Thursday, September 9, 2021

Colleges, Israel, Mongolia and Covid

I have written before about the alarming number of confirmed Covid cases on college campuses which have mandated vaccinations for students, faculty and staff.

Duke University mandated the vaccine for all returning students in the Fall. It announced that it would terminate any employee who was not vaccinated by October 1 and that employee would never be allowed to work at Duke in the future.

When school started this Fall 98% of students were vaccinated. 92% of all employees were.

Since classes began students have been required to wear masks indoors and outdoors on campus. There is no indoor dining. Tents have been erected around campus for student meals.

Despite this, Covid cases at Duke are much higher than they were last year when no one was vaccinated.

Through September 6, Duke has had 736 positive cases since August when it started tracking cases for the Fall semester.


Source: https://coronavirus.duke.edu/covid-testing/

For the entire Fall semester last year of August 2-November 20 Duke had 241 cases when no one was vaccinated.


Source: https://coronavirus.duke.edu/covid-testing-old/fall-2020-duke-covid-testing-tracker/

We see a similar situation at Cornell University. 

Cornell has 95% of its students, faculty and staff vaccinated.

Last year between September 1 and September 7 Cornell reported 62 positive cases of Covid.


Source: https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/

This year Cornell reported 180 for the same period---three times the number last year when no one was vaccinated.


Source: https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/

I thought I would compare these results with three colleges that at this time last year were dealing with huge Covid case surges to see how they are doing this year.

Last year the University of Georgia had 1,417 Covid cases reported in the first week of September.

This year Georgia had 91.




Interestingly, there has been a Covid outbreak among the University of Georgia football team and staff in the last week. All of the cases were among those who had been vaccinated. Head Coach Kirby Smart said this spike in cases was higher than it was anytime in the last year and a half for his team


Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/georgia-football-coach-says-team-has-covid-19-spike-despite-high-vaccination-rate/ar-AAObRGh


During a teleconference with reporters Monday, Smart said three or four players will miss Saturday's game against the University of Alabama-Birmingham due to the coronavirus.

"For us, we're at our highest spike. And people are talking about vaccinations - well, these are people that are vaccinated. We're talking about breakthroughs, and so that concerns you not only for the players on your team that are unvaccinated, that are playing and not playing, because we want everybody to be safe," Smart said.

Last month, Smart said 90 percent of the team's players, staff members and coaches have been vaccinated against the virus, according to ESPN.


The University of Alabama had 2,378 Covid cases in the first three weeks of the Fall Semester in 2020 among students, faculty and staff.

In the first three weeks this year Alabama has had 416.

Alabama has a vaccination rate of 60% among its students.

My undergraduate alma mater, Miami University, had 1,084 Covid cases at this time last year despite the fact they were not even conducting in-person classes. However, many students were living in off campus housing and socializing when not doing online classes.

This year there are 88 cases (77 students and 11 staff) thru September 6, 2021 with in person classes and students living on campus.




Despite this, Miami is going to mandate vaccinations for the Second Semester  for all students, faculty and staff. Employees who are not vaccinated will be terminated. Students will not be allowed to enroll for the Winter Semester.

Is anyone else curious about what we are seeing in the data?

The colleges with low cases last year and vaccine mandates this year are seeing an explosion of cases right now.

The colleges with high cases last year and no vaccine mandates this year are seeing only a fraction of the cases they saw last year.

What is going on?

Could it be that natural infection has conveyed a much higher degree of immunity and protection against transmission to the community than the vaccines have?

Is this not similar to what we are seeing in comparing the experience of Sweden and Israel?

Sweden did no hard lockdowns, did not employ strict mask mandates and kept their schools open. They focused their efforts on protecting the most vulnerable. Israel did the opposite.

Israel also was a world leader in vaccinating its population. It is already well into distributing booster shots to its population.

Sweden was slower in rolling out vaccines but is now very close to Israel's numbers without considering the boosters.




Sweden was hit pretty hard in two separate earlier waves. However, Sweden has almost no cases of Covid right now while Israel is rising.



More importantly, Sweden has had almost no Covid deaths for the last two months while Israel has seen a sharp increase over the same time period.



Sweden may just be lucky right now and will soon see a seasonality surge as the weather turns colder in that country.

Israel may find its cases going the other way due to more seasonable temperatures in that country.

However, could it be possible that higher natural immunity in the colleges that bore the greatest brunt of the pandemic last year is keeping cases down this year much better than the vaccines are doing?

That may also be the reason that Sweden is faring better than Israel right now.

If you want one more mystery consider this one.

Mongolia was one of the few countries on the face of the earth that had almost no Covid cases for a year into the pandemic.

This chart shows cumulative cases from January 22, 2020 to February 1, 2021.

You can barely see Mongolia at the bottom of the graph.




In February, 2021 Mongolia started vaccinating its population. It has now vaccinated more people than most countries in the world.




Since then, Mongolia has gone from among the nations with the lowest incidence of Covid in the world to where it is now seeing more Covid cases than anywhere else in the world.

Almost all of these cases have arisen after they started the mass vaccination of their population.



There is only one country that is having an almost identical experience right now.

Israel.



What is going on?

How could any of this occur if the vaccines were truly preventing disease and the transmission of the virus?

After seeing this data how do we know that the vaccines are not somehow facilitating the spread of the virus and the development of new variants?

Now consider that the President of the United States wants to mandate that almost every American must be vaccinated and he is going to put the POWER of the federal government (and the dollars it controls) to make sure it happens. 

Where in any of the data above does it suggest that this strategy is the best move now to curb the pandemic?

If this is supported by the SCIENCE why does the DATA not support the science?

If we only had someone who could answer the questions I pose in these pages!

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

What Is The Truth About Ivermectin?

I first heard about the drug Ivermectin a little over a year ago in my research and reading about Covid.

It was a story out of Australia about a doctor in that country who stated that his work indicated that a triple therapy of Ivermectin, zinc and Doxycycline were all approved, available and cost-effective therapeutics that could be used to treat Covid effectively.

This is what Dr. Thomas Borody said about the use of Ivermectin and the other drugs in August of last year.


 "We have a therapy that can fight COVID-19. The medications have been around for 50 years, they are cheap, FDA and TGA approved and have an outstanding safety profile. Why are we just waiting around for a vaccine? To save lives we should be using whatever is safe and available right now. We could lead the world in this fight.

"Australia has some of the best medical and science people in the world -indeed the Ivermectin connection was first discovered by Dr. Kylie Wagstaff's team at Monash University in April. How long do we need to wait before Australian politicians get behind Australian medical science and use 'war room' tactics with safe and approved medications.


Bear in mind that Borody is no ordinary physician and researcher. He is famous for developing the cure for peptic ulcers using a triple antibiotic therapy that is used the world over and has been estimated to save countless lives and millions of dollars in health care costs.

I filed the name Ivermectin away as I had not seen it mentioned in any reports from U.S. doctors at the time.

In my research I found that Ivermectin is a drug typically used to treat parasitic tropical infections such as river blindness. There is also an animal version that is typically prescribed for the treatment of worms in animals.

The drug has been so successful in humans that the discoverers of the drug received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2015. It was the first time in over six decades the award was given for the treatment of an infectious disease.

Over the succeeding months I began to see more mentions of Ivermectin being used successfully by U.S. physicians. It did not get the publicity that Hydroxychloroquine received but it was steadily  gaining adherents based on my reading and research.

Ivermectin started to get a lot of attention when Dr. Pierre Kory testified before a U.S. Senate committee last December where he made this statement.


"Mountains of data have emerged from many centers and countries around the world showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin, it basically obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick."


Kory is not some doctor on the fringes of the medical community either. From 2015-2020 he was an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin and Critical Care Service Chief, Medical Director, Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, Madison, WI. Since the Covid pandemic struck he has dedicated himself to treating critically ill Covid patients in New York City, Greenville, SC and Milwaukee, WI. 

A week after Kory testified to the Senate Committee the U.S. FDA (coincidentally?)  issued a statement that people should not take Ivermectin to prevent or treat Covid. The FDA stated that some lab studies had been conducted with the drug but additional testing was necessary to determine whether it was appropriate to use against Covid.

I might note that this statement was made almost nine months ago and there is no word on that additional testing. Why?

The Covid vaccines were conceived, developed, tested and fully deployed in less time.

Ivermectin has been on pharmacy shelves for decades. Almost 4 billion doses have been administered in that time around the world. It is generally considered one of the safest drugs in use today. 

The FDA can approve a completely new and unique vaccine and attest to its safety and efficacy in "preventing" Covid in under nine months but it can't perform tests on Ivermectin in treating Covid in over nine months?

I don't know if Ivermectin is as effective as Drs. Kory, Borody and hundreds of other doctors around the world claim it is.

It just seems that we are owed some truth and honesty about it rather than dismissing it out of hand with no real effort to study it comprehensively.

If you have been paying attention there is a full-fledged effort recently underway to completely discredit and damage Ivermectin and the doctors who have spoken out in favor of its usage.

If you don't believe that, consider this tweet that was actually published by the FDA.



Apparently the FDA has forgotten that it approved the use of Ivermectin for human use back in 1996.

The CDC also recommends that all refugees from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean should take Ivermectin as presumptive therapy for intestinal parasites after they arrive in the United States.

This sounds like it would apply to all of the Afghan refugees coming into the country as well as all of the illegal immigrants flooding our Southern border right now.


Source: https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/guidelines/overseas-guidelines.html

 

Ivermectin is safe for refugees but not for anyone else?

We also had someone who claimed he was an emergency room physician in Oklahoma who said that gunshot victims could not get treated at the hospitals he served at because there were too many cases of people overdosing on Ivermectin.

This story went viral and was covered by hundreds of media outlets including Rachel Maddow and Rolling Stone.



The only problem was the main hospital which the doctor referenced stated that they had no cases of Ivermectin overdoses and no one was being denied care. The doctor who made the claim also had not worked at the hospital in over two months.



Source: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/rolling-stone-horse-dewormer-hit-piece-debunked-after-hospital-says-no-ivermectin?fbclid=IwAR2I6iQ3ExaC4NBiDDk9I3uEITkc4BKiqdOnYQYrXAiBHxlDbpiiuJ3QAi8


The AP also published a story claiming that 70% of the calls to the Mississippi Poison Control hotline were from people who had ingested Ivermectin. It turns out the actual number was 2%,



For context, consider that there are over 100,000 calls each year to Poison Control centers in the United States with concerns regarding Tylenol that results in 56,000 annual ER visits and 500 deaths. When has that ever been reported in a breathless AP story?

It makes you wonder if something else is at play?

Do stories like this just get published by coincidence?

If you want an excellent read about the doctors who believe in the efficacy and safety of Ivermectin in treating Covid I highly recommend reading this article by Michael Capuzzo.

The article appeared in Mountain Home which is a magazine that Capuzzo and his wife own. Don't let the fact that this article appeared in a relatively unknown regional magazine fool you. Capuzzo is a 4-time Pulitzer prize-nominated reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer who is a graduate of Northwestern University. The article is well-written and well researched. Warning-it is long---about 10,000 words.


Source: https://www.mountainhomemag.com/2021/05/01/356270/the-drug-that-cracked-covid

If Capuzzo and the doctors he profiles in the article are correct, why isn't Ivermectin our first line of defense against Covid?

For those who don't want to read the entire article let me provide you with a few quotes.

Dr. Paul Marik an endowed professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and a world-renowned clinician-researcher who is the second most published critical care doctor in history with more than 500 peer-reviewed papers. 

Marik, along with Kory, have been the leading advocates for Ivermectin use in the United States.


An over-the-counter medicine in France, Ivermectin is safer than Tylenol and “one of the safest drugs ever given to humanity,” Dr. Marik said, with “3.7 billion doses administered in forty years, that’s B for billion, and only extremely rare serious side effects.
An earlier Australian study, reported in the journal Antiviral Research, showed that Ivermectin, which blocked other RNA viruses like Dengue virus, yellow fever virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, influenza, the Avian flu, and HIV1/AIDS in vitro, decimated the coronavirus in vitro, wiping out “essentially all viral material by 48 hours.” But more research was needed in human beings.

Marik conducted that research in university trials. No, they were not the gold standard randomized clinical trials that usually can only be done by Big Pharma because of the costs. However, the efficacy and safety of Penicillin wasn't confirmed by RCT trials either when it was introduced. Doctors just observed that it worked.

But by October Marik’s concerns were answered. The studies were well-designed university trials that showed amazing anti-COVID-19 activity at the normal doses used to treat parasites. Though small and endlessly diverse by large, Western big pharma “one-size-fits all” random control trials, the Ivermectin studies were a mosaic of hundreds of scientists and many thousands of patients in trials all over the world, all showing the same remarkable efficacy against all phases of COVID-19 no matter what dose or age or severity of the patient. “Penicillin never was randomized,” Marik says. “It just obviously worked. Ivermectin obviously works.”

Marik was astonished. “If you were to say, tell me the characteristics of a perfect drug to treat COVID-19, what would you ask for?” he said. “I think you would ask firstly for something that’s safe, that’s cheap, that’s readily available, and has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. People would say, “That’s ridiculous. There could not possibly be a drug that has all of those characteristics. That’s just unreasonable. But we do have such a drug. The drug is called Ivermectin.”

If it was universally distributed at a dose that costs ten American cents in India and about the cost of a Big Mac in the United States, he said, Ivermectin would save countless lives, crush variants, eliminate the need for endless big pharma booster shots, and end the pandemic all over the world.
There were no effective, lifesaving, approved COVID-19 treatments that doctors had used to slow down or stop the coronavirus in the history of the pandemic, in any phase of the disease, except the one, corticosteroids, that Marik and company had discovered.

Now they had discovered another treatment, even more powerful, that could save the world.


The only problem was Drs. Marik, Kory and their compatriots could not get anyone to listen.

Why is Ivermectin under such attack by the medical and pharmaceutical establishment?

It is difficult to understand using standard reasoning particularly as there apparently are no early treatments that Dr. Fauci and the medical establishment endorsed well over a year into the pandemic.

And if there is one thing that is important in treating Covid it is to get EARLY TREATMENT. Too many are told to stay home, rest and go to the ER if they have breathing issues. If you are going to the hospital under those circumstances you are already behind the curve.


On November 11, 2020, Dr. Fauci co-authored a paper for JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Therapy for Early COVID-19, A Critical Need,” explaining that early treatments “to prevent disease progression and longer-term complications are urgently needed.”


It might be argued that Fauci has now endorsed monoclonal antibody treatments but this curiously was only done after the FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine a few weeks ago.

One of the international Covid doctors who supports the use of Ivermectin may have explained it better than anyone. 

The doctors promoting Ivermectin are too close to affecting the most sensitive organ on humans--the wallet.


In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet...”


What is the truth about Ivermectin?

Is it useless as a treatment for Covid? That is why my doctor told me.

Is it dangerous? My doctor told me he would not prescribe it because if I died after using it he could get sued.

Or is it just a threat to someone's wallet? 

If Ivermectin works would there be as much demand for the vaccines? For the boosters?  

It almost assuredly would change the entire risk/benefit profile in taking the vaccine for millions of people.

It most definitely would decimate the argument for vaccine mandates.

This is the way some look at the truth about Ivermectin on Twitter.




Is it just a coincidence as well that Merck and Pfizer are both working on anti-viral drugs that are very similar to the formulation of Ivermectin but would probably cost about $3,000 per dose compared to the $2 cost for Ivermectin which is a generic medicine not under patent.

Is Ivermectin getting too close to that most sensitive of all organs?

What do we make of the fact that in Africa there is a sharp division in countries that use Ivermectin regularly to treat parasitic infections versus those that don't?

Is this just a coincidence?



What about this?

Here are the results of two states in India that implemented a mass Ivermectin home program.


Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

 

Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

And this?

This chart shows the experience in Peru which was using Ivermectin treatment aggressively until a new President came into office and put restrictions on its use.


Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

They may all be mere coincidences.

Ivermectin may have nothing to do with the results since there are a lot of factors in the rise and fall of cases and deaths with Covid.

It also might be a coincidence when we hear about the success patients have had after being treated with Ivermectin. The argument is made that they might have gotten better anyway. There are too many confounding factors to make a definitive statement. That very well could be true.

However, the same could be true of all the testimonials I am hearing these days about people who have contracted Covid after being vaccinated. How often do I hear "thankfully they were vaccinated or it would have been much worse"? How do we really know that? Who is to say they would not have a mild case or recovered without the vaccine? Millions did in the year before vaccines were available.

Like many things about Covid, I don't know.

Unfortunately, too many others think they know, when they don't, but they persist in telling us they KNOW ALL.

With Ivermectin, as with many other things involving Covid, most of us are left not knowing what to believe.

I saw a recent quote from Friedrich Von Hayek which summarizes my thoughts pretty well on Ivermectin and a lot of other things right now.

I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

                                                  -Friedrich Von Hayek, Nobel Prize lecture, 1974

May truth (whatever it may be) prevail in the end.

Sunday, September 5, 2021

Who Do You Trust?

The arrival of the fall hurricane season is always accompanied by claims that these violent storms are unprecedented and are the result of man-made climate change.

So it was over the last week as Hurricane Ida hit the Louisiana Gulf Coast and swept up through the Northeast.


Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/30/1032442544/how-climate-change-is-fueling-hurricanes-like-ida


Source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/world/ida-climate-change-floods-rain-intl/index.html

Never mind that if you look at the data regarding hurricane activity over the years it does not support the contention that hurricanes are increasing in number or strength.

For example, it seems that Louisiana is always bearing the brunt of hurricanes each year.

The data actually shows that hurricane activity has slightly declined over the course of the last 170 years according to Dr. Roy Spencer who is a climatologist and former NASA scientist who writes about climate issues.

This chart uses data from the official NOAA National Hurricane Center (NHC) statistics and specifically looks at Louisiana.



Source: https://www.drroyspencer.com/2020/08/even-with-laura-louisiana-hurricanes-have-not-increased-since-1851/


The same is true for hurricanes generally. They are not getting worse. However, the damage they do is worse. Spencer explains.


There will be the inevitable fake news coverage claiming how U.S. landfalling hurricanes are getting worse, a subject which I addressed in my Amazon Kindle e-book Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can’t Be Blamed on Global Warming.

Of course, hurricane damage has increased, as people flock to the nation’s coasts and associated infrastructure increases. But we should remember that (for example) Miami only had 444 residents when incorporated in 1896, and now the Miami metroplex has over 6,000,000 inhabitants.

So, yes, storm damage will increase, but not because the weather has gotten worse.

We hear similar warnings from climate alarmist every tornado season.

This is a chart that is often used to attempt to show that tornado activity is increasing by the NOAA.

Notice that even with this chart recent total tornado activity is lower than it was in the 1990's.


Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/tornadoes/202013



I wrote about this last April in a blog post titled "Tornado Watch".

Before you believe that tornado activity is trending up, bear in mind that tornado reporting is much better today than it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Nothing occurs on the face of our earth today that is not reported and chronicled. It was not always that way. In years past, many smaller tornadoes were never recorded as they meandered harmlessly across a Kansas field.

The advent of Doppler radar in the early 1990's made it possible to document every tornado no matter how small. The fact is that most tornadoes are category f0 or f1 and they comprise 80% of all tornadoes.

A better perspective in comparing tornado activity over the years is to focus on those storms that are rated f3+ to f5+ on the Fujita scale. These are the tornadoes that cause the most severe damage and would clearly have been captured in previous statistics.  

This data indicates that tornado activity is actually less severe in the United States today than it was previously and has actually been trending downwards in recent years. For example, 2018 had the lowest number of f3+ tornadoes since the NOAA started publishing tornado activity in 1954.

Data from NOAA indicates that F3+ tornadoes have decreased in number in the last thirty years compared to the 1954-1985 period.


Source: Source: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/inconvenient-weather-fact-for-earth-day-the-frequency-of-violent-tornadoes-fell-to-a-record-low-in-2018/


This is another chart that plots EF3+ tornadoes from 2005-2020.

You can also see here that the number of strong tornadoes have generally been running below the historical average in recent years.


Source: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall16/atmo336s2/lectures/sec2/tornadoes.html

This summer we have heard innumerable media reports about "unprecedented" wildfires burning vast amounts of acreage in the Western United States.

Acres burned this year is actually BELOW the 5-year average according to the National Interagency Fire Center based on year to date statistics.

Acres burned is actually 40% below what it was in 2015.


Source: https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn

 
Here is a longer term perspective going back to the 1920's.


Source: https://twitter.com/Tony__Heller/status/1433782601580310534/photo/1


Again, wildfires get much more media attention today because there is a greater chance they will threaten population centers due to massive real estate development that has meant people are living ever closer to the forests and fields that are the tinder for these wildfires.

Keep these facts in mind as you read the headlines and hear the narrative that climate change today is unprecedented and requires immediate actions such as the Green New Deal or other radical ideas.

Even if the claims that carbon emissions must be drastically reduced are accurate consider where massive amounts of these emissions are coming from today.

Below is a chart that shows the 25 mega-cities in the world that produce 52% of the world's urban greenhouse emissions.

23 out of the 25 are in China.


Source: https://twitter.com/dlacalle_IA/status/1432764565129994248


This graph gives you broader context on the global numbers for each continent.


Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2021.696381/full?utm_source=fweb&utm_medium=nblog&utm_campaign=ba-sci-frsc-keeping-track-of-greenhouse-gas-emission-reduction-progress-and-targets-in-167-cities-worldwide


While we have politicians unilaterally killing coal, oil and gas in the United States due to "climate change" what are the Chinese doing?

They are going on a coal spree.


Source: https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissions-china-goes-on-a-coal-spree


This shows how many coal generating power plants have been constructed in China over the last 40 years compared to the rest of the world.


Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundreds-of-new-coal-plants-in-the-2020s


They are not stopping despite promising they are going to cut carbon emissions.

Why should anyone believe them when they say they are committed to the Paris Accords?

A total of 247 gigawatts of coal power is now in planning or development, nearly six times Germany’s entire coal-fired capacity. China has also proposed additional new coal plants that, if built, would generate 73.5 gigawatts of power, more than five times the 13.9 gigawatts proposed in the rest of the world combined. Last year, Chinese provinces granted construction approval to 47 gigawatts of coal power projects, more than three times the capacity permitted in 2019.

And why do we have politicians who want to decimate our economy that is based on affordable energy when anything that is done will not amount to a hill of beans when you look at global carbon emissions? 




The fact is that if China does not curb carbon emissions the United States could have zero emissions and it would make no difference even if the doomsayers are correct.

Why would anyone trust the Chinese Communist Party on anything?

For example, here is a global map of cumulative deaths from Covid since the pandemic thru September 2.

Which country has had the lowest reported deaths per million from Covid since the pandemic started in Wuhan, China almost two years ago?


Source: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths


I would like to say that China sticks out on this map like a sore thumb but the death rates in most populated countries in the world are colored red. China is about the lightest shade of yellow on it.

China is not actually the lowest. It has had 3.21 deaths per million from Covid. Tanzania has only had .81. 

Peru has had 5,946!

What do I make of all of this?

Don't trust the narrative on climate change.

Don't trust politicians who use the narrative for their own agendas.

Don't trust China. On anything. 

I wrote this eight years ago. It is as true today as it was then.


Only in a liberal mind does it make sense to...

shut down your most cost-effective energy generating source,

shut-off your most abundant energy resource,

raise electricity costs on all Americans,

and risk losing hundreds of thousand of jobs in the process.

In an attempt to solve a problem...

that we are not even sure we have,

and if we do, we are not sure we can do anything about it,

because of natural or external forces that we cannot control, 

that may overwhelm anything we do anyway,

that ultimately works to the advantage of your biggest trade partner,

that will undoubtedly result in more job losses for Americans over the longer term.


When I wrote this, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Chairman of the Democrat National Committee) and had just stated that her South Florida Congressional District was going to disappear unless climate change was addressed "in a few short years" as rising sea levels would mean she would have to represent the Orlando area.

When I wrote that in July, 2013 the mean sea level at the closest NOAA sea level station nearest Miami (Vaca Key) measured a mean sea level of .0.11 meters. In July, 2021 the mean sea level was 0.099 at the same station. 

The mean sea level in Vaca Key is actually 10% lower than it was eight years ago. 

Is that the few short years she was talking about?

Should you trust your future to anyone who peddles this stuff?

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Happy Birthday!

It is hard to believe that September is already here.

September is also the month that I have the best chance of wishing you "Happy Birthday" and being right.

A study of all births in the United States between 1994 and 2014 showed that September was the most popular birth month.

In fact, September has nine of the top ten birthdays for the entire  year. Those nine days are actually all between September 9 and September 20.

If you turn back the clock 40 weeks you can also determine that mid-December would also be a popular period for conceptions to occur. Is it the cold weather or the holiday mood?


Source: https://www.rd.com/article/september-popular-birth-month/

September 9 was the most popular birthday in the study followed by September 19 and September 12.

The least common days to be born are all holidays: December 25 is the least common followed by January 1, December 24 and July 4. This suggests to me that nature has been overriden by either a doctor who has other plans for the holiday or a family who does not like the idea of having their child's birthday overshadowed by other events.

Notice in the chart above the spike in births on December 28, 29 and 30? That might suggest some tax planning is also in play as well.

That might be true even more so in 2021 with a $3,600 refundable tax credit available for every child age 5 and under. Will there be any children born in the first week of January, 2022?

What about the most popular birthdays in other countries?

Let's look at Australia in the Southern Hemisphere.

December is in their summer season. July is in their winter. You might expect a different pattern on births if seasonality is a driving factor.

Curiously, the most popular birthday in Australia is September 17. September 23, 24 and October 1 are also in the top 5. It might suggest that the feelings of the holiday season has more influence than climate in conception.


Source: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2021/06/27/most-least-common-birthdays/

The least popular birthdays in Australia are December 25 and December 26 (Boxing Day which is a holiday in Australia).

Note that there is no surge in births in Australia in the last week of the year. No strong tax incentive?

You can also see that February, March, April do have a fairly high percentage of the most popular birthdays in Australia. Backing up nine months gives us May, June, July which are cooler climes Downunder. In fact, April 8 is the second most popular birthday and the only one in the Top 5 that does not correspond to conception in the holiday season.

In the United Kingdom September is also the most popular birthday month according to a study of all births from 1995-2017.



The five most popular birthday are all in late September in this order.

September 26

September 25

September 24

September 27

September 30

Nine months before? Christmas and Boxing Day (December 26).

Despite the differences in the charts above, the numerical differences between the most popular birthdays and least popular are not as great as you might be led to believe.

For example in the UK, the most popular day, September 26, sees an average of 1,974 births in the average year. There were still 1,422 births on Christmas Day. 

The same is true in the U.S. and Australia. You generally will only see a variation of 20%-25% between the most popular and least common birthdays. Nature still is (mostly) in control.

Happy Birthday no matter when the big day is!

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Time Traveler

Let's go back in time with a time traveler.

It is September 1, 2020.

Americans are weary of the Covid pandemic that has gripped the United States for the last six months.

They have had to deal with lockdowns, job losses, lost incomes, school closures and mask mandates.

The 7-day rolling average of new cases is 42,892.

That is somewhat encouraging because six weeks earlier it had been nearly 70,000.

Deaths are averaging 960 over the last seven days but they were running above 2,000 per day during most of April when the virus was running rampant in New York and New Jersey.

There is hope that things are improving.

After all, the CDC Director Robert Redfield told us in mid-July that if everyone wore masks we would have Covid under control in 4-8 weeks.



We have to be very close to getting this under control based on what he told us.

We are also are being told by President Trump that Covid vaccines are on the way and will be ready to distribute before the end of the year. Trump says that they might actually be ready by November 3--election day.

However, Trump's Democrat opponents in the November elections are sowing doubts on whether the vaccines will be ready and whether they will be safe.


2020 Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris this weekend overtly undermined any COVID-19 vaccine rolled out by the Trump administration in the fall. She told CNN Sunday she didn't "trust" the White House incumbent.

"I will not take his word for it," the California senator said. "He's looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he's grasping to get whatever he can to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he is not."


Joe Biden would go on to say this about what he was going to do to solve the Covid pandemic in the last Presidential debate on October 23, 2020.


Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-says-he-would-shut-down-the-virus-not-the-country-during-the-final-presidential-debate/ar-BB1ajnhw



Biden said it was in large part Trump's fault that we had high cases from Covid that made the lockdowns necessary. Trump had been inept in his handling of Covid. Biden had a "plan."

"It's his ineptitude that caused the country to have to shut down in large part," 

Biden says he has the answers on Covid.

Fast forward to September 1, 2021.

Biden has been elected.

The Covid vaccines (three in total authorized in the United States) began to be distributed in December.

174 million people have been fully vaccinated. 205 million have received at least one dose.

61% of those eligible (age 12+) have received both doses. 74% have received at least one dose.

92% of those age 65+ have received at least one dose.


Source: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total


Trump appointees at the CDC, HHS and the FDA have all been replaced with Biden appointees.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is still the leading "expert" on our Covid response.

Think for a second if you were told a year ago that all of these things would occur by September 1, 2021 and you were asked to predict where we would be in the pandemic.

Would anyone believe that we would be where we are today?

Assume as well that on September 1, 2020 that the time traveler went on to tell you exactly what was going to be the situation on September 1, 2021 with Covid cases and deaths.

The 7-day rolling average of cases is 158,270---that is over 3.5x higher than it was last year. That is also higher than cases were on January 30, 2021, 10 days after Biden took office, at the height of the winter surge. Just as troubling is the fact that daily cases rose from 13,381 on June 15, 2021 to 158,709 on August 30---almost 12x higher in 10 weeks.

The 7-day average of deaths is 1,075. It has now been higher than it was last year for seven consecutive days. Even worse, last year deaths were declining at this time of year. This year deaths are climbing.



Wouldn't that cause anyone to ask a few questions back on September 1, 2020?

Perhaps Joe Biden is promising things he can't deliver?

Perhaps Donald Trump is not quite as bad as we are being told?

Perhaps a mass vaccination program is not a great idea? How could we vaccinate over 200 million people and cases are up 3.5x a year from now?

Perhaps Dr. Fauci doesn't really deserve to be in the position he is in?

Based on the facts and data, these are all fair and legitimate questions.

I can understand why someone who was told these things a year ago by the Time Traveler might not believe that they would come true. Something must have gotten messed up in the translation when they came through the time barrier. It is counter to everything we have been led to believe by the experts.

However, we don't have to rely on a time traveler to predict these things.

We know right now that the facts above are all TRUE. We have seen them occur right in front of our eyes.

Why then are so many just blindly ignoring the facts right in front of them and doubling down on the same policies?

Why are so many demanding mandates?

Why are so many pushing for vaccine passports for people to be allowed to do almost anything?

Why are we beginning 3rd booster shots (never subjected to clinical testing and identical to the original vaccines) and declaring that you will not be considered fully vaccinated if you don't do so?

Where are those who look at the actual data and suggest that we might want to take a step back and assess our assumptions?

Where are those who might have some doubts that the path we are on is wrong?

We already have a glimpse of how the 3rd booster shots are working so far in Israel. No need for a time traveler to report.

Cases on Monday, August 30 (10,947) were the highest on any day since the pandemic began. Its daily cases per capita are now over double that of the United States.


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


Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. It is also the first country to start booster shots. Israel has already administered boosters to 60% of the population over age 60 since July 31. 2 million out of 9 million in the country have already received the booster 

How is it going so far?


Here is another graph of cases in Israel that also shows the various mask mandates that have been instituted during the pandemic.



I had to chuckle when I saw what someone did with this graph on Twitter when they flipped it over.

Isn't this more like what you would have expected with mask mandates, vaccine mandates and booster shots after 19 months of the pandemic?


Source: https://twitter.com/justSome1_222/status/1432406760644661255

It seems we have gotten the reverse outcome that would have been predicted a year ago.

I cited the Covid statistics involving Duke University in a blog post last week.

At that time, Duke already had more cases this year than in the entire Fall Semester last year.

It has gotten worse in the last week despite the fact that all students were required to be fully vaccinated in order to attend Duke this Fall.

92% of Duke faculty and staff are also fully vaccinated,

These are the cases at Duke so far this year since August 2, 2021.


Source: https://coronavirus.duke.edu/covid-testing/
as of 8/29/21

These were the cases at Duke for the entire Fall semester last year (almost four months).

Positive cases are already 3x higher in less than a month this year compared to what they were in four months last year.


Source: https://coronavirus.duke.edu/covid-testing-old/fall-2020-duke-covid-testing-tracker/

One report stated that only 8 of the cases were in someone that was unvaccinated.

The university, which instituted a Covid vaccine requirement for students earlier this year, said 98% of all students are fully immunized. Just eight people involved in the outbreak are unvaccinated and a majority are asymptomatic, the statement said.

What is Duke doing about the rise in cases?

Everyone on campus has to wear a mask indoors and outdoors.

There will be no indoor dining.

Duke employees must be vaccinated by October 1 or they will be fired and be ineligible to be hired by Duke in the future.

Source: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article253835668.html

Consider the facts and the solution.

Assuming the report above is accurate, 98.7% of the cases at Duke are in those who are vaccinated. They clearly are the ones spreading the virus.

However, Duke is going to fire those who are not vaccinated?

I had to chuckle as well at this quote from the Duke University statement announcing the new restrictions and the policy that will result in firing any employees who do not get vaccinated.

“We want to be clear: the problem is not our people, the problem is COVID-19,” the statement said. “Our Duke community has been extraordinarily united and resilient in fighting, and adapting to, this pandemic over the last 19 months.”

They have no problem with "our people" but they are going to fire any of their people who don't do exactly as they mandate?

In what universe does any of this make any sense at all?

Are we in a time warp in which all facts, reason and logic is totally missing?

The Time Traveler is very confused.

How about you?