Charts and Other Info

Today, once again, is about data and questions related to this virus that has messed up our lives for the past two years.

There’s a chart worth looking at:

from Alex Berenson's Substack

It shows data from Great Britain during the last week of December and first week of January. I got this in a regular email from libertarian Tom Woods, who has been providing a lot of COVID-19 data and commentary throughout the pandemic. The email is passing along info from Alex Berenson’s Substack. The Berenson post included similar charts from Scotland, Israel, and Denmark, all showing age makes more of a difference than vaccination status. And then Berenson comments,

Remember, these failures cannot be blamed on vaccine skepticism, or Tucker Carlson, or me. These countries are as close to fully vaccinated as it is possible to be.

If you think this is what you were promised a year ago—or six months ago, or even a month ago—I don’t know what to tell you. But the answer cannot be to do MORE of what has not worked.

He's right. But as I look at the Britain chart, I still have questions. It compares the raw numbers of unvaccinated to the vaccinated. But it doesn’t compare populations. You would need to know how many in the total population are vaccinated or unvaccinated at those various levels. Then you could do a per population comparison, for example per 10,000 or per million or whatever is appropriate. There are probably other studies that do that.

Even better, but I don’t know how to get this, would be data on how well the different cohorts do when exposed to the virus. You can’t really tell how effective a vaccine is if the vaccinated person isn’t exposed to the virus. Since you can’t purposely expose people, that study isn’t possible. So you have to extrapolate from general populations and assume there’s some sort of random or generalized exposure.

And, of course, the unvaccinated bucket contains both those who have gotten and recovered from the disease and those who haven’t contracted it yet. There’s an enormous difference between those two cohorts. Add in, as Dr. Mobeen Syed talked about January 27, there’s data showing that people in households with sick Covid patients but who do not also contract the disease—so they have definitely been exposed but don’t get sick—also show that they have antibodies. From some previous illness? From a highly tuned immune system that stopped the virus in its tracks before it could cause illness? More study needed. But it’s interesting. It’s not different from what we see in a great many other illnesses, where some people in the family get sick, but some resist illness.

There may always be more to learn. But it does look like we’re nearing the end of this pandemic. There are still some deaths happening, although more of a plateau than a rise. There are still some hospitalizations. But only a small fraction need oxygen or ventilators, and time in hospital is down from weeks to 3 to 5 days.

The number I don’t have is hospitalizations as a percentage of cases. Even during Delta, the number was about 1 in 100, of which somewhere above 90% recovered—while media had stirred the public to believe that 50% of cases went to the hospital and 50% or so of those died.

But now, the case numbers have skyrocketed. I look at my zip code to get a grasp on numbers, gathering numbers daily from the Harris County website. Through most of the pandemic, we’ve had active cases mostly below 100. Now we’re more than 10 times that number. Yet we have had no additional deaths since early December. The total number—through the entire pandemic—is between 36 and 38. We hit 36 on November 30; 37 on December 7; 38 on December 10. That was a pretty rapid rise, since we’d been averaging a bit over 19 days between additional deaths. But this was Delta, before Omicron took over.

But wait! We went back down to 37 on December 16, and down to 36 on December 17, then back up to 38 on December 18, but back down to 36 on December 24—Merry Christmas to whichever families got their loved ones back. I’ve been calling these resurrections. We went as low as 35 again on December 27, but have toggled mostly between 36, 37, and 38 most days since. Yesterday and today we are at 37. I don’t know the meaning of these “resurrections.” I’m assuming someone inputs data wrong, although I can’t explain why they would change it downward from an existing number. It may be that a death attributed to COVID-19 was later found to be due to some other cause. Whatever the reason, we essentially have not had a death due to COVID-19 in this zip code for over a month and a half. Back when we first got to 37 deaths, we had 70 active cases. Now, we topped out at just over 1200 active cases last weekend, and maybe this week we’re trending back down for good.

The comparison is, 70 active cases, one death per 20 days, to 1100 active cases, no deaths in 45 days.

I also look at my son’s county, in rural central Texas (getting data daily from the state) which has a population in the range of imaginable, like my zip code. They had a surge in deaths in a late summer wave. In November they had a total of 7 deaths. In December, just 1, going 35 days until 2 more in January. None the past two weeks. Their cases, meanwhile, have skyrocketed as we see all over.

In other words, unlike in past waves, deaths remain low, as if we are past a wave, even though our case rates are the highest ever. And, we should add, case rates are likely undercounted, since only official tests count, and for people who have only minor symptoms, they’re likely to stay home a few days until they feel better and not bother getting a test that would tell them to stay home a few days until they feel better. Or maybe they've done an at-home test that they do not report.

I’m on day 4 of something that feels like a bad cold; my husband had it for the five days before I came down with it. Neither of us had fever. I had a sore throat the first day. The rest has been just sinus congestion and severe fatigue. I haven’t been able to find at-home tests in stores (don't want to contact the government to send me any), and haven't wanted to go out and get a test when what I’m doing is getting me through this just fine. But, maybe it would be good to know if this is just a cold or Omicron.

The silver lining for all the people getting the Omicron variant this month is, getting the virus now gives future immunity. Even if there’s another wave to come, of an even more transmissible variant, this natural immunity holds up. And for those who miraculously stayed well through until the next strain, the severity of a future strain is going to be no worse than now, and possibly even weaker. And it will only progress through the population that doesn’t have it now, a population that's getting harder to find.

I've been watching these charts turn blue lately. The comparison is to the week before in that area. You can get actual numbers by clicking on the interactive maps on the site. If an area has been blue for a very long time, like South Africa, and now it's up a bit, that's a comparison to that place 7 days earlier, already low, so probably still low and not reason for alarm. There's another level that goes down to the county level, which is also fun to look at. Again, these are case counts, saying nothing about severity of illness, just whether it is spreading (orange) or not (blue).

New cases compared to 7 days prior, showing the trend
for the past three days for the US.
data gathered daily from here

New cases compared to 7 days prior, showing the trend
for the past three days for countries worldwide.
data gathered daily from here

Dr. John Campbell has been giving a lot of good news, from the data, this past week. On January 27, he pointed out that concerns about high case rates or even hospitalizations are temporary:

I don’t think it will mean that more people will die overall. But it means that the deaths could come in a shorter period of time, because the infection is going through the population in a shorter period of time.

A week earlier, January 20, Dr. Campbell presented interesting data on deaths from COVID-19 with no other underlying causes. That was eye opening. 

He refers to a release of data in the UK, following a FOIA request, which he assumes will translate to similar news in the US, Canada, and other similar countries.  The data was provided about a month ago but strangely was not mentioned in mainstream media, and he only just came across it. The data is cumulative, covering 2020 through the first three quarters of 2021, ending September 30, 2021. They’re looking at deaths listing COVID-19 and no other cause on the death certificate.

Total deaths from COVID-19 with no other underlying causes.: 17, 371

Age 0-64: 3,774

Age 65+: 13,597

During this time, the average age of these COVID deaths in 2021 for all of UK: 82.5 years.  This means a lot of people were over 82.5 in order to get that average. For comparison, the average life expectancy in the UK from 2018 to 2020 (which includes the first year of the pandemic):

Males: 79.0 years

Females: 82.9 years

Averaged out for whole country, there’s a drop in life expectancy of 7 weeks for men and an increase of 0.5 weeks for women—meaning all the COVID deaths have only reduced men’s life expectancy by a few weeks, and women’s life expectancy through the COVID-19 pandemic has actually increased by 3-4 days.

Dr. Campbell did this simple math, dividing the total number of deaths WITH COVID-19—137,133—by the number of deaths FROM COVID-19—17,371—and you get that there are 7.9 times more deaths WITH than FROM the virus.

For anyone well under 82.5 years old without comorbidities, the likelihood of death caused by COVID-19 was remarkably low—through September 2021. Since then, the Delta variant has been taken over by the Omicron variant, and likelihood of death has further dropped dramatically.

The data we’re getting can be summed up as:

·       Natural immunity is much stronger than vaccination.

·       The surge in cases with the Omicron variant (and sub-variants) will mean a huge portion of the population will have natural immunity going forward.

·       Vaccination may be helpful for certain groups, such as the elderly and those with comorbidities, for whom the virus is most dangerous; to all others, the vaccines and boosters provide little protection from contracting the virus or spreading the virus, and only marginal help in less virulent cases.

·       Following each additional booster, the amount of time before antibodies wain and a new booster is needed drops approximately in half. (This is mentioned in a Dr. Mobeen video.)

·       Lockdowns, masks, mandates, and other attempts at coercing the public have not contributed to protection from COVID-19 and have contributed to deaths and lower health by other causes than COVID-19.

There’s more news daily. Most of it indicates better days ahead, and what ought to be regret for the utter failure of national health advisories responsible for doing everything wrong these past two years, including squelching dissent and even possibilities for treatments, which have been known since the early months of 2020.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein discussed how to go forward, after knowing how people have behaved the past two years. Their advice seems to be, if someone recognizes their wrongness and apologizes—or at least admits their wrongness—then that is the right direction going forward, and we can associate with them. If they refuse even now to recognize they were wrong, or perhaps they claim against all evidence that they’d been on the side of truth all along, then we will know them for what they are and probably continue to distrust them. This has been significant for them. They were fired from their teaching positions and had their lives disrupted and their reputations sullied. For me, I’m just an onlooker, seeking the truth the whole time, but not materially affected.

This whole episode in world history has been both baffling and disturbing. May the effort to tyrannize people through fearmongering over this illness end abruptly and soon. And may everyone be wiser in the future.

 

More Resources:

Dr. John Campbell and Dr. Mobeen Syed put out videos just about every day going over the latest data and latest news. I suggest following them. Both are pretty good at explaining the data clearly, and also give links to the data sources for you to search out yourself. Dr. Peter McCullough goes on various podcasts and is always worth listening to. Besides those linked above, here are a few more sources worth checking out:

·       Dr. Peter McCullough on Meet Me for Coffee podcast, January 9, 2022.  Dr. McCullough gives a list of ways to treat yourself at home when you can’t get hold of the helpful medications (HCQ or Ivermectin).

·       “FDA Approval Never Happened for the Vaccines? Peter McCullough” on Anthony Pompliano podcast, January 12, 2022.

·       “Walmart in Quebec is BANNING Unvaccinated from Entering! Viva Vlawg on the Street” Viva Frei law vlog, January 25, 2022. 

·       “Who constructed the COVID narrative? (Chris Martenson & Bret Weinstein)” DarkHorse podcast clips, January 28, 2022. This is an interesting conversation about the topsy turvy situation we’re in.

·       The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., © 2021, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 

·       “Man removed from heart transplant list for being unvaccinated gets emergency pump” Yaron Steinbuch for the New York Post, January 27, 2022. 

Not Like the Others

 

 

This meme is perhaps a tad unfair. Three of these quotes were given during speeches designed to inspire, such as in an inaugural address. And the odd one is given simply in a Christmas greeting to the people, on December 20, 2021. Plus the photo (found here) is less than inspiring. Rather, it is intended to inspire fear.

Viva Frei, observing from Canada, heard of Biden’s statement and thought it must be a parody, so he looked it up, and wasn’t convinced until he found it on the White House’s official site:

This shouldn’t be another dark winter, however. There’s plenty of good news surrounding this virus the president wants us to remain panicked over.

We’ve already gone over some of the data relating to the Omicron variant. As more data comes in daily, here’s what we think we know:

·        It is definitely less severe than Delta and other previous variants. This appears to be true not just for younger people, but for all demographics.

·        It is quickly overtaking Delta and becoming the dominant variant as it spreads around the globe.

·        It doesn’t much care whether a person has been vaccinated or not, although people with a recent third shot (booster) may be better at preventing serious infection.

·        Death is very rare from this variant; it is unclear whether any cases died of this disease or only died with it (meaning they died of some other cause while also testing positive for the infection).

·        A much smaller percentage have an infection that progresses to need hospitalization. Those that do, by some reports, have a similar later progression of the illness as other variants; however, anecdotal evidence shows a much shorter hospitalization stay, down to 2-3 days, rather than weeks.

·        South Africa has already passed through its spike of Omicron cases; new cases are now down. Their spike began around November 23, so it lasted a month. Places experiencing a current spike are likely, then, to be through it by a month from now. (By my reasoning, if you were to get vaccinated now, or get a booster, the Omicron surge will have passed before you get any positive effect.)

·        This illness, while mild, is also very amenable to treatments.

·        Loss of smell and taste is not a common symptom for this variant, which may mean less neurological damage. Also, it seems to affect only the upper respiratory areas, rather than causing COVID-pneumonia as previous variants.

·        In Great Britain, a person with cold symptoms has about a 50% chance of actually having the Omicron variant of COVID-19. While no one recommends risking the illness to get immunity, getting this weaker variant is likely to give immunity.   

One of the good things we’re learning is how to treat. These things probably also work on previous variants as well, but it turns out practically anything kills this virus. Doctors are recommending a sinus wash. You can use a neti pot or a spray bottle. The solution is 2 teaspoons of betadine in 6 ounces of water. As one experienced with a neti pot, I recommend using distilled water; regular filtered water will sting. Even distilled water stings; I use a teaspoon of salt and baking soda in a cup of water to get a saline solution (I buy little packets for the purpose, for convenience, but making your own is fine). Add the betadine to that. Alternatively, you can use hydrogen peroxide (get the kind meant for human use rather than just for stain cleaning). 

A sinus wash and/or a mouthwash can help
kill the virus in the mouth and sinuses.

For your throat, use some of the solution and swish it around and gargle with it. Or use a typical mouthwash. The most data is coming in about Listerine Cool Mint but just about any mouthwash will do. Even a saline mouthwash helps, although not as completely.

So, if you clear out your sinuses and mouth/throat 2-3 times a day, or particularly when you’ve been out among a crowd, you can prevent the replication of any virus particles you may have picked up during the day.

This is long-known information for fighting respiratory infections. There’s just now data showing that, of course, it works for COVID-19 as well, which is a respiratory infection. Dr. Peter McCullough last week referenced nine studies showing these nose and mouth virucidal washes work. This simple thing could either help you avoid the illness altogether or make it much milder than it would have been.

This practice should be on top of taking zinc, Vitamin D 3, and anything else you may need to boost your immune system. And have a plan for early treatment in case you get the illness. With the Omicron variant, unless you’re in a high-risk group (elderly or with multiple co-morbidities), you’re unlikely to need even the typical medical interventions like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, or monoclonal antibodies.

The point here is, you’re in control. You don’t have to live in fear of an illness that is now about as high risk as getting a cold.

If you’ve had COVID-19 before, can you get this new variant? There are mixed messages on this. Dr. McCullough, just before Christmas, still believes there is virtually zero reinfection. He tells this about what the CDC finally admitted:

You know, our CDC was pressured on this by a Freedom of Information Act request that basically said, listen, if someone really can get it twice, show us the case. The CDC must have a case of someone who’s really gotten it twice, and they’ve spread it, and this is all verified with basically confirmatory testing. We’d have to see a patient who’s PCR-positive, who’s sick with COVID-19, has signs and symptoms, chest x-ray, laboratories everything fits COVID-19. And they have a PCR at a low-cycle threshold, and a confirmatory antigen, and confirmatory sequencing. And the same person gets the same serious illness, let’s say six months later. And the CDC doesn’t have a case, thankfully. And they’ve certainly never had a case where someone has gone on to spread it on a second occurrence.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mobeen Syed reports—simply passing along reports he’s reading—that this new variant has a reinfection rate about 5 times that of Delta. Are they screening the way Dr. McCullough says must be done? Doubtful. And the supposed reinfection rate before was very low, about one in a thousand, so five times that would be only five in a thousand. In other words, if you’ve had COVID-19 previously, you don’t need to worry about getting it again even as this mild strain.

And if you’re one of the surging cases getting this Omicron variant—whether you were vaccinated or not—afterward you’ll have lifetime immunity.

This will hold true until the variations are no longer COVID-19, but have varied enough to become an unrecognized new virus.

By the way, there is no mechanism for this Omicron variant to mutate into a more dangerous strain. Dr. Mobeen Syed goes over that discussion here. 

We are coming out the other side of this pandemic. Give it a month or two.

But the real plague hasn’t been this highly treatable illness; it has been authoritarian control. And there is no guarantee that will let up. Biden’s Christmas warning hints at that.

Here’s an anecdote for the day. This just happened last night. A friend here has relatives elsewhere who go on a bi-annual trip to Hawaii with all the kids and grandkids. They were flying out of Los Angeles and had done all they were required to do—and there were a lot of hoops to jump through. All the adults were vaccinated. In fact, if I understood correctly, all were vaccinated but one seven-year-old boy. Oddly, when they all had their pre-flight PCR tests done, this boy's result didn’t show up with the rest of them. It was obvious he wasn’t sick. It was obvious he’d been tested—because he was with the whole family who was tested. But a glitch in the system prevented his result from showing up. At the airport, they went through all of this, and the officials there thought this shouldn’t be a problem and let them fly to Hawaii. But in Hawaii they were not allowed to leave the airport. None of them. They were not allowed to get the boy an additional test. They were not allowed to do anything but fly back to LA in the middle of the night.

This was a family where they had been perfectly willing to go along with whatever was required of them. Only the grandmother had been skeptical, but even she had been willing to get vaccinated. Now there’s a whole extended family that has been red-pilled. The boy wasn’t sick; he couldn’t spread anything. He had been tested, and results are somewhere, just not where they belong—because of some bureaucrat somewhere making an error, or maybe a machine making the error. That error cost this family thousands of dollars and the loss of a much-anticipated holiday vacation. This is not OK.

Add to that, the family doesn’t like the idea of vaccinating a seven-year-old for an illness that will not harm him, while the vaccine risk is unknown for children. But California is requiring school children to be vaccinated in order to return to school in January. The family had been considering homeschooling for that reason; this experience may settle it. As if there weren’t already hundreds of reasons to homeschool in California to prevent anti-family and anti-American indoctrination there.

The summary today is, a month from now the pandemic may be over. In the meantime, while we may not be able to do much to prevent exposure, we can take actions that may prevent any infection at all, and will at least make serious infection much less likely. That’s great news for us, but it’s bad news for authoritarians. They're likely to double down on the fearmongering. Their plague on us may not let up for some time.

Dr. Alfred Johnson (left) talks with Dr. Peter McCullough
screenshot from here

Some Resources

·       “Covid-19 and the Holidays” on Real News Communication Network, Dr. Alfred Johnson interviews Dr. Peter McCullough, December 22, 2021. 

·       “Omicron—70 Times More Infectious than Delta and Significantly Less Severe (Study from HKUMed)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 16, 2021. 

·       “COVID and Vaccine Policy Dangerous” Bret Weinstein talks with Dr Peter McCullough on DarkHorse Podcast Clips, December 18, 2021. 

·       “Cancel Culture Tactics Being Used against Unvaccinated (from Livestream #109)” Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on DarkHorse Podcast Clips, December 26, 2021. 

·       “Documentary Maker Reveals His Experience of COVID in Australia” Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on DarkHorse Podcast Clips, December 27, 2021. 

·       “Simultaneous Reinfection and Breakthrough Case Report” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 20, 2021. 

·       “Omicron—Good News Continues (60% Less Risk of Hospitalization by Omicron)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 23, 2021. 

·       “UK Common Cold Maybe Omicron, South Africa—Peak Is Over” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 24, 2021. 

·       “Omicron, Half of Common Colds” Dr. John Campbell, December 24, 2021. 

·       “Mouth Washes that Inactivate Coronaviruses” Dr. Mobeen Syed, October 21, 2020. 

·       “Mouth Wash, Colchicine and Vitamin D” Dr. John Campbell, February 2, 2021.

·       “STUNNING—No Reinfection in Previously Infected (Harvard Preprint Study)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, November 22, 2021. 

·         “Dr. Peter McCullough on NFL Protocols, Pregnancy, Omicron and More” Teryn Gregson talks with Dr. Peter McCullough, December 17, 2021. 

·       “(Dec 15, 2021) Omicron—Prof. Dr. Terrence Kommal Shares South Africa Cases and Hospitalizations” Dr. Mobeen Syed talks with Dr. Terrence Kommal, December 15, 2021. 

·       “Omicron Spike Protein is Less Efficient—Random COVID Questions with Dr. Been (#162)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 17, 2021. 

·       “Will Omicron Mutate Back to a More Lethal Variant?” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 11, 2021.  

Coming to a Fortunate End

It’s only slightly premature to say the pandemic is ending. From the data we have so far, much of it from South Africa, the Omicron variant is more contagious than the Delta variant, or other variants, and is therefore likely to overtake the others and become the dominant strain. That is likely to happen in the UK in the next couple of weeks, and in the US shortly after that, and definitely within the next couple of months.

The good news is that it is very mild. There are very few hospitalized cases. About 90% of those hospitalized were incidental, meaning the patient was in the hospital for some other reason when a standard test for COVID-19 showed up positive. Of patients on ventilators, all were on ventilators for some other reason; the Omicron variant of SARS-COV-2 did not cause the need for oxygen. There have, as of this writing, been zero deaths attributable to the Omicron variant.

The Omicron variant seems to be less transmissible than the Delta variant—around R-2.5, rather than R-5. Yet it does seem to be overtaking Delta in populations. The reason seems to be that it has a greater affinity for binding with the ACE-2 receptor. If Omicron and Delta were in the same body, but Omicron gets into a particular cell before the Delta, the Delta has to look elsewhere—like a game of musical chairs—or it gets killed off by the body’s immune system. Omicron seems to be winning the game.

If Omicron continues to evidence less virulence, that is a good thing.

Dr. Mobeen Syed illustrates Omicron's doing damage to Big Pharma
screenshot from here

Doctors are starting to speculate that this could mean the end of the pandemic. In a similar way to how the Spanish Influenza pandemic of a century ago went, there was a bad first year followed by an even worse second year, followed by much milder forms, eventually moving into the endemic background illness that it continues to be. That could be the trajectory for SARS-COV-2.

Here are some sources:

·       “WHO: No Deaths Reported as a Result of Omicron Variant to Date” Nathan Worcester for The Epoch Times, December 10 (updated December 12), 2021. 

·       “Omicron Could Be Natural Vaccine for Unvaccinated—Prof. Eleanor Riley (University of Edinburgh)” Dr. Mobeen Syed discusses a UK study on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast December 11, 2021.  He shows why using a model for Delta looks alarming, but if Omicron is truly less virulent, that fear is unwarranted.

·       “Omicron Helping Wind-down the Pandemic—Netcare Report from South Africa” Dr. Mobeen Syed on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast, December 11, 2021.  He states his opinion that the pandemic is winding down, thanks to the Omicron variant.

·       “Good Fortune with Omicron” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 11, 2021.  He talks about current data on the virus in South Africa and the UK. He also goes over the Eleanor Riley piece that Dr. Mobeen covered.

Dr. Campbell says, in that last one,

It’s not because humans have been particularly clever. It’s not because the vaccines have been so successful that it’s eradicated the infection. It’s not because the lockdowns have worked. It’s not because we’ve been so clever. We are just fortunate that this massively communicable variant that is going to bring about huge amounts of herd immunity is doing so at the cost of absolutely minimal disease. Humanity has been indeed fortunate.”

And then he adds, “It’s almost as if there’s corrective systems looking after us. I don’t know how much philosophy or emotion to put into this, but this could have been bad….” And “Palpable relief here.” He stops just short of calling it a miraculous turn of events.

As with many other things about this virus, however, there are unanswered puzzling questions.

Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and wife Heather Heying discuss a great many things on their podcasts. And they typically think of themselves as liberal. But this past couple of years of pandemic, they have commented frequently on the biology of the disease as well as the authoritarian response—in a way that has been getting them labeled as conservative. This past week Weinstein was commenting on the evolution of the Omicron variant. They are asked by a follower this question:

Q: Can you steel man the arguments for the various ways Omicron might have evolved from 2020 without being noticed by the medical community that has been sequencing as many variants as they find? To the naïve, “engineered” seems like a possibility. But I would like to hear other natural evolutionary solutions to the problem.

The answer, in short, is that there are too many strange things about this variant, from an evolutionary biological perspective, specifically from a phylogentic systematics perspective, which they explain. Briefly that has to do with the genetic inheritance tree of a thing, in this case a virus. They show a time-lapse animation of the phylogeny of the different strains, from someone else’s work. Here’s the discussion from that point; I’ve highlighted some key sentences:

Bret Weinstein: So, these are all the variants that are being tracked. And the line—

Heather Heying: What’s the X? I mean the X axis is presumably time, so when does it start? What’s the left most—?

BW: Zach will have to read it. I think it’s like mid-2020, or maybe it’s early 2020. (responds to technician off screen). 2019. Yeah. OK, OK. So it starts right at the beginning of the sort of named pandemic. And what you have are all of the variants and their relationships as deduced by their sequence differences. And what you saw is that Omicron pops up without any history of connection to the rest of the swarm, as if it came about somewhere March through September of 2020.

HH: 2020?

BW: Yes. So it—

HH: Not 2021? Omicron? 2020?

BW: No. It shows up in 2021; but the point is, its relationship is as if it has been frozen in time at a much earlier state and then shows up.

I looked up the chart used in the DarkHorse podcast and found it here.
I added arrows to show the beginning and current day points of the Omicron variant.

Now, the thing is, this has people over in lab leak world fascinated, because this is not the first time in history that this has happened. In fact there’s a very famous example that you may have just barely heard mentioned in the lab leak discussion about the flu of 1977. And the flu of 1977, it has been concluded—this of course could be revised if some better model emerged that was more predictive or assumed less—but, it has been concluded, for now, and with substantial evidence, is actually a lab escapee. And the way we know that is that its closest relative dates back to 1949. So it vanished from the world, and then the clock started again on its evolution in 1977. So that indicated this surely was in a fridge somewhere or isolated from the world. Whatever was happening with it, effectively time was stopped, and that effectively requires a refrigerator.

HH: In an organism or a virus that does not have extraordinarily variable mutation rates, you would not, you could not possibly expect a—whatever that would have been—a 28-year hiatus with no changes.

BW: Right. And so, the other example which we have of this, which isn’t as good, because we don’t really have a good ancestor, right, is SARS-COV-2 itself, where we suddenly have a virus that’s very very good at doing the things a virus needs to do in order to become a human pandemic, with no history of circulating in another animal where it learned those tricks, no history of circulating in some population of humans, as far as we can tell, somewhere. It just— It’s a genius right off— It’s like a child that was born speaking three languages or something, you know.

And so, anyway, this has people who are paying attention to this thinking very carefully about what could even explain this other than its having been somewhere in someone’s lab during the period of time that we would have expected it to emerge and then suddenly popping back up.

And there are other anomalies too, like things like the non-synonymous to synonymous mutation rate is way off of normal. It’s like 25 to 1. So, this is about how many alterations that have no consequence for actual protein sequence you would expect for every one that has an actual consequence, and the number appears impossible through a normal process.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
screenshot from here

Now, what the discord server [person who posed the question] has asked us to answer is the question of, well—

HH: Could it be, you know, what might explain this variant with this many changes appearing so suddenly, given a supposed background rate of so many people checking all the time for variants?

BW: Right. And so, what I think we should do, rather than search the world for crazy explanations, is just identify one— So, you’ve heard things like “immunocompromised person” in which much more evolution took place than normal, because their immunocompromised state effectively created a gain-of-function environment, a serial passage environment between tissues that was extremely favorable to variants. Now this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because— And, in fact I think the idea— So, it was originally reported that it had been isolated from somebody with HIV and diagnosed HIV; I believe that that has been debunked—although who even knows what debunked means in 2021.

But, nonetheless, these kinds of explanations have been offered before. In fact, there was one quite good paper—I thought it was dead wrong, but quite good paper—that argued that it could be that SARS-COV-2 experienced extreme evolutionary change in one of the miners who got sick in Yunnan Province, because lungs have such a large surface area.

HH: Back in 2013.

BW: Yeah. It was a very clever argument. Again, I think it’s dead wrong. But, anyway, it’s at least the kind of thought you would want to have. How could you get more evolution than you expect, right? Maybe surface area is the answer.

HH: Well, at least in that case, it— You can track the story evolutionarily. Like, the logic—each logical step is plausible, even if one or more of them may be so unlikely as for it not to have happened. So many of these stories that are charted, these explanations that are thrown out at the masses, and then the guy in effectively the white lab coat steps out to say, “I know you can’t follow this, so let me just tell you, the conclusion is...” actually just don’t even logically hold together. And we’ve sort of stopped, you and I have stopped largely on here even saying, “Oh, this thing, except it doesn’t make sense. And this thing, except it doesn’t make sense,” because it’s just coming so fast and furious. Like this— I don’t, on the face of it, the idea that immunocompromised creates gain-of-function in a body—I don’t know why that would be true. I have yet to hear the explanation for how you get from a to b. That’s just a simple a to b. Spell it out.

BW: Well, the idea, to the extent it is an idea rather than excuse, is, in the immunocompromised body, the defenses that would ordinarily silence lots of evolutionary experiments in the body tolerates them. Right? Something like that. And so you have— It’s like a big population in which processes that wouldn’t make any headway, in a small population gets a chance.

HH: So if that is true, you would expect that immunocompromised people would tend to be incubators of lots of variations in colds, other coronaviruses, or flus, or, you know any of the other things—

BW: It makes other predictions. And frankly, I don’t know whether any of those predictions are manifest.

HH: Right. That’s how you would actually follow this up with a scientific approach.

BW: The other thing would be—OK, so let’s say that this is true in the immunocompromised person and you get lots of evolution of little—you know, there are lots of foothills in the immunocompromised person that don’t exist in people with a fully competent immune system. But then, when the variant gets out into people who do have a fully competent immune system, you wouldn’t expect those variations to function very well, unless—

HH: If they only got a foothold because of immune suppression—

BW: Right. So then you would need another step to the process. And the point is, this is where you start running afoul of Occam’s razor. You’re not just hypothesizing an immunocompromised person, which provides a unique environment; you’ve got another black box that you need to fill. And at some point, it’s too many epicycles to be sustained.

So, I just want to point out, the other thing that we talked about last week that fits this category is, why did COVID-19 collapse in Japan, oh yes, after they allowed doctors to prescribe Ivermectin? And the answer was, “Oh, it became mutationally aggressive and lost its coherence.”

HH: It just did so well that it failed.

BW: Right. Something. And so the answer is, No, you need at least one more factor. You know what one factor could do it? Ivermectin could drive a virus to make some sort of a deal that it couldn’t sustain. But you can’t do it with just spontaneous mutational idiocy.

Bret Weinstein Twitter Thread
December 12, 2021

The summary of this is,

·       The Omicron variant’s history traces back to mid-2020, but it didn’t appear until November 2021. It’s as though it was kept in a lab refrigerator for a year and some months.

·       Also, it has a mutation rate that is impossible under normal processes.

·       The explanation about it being naturally developed in an immunocompromised person doesn’t hold up.

So, if you ask these evolutionary biologists, who have looked at the data and charted the history of the disease, this variant didn’t just happen naturally.

I’ve wondered about deus ex machina. Are we at a point where God has intervened and purposely altered the genetics of a worldwide plague? I’m not ruling that out; I tend to see His hand, whatever is happening.

But I am asking this additional question: If someone had a variant in mid-2020 that would be both mild and highly communicable—so that it would quickly end the pandemic through herd immunity and giTwitve people natural immunity for the future—why would such a person hold back, allowing another year’s worth of deaths to occur, before bringing it out?

And another question: Why, if the data shows this variant is likely to end the pandemic, is there so much panic and continued push to take a vaccine not designed to help against this variant, even pushing the vaccine onto children, who have always been at extremely low risk of serious illness from any variant of SARS-COV-2?

All versions of this illness have been highly treatable when dealt with early, using typically low-cost medicines and supplements. It looks like ease of treatment—or lowered need for any treatment—is nigh. As those who claim to be science keep saying while not showing any evidence of science, “Follow the science.” When you actually do that, you’ll notice that there was never any need for the vaccines, or mandates of any kind, or lockdowns. This has been a plague of authoritarians. Let us hope someone who has the power to hold off solutions for well over a year does not also have the power to spring an even more lethal virus upon the oh-too-trusting world.

Here are a few more interesting references: 

• “Live Q&A: WHO Says No Deaths from Omicron; Was Jussie Smollett ‘a Hate Crime in Reverse’?” Joshua Philipp on Crossroads, December 12, 2021.  After mentioning that there are no deaths or other worrisome data associated with the Omicron variant, he asks, then why are countries taking even harsher measures? 

• “Covid: The Path not Taken—DarkHorse Podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough” Bret Weinstein The DarkHorse podcast, December 6, 2021.  This is mostly talking about SARS-COV-2 in general, including treatments and possible vaccine dangers, rather than about Omicron. 

• “Omicron on the Move” Dr. Peter McCullough on The McCullough Report podcast of December 6, 2021. 

• “Ivermectin in Japan” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, November 23, 2021. He shows the data that seems to show cases plummeting in Japan 12 days after Ivermectin was allowed openly as a treatment. News outlets seem to be assuming this is mere coincidence. 

• “UK, 50% Omicron Now” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 13, 2021. https://youtu.be/XzrG3Odgf28 While noting the sharp rise in cases in the UK (and where the UK is today, the US is likely to be in January), he offers update from South Africa, where they have passed three weeks, showing only mild cases, recovery in 3-5 days, regardless of age or vaccine status; there isn’t a later cytokine storm, as some feared might come.

Holidays—Must Be Time for Another Crisis

News came out over the holiday weekend about a new variant. Followed by calls to panic.

I was listening to a meditation training the other day, which said that one thing that happens with fear is that you cease to breathe, or you fail to breathe deeply. If you take the time to breathe deeply, the fear can turn to simply excitement or interest in whatever was suddenly upon you without warning. So let’s take a moment here to breathe deeply. And then maybe we’ll think better.

Since I’m not a doctor, just a regular person trying to make sense of things, I’m getting my information from what I believe are reliable sources, and I’ll try to reference those. When it’s just me trying to think things through, I try to make that clear.

The new variant of SARS-COV-2 is called omicron. The names have been coming from the Greek alphabet. The most recent was mu, so the next was to be nu. And in fact the first story I heard about it called it nu. But the namers of such things (the WHO) decided to skip nu, because it can be confused with the word new; then any new variant after nu would be called the new variant, confusing it with the old nu variant.

tweet about the naming of the new variant,
found here

So the next option was to be xi (pronounced like z-eye; the Greek letter X, pronounced like sky without the s, is a later letter). That however was said to be confused with the common surname Xi (pronounced like she), which just happens to be the name of the Chinese dictator, in the country that originally spread the virus, but which the WHO doesn’t want to offend. So that Greek letter got skipped also.

That brings us to O; omicron (pronounced O-mi-cron, long O, short other vowels, accent on first syllable) is the small letter, while omega means large O, which you would think is the capital form, but it is a later letter in their alphabet. It’s all Greek to me, as they say. I don’t know what names they use after they get through the Greek letters. It’s sort of like hurricanes when they get through the entire alphabet in a season and have to start over.

So, what do we know about this virus variant? Not a lot. But we know that it was identified by doctors in South Africa. That doesn’t necessarily mean it developed there rather than somewhere else; it just means that’s where it was identified. Doctors there had been facing very few cases of SARS-COV-2 for some time; they were having something of a pause. Then they started seeing this version. Testing showed it was SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19), but the symptoms were not what they had been experiencing. This one showed no loss of smell or taste. There wasn’t much of a cough. If they hadn’t been alert, they would probably have dismissed this as just a cold and not known what they were dealing with. And that quite likely has been happening elsewhere in the world.

It was infecting younger people, often men, around age 40. This demographic tends to get over COVID-19 pretty easily anyway, so that may have affected the data they have, but so far zero patients with this variant have needed hospitalization, and zero have died. After a couple of days of tiredness and muscle aches (about what many people experience following the vaccine), it’s gone.

There’s some definite good news here. It seems to not be affecting the epithelial cells in the nose and throat; that’s why no change in taste or smell. And this also probably means no neurological damage.

From what we know so far, it is a milder version of the illness. Again, we don’t yet know how older or more vulnerable people might react to it. But if it becomes milder for them as well, then what we’re looking at is a good introduction to the endemic stage of the virus—where it becomes simply part of the background of our lives, instead of the focus.

Just to remind, because the reaction to this virus hasn’t followed what we have always known about viruses: they mutate and create variants. The progression is typically toward less virulence (damage to the individual body) and more transmissibility (ability to reach more hosts in which to replicate). That is what viruses do. That is what to expect. And that is mainly what we’ve seen. The delta variant, while more widespread, was milder for most people than the original.

Variants tend to leak through the vaccines. That is, the vaccines are less effective than on the original. There’s a reason for that; the vaccines target a particular protein, in this case the spike protein part of the virus. When mutations happen in the vaccine-targeted protein, then the antibodies provided by the vaccine may not recognize the virus and therefore fail to fight it before it let it replicates enough to make a person sick.

When a person fights off the virus, they develop immunity against the entire virus, not just the targeted protein. So the body’s immune system recognizes the mutated virus—up until the mutations make it a totally different virus—because there’s enough of the parts that make it that virus for the body to recognize. If we see a large increase in reinfection (this variant after recovery from some other variant), I think that means that then we might be very close to having a mutation beyond SAS-COV-2. We’ve seen this with the common cold caused by some endemic coronavirus.

We will wait and see on the vaccines, whether we have more breakthrough cases. But since the vaccines were targeted to an earlier version, and this particular variant alone has 32 mutations in the spike protein, we may find that the vaccines—targeting the spike protein—are less effective on this variant. Or not. We’ll see. But getting a booster that targets the spike protein the way it used to be, logically, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

So, we’re back to the things that don’t make sense. Panic, for one. South Africa’s medical officials not only identified the variant, they quickly shared with the world all their findings. And, as a result, countries all over the world shut down travel from South Africa. Not a single person has been hospitalized, let alone died, from this variant, as far as we know. And yet the country that behaved well is punished for their openness.

map of travel restrictions, found here

New York declared a state of emergency—with zero identified cases in the state, or even in the country. And Biden imposed a travel ban that looks suspiciously more racist than any travel ban his predecessor may have imposed on countries not screening for terrorists. People are talking about shutting down Christmas, returning to lockdowns and masking—for a variant that has led to only mild cases.

The World Medical Association Chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery says, “The new South African variant is a good example of the mutations and us trying to prevent every possible infection and how it can’t be done. We don’t know anything about its dangerousness yet, but it seems to be spreading rapidly. My great concern is it could lead to a variant that is as infectious as Delta but as dangerous as ebola.” (Glenn Beck mocks this here.) 

Is this rational? Zero deaths, zero cases of hospital admission. But someone who I would assume carries some clout in the medical world worries it might be a very transmissible version of an almost instant killer. Based on what?

I’d like to know whether he had this fear about the Mu variant—you remember, the one we were supposed to be concerned about in September, even though it had been around since January and still wasn’t overtaking Delta. Or, before that, all the other Greek letters. Not to mention the many many variants that don’t get a label.

I learned about the new variant on Friday, when someone linked this story:

·       “New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529” Katelyn Jetelina on Your Local Epidemiologist blog, November 26, 2021.   

This was the first news I had of the new variant. I’ve encountered this writer before and found her not very persuasive. This article is well laid out and documented, although I would say there’s more fear in it than the available information leads to.

So I went to Dr. Mobeen Syed, who looks at studies and data, and then thinks through it with other doctors. It turned out that he had taken time out of his Thanksgiving with family to look up information and share it. That was here.

·       “Omicron—How Bad Is It?” Dr. Mobeen Syed, November 26, 2021. 

He says for now there’s not a lot of reason for fear. And he added to that a couple of days later, with a summary underneath.

·       “Omicron—Different Symptoms” 

Here’s his summary:

According to the Dr. Angelique Coetzee who is the Chair of the South Africa Medical Board and a practicing GP in Pretoria, the symptoms are extremely mild. Scratchy throat instead of cough. No anosmia and loss of taste, however, lot of fatigue. A young child had high heart rate.

Dr. raised the alarm when four members of a family tested positive for COVID and all suffered with exertion.

Omicron is spreading rapidly among young people. Most patients from which the following symptoms are observed were men. Half of them vaccinated.

No or slight cough means: shedding will be limited to talking, laughing, etc. It will also mean that patients might not realize that they might be shedding. However, absence of cough itself is going to reduce shedding and spreading.

No anosmia and loss of the sense of taste is interesting. It means that the swelling of the olfactory epithelium is not occurring (at least in the patients she saw so far.) This also means that possible neurological effects and possible long-haul may be less frequent.

Patients complaint of sore muscles and tiredness according to Dr. Coetzee.

A six-year-old child had fever and very high pulse.

How is this variant behaving with older population and folks with comorbidities is not known yet.

Omicron's (B.1.1.529) Symptoms are not like delta (B.1.617.2), instead these are similar to beta (B.1.351 - South African variant). No loss of sense of smell or taste. No cough or slight cough. Just scratchy throat. However, severe muscle aches and tiredness.

Young people with body aches and pains and fatigue.

This is the account of the Dr. Angelique Coetzee. She says in an interview to Newsroom Afrika that she has consulted with other general practitioners. They all are observing very very mild symptoms.

No loss of smell or taste. No oxygen levels dropping at this stage.

Dr. Mobeen Syed links to an interview Dr. Coetzee did with Newzroom Afrika and adds, “Finally, this is a single doctor’s account of her patients. We will have to wait for more data from more doctors and studies.”

Dr. Angelique Coetzee, talking about the new variant from South Africa,
screenshot from here

On Sunday night’s Crossroads, Joshua Philipp covered the new variant among other news:

·       “Live Q&A: Governments Eyeing Lockdowns Over Omicron Variant; New Global Social Controls Emerge” Crossroads with Joshua Philipp, November 28, 2021. 

He read a comment from a viewer, Cameron Bacon, who said,

Josh, do I have amnesia, or did the Democrats and communists go from claiming they didn’t trust the vaccine under Trump to now backing a 100-day turnaround for a variant discovered a few days ago that somehow everyone knew about instantly?

He was referring to this story:

·       “US-Based Company Developing Vaccine That Targets New COVID-19 Variant” Zachary Stieber for The Epoch Times, November 27 (updated November 29), 2021. 

There is indeed an effort now underway to develop a new version of vaccine based on this new variant. And one wonders why, if it was doable that quickly, that they haven’t do one for the Delta variant. In fact, as the vaccines appeared less and less effective, they pushed for more and more boosters.

Later in the podcast Philipp was talking about natural immunity, which ought to be news worth cheering about:

New information coming out is suggesting that people with natural immunity are of little risk of infection. And you can have an antibody test to see if you need it or not. You can have an antibody test. If people are talking about actual immunity, and if governments actually cared about actual immunity, natural immunity would be considered as part of that. Why it’s not is beyond me.

He read from this story:

·       “Naturally Immune People at Little Risk of Reinfection, Severe Disease From COVID-19: Study” Zachary Stieber for The Epoch Times, November 27, 2021.  

The story says,

Researchers in Qatar examined a cohort of over 353,000 people using national databases that contain information about patients with polymerase-chain-reaction-confirmed infections.

The studied population contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, between Feb. 28, 2020, and April 28, 2021.

Reinfections were counted if a person tested positive at least 90 days after their first infection.

After excluding approximately 87,500 people with a vaccination record, researchers found that those with immunity due to having recovered from COVID-19 had little risk of reinfection or severe cases of the disease.

Just 1,304 reinfections were identified. That means 0.4 percent of people with natural immunity and without a vaccination record got COVID- 19 a second time.

The odds of severe disease were 0.1 times that of primary infection, according to the study. Just four such cases were detected.

No cases of death were recorded among those who got infected a second time.

It ends with this summary:

[T]he study adds to the growing body of research that indicates that people who have recovered from COVID-19 enjoy high levels of immunity against reinfection, and even higher protection against severe disease and death.

There’s plenty of reason to be hopeful as we move into this holiday season. Those who are calling for panic may have an ulterior motive—not to protect your health, but to control your life. If you’re taking good care of yourself, thwart them by going ahead and living your life.

Here are some additional things I’ve read or seen:

·     “Biden Imposes Travel Bans He Called Trump Racist for Imposing” Robert Spencer for PJ Media, November 26, 2021. 

·     “It's the 'Nu' Variant. Everyone Run for Your Lives!” Rick Moran for PJ Media, November 26, 2021. 

·       “Dissection of the Omicron variant” from Newzroom Afrika interview with South African Medical Association's Dr Angelique Coetzee, dissects the Omicron variant, which has been detected in South Africa and is causing havoc throughout the world. 

·       “Omicron COVID-19 Variant Found in More Countries, Sparking Global Concern” Jack Phillips for The Epoch Times, November 29, 2021.

·       “The O variant” Dr. John Campbell, November 26, 2021. 

·       “Omicron - Is Immune Escape Imminent? A DeepDive” Dr. Mobeen Syed, November 30, 2021. 

·       “Omicron good news” Dr. John Campbell, November 30, 2021.