the virus was designed to do, which was to evade such antibodies. ...
The bottom line is that if public health had stopped lying years ago and had been honest about the costs, and if public health had realized what the correct approach is, which is to slow evolution down, then we would have been in a situation today where public health was treating Covid as a disease that needs to be suppressed. The whole canard from day one was that we would never eliminate or eradicate it, so, let’s let it spread as widely as possible. 'Learn to live with it,' for other diseases doesn’t mean the same thing as we have applied to Covid. When we say we must learn to live with leprosy, we don’t mean let’s make sure everybody has leprosy. When we say we must learn to live with malaria, we don’t mean let’s make sure everyone gets malaria as often as possible, let’s keep mosquitoes lurking in our tanks outside our house. No one says you must learn to live with tuberculosis. Let’s let it spread as much as possible and see how that goes. No, we suppress those diseases every step along the way. We suppress dengue. We suppress tuberculosis.
This whole idea that learning to live with the disease means permitting and encouraging its rampant spread and rapid evolution is just so many levels of stupidity that I don’t have a word for it. ... There’s not a party in this world that’s handled it correctly. It’s all different flavors of stupid. Pick your poison. The Democrats went out of their way to normalize mass infection. They went out of their way to lie about the vaccines and say, 'If you’re vaccinated, the pandemic was over' That was completely unnecessary. It was completely at odds with science. Then you have Trump in the first Trump administration saying, 'Why don’t you drink some bleach?' It would be a comedy if the consequences weren’t so grave. Frankly, wherever you go it’s like this. You look at Canada’s Bonnie Henry (Canadian epidemiologist and physician) in BC. On day one she insisted that the kids wouldn’t get infected. Then she went and published a paper, put her own name on it, bragging about how herd immunity has been achieved because 90 percent of Canadian kids have been infected. ... There are tens of thousands of papers, if not hundreds of thousands of papers, on the risks of Covid. You could literally find thousands of scientists who would be willing to go up in front of the House of Representatives and testify that getting Covid repeatedly is bad for you. Where are those scientists? Nobody’s listening to them. They’re listening to the scientists who whisper in their ears and say that everything will be okay. ...
Big tobacco sponsored a bunch of corrupt scientists to create a counter-narrative to reality. This time around, who’s playing the role of big tobacco? It’s the politicians and governments. But the exact same thing is playing out. That nexus between this group of corrupt scientists and politicians who are actively funding their work is a global phenomenon. Unfortunately, I hate to say this, but it’s going to take reality breaking through to solve this. They’ve been very effective at convincing people that this is not a problem you need to worry about. On top of that, they’ve undermined any trust in public health. You’ve driven it back into the 18th century. And all of this is being packaged as a win. So, I don’t disagree with you that the Trump administration will make things worse. But again, there’s only so much you can do to defy gravity. If you jump out a window and you insist that gravity is not going to apply to you, you are facing a 'Wile E. Coyote' situation. And we are at that “Wile E. Coyote” point where governments worldwide have driven us off the cliff and it’s just a matter of time before gravity kicks in.... Suppression is a goal in and of itself. There’s no disease in the world that we don’t suppress. ... At the end of the day, it remains a solvable problem. It’s disgraceful the way that this has unfolded. And I think that if you’re out there taking COVID seriously, and if you’re out there still trying to avoid repeated infections, you’re still doing the right thing. It is still possible to avoid being infected and a worthwhile goal."
And, if you're still with me, I keep getting comments about being psychotic for continuing to write about Covid. Some insist there are two sides to this as if writing about many well researched studies published in highly reputable peer-reviewed journals, with strong replication, is an extremist view and that I need to find the sane middle ground. They point to the number of people who have moved on as proof that Covid is no longer a problem.
But that's like arguing that, because most people aren't doing anything to reduce their GHGs or act to prevent further climate change or even think much about it at all, that it's pathological to continue to argue that we should continue to do all we can to try to reduce the use of fossil fuels in order to survival a bit longer on this planet. The science clearly points to being in a very bad place with GHG levels, and it is a very act of hope to continue trying to make people aware of the science and the steps we can take either in our own personal lives or to try to influence policy. Some cities are making huge headway by encouraging cycling, so it's possible to make a dent in this disaster. Same with Covid. It is so possible to reduce the rate of childhood deaths. What's the other side of that??
It's not paternalism to encourage people to act in ways that prevent harm to one another. That's just straight up good socialization in a functioning civilization. Not teaching people to care for each other leads to a destructive atmosphere dominated by greed and violence. We're living at a time when people are eschewing pasteurization and basic water filtration. We need to teach people some basic facts about toxins and pathogens.
Another commenter had a very strong reaction to me accepting help for a flat tire on a totally unrelated post, but there is a tangential connection. The finger-wagging for not "taking responsibility" to change my own tire aimed to shame me for accepting help. I also call for help to get my furnace serviced and my fridge fixed as needed, which I thought was being responsible. That points to that do-it-yourself idea that mistakes independence and self-sufficiency for responsibility. Covid and climate change both force us to realize that we live interdependently, that we depend on each other to do the right thing for our own survival. Your exhale is my inhale. We will manage longer if we can accept that we need other people's help.
The difference with this situation, though, is that whether I change a flat myself, or let some tall, dark stranger lend a hand, doesn't threaten the life or livelihood of either of us or anyone around us, but suggesting that advocating for masking is a sign of mental illness does cause harm to others.
We can never know someone else's story or what they can do, and what one person is able to do isn't ever a good bar for what other people should do. Some people can't wear a mask, and some people are immunocompromised, and some people really don't understand how serious Covid still is, and some people are feeding their kids water runoff from a farmer's field, so it's all the more important for the rest of us to do what we can to reduce the risk to others and to try to help people understand the risks they're taking.
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