It’s been more than 2 months since my last post.  Today, I’ll give a little update on new cases, plus a collection of brief but interesting stories.  Michael Shellenberger claims to have interviewed 3 “patient zeros” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Then I’ll discuss a study from the Cleveland Clinic on booster effectiveness, a report from John Campbell on adverse events from vaccines, and a story about excess deaths pointing to vaccine injury, supported by another video from John Campbell.

I am only collecting data once a week now, just to monitor new cases, so my graphs are pretty low-resolution.  New COVID cases are as low now as they were at the very beginning of the pandemic, even lower than the Spring of 2021 before Delta arose and spoiled the party.  New deaths due to infection are also very low.  There was an apparent spike in new deaths in San Diego County in mid-July, but this may have represented a bunch of hospitals reporting at once, and not a spike in actual deaths.

A new Omicron variant, EG.5 is rising in prominence, but this new variant is apparently no deadlier than other Omicron variants, so is not of great concern.

3 “Patient Zero”s identified:  Journalist Michael Shellenberger claims that the identities of 3 “patient zero” individuals are now known, and all of them worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  These people were likely the very first people in the world to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. One of these individuals is Ben Hu, the 2^nd in command at the WIV, and someone who was directly involved in Coronavirus research.  Shellenberger was not shocked to discover that the initial patients were from the WIV.  Rather, he was shocked and dismayed that he had to discover this for himself, rather than the information be released by the WHO, the CDC, the FBI, or a number of other agencies who should have informed the public.  Shellenberger is now 100% convinced that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the lab in Wuhan. 

The Hill interviews Michael Shellenberger.

Boosters increase likelihood of reinfection: A study from the Cleveland Clinic claims that the likelihood of reinfection with COVID-19 actually increases with more vaccine boosters. The study began in the Summer of 2022, during the BA.5 outbreak, and shows increased likelihood of infection by later variants the more boosters a person had!  It’s unknown why this phenomenon occurs, but it may be a mechanism similar to Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) which I was concerned about early on.  Happily, available data doesn’t appear to show that ADE has caused more severe symptoms in COVID patients.

The paper also shows that the new Bivalent boosters, containing both the original Wuhan strain and an Omicron strain, has only a mild benefit to prevent infection.

Adverse events were batch dependent:  A paper from a lab in Denmark appears to show that the number of adverse events associated with vaccines, referred to as “suspected adverse effects” (SAEs), were dependent on the batch in question.  Adverse events appeared to cluster in 3 groups, some vaccine batches produced very few events, while others produced thousands.  This difference probably contributed to the confusion and the difficulty of identifying real problems. The worst batches produced adverse events at a rate of almost 9%, and also produced the most severe effects. 

These results should provide some clues as to what went wrong with the vaccine rollout.  Unfortunately, this data comes from cases in Denmark so is less relevant to the US.  This is the kind of information that is the CDC’s job to produce.  The fact that the CDC is not producing data like this is a big worry, and shows that the agency is in dire need of reform.

John Campbell: Adverse events are batch dependent.

Excess deaths may be related to vaccine induced inflammation: Ed Dowd was on the Dr. Drew podcast.  Dowd has an interesting take on adverse events.  He is an analyst for an investment firm, and looks for trends to help in making investment decisions.  He often uses information from insurance claims to analyze trends in worker health, illness, accidents, and death. He noticed that in the UK, there were approximately 500,000 excess deaths in both 2021 and 2022, many among younger people.  This effect was correlated to being in the Millennial generation and being employed.  He says that in late 2021, excess deaths among Millennials was 84% above normal.

He says that hematological (blood related) illnesses were up 522% in 2022, during the time when Omicron was dominant.  That’s 61 standard deviations above the expected trend.  For those of you who know statistics, you know that this is far, far, above what you would expect for a random event. Dowd is asking physicians to help his team interpret this data.

John Campbell has also reported a higher number of excess deaths in 2021, 2022, and 2023.  Because of tech censorship, he can’t make any connections to spike protein from the COVID vaccines, but he strongly implies that there is a connection. Interestingly, Dr. Campbell strongly advocated COVID vaccination until at least mid-2022.

At this point, it seems unlikely that we will get accurate information on adverse events in the US.  Unfortunately, the CDC is too politicized to perform its function.

I’m not a physician.  But in my informed opinion, there is no longer a benefit to getting a COVID vaccine booster, even if you are at high risk.

Don’t fear, but be smart,
Erik