Joe Biden’s Dismal Approval Rating Sinks Past Fauci, Blinken, Harris and Pelosi

Some interesting commentary...

 

~ I hope this time Putin brings the candy .

 

Lol.

 

Which started in 2014.

Why do you keep ignoring that to serve your agenda?

 

Fake News. Biden's at 35 and still sinking.



CIVIQS rolling job approval average.

He's lower than even Fauci and monkeys throw crap at Fauci.

Fauci’s NIH Division Spent $205K of Taxpayer Money in One Month to Study Transgender Monkeys.

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Gave male monkeys feminizing hormones.

Lied about dog testing.

They sure do a lot of weird things, spend money like water and lie a lot.

 

' ? I wonder if the rumors that Fauci receives $150K in royalties from pharmaceutical companies are Fact or Fake ...

 

Well, on $400,000/yr he has a net worth of ~$7,000,000

Fox to Psaki: How is this still a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” if the boosted are getting sick?

Because their Us/Them narrative requires it. A foolish, counterproductive narrative with Omicron blazing through the triple-vaccinated like a knife through hot butter.

 

~ The scary thing is if you look around for information & opinions from scientists who actually work on vaccines some are afraid mRNA vaccinated individuals are more susceptible to infection. There are also some side effects like vascular leaks that seem to be unreported .
Let us hope that these vaccines are not doing more harm than good . We shall see ...

 

There is a sizeable study that shows that on balance they do more good than harm.

I don't trust any of them or their interpretations of the data, but, I do trust them to be able to count dead bodies, that I think they can handle. And the findings were interesting, on balance, regardless of the cause, the death rate for vaxxed was lower than unvaxxed. To me, that is very strong evidence that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh any harm. I asked @CenterField to weigh in this, he has a lot of experience evaluating studies, but, we probably buried him in requests and he apparently wasn't able to get to it.

 

~ As always time will tell. We are the experimental subjects whether we like it or not - for now.

 

Indeed. I've been logging in to PF less frequently, pretty busy, sorry. I can't read the message you're referring to, since my Ignore list is long, and if you quote someone I ignore, I read you but not what you're quoting. If you tell me exactly what's the issue, I may try to reply once I have a moment.

 

I came across this study https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm?s_cid=mm7043e2_w

Which showed lower mortality rate for vaccinated vs unvaccinated. If you feel like it, I'm interested in your take. I had a couple ideas and observations:

• Very little difference with the youngest group, but then very significant differences as age increased.
• Certainly other than the youngest group, clearly vaccine benefit outweighs risk.
• Is there anything here potentially indicating a broader health benefit from the vaccines than just COVID protection?

 

Lower than Fauci is really low. Damning Fauci Emails Suggesting Concealed Knowledge Of Lab Leak

Well-Paid Liar.
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'And the possibility that the virus was intentionally genetically manipulated..."

Put him under oath, get to the bottom of it.

 

Joe Scarborough points out that Stacey Abrahms dis today for an event custom made for her was because Biden is so low in polling. Mika was not amused.

 

Fascinating issue, thanks for posting.
It must be understood, and I'm sure you did (but others just reading the posts and not the links may not) that this paper address NON-COVID-19 mortality.
"Non–COVID-19 deaths were those that did not occur within 30 days of an incident COVID-19 diagnosis or receipt of a positive test result for SARS-CoV-2"

So the study shows that Covid-19-vaccinated people die less often of OTHER conditions, than unvaccinated people.

You make 3 observations.

1 - Very little difference with the youngest group.

My take: Naturally. The youngest group doesn't tend to die of ANY cause, Covid-19 or not, so I wouldn't expect an impact there anyway. The statistical power of such impact if any would be extremely diluted by the fact that this group has very low mortality by any cause to start with.

2 - Clearly vaccine benefit outweighs risk.

My take: Yes, we know that; we didn't need this study to reach this conclusion. And mind you, this is WITHOUT factoring in, Covid-19 deaths, for which the benefit is HUGE. What this paper is saying is that even outside of Covid-19 there is a reduction in mortality among this population. Now, the latter fact, we do need to take with a grain of salt. Not to dispute the facts found (they are what they are), but to dispute the causality involved, and the intervening factors. More on this, in number 3.

3 - Is there anything here potentially indicating a broader health benefit from the vaccines than just COVID protection?

My take: Yes and no. The answer is complex.

First, the Yes (although it's a relative Yes). Where do I see a broader health benefit? In the deaths related to subtle organ damage in unsuspecting people who had mild or asymptomatic cases of Covid-19, and may have died past 30 days of Covid-19 diagnosis (or were never diagnosed with Covid-19 to start with and never knew they had it) from malfunction of organs other than the usual (lungs; or over-reacting immune systems, which are the two phenotypes most responsible for how the virus kills). Here is a typical example: the SARS-CoV-2 tends to cause endothelial dysfunction, which in turn can lead to hyper-coagulation. This, then, can result in a sudden stroke or pulmonary embolism; either one if massive enough can cause sudden death. We've seen cases of otherwise healthy people who caught mild Covid-19, recovered fully, then a few weeks later suffered a massive stroke, something that would otherwise be unexpected given the absence of other stroke risks. Or, we've seen people as young and healthy as college athletes developing myocarditis from a bout of mild or even asymptomatic Covid-19. Say, someone develops myocarditis and then ends up with a heart attack (from clots developed due to a weak heart) or cardiac arrest (from arrhythmias caused by disarray of the heart conduction system during myocarditis).

So, one explanation for this relatively Yes (because I'd still call these deaths, a Covid-19 death although they'd escape the definition used by this study), is the following: Joe Unvaccinated has a case of the sniffles. Doesn't think much of it. Unbeknownst to him and even to his doctors, he had Covid-19. Joe Unvaccinated then goes about his business, and suddenly drops dead of a stroke or a heart attack, or cardiac arrest. Or gets a bit of brain fog and doesn't look left and right when crossing a street and is hit by a car. Or the brain fog makes him lose control of his car or motorcycle. Or his existing diabetes takes a sudden turn for the worse and he dies of a crisis of diabetic ketoacidosis (the SARS-CoV-2 can destroy insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells).

I wouldn't exactly call it a broader health benefit per se, but rather, the avoidance of a myriad of Covid-19 sequelae and subtle organ damage that the infection with this NASTY, TERRIBLE virus can cause, and most people don't realize that they are also a problem (people tend to focus on the stats of the dramatic deaths by lung failure or cytokine storm). I'm not calling it a broader health benefit because it's not like the vaccine is likely to be intrinsically helping with other FULLY SARS-CoV-2 unrelated illnesses. Say, the vaccine is NOT helping with prevention of cancer.

Lastly, the No.

The No comes from a large number of intervening factors that are NOT being addressed by this study, where being vaccinated is a correlation rather than causation of a lower mortality benefit.

See, they controlled for age, sex, race, and ethnicity. While these are pretty strong factors in mortality, they are far from being the only ones. Let's consider certain things that are most likely mudding the waters.

The most blatant one, class. It is well known that wealthier people are generally healthier than poorer people, for the simple fact that they are likely to be better insured and to be able to pay for better care, better food, etc. It has also been shown over and over that in the United States, poorer people had less access to the vaccines so they are likely to be over-represented in the cohort of the unvaccinated. Obesity for example is more prevalent among poorer people due to eating low quality, cheaper foods that tend to be fattening and with lower protein content.

Related to this, and also not covered, is access to care, insurance status, and quality of care received (a yuppie living in an advanced metropolis will typically get care from highly trained doctors in sophisticated medical centers while a peasant in a rural area will get some over-worked, stressed-out general practitioner in a poorly equipped regional hospital). The population in rural America is both less vaccinated, and less able to get high quality care for their non-Covid-19-related illnesses.

Underlying conditions and causes of death are not addressed by this study (thus my including the brain fog leading to being hit by a car or losing control of a vehicle - no, it's not far-fetched). Like I said, if we were to look into what deaths are more prevalent among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated, we probably would see this effect lessened when completely unrelated diseases are considered, versus the ones that can be related to viral sequelae such as coagulation issues and heart attacks. As an example that @557 will like, deaths by heart attack associated with the influenza virus are GROSSLY underestimated in America. I expect that the same will be true (or even more so for the - more aggressive - SARS-CoV-2).

Then, there is the whole behavioral component. It is very possible and even likely that among the unvaccinated, there are more habitual risk-takers than among the vaccinated, which may be a very powerful factor tainting this data. Not only risk takers, but those who don't care for their own health, as in people who say "whatever, if I die, so be it" and are averse to vaccinations, doctor visits, health-promoting habits, etc.

Also among the behavioral issues, maybe there are also those who fear the Covid-19 vaccines for various reasons but also fear the virus. These people may say "I am not sure about these new mRNA vaccines, I hear some stuff about them causing issues. But I am also terrified of going to a doctor's office and sitting there in the waiting room with people coughing all over the place because I hear this virus is nasty too, so I'll stay put and postpone my care to a safer time." The vaccinated ones, on the other hand, may feel safer and may take the initiative of seeking care for their OTHER medical problems, without postponing visits. The former will have their other health problems balloon for going untreated.

And so on and so forth. How much each of the above factors influences the overall results? In isolation, each one, not much, but when you put them all together you start getting to bigger numbers.

Let's now think of the BIGGEST confounding factor here, one that jumps out of the page of this study and screams "HEY, HOW COME YOU DIDN'T THINK OF ME, STUDY AUTHORS???"

They picked a cut-off time of 30 days. WHOA! This is clearly insufficient to address a difference in mortality, because many (not most, but many) Covid-19 deaths are delayed by 5-8 weeks after initial positive test. The study is vague about it. If their only mechanism for excluding what they call "deaths associated with Covid-19" was this arbitrary 30-day cut-off, then they missed many deaths that are indeed associated with Covid-19. The study does indicate that at least in part, they weren't very precise in this assessment, when they say "it is possible that the algorithm used might have misclassified some deaths associated with COVID-19 because of lack of testing or because individual mortality reviews were not conducted."

If I had designed this study, I'd have used a cut-off of 60 days. One would hope that they did exclude not only people who died within 30 days of a positive test, but also those who received a death certificate with primary cause of death Covid-19 even if they died more than 30 days later. But frankly, from the wording in this study we can't even be sure that they did that (although, they probably did - but in any case, a 60-day cut-off would have provided for better shielding against misclassification of causes of death, given what we know about late complications of Covid-19.

So, for all the above reasons, I take the findings with a grain of salt.

There is one solid element that they did highlight, and I would too: while from this study I can't say with certainty that being vaccinated in itself (when adjusted for a bigger array of intervening factors) prevents non-Covid-19 deaths, one thing I can say from this is the following: certainly it does not seem like being vaccinated INCREASES mortality, like the anti-vaxxers so adamantly insist that it does.

This seems to me to be a bigger take-home message from this study, because a 30-day cut off, and controlling only for age, sex, race, and ethnicity, seems to me to be insufficient to draw broader conclusions.

I hope that this is helpful to your take on this study. Again, thanks for posting. Take care.

 

Thank you for the detailed and informative response. I'm once again reminded of what a nasty bug this is and how important it is to avoid it, or, clear it quickly if avoidance fails.

 

@CenterField and @Zorro,

Interesting discussion. I would add one more possibility to the good list already provided. Vaccination for one pathogen often stimulates the innate immune system to become more effective at prevention of other infections as well. That effect could show up in overall mortality.

 

That was my hope as well, but, @CenterField seems to lean more toward that in the comparative analysis the unvaccinated group, they are fairing more poorly actually because of missed COVID damage, that is, the vaccinated group is enjoying a better outcome due to avoided covid damage not enhanced non-covid related health.

Also, when I was considering the point you raised, if I understand correctly, too much immune response can be a real problem with COVID. Can an immune system be made both stronger and smarter?

I have a stack of supplements on the ready in case I think I haven't managed to avoid a COVID infection and his post left me wondering if I should add baby aspirin to the mix. I looked for support online and didn't seem much recent evaluation of that and my doctor didn't suggest it with all the other things she advised me to have on hand,

 

This is correct (as usual, 557 is correct). We used to give the BCG vaccine not only to prevent TB, but also to stimulate someone's weak immune system. It's been even proposed to increase immunity against the SARS-CoV-2.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0337-y
"randomized controlled trials, showed an up to 50% reduction of mortality induced by BCG in young infants3. This reduction in childhood mortality by BCG appeared to be due to the protection against unrelated infectious agents and especially respiratory tract infections and neonatal sepsis."

 

So on the topic, Moderna is said to be experimenting with merging their coronavirus vaccine with the flu vaccine in order to strengthen the vaccine. What are your quick thoughts on that? Also, the whole hyper-coagulation thing that can lead to a sudden stroke, etc are there symptoms that one could watch out for? If one wanted to make it in time to a hospital and possibly recover.

 

Like I just said, 557's point is well-taken. It should be added to my list.
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Can we train the immune system to be stronger AND smarter? Yes, the BCG strategy above is one such idea. It's always a fine line, though. You don't want a hyper-active immune system turning against your own cells and triggering auto-immune diseases such as lupus.
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Aspirin and Covid-19: earlier protocols recommended actually bigger doses than baby aspirin; 325mg to 650mg. A more recent study did not find an advantage in taking that. Your doctor is right. Aspirin in larger doses does have risks, most notably GI bleed.
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These days, Paxlovid and molnupiravir are slowly becoming available. My hospital has just received them today and the head pharmacist is doing rounds to educate the physicians on indications, side effects, etc. We used to recommend a number of supplements to strengthen the immune system during the replication phase of Covid-19 (Zinc, quercetin, vitamin D, vitamin C, etc.). Of course if then the case goes severe and and the immune system overshoots we want the opposite, thus the protocols for severe cases including potent steroids such as dexamethasone or prednisolone.

But the arrival of especially Paxlovid, and to a lesser degree molnupiravir (efficacy of the former is close to 90% while the latter only 30%), makes of these much more powerful options for the treatment of the initial, mild to moderate phase of Covid-19, than any supplements you might take, which had marginal benefits at best, supported by weak evidence.

These supplements are good for general health and probably do enhance immunity over time, and some may disrupt to a small degree viral replication (such as zinc) but the SARS-CoV-2 can rapidly overwhelm this tiny effect; and the improvement in the strength or your immune system will be slow, measured in months/years while if you catch Covid-19 we are talking a few days until things can go south. The SARS-CoV-2, however, in ANY of its variants, cannot bypass Paxlovid, which disrupts viral replication strongly using a mechanism of action that all variants rely upon and is only very marginally subject to possible future mutation that is not dramatic like the antigenic shift in the spike protein that is the target of the vaccines.

The bottom line is, while we didn't have any other tools (and no, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are not valid ones), it would make more sense to take these supplements in case of early Covid or pre-Covid (I mean, if you have a very low vitamin D level your immune system won't be great), but now that we do, much more important would be to chase down the still scarce Paxlovid courses of treatment.

 

I'm about to go into a meeting. The short answer is that yes, Moderna's idea is good.

And yes, there are symptoms such as symptoms of DVT with calf stiffness, pain, and redness that can indicate that a coagulation event is developing, and people can get treated urgently with anticoagulants before clots start shooting upward and going to the lungs and brains. There are also blood tests to diagnose it, such as D-dimmer, and venous ultrasound (Doppler). Similarly, myocarditis and pericarditis can have symptoms of chest pain, palpitations, shortness of breath, etc. and come with several telling signs on EKG and blood tests.

The bottom line is, if you develop any sudden and serious symptom like the above after recovering from Covid-19, rush to an Urgent Care Center or ER to be checked out. Some practitioners recommend that you don't engage in strenuous exercises for 2 months after recovery from even mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 until you can be checked out for these late complications.

As I keep telling you all, this virus is a lot trickier than the deniers and anti-vaxxers pretend. Its health consequences are dire, and it is a dangerous virus that needs to be avoided as best as possible.

 

LOL! See if I understand what you're saying: if the polls are bad for Democrats, it's really something, but if they're bad for Republicans, they must be wrong.
This "poll" bullcrap is ridiculous. Those who spout poll numbers in their favor, but dismiss them if they are not.
Sometimes I wonder if some foreign power has spiked the food supply in America with something that makes them have difficulty reasoning.

 

I agree the damaging effects of Covid are probably the biggest factor. It’s not a case of either/or, there are dozens of confounders and a couple studies can’t sort them all out.

The idea a strong immune system is a disadvantage is really a fallacy. What we are observing when we see cytokine storms etc. that have negative consequences is actually dysfunctional immunity, not immunity that is too “strong”. It occurs when the different components of the immune system aren’t communicating correctly for lack of a better analogy. This results in improper timing and/or ratios of response from the various components.

Yes the immune system can be made stronger and smarter. Little things like adequate consumption of insoluble fiber strengthens your immune system by regulating immune response. The effect of vaccines on the innate immune system I described in the previous post make your immune system smarter by changing how your genes are expressed (epigenetics), resulting in better ability of your innate immune system to detect threats. Stress, sleep deprivation, dehydration etc. severely weaken the immune system and impair it’s ability to become “smarter”.

@CenterField can better answer your question on aspirin but in my opinion we should be strengthening our immune system in advance of infection, not after. I have posted a lot of studies showing little things like diet and exercise have a large impact on chance of infection and the outcome if you are infected. If you are interested there is some of that here:

http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?posts/1073045677/

 

I appreciate it. Just checked my fiber, it's a 3/2 mix of Soluble/Insoluble. And, I'm trying to get up to 5 hours a week of exercise. Did it last week, on track for this week.

I was reading over the holidays about how everyone wants a poly pill that fixes everything, and we have one, it's called regular exercise and the other things you mentioned.