Do I Know Anything More Now #2

Now with bad Cowboy Poetry!

After a really sh*tty week experiencing what I feel¹ to be true religious bigotry I’ve never experienced before, I sit back down at this, and then see substack just gave me a feature alert that says I can write poetry now. We embrace the ADHD, and obviously must give that a run:

I hear tell of this new vaccine
With effects none short of obscene
Right after your poke
You might get a stroke
Good news though, you'll poop Spike Protein!

Well. OK². Still wish they instead cooked something up to let me make subscripts.

Alright — back where we were going — continuing our questions from here:

Some things that I do not know

With this:

Do I Know Anything More Now #1

Now this — working through where I stand with my questions (BTW — you should go to substack to read this, since I now violated the email length limit. You need my footnotes for full effect):

Could severe side effects be dependent on vaccine delivery?  I.e. injected into bloodstream?

So when asking this question I was guessing this based on my own experience having had to administer injections at home. Despite best attempts, my amateur hand definitely did hit blood vessels. I supposed that a flood of newly trained volunteers at the height of the vaccination peak a year ago could also be hitting blood vessels, triggering the observed myocarditis and bloodstream related problems. Maybe this question wasn’t so far off:

Intravenous injection of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine can induce acute myopericarditis in mouse model. Can Li et al.

…only IV group developed histopathological changes of myopericarditis as evidenced by cardiomyocyte degeneration, apoptosis and necrosis with adjacent inflammatory cell infiltration and calcific deposits on visceral pericardium, while evidence of coronary artery or other cardiac pathologies was absent.

So that should read to you as “IV” = intravenous = bad sh*t happened. Interestingly the CDC doesn’t want vaccinators to take precautions against this when they apply the injections though³ — speaking of “aspiration”, or pulling back on the plunger slightly to make sure no blood from a blood vessel appears (which admittedly probably means abort on the thing and waste that round of vaccine):

That certainly makes sense — when the most common acknowledged side effect is “a sore arm” you certainly would want to discourage vaccinators from wrenching the needle back and forth and causing more arm pain rather than ensure you’re not injecting into blood vessel and giving the poor guy a stroke…

It could be a subset of the vaccinated people have had one or more of the injections enter the blood somehow. I don’t know how you would identify that subset after the fact though. Perhaps by identifying batch numbers and shot (geographical) locations⁴, and tying them to a particular unskilled vaccinator.

“Oh hey Bob - I know you’re not a fan of blood, but did you know you were supposed to OPEN your eyes when you give folks the shots?”

But failing that you’d need to take what we have as a whole. Maybe the continuing increase in reports⁵ implies the adverse events are not necessarily due to lack of skill of new vaccinators — they ought to know what they’re doing by now. Though if told not to worry about hitting blood vessels or not, maybe not?

Do masks really work?

The key here is to define “work” and what “mask” means, which I think I didn’t do when I asked the question. Will a mask —guaranteed— prevent you from ever getting infected? Of course not. Will a good mask and knowledge of how to use it help reduce your chances of getting infected? I think so.

For one thing there are masks, and then there are masks. Pulling your skivvies over your head, or loosely wrapping a bandana across your face certainly isn’t going to help you so much. It might though get you past a poorly worded mandate. Ultimately this is why mandating the things will never go well.

I’m not really convinced a surgical mask helps much, especially the way I’ve seen many wear them — worst with nose hanging out, but not far from that I’d think, is the usual huge gaps poking up to each side where you're basically circumventing any filtering capability of the thing.

Personally I very much like Pierre Kory’s article on this: Masks! – Clearing Up the Confusion

I will tell you what my family does. We found a mask design⁶ that fits our faces pretty well early on. My wife learned to sew and operate a sewing machine to make these. There are several layers, including electrostatic fabric that couldn’t hurt, and a pocket to insert a N95 filter in the middle. Cotton lining, comfortable. I’ve literally worn one all day without thinking about it. We have pegs by the door for the freshly washed masks, grab & go, and a box in the laundry room for used masks. Masks are like underwear — you wear them once, then in the wash.

Absolutely its not the P100 thing Steve Kirsch advocates one needs to defeat the virus⁷, but I would argue we’re talking ways to reduce the probability of infection. The vaccine, especially with omicron has hit the floor failed at this. And you cannot undo it once you’ve done it. Masks you can remove at any time. And honestly, with case rates down again in the US, masks are now staying home. But we have them now for when the next wave hits.

What really happened to mask supplies in the US in the winter of 2020?

I still haven’t seen any attempt to answer this — right after emerging from the holidays in January 2020 we started looking for masks and found them NOWHERE. First signs of some kind of supply chain crisis. This would have been an interesting article for somebody to do — track down who bought masks and find, oh I don’t know, perhaps various social groups tied to the Covid Mother Country bought them all up to ship home? Or were supplies yanked earlier on the supply side? At this point though, two years out, the trail there is likely pretty dry to see what happened there.

What is going on in Japan?

Ultimately this question was motivated by observing that at least through September, Japan really had nowhere near the level of infection and especially death we have here in the US. And I attributed this to culturally, Japanese already have a lot of things going for them when it comes to this pandemic. There has been a lot of news regarding Japan and omicron however — what does the situation look like there now?⁸

(same source both plots, colors switched in the second plot — dark grey is US, red Japan). So what is interesting and unfortunate, it looks like the death rate increased with omicron in Japan, where it may have decreased in the US. There are differences of course with vaccination rates as well. Fortunately this morning I latched onto a good reasource for maybe answering this question here from Andreas Oehler’s Live to Fight Another Day.

Mu and Lambda variants?

Well at the time Mu and Lambda variants were getting to be a thing based on what people were seeing in sequencing, but ultimately delta took them over. And then omicron, now the BA’s. I truly fear the BA.Baracus variant.

To what extent is vaccine breakthrough due to immunity decay and what is due to a better virus “toolset”?

Right now I’m leaning towards toolset. If it the decay in efficacy we see were due to a general decay, you would see a downward slope in efficacy over time. If it were due to variants having a better toolset you would see something more like discrete jumps with different variants. I think with my last foray into Utah⁹, I was able to cook up a good indication of the latter:

There is some slope to the efficacy in the summer of 2021 there, but I think it matches the ramp up in orange, which is the delta variant. We see delta settling in at about 70%, then drop to 40% with omicron. I think the toolset theory fits, especially given OAS type theories¹⁰ we’re starting to see with relation to observations in Europe.

Ah — I am seeing the Substack Glaring Pink Near Email Length Limit Warning Of Death. I guess I go through my new Things I Do Not Know™ in part 3!

Substack Pink Warnings brought to you by Pepto Bismol!¹¹

1. Later post once I come to my senses on this — was told by a friend I’ve known for over a decade that they don’t want to be in the same room with me based on their knowledge of my vaccination status. I’m working on a long email to them. Think they deserve a long explanation of why I am where I am, and it will be difficult, given they are descended from victims of the sort of thinking they are thinking. This mass formation crap really sucks. And by the way — in my very amateur opinion in the softer sciences, I at the moment view Mass Formation == Formation of Religion. I fear I’m at the wrong end of the kind of fascism that comes with that…

2. EDIT: I swapped in I think a better version than the original:

I hear tell of this new vaccine
Which has effects none short of obscene
Right after your poke
You might get a stroke
Good news though, you'll poop graphine!

3. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/faq.html#vaccine-administration

4. The Good, The Bad, or The Ugly Batch?

But actually much better:

Getting to the bottom of potential toxicity variability between Vax Lots

5. I am anticipating a continuing surge in reporting to VAERS

6. https://smileworks25.com/3970/ Yes its in Japanese. Deal. Also this: https://smileworks25.com/4050/

7. How to protect Grandma (or yourself) from getting COVID-19

8. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

9. Armchair Quarterbacking Utah's Rebound 2

10.

Geert Vanden Bossche Predictions on evolution Covid 19 pandemic

https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/86185952/this-is-how-you-read-gvb.jpg

11. https://pepto-bismol.com/en-us