Protect the vulnerable. Don't close schools, don't mask children, don't vaccinate them against Covid. Maintain a healthy lifestyle. Against passes and mandates.
A lot of energy is wasted arguing whether vaccines reduced transmission or not, missing a much more important point: were vaccine mandates justified?
A thread...
Sweden had some of the lowest excess deaths in the developed world during the pandemic. It performed far better than Finland, and just as well as Norway.
The fact seems difficult to accept for lockdown enthusiasts, so I decided to write a thread summarizing the evidence...
Reminder: lockdowns were torture for care home residents, leading to precipitous decline and early death. Cherry on top: the carer’s daughter also suffered at home.
Lockdowns were a policy by the well-off middle-aged, for the well-off middle-aged. Everyone else paid a price.
Every carer’s story matters, including those that reveal the torturous stupidities of lockdown and the specious counting of COVID-19 deaths.
(Screenshots from an ethnography of care home workers during COVID-19)
Exclusif 🚨
J’ai obtenu une vidéo de
@lonnibesancon
en train de freiner l’épidémie avec ses petits confinements musclés !
Lonni, que voit-on sur la vidéo ? (Les autres, ne dites rien.)
@forexposure_txt
Graphical artists who contribute to French Singer M. Chedid's book (for free) will be rewarded with the right to... buy said book at a 30% discount.
Matthieu Chedid cherche des illustrateurs pour son prochain livre, et est très clair sur le fait que les participants ne recevront aucune contrepartie, sinon le droit de payer moins cher le livre qu’ils ont illustré. C’est assez incroyable de désinvolture.
Each time we lift a veil of government, it's obvious that none of them were ever "following the science".
The claim was bogus at the time. It is now demonstrably false.
A thread...
The most misleading chart of the pandemic
I accidentally found a contingent of soldiers lost on a Pacific Island, still fighting for lockdowns in 2024. They bandy this chart around as a primitive weapon.
A thread...
Vaccine mandates were a disgrace. This is a moral position that does not require any supporting data. I consider it unacceptable to force anyone to get vaccinated to protect others. I also oppose authoritarianism in any form. Those are my values.
@nicolasberrod
Très bien, maintenant il faudrait leur demander pourquoi ils ont un tel excès de mortalité comparé à nous. Ce n'est pas à cause du vaccin, mais la France fait mieux sans ce vaccin, donc ils feraient mieux de se concentrer sur les vrais problèmes.
Source :
@MonicaGandhi9
I’m genuinely curious: what oath are you referring to? An oath to force an intervention on people against their will if the intervention is safe and effective? It sounds truly bizarre.
I saw this happen in real time. I don’t care if ivermectin works or not. The absolute determination to prove that it did not was incredible. Especially when contrasted with the relentless promotion of remdesivir and Paxlovid.
This is completely unthinkable.
A meta-analysis of ivermectin makes a rookie error (inverting the data for treatment and control). The error is pointed out in the preprint and the relevant figure is corrected.
However this correction changed the outcome of the meta-analysis
Them: What makes you qualified to comment on public health?
Me: I am a member of the public, remember?
This is a lesson that public health would do well to re-learn (since it was apparently forgotten).
@kevinnbass
This should point you in the right direction. The trick, if I remember correctly, was to include deaths from the first months of 2021 when hardly anyone was vaccinated.
Report from French public institute of statistics shows that hospitalizations of girls and women aged 10-24 for acts of self-harm have almost doubled since 2021.
As expected, the harms of lockdowns take years to manifest, and nobody cares.
I hope African countries torpedo the treaty. Not only did we throw poor countries under the bus by disrupting their economies, but we sought to vaccinate them to protect ourselves from variants (thereby diverting limited resources from more pressing problems).
A letter is being sent to African nations from Gordon Brown, urging signing of WHO treaty in May.
"The overwhelming lesson we learned from COVID-19 is that no one is safe anywhere until everyone is safe"
Brown of the "variant factories" school of neocolonial health.
Disgusting
I oppose mandates for moral reasons, but they were also grossly unscientific.
Could mandates for a perfectly safe and sterilizing vaccine ever be justified? Morally, no.
Practically, public health has proven beyond doubt that is unable to make the right call. So no, never.
@eekymom
If the CDC had admitted and publicized the link between the vaccine and myocarditis in teenage boys, your son may have been able to connect the dots after the first shot already. Another reason why their denial was criminal.
However, let's pick apart the idea that mandates had a scientific justification...
The effect of vaccines on transmission was not demonstrated in a randomized trial. Suspending free and informed consent should require the highest level of proof. This was notably absent.
@MJnanostretch
The Hill manages to completely bury the extent of bipartisan agreement on the topic with their headline:
“GOP wants research group barred from federal funding over COVID work with Wuhan”
Does anyone know how Finland, having avoided excess deaths until summer 2021, having benefitted from 1.5 years of preparation, and having vaccinated more than Sweden, ended up with a significantly worse excess death than Sweden?
I am looking for any study or data on the topic
1/4
@CollignonPeter
The problem is that many elderly were not given the choice, like home care residents who suffered from isolation and then died alone. I don’t know anyone who would want to live an extra year like that. Let alone have it forced on them.
To conclude, an excellent source on the topic is
@Folkehelseinst
. The chart shows that excess deaths in Norway and Finland were catastrophic in 2022, far higher than Sweden in 2020. Maybe they should have locked down harder.
Source:
By the time vaccine mandates rolled out, real world data made it clear that vaccines did not stop transmission. Retrospective studies showed a reduction of transmission, for a limited time. A weak level of proof, provided in hindsight, cannot justify mandates.
Moreover, a reduction in transmission in isolation does not guarantee population-level effects. Behavior matters in complex systems. Surely, a lot of vaccinated people were asymptomatic. They then went out to contaminate others, safe in the belief that they could not transmit.
After receiving a few thoughtful answers, I believe that we don’t understand what happened in Finland compared to Sweden or Denmark.
If there’s so much we don’t understand, maybe next time we shouldn’t shut down society on a whim. Just a thought.
Does anyone know how Finland, having avoided excess deaths until summer 2021, having benefitted from 1.5 years of preparation, and having vaccinated more than Sweden, ended up with a significantly worse excess death than Sweden?
I am looking for any study or data on the topic
1/4
Finally, if hospitalizations were the reason, mandates should have been brought to bear on the elderly. Easy: suppress pension payments in case of non compliance. Instead, children and young adults who wanted a social life were those on whom the greatest pressure was applied.
@MurielBlaivePhD
I love the optimism (“it’s not too late”), but I think that a whole generation will have to die before we can face the awfulness of what we have done. The truth will emerge one death at a time.
@sarahbeth345
One boy died 3 days after the second dose. I found it incredible at the time that the investigation "could take three to five months to complete". In the middle of a mass-vaccination campaign for teenagers, I would have thought there would be more urgency.
I think it's generally a mistake to pay too much attention to what Trump says. He will say anything that benefits him. But when Trump is right and you are wrong, you have some serious soul-searching to do.
Four years ago today, as the covid pandemic worsened, Trump sharpened his attacks on public health experts in a desperate attempt to convince people it was safe to reopen schools 👇
@daniela127
@MichaelElsenRoo
It’s insane that no journalist would ask the question that you asked. If you decide to raise money for this fight, I will contribute, and so will many others, no doubt.
How about the argument that we have always mandated vaccines? Regardless of how safe a vaccine is, vaccine mandates are not an evidence-based policy. Jurisdictions with vaccine mandates achieve no better vaccine coverage than those without. Argument rejected.
This is one of the worst things we’ve done. I cannot believe that not a single influential voice (for instance at the WHO) rose against the madness of lockdowns in developing countries such as India. Was it stupidity, cowardice, selfishness…?
“Concerns are growing that police forces around the world are using gruelling and humiliating punishments to enforce quarantine on the poorest and most vulnerable groups, including tens of millions who live hand-to-mouth and risk starving if they do not defy lockdowns and seek
But surely, any reduction in transmission is good? No, it is just an intermediate target, meaningless in terms of tangible outcomes. Now, pit this dubious benefit against the harms of mandates: social strife, loss of confidence in public health, distrust of other vaccines...
@TheEliKlein
All I know is that HCQ and Ivermectin were disparaged before we even knew whether they worked or not, while remdesivir and Paxlovid were heavily promoted based on mediocre or preliminary results. Paxlovid was even prescribed liberally in cases where it was not proven to work.
@EWoodhouse7
Is there a breakdown by state? If the increase is much higher in California or New York than in Florida, then it would be a damning indictment of lockdown policies.
Für alle, die noch immer im Unklaren sind, ob Masken gegen COVID schützen: hier eine neue amerikanische Mega-Studie, die über 1.700 Studien auswertet. Der Nutzen der Masken ist sehr groß, unumstritten und gilt für viele Bereiche.
@kevinnbass
And even the vaccines were bungled in their application: coercion, mandates, denial of natural immunity, obfuscation of risks to specific demographics, exaggeration of the effects on transmission. Even a potentially good tool becomes bad in the hands of public health.
@alpa_denaik
@houmanhemmati
@ashishkjha
So Fauci had no choice but to lie? And it wasn’t his fault?
A noble lie is still a lie. Lying is never acceptable, especially when deciding the fate of millions.
Extracting such information from the chart is impossible to do at a glance, which makes it a bad chart. It is, of course, very useful as a cudgel to repel outsiders who try to rescue the soldiers lost on their island, who have had no contact with reality in many years.
The claim is false because the chart does not allow comparisons at different points in time.
This is because this unusual metric is a percentage whose denominator is constantly increasing. Comparing percentages with different denominators is simply nonsense.
@nycexpatmom
@feelsdesperate
The psychiatrist gave him advice that he believes saved his son: “You have to be very, very careful because if you come across as just even a little bit anti-trans or anything, they’re going to call the Child Protective Services on you and take custody of your kid.”
Is this real?
🤯 Dr. Paul Offit Shares Fauci's Rationale for Pushing COVID Vaccines For All Ages Despite Only Benefitting the Elderly & High-Risk Groups
"The language originally was boosting and that morphed to essentially a universal recommendation for everyone over six months of age...I
@ElonBachman
Someone I know had an adverse reaction after the vaccine. Was it caused by the vaccine? I have no idea.
The important point is that the doctor refused to report it. It’s not the doctor’s role to decide what is or is not caused by the vaccine. 1/2
Measuring excess deaths rests on a careful tally of total deaths and a few assumptions to calculate expected deaths.
However, when all estimates concur and show that Sweden is among the best performers, it means the finding is robust and does not depend on modeling assumptions.
As NC health director,
@DrMandyCohen
felt comfortable wielding dictatorial power. Here she laughs about consulting with her counterparts in other states:
When she was like, are you gonna let them have professional football? And I was like, no. And she's like, OK, neither are we.
@19joho
Closing school did not save any teacher’s life. Infection rates among teachers tracked community levels, no more, no less. (One thing to do would have been to let genuinely vulnerable teachers stay home.)
The chart is difficult to interpret, and misleading. I think OWID, for all their excellent work, should not have published it.
The false claim is as follows. Since Sweden peaked at 10% excess death, it shows that it had higher excess deaths than its neighbors.
New email dump showing Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins coordinating a propaganda campaign to attack the Great Barrington declaration last October. More coming soon so here's a teaser...
Stealing from
@VintageMrHobbes
, who locked his account:
Was Parris vociferously pro stringent lockdowns in order (so he thought) to protect the frail elderly just so we could euthanise them properly later?
Matthew Parris says the quiet part out loud about euthanasia: “we simply cannot afford extreme senescence or desperate infirmity for as many such individuals as our society is producing.”
1) After
@cochranecollab
Karla Soares-Weiser threw scientists under the bus, she has backtracked on her mask review statement.
Soares-Weiser has still not explained her unprofessional collusion w/
@zeynep
Because of the ever-increasing denominator, the chart amplifies oscillations at the beginning of the period, and minimizes them at the end.
This, of course, makes Sweden stand out, since it had its excess deaths in 2020 rather than 2022.
A bit of COVID history:
In 2021 the CDC announced a mask design contest with $500,000 in prizes.
One of the winners was the dystopian "PaciMask" for mask-resistant toddlers.
The company that produced these is blessedly no longer in business.
@GYamey
You misrepresent the argument. If all the children who died had pre-existing conditions, then the risk of covid to healthy children is zero. This has major implications for school openings and the decision to vaccinate children or not.
‘Rather than ask what there was to learn, Hancock became enraged by what he called the “f-----g Sweden argument” and wanted it quashed. “Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong.”’
Therefore, 10% excess deaths in January 2021 is relative to 1 year of all-cause deaths, while 5% excess deaths in January 2023 is relative to 3 years of all-cause deaths.
This is my preferred explanation of the madness that gripped the world. It would also restore a bit of my faith in humanity. We abandoned all scientific principles not because we were stupid (though we sometimes are) but because we panicked at the idea of a lab-engineered virus.
Containment policies weren’t cost-effective in the calculus of public health policy for a zoonotic pandemic.
But if endemicity meant responsibility for the indefinite medical burden from a lab leak, containment at all costs would be a rational policy.
“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
I always wonder what D.A. Henderson would have said about such closures.
We’ve learned a lot about what creates division: closing schools, shutting off nursing homes, closing churches. The mandate for the future is to listen to the science, but let’s balance it with preserving our democracy
@AsaHutchinson
#americandemocracyhealthsecurity
@suzy_redd
@nycexpatmom
Thank you for that. My parents are thankfully healthy, but I was horrified by the way we treated old people (the very people we set out to protect) either in care facilities or at the end of their life.
Also, ich habe jetzt Juni 20-Februar 21 der RKI Protokolle quergelesen:
Das RKI war stabil intern auf der Seite der Schwurbler.
- Die wussten, dass ihre Daten schlecht sind und finden noch in den schlechten Daten viele Fehler
@MonicaGandhi9
@AmeshAA
This does not excuse the huge public health failure of not including cycle threshold (Ct) values in test results. Or of behaving as if children, with higher natural immunity than older, vaccinated people, could be drivers of community transmission.
The estimate below is worth including because it often makes the rounds. It is not necessarily the most sophisticated, but in conjunction with all the others, it adds another stone to the edifice:
Quite astounding:
Sweden took a lot of flack for its Covid19 policies
But actually, Sweden has done best in Europe over 2020-22
measuring excess mortality in percent of total mortality
@phl43
Les gens ne se rendent pas compte à quel point une règle injustifiée a des effets corrosifs. Sur la confiance en nos dirigeants, le respect des autres règles, les relations avec les forces de l’ordre, etc.
@ElonBachman
The doctor’s role is to faithfully report adverse events so that the signal can be analyzed downstream by researchers (and compared to the population-level rate of occurrence).
Blocking information at the individual level is unscientific and unconscionable.
BREAKING: We’re suing to end South Carolina’s ban on mask requirements in schools, with Disability Rights South Carolina, Able South Carolina, and parents.
Students with disabilities are effectively being excluded from public schools because of this ban.
Courts must intervene.
@bellarose__k
I’m sorry that you have to live through this. But mask mandates are dangerous for you because they give a false sense of security and will make you take risks that perhaps you shouldn’t be taking.
@Steiner61421320
L’obligation vaccinale est une politique de santé qui n’a aucun fondement scientifique. Les comparaisons entre juridictions avec et sans obligation le montrent. Le goût de certains pour la coercition sous couvert de bonnes intentions m’étonnera toujours.
For years, Sweden was held as proof that lockdowns save lives by comparing it to Finland and Norway. Understanding what went wrong in Finland is fundamental.
Does anyone have an answer? All I ever get is hand-waving. No hand-waving please, only answers supported by data.
4/4
@PedsGeekMD
Big shoutout to everyone who ever thought children should get the Covid vaccine not for their own benefit, but for an unproven protection supposedly extended to adults. Bonus shoutout to those who coerced them.