For everybody or for some people? What is the causal chain?
The study it is based on is from Al Aly [1], who is using a dataset of (mostly elderly, unhealthy) veterans who regularly seek hospital care from the US government hospital system (VA).
It is an older, sicker population, and no, the results aren't generalizable. Moreover, his methods are dubious. I've dug into one of Al Aly's other paper's downthread [2], and the comments cross-apply. He has a bunch of papers using the same dataset and core methods, and they're all pretty bad, but the press loves them. Eric Topol is either ignorant of their problems, doesn't care, or a little of both.
As an editorial aside, Eric Topol really isn't a reliable source of information. He's pretty much on par with Eric Feigl-Ding at this point. He's someone who has surrendered all former scientific credibility to sensationalism. Even if you 100% believe every word in these papers, unless you acknowledge that they're a study of older, sick people, you're sensationalizing the results and misleading the listener.
For example, there's absolutely nothing stopping Al Aly from using a real, consistent control (e.g. influenza, or even just the same negative control) instead of a grab-bag of different illnesses. The reason he switches them with every paper is probably because his synthetic weighting scheme produces inconvenient results from experiment to experiment when the same control is used. But we can only speculate, because we don't have the data. Remember: he's re-weighting his covariates using these controls! This is a real, objective problem.
My opinions about Topol are my own, which is why I said they're editorial, but I'm tired of the guy's constant doom-and-gloom messaging and inability/unwillingness to critically appraise data. Even in the most charitable, rational take on Al Aly's work, you can't casually extrapolate it to the entire population the way that Topol does.
Lazy? Guilty as charged.
More data is needed, but it's looking like a key component of it is micro-clots: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02286-7
COVID-19 does massive damage generally.
There's only one novel pandemic to study every century or so. I don't think there's any evidence at all that it's "so different". It's just better studied because in 1918 only a handful of scientists even knew that "viruses" existed.
Preprint of a major study from VA data. It will probably publish in the near future and I haven't heard any major changes or revisions.
Per the paper's abstract:
> We show that COMPARED TO PEOPLE WITH FIRST INFECTION, reinfection contributes additional risks of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, and adverse health outcomes
(emphasis mine)
All this paper shows is that if you follow a cohort of older, sicker people -- people who are seeking hospital care! people who were infected and possibly hospitalized in the first wave! -- long enough for them to get multiple reinfections (in this case, about 2 years, from the original Covid wave through the Omicron wave), the overall rates of a (selected) set of different health conditions goes up over time. They have not shown that the increased risk is because of Covid. The paper has no way of following the younger, healthier people (particularly in the later waves, where home testing was common) who never set foot in a VA hospital and had a Covid test, despite having Covid. There is a huge selection bias [1] problem here. There may be others, such as immortal time bias. [2]
What you would like to see in a study like this is that it is prospective (the participants were selected randomly in advance and followed over time); but this study is retrospective. You would also like to see a control against a similar illness, such as flu or non-Covid pneumonia; this study does not have such a comparison (despite being trivial to make), and resorts to using "atopic dermatitis and neoplasms" as a "negative control" instead.
As an aside, Al Aly has a history of using a weird grab-bag of negative control illnesses against this same dataset across his various papers. One wonders why he doesn't always use the same illness as a negative control -- presumably atopic dermatitis didn't suddenly start being unassociated with Covid between his studies, right? Would the results not be the same if he was consistent? I'm guessing not.
In short, this study is confounded, and Eric Topol really needs to tone down his fear-mongering. Even if you believe the top-line results, unless you are an elderly person sick enough to be seeking regular hospital care, this has very little relevance to your risk profile.
Except for the parts where I point out that this result is confounded by the advanced age and morbidity of the study population; the health-seeking behavior that led to their inclusion; and the fact that they're all getting older across the course of the study (which tends to result in higher rates of death, illness and relocation to Florida. I wonder if he found that Covid caused higher rates of golfer's elbow?)
Also, no, the study didn't show anything is "creating" anything else. It argued that there's a correlation.
The results section of the paper updates this knowledge. It says:
“Compared to those with first infection, those with reinfection exhibited increased risk and excess burden of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, and at least one sequela in the acute phase and the post-acute phase of the reinfection.”
“… the risk was higher in those who had two infections (HR 2.11 (2.07, 2.15); burden 234.58 (227.08, 241.92)), and highest in those with three or more infections (HR 3.00 (2.71, 3.31) …”
Additionally how about we don't just jump to lumping huge numbers of people into out groups to feel better about ourselves and create divisiveness? Or go to Reddit where you can cheer on people dying.
https://yournews.com/2022/07/11/2375584/emails-confirm-why-c...
"a substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases, prepared from the causative agent of a disease, its products, or a synthetic substitute, treated to act as an antigen without inducing the disease."
Steriods and antibodies don't meet this definition. No vaccine has a 100% success rate, so reducing symptoms doesn't make it not a vaccine.
See how silly this line of reasoning is when you don't feel bothered by a need to provide data or statistics?
But the difference between the COVID vaccines and seatbelts is the data — hence why you hear that argument about COVID vaccines, but not seatbelts.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/thailand-study-of-young-a...
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/here-is-the-data-behind-a...
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/doctors-in-canada-are-dyi...
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/steve-ki...
Eg, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTR0w2M9-U
Also, that link doesn’t address the data in those links. You seem to be making an ad hominem.
https://austingwalters.com/covid-19-vaccine-deaths-being-cod...
UK government was counting gene therapy (“vaccine”) deaths as covid19 deaths. Which I mean, kinda?
Regarding the fatalities, yes obviously part of them are from the gene therapy. The question was were they primarily from the gene therapy.
https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/
It turns out all the predictions people were making about the gene therapy risks came to pass. I was credited by many of the “anti-vax” crowd for discovering the first real trend of this happening in the US cdc data (led to a lot of death threats and what not).
After my blog and people picked it up, the CDC did a major edit to the data -
https://austingwalters.com/changes-in-the-cdc-counts-of-deat...
The only time I’d seen that in the 2 years I had been monitoring it (I tracked the data from 2019 - 2021). No idea why, but tracked what changed.
Anyway, to your point. All of those were predicted by people who knew how the gene therapy worked (I did take bioengineering classes, and knew mRNA was highly experimental), as well as those monitoring data (where I primarily worked from). The data is frankly overwhelming in one area, but it’s difficult for people to admit what Obama put so well…
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1517239870875447297
It’s an experiment. We didn’t know the long term effects (still don’t), but the fact it caused heart damage (“rarely”) still means it probably happens a lot, but won’t be discovered for a while. That said Covid19 spike proteins are believed to be the cause; so the gene therapy and the disease both likely cause the heart damage. The thing with the gene therapy is the proteins were produced rapidly and we didn’t / don’t know how long it lasts or the rate. So it could cause more damage, imo evidence supports it was more damaging.
Personally, I stick to the research on mRNA technology prior to 2020 -- it doesn't work effectively and carries a lot of risk.
Some basic unanswered questions:
- How long does the mRNA last inside the cells? i.e. how long will your body produce spike proteins?
- What's the appropriate quantity of proteins to produce a decent immune response?
- In a batch of "vaccines" what's the quality and density of mRNA being injected into cells?
- What are the long-term risks of creating proteins in this manner? (5, 10, 20 years out)
- My wife was recommended the COVID19 vaccine when pregnant (in 2021) - what was the risk profile? It took a decade to learn that for the other vaccines (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/vaccines-during-p...)
Just to point out how crazy that last point is... They recommend it on the CDC website (been recommending the vaccine since 2021):
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
Yet, here's a paper published Aug 10, 2022:
> Overall, studies monitoring people who have received covid-19 vaccines during pregnancy have not identified any pregnancy specific safety concerns. Additional information on non-mRNA vaccines, vaccination early in pregnancy, and longer term outcomes in infants are needed. To collect this information, vaccination during pregnancy must be prioritized in vaccine research.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35948352/
Here's another one from May 3, 2022:
> Pregnant women were largely excluded from initial clinical trials investigating the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines; however, they have since been included as part of the routine roll-out of these vaccines.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9061132/
People / "Experts" know what they are doing and it's a massive experiment.
Can we have a statistical analysis for the lockdowns and curfews? Do incitations at being a couch potato have an impact on life expectancy?
And it is going to decline further. Covid affects multiple organ systems; the acute phase of the infection, it is safe to say at this point, is not the primary cause of concern.
Covid-19 infection increases the chances of a stroke 4x and of heart failure more than 10x, among other disorders, within 12 months of infection. [1] A chief scientist at the WHO recently said [2], “We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic.”
[1]: https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1564612325356670978
[2]: https://twitter.com/doctorsoumya/status/1564649057599078401