It is a good time for a COVID update as cases and deaths in the U.S. have fallen to their lowest levels since the very beginning of the pandemic. In other words, you have to look back 14 months to last March to find lower numbers than today. I will focus first on the numbers and then a very important story regarding the origins of COVID-19 which highlights what I call COVID fascism. Also, should you vaccinate your teenage kids?
The Falling Numbers
The first COVID wave peaked last April. The case count last Spring was severely understated because a lack of testing, but peaking at 33,000 per day, it was still more than today’s number. The case numbers dropped to about 22,000 per day last Summer and then jumped again to 71,000 during the second wave. Cases fell again and then skyrocketed to 256,000 during wave three. Except for a slight increase in early Spring, the numbers have been falling for five months, down by 92% since their peak.
What’s even more noteworthy is how rapidly cases are falling. The last six weeks have seen double digit declines, with last week being the biggest decline of the last six, falling more than 22% from the prior week. We ended the week at around 20,000, so another 20% drop puts us at 16,000 by the end of next week and we probably go lower still the following week. Even the pessimism of Drs. Fauci and Wallensky can’t put a damper on these numbers.
Do you remember the CDC Director talking about an “impending feeling of doom” in early April? Do you remember in May when the CDC also warned of a potential rebound in COVID in May, but I told you numbers would drop by half during the month? Cases actually dropped by more than half (60%). The case numbers will eventually flatten out, but the big question still remains when. I hope we don’t find out any time soon.
On the other hand, deaths have not fallen as rapidly as I expected, although they fell about a third in May and at their lowest point since March 30, 2020. We’ve been told there is a lag of a few weeks between the time cases drop and then deaths drop. I think the lag may be a month or more given that there have been double digit drops in cases for six straight weeks but smaller drops in death numbers to this point. That really big drop in numbers is still coming, just a little later than I expected.
Vaccines
As of May 30, 50.5% of U.S. citizens have received at least one dose of the vaccine and 40.8% are fully vaccinated. The rate of vaccinations is falling as the pool of eligible unvaccinated shrinks (1.32 million per day). What do these numbers tell us?
Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations for where we might be headed with vaccines. Let’s say we dispense another 30 million vaccines in June. I think an average of one million per day for the month is still possible. More are now getting their second dose rather than the first, so let’s say the split is 18 million second doses and 12 million first doses in June. That means by the end of June, we would have about 54% with one dose and 46% fully vaccinated. At that point, the numbers creep up very slowly. I think we wind up in the neighborhood of 55-60% vaccinated by the end of the year. I know that Dr. Fauci is saying we need to get to 75%, but that seems completely out-of-reach at this point.
On the other hand, no matter how many are vaccinated, we are in an infinitely better situation than we were last year. The most vulnerable among us are protected: more than 80% of those over 65 and about two-thirds of those between 55 and 64 have been vaccinated. Despite not reaching 75% vaccinated, we have an a large percentage who already have natural immunity. We still don’t know exactly how many have COVID antibodies, but according to CDC numbers there could be as many as 30% of all Americans with a natural immunity. CDC, before this Fall please do a study of how many have the COVID antibodies (from vaccine or from contraction of the disease) instead of talking of impending doom. We need to know how close we are to herd immunity we actually are.
Follow the Trends
Two months ago in a post I said to follow the trends COVID by the Numbers – Seek the Truth (seek-the-truth.com). So, how are we doing in the two months since that post?
In late March, California and Texas were still seeing triple digit death rates daily, 183 and 108 per day respectively. Those states are now at 33 and 39, respectively. In fact, all states have fallen below 50 deaths per day. Even Michigan which saw a COVID spike in April, (don’t forget, this was the cause for yet another media panic) has seen deaths drop from 151 per day down to 33 per day in the last six weeks. In late March, New York was stuck at around 7,000 cases per day, but now has only 1,000 per day; deaths in New York also fell, from 102 per day on March 29 down to 25 per day on May 30. Of course, New York’s death rate hit 956 April 2020. What a difference a year makes!
In late March, we had already seen cases drop from their peaks by 90% or more in 11 states. Today, 41 states have seen drops of 90% or more, including Michigan which is down to fewer than 700 cases per day. All but three states (Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii) have dropped 80% or more. Two months ago, I told you deaths were down 95% in the U.K. and 80% in Israel. Two months later, U.S. vaccinations are at the rates those two countries were back then and we are seeing similar results with deaths down 85% and cases down 92%. Deaths in Israel and the UK are now down 99% from their peaks. You can’t get much better than that.
Of course, we haven’t seen numbers drop to zero anywhere and deaths at 500 per day and cases at 20,000 per day in the U.S. are still relatively high, but look how much the numbers have fallen and know that the numbers will be going lower still.
Can the numbers actually go to zero or some number very, very close to zero? Israel is getting as close to zero as any country. As of May 30, cases in Israel are down to 19 per day. For the entire month of May, Israel had 48 deaths, about one-and-a-half deaths per day. Those numbers are getting close to the point where COVID is no longer relevant. In late May, Israel finally exceeded 60% vaccinated, so I would expect they will reap more benefits in June; the numbers can go lower still. Just how low can they go is anybody’s guess.
Vaccines and Kids
The CDC has authorized vaccines for kids between the ages of 12 and 16. Everyone with kids in this age range has an important decision to make. Here is an interview of a pediatrician who explains the pros and cons of vaccinating kids. If you have teenage kids, be as informed as you can before deciding what to do for your kids. She recommends at the least you determine whether or not your kid has natural immunity before vaccinating them. The interview with the doctor starts around the 2:30 mark.
Our pediatrician as well in his newsletter included the following advice and commentary:
- “Are we all ok with an emergency use authorization for the COVID19 vaccine for children under age 16 years old? That is a loaded question. In the British Medical Journal we see a piece written by Drs. Pegden, Prasad and Baral this week. They state: “For adults, the benefits of covid-19 vaccination are enormous, while for children they are relatively minor. Rare side effects from adult covid-19 vaccination are unlikely to lead to future vaccine hesitancy whose public health impact could be comparable to the benefits of the adult covid-19 vaccination program itself. But accelerated mass child vaccination under emergency use authorization—perhaps even spurred by school mandates and “vaccine passports”—presents a different balance of risks and benefits. The possibility that rare adverse events could emerge as the more durable public health legacy of an emergency use authorization for child covid-19 vaccines is much greater.” (Pegden et. al. 2021)
- “Young people have been largely spared from severe covid-19 so far, and the value of childhood vaccination against respiratory viruses in general remains an open question for three reasons: the limited benefits of protection in age groups that experience only mild disease; the limited effects on transmission because of the range of antigenic types and waning vaccine induced immunity; and the possibility of unintended consequences related to differences in vaccine induced and infection induced immunity.” (Lavine et. al. 2021)
- Our priority should be vaccinating the at risk population which is the adult population and allowing children to receive the vaccine based on each persons comfort with the scientific data as it stands. Even, in this situation, it may be better served for us to send our potential childhood use vaccines overseas to hotspots like India where people are succumbing to COVID19 in record number. Morally, this makes complete sense to me.
- I am pro vaccine, but I am more pro safety and an EUA at this point as pointed out is jumping the safety gun for kids. Couple this to a much greater need over seas and you have a path forward.
- According to the CDC, there were 654 deaths from COVID19 in the age group 0-24 years old. In 2020, from 0-17 years of age, there were 178 COVID deaths from unvaccinated children and 179 influenza deaths in the 2020/21 season. Remember that the 179 deaths is from a partially influenza vaccinated youth population not a native COVID population. (CDC) Putting this into perspective, when measles was rampant in the United States, 500 deaths and 1000 damaged brains occurred yearly in an unvaccinated population. This is a factor of 6X worse for outcomes and coupled to robust vaccine safety data. I have never seen a live case of measles in clinic in 25 years of medicine. Thus, vaccination works well for measles with no significant side effects.
- For a counter argument that vaccination is necessary for children’s mask removal in public see this piece by Wamsley from NPR. Regardless of which side of this debate you find yourself on, the discourse is important while the judgement of viewpoints is not.”
- Perspective: 178 children died from coronavirus last year between 0 and 17 years of age of which 27% had a known underlying medical condition. (CDC Table) In 2018, 4,074 children under 19 years of age died in a motor vehicle accident and 3,143 from firearms. (Cunningham et. al. 2018) Driving in a car or owning a firearm is 20x more dangerous than being unvaccinated against SARS2 as a child/adolescent.
I think this is good advice. We have a couple kids in this age range ourselves and my wife and I do not want them vaccinated at this time because the risk from COVID for them is almost non-existent. The vaccines may be safe for kids as well, but we will wait and see. I’m sure we’ll know more about this in the future.
COVID Fascism
Ronald Reagan said a few years ago, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Apparently, there is a corollary for the government of Canada. They have their counterparts to our so-called experts and they aren’t any better than our experts. Don tells us in this video that their experts have determined the expiration dates on the COVID vaccines don’t really matter after all. I guess it is more important to get the vaccine numbers up than to keep people safe from spoiled vaccines.
The latest news in the U.S. is that there are questions about the origins of the COVID virus. Was it released in a wet market by eating an undercooked bat or was it a sinister man-made plot unleashed by the Chinese government or was it an accidental leak from the lab due to incompetence? This story actually is not new news, but our media is treating it as new because people like Dr. Fauci and former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Scott Gotleib are finally lending credence to it. Transcript: Scott Gottlieb on “Face the Nation” (msn.com)
This is a prime example of how truly awful our TV, print, and social media are: the lies, hypocrisy, and rewriting of history (retconning), are all exposed here. Last April, the Trump administration was talking about the possibility of a man-made virus originating from China. Mike Pompeo, then Secretary of State, launched an investigation into this matter. The response last year from the media was scorn and outrage. They told us the Trump administration was dealing in conspiracy theories or that this was a tactic to gin up support for the presidential election, or, of course, that this was simply racist (everything the Republicans do is racist, you know). When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who is as mild-mannered as Clark Kent, not as brash and outspoken as Trump, also raised this theory, he too was dismissed because he was just doing Trump’s bidding or something.
Facebook, because they want to be known as the arbiters of “truth” (which is actually the “truth” as redefined by the political side they prefer), censored any content which made the claim that virus was not natural. Well, now that Dr. Fauci says there is the possibility that the virus may have been created in a lab, Facebook has removed the ban. Dr. Fauci changes his mind and now we can debate the issue? Facebook is telling us only experts in government can set the debate on sensitive political issues? Why does Facebook follow the caprices of Dr. Fauci and nobody else is allowed to speculate on a matter or offer an opposing opinion?
When Dr. Fauci flip-flopped on mask wearing, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest followed suit and stuck labels on posts or outright banned folks for saying masks were not effective. When Trump touted the efficacy of the drug Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum attempted to shut down debate on this topic as well, but now that Trump is gone we can talk about HCQ as a palliative to COVID. And when Dr. Fauci raised doubts about the origin of COVID, social media followed suit again. Facebook Ends Ban on Posts Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made – WSJ. Why didn’t the just ban Dr. Fauci instead? Folks, our social media outlets are a huge problem; they are attempting to control debate on topics for which they have no actual expertise. Why is there not more outrage over this? Where is the boycott of Facebook and the rest of social media? They are the robber barons of our time. I cover the problem of social media more in my last post: On (American) Fascism – Seek the Truth (seek-the-truth.com) and I will cover it again in future posts.
We should all be aware that China is an enemy and an evil and tyrannical regime. This thought that China cooked up this pandemic in a lab, is one that many of us have wondered about. We will wait for the proof, but given the nature of the Chinese regime, given the regime’s reticence in the early days of the pandemic, and given the many coincidences regarding the origin of the virus, it is not unreasonable for us to speculate about this. We should have been asking some serious questions about it and discussion on social media should not be censored. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana knows all this and he tried to get Dr. Fauci to explain what is happening. This following video is very revealing. Dr. Fauci comes across as someone with something to hide. Perhaps certain people in our own government might be implicated by this revelation and it is why there has been attempt to shut down debate on the question:
The Senator asks a key question at the end of this: “Why did the Biden administration spike the investigation into the origins of the Wuhan virus?” Dr. Fauci declines to answer the question as it is in the political realm, although one has to wonder if he had been consulted on this as well.
The Biden administration is dissembling their way through this matter as well. Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, doesn’t know how to responded when confronted with the fact that the Biden Administration shut down an investigation begun by Trump and then says it is fine for the World Health Organization (WHO) to lead the investigation instead of our own intelligence agencies. Jen Psaki snaps at reporter after question on COVID origins | Daily Mail Online
- With 589,920 dead Americans at what point does President Biden say we don’t want to wait for the WHO effort, we don’t know what they’re doing, this needs to be an American-led effort to get to the bottom of what happened?’ Doocy asked. ‘
- ‘I think you’re misunderstanding how this process actually works,’ she told the him, and said the Biden administration was relying on the World Health Organization to conduct an independent investigation – even though their report already dismissed the lab leak claims.
This is a serious charge that should be considered by our intelligence agencies. Don’t we want to know the answer one way or another? Why is there not more outrage at the lack of concern from the Biden administration? Who are they covering for? And why rely on the WHO? We could go in depth on how the WHO blew COVID from the start and how they were doing the bidding of the Chinese this past year, but I don’t need to tell you anything about the WHO at all. Instead, just listen to the lead WHO investigator yourself when he was interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes earlier this year. Even this liberal journalist is a bit incredulous at the naivete of the investigators. These are the folks we are relying on to get to the bottom of this issue?
Stu Burguiere on his show Stu Does America, highlighted the rewriting of COVID history very well in the following episode from last week. If you have time, watch the first 15 minutes of the following video. It is remarkable to hear what the various outlets said about this theory then and what they say now. This ought to tell you that our one-channel liberal media cannot be trusted. When asked if maybe the Trump administration was asking the right questions all along, the various media outlets all continue to blame Trump for their own failures. The logic is something like: you just can’t believe Trump and Republicans and so we didn’t believe them and that’s their fault because they are all so bad. Even when proven correct, they say the Republicans are still wrong. Remember the facts don’t matter when you are morally right. How great is to be a liberal journalist? You are always right and your opponent is always wrong. Do you still trust any of these outlets to provide you the news?
Like our doctor said above, what we need is an open debate, not judgment of those who believe one side or the other. Let the facts determine the truth, not political ideology. Our media no longer believes in open debate. We need to demand better from them.
Stu knew there was something fishy, something wrong last year. Here are a couple episodes from 2020 in which he discussed the matter. At least, he and Blaze TV was consistent in their reporting on this issue:
Seek the Truth 