Coronavirus news & views

Harry Became Severely Disabled After The Vaccine

Does the crowing of a rooster cause the sun to rise?

Harry: A follower of this blog, recently wrote to me about the experience of his senior friend, Harry. With permission, I relay the story here and add some thoughts.

Harry was 80 years old and living a healthy, robust life. He did his own home improvement projects, he was mobile and drove everywhere--he lived an active life. His only health concern was a bit of a problem with high blood pressure (who doesn’t at his age?) that was well controlled with a statin drug.

But, soon after his third shot (booster), his shoulder in the non-injection arm began stiffening. After that, one side of his groin became very painful and the pain migrated to the other side and then began shooting into his legs. Within weeks, he was unable to walk, relying on a walker or wheelchair. He became home-bound. His painful arm is now useless—he needs to hoist it with his other hand to get dressed. Same with both legs. Harry gets by each day on pain meds, but he is reluctant to take a higher dosage to fully control the pain as it makes him too groggy, so he only sleeps an hour or two at night due to the pain, then catnaps in his recliner throughout the day.

This sudden and quick decline began about a month after his booster shot so he was convinced his new maladies were a consequence of the vaccine.

VAERS: Harry’s case is the sort of case that is reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting Site or VAERS. When someone begins experiencing untoward health problems soon after vaccination they or their doc can easily report it on the VAERS site, which has served as an early warning system for identifying rare side effects of vaccines since 1990. Thousands of people have reported post-vaccination symptoms, and the site is accessible to anyone. Hence, there is a CDC database listing thousands of reports of health problems following COVID vaccination that you can pull up after a few clicks.

The CDC uses this uncorroborated raw anecdotal information to look for patterns that could point to previously unknown side effects of vaccines. This is common practice for all medicines after they have been approved for use. Data from clinical trials that form the basis for approval or rejection of a new medicine or vaccine only include results from ~40,000 test subjects. That is enough to discover very significant and fairly common side effects. But, after the medicine gets on the market, patient data still are collected in order to see if there are serious side effects that only appear in, say, one out of 250,000 people and that would not be found during the clinical trial on just 40,000 subjects. Remember the COX-2 anti-inflammatory drugs that were widely used in the 90s but were pulled because they were found to cause rare, but serious cardiovascular problems? This was found by collecting post-approval data from a few million people who had taken the drugs. Evaluating data collected after a medicine is on the market is referred to as post-market or Phase IV research. This is what the CDC uses the VAERS database for.

The CDC then digs into the raw VAERS reports to make sense of them. They first confirm the reports and then to see if they are just correlations or causative. Scientists look at further health data on the patients, and look for similar recurring problems in other patients. This also means that the raw data reported on the VAERS site are just that—raw. The raw data you can see on the site have not been confirmed or determined to have actually arisen from a vaccine side effect. In fact, the VAERS web site carries this clear disclaimer:

“VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.”

The task for the CDC then is to separate health complaints that are just coincidental (i.e., that would have happened anyway without the vaccine) from those that are causal (i.e., that were caused by the vaccine). The fact alone that someone vomited a day after being vaccinated cannot be taken as proof that the vaccine caused the vomiting. There is a big difference between correlation, i.e., when two unrelated things happen together, vs causation when one thing leads to the other thing.

But, this is what the vaccine naysayers are doing—they look at the VAERS site and believe that all those raw reports are causative reports showing that the vaccines harm people. In other words, they completely ignore (or do not even read) the CDC disclaimer that the VAERS data are very incomplete and require further investigation before any conclusions can be drawn. When you hear someone on social media, TV, or the radio claim that tens of thousands of people have been seriously hurt by the vaccines, they are basing that claim on an incompetent (and possibly dishonest) use of the raw, uncorroborated VAERS data. I know this because every time I ask someone to back up their claim that the vaccines have injured tens of thousands of people, they eventually cite the VAERS database. When I quiz them further, most clearly have not even looked at the complicated VAERS web site, but are reporting second hand what they have heard elsewhere.

The truth is that few of the VAERS reports have been confirmed to be related to vaccination. Furthermore, the side effects mostly are of the “sore arm” variety, while serious health effects are vanishingly rare. Only about 200 people have actually died from the vaccines. All this compares to the almost 900,000 deaths (and counting) from COVID, and the ~20 million (and counting) cases of long term debilitation from long COVID. Remember, both the deaths and long COVID are prevented by the vaccines.

Back to Harry: Harry developed his debilitating conditions shortly after his third shot and attributed his woes to the vaccine. That is a temporal correlation—the debilitation happened shortly after the vaccine. But, is there anything that proves the vaccine caused Harry’s debilitation?  Well, a deep dive into Harry’s medical condition, like the CDC does into the data in its VAERS data, proves the vaccine did not cause Harry’s condition.

Sadly, a couple of days ago my blog friend told me that recent scans showed a mass on Harry’s lung. He has end-stage lung cancer that has spread to his pelvic bones and shoulder causing severe bone lesions and the pain. He will soon die from untreatable advanced cancer. It seems that Harry has a 50+ history as a smoker. But, he, as well as folks who abuse the VAERS system, totally ignore that kind of history and jump on the less-likely correlation between vaccination and diminishing health as proving a cause and effect relationship between the two. In doing this, people must assume that there could be no other causative factor for any malady that appears shortly after vaccination. Harry himself, ignored his long history of smoking, which is, by far, the leading cause of lung cancer, while the vaccines have been associated with zero cases of cancer.

This is a sad example of the mental gymnastics anti-vaxers resort to in order to confirm their bias against the vaccine. Real data be damned once they see a simple correlation that fits their bias.

Bottom line: Just as the vaccine did not cause Harry’s cancer, the crowing of the rooster does not cause the sun to rise. Both are correlations of events only temporally, not causally related.

Do not buy into the claims that the VAERS shows that people are suffering by the thousands from the vaccines. It is not true.

File This Under ‘Weird Pandemic Effects’: Decreased Incidence Of Lightning

“If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.”

- Lao Tzu

Yup, since the pandemic began, it appears that trees are safer. Thanks to the lockdowns, there is less lightning to strike them.

A study presented at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) analyzed atmospheric factors that may have contributed to lightning reductions of 10-20%. 

It seems that atmospheric aerosols produced by burning fossil fuels were reduced because of pandemic lockdowns. Particles in these aerosols enhance the collection of water vapor, which causes clouds to form. And the more these particles absorb water they also reduce rain and, therefore, the creation of small ice crystals that collide in the clouds and build electrostatic charges that create lightning. So, fewer aerosol particles, less bumping and rubbing, less static and fewer zaps.

I have previously noted other weird effects of the pandemic such as farmed fish being too large for restaurant plates, rattle snakes in plane landing gears, and a dearth of ketchup and mustard condiment packages to go along with less lightning. What crazy thing will happen next—the Cincinnati Bengals win a playoff game?

Oh….wait a minute……..

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The Long Haul, Part 4: The Cost of Long COVID In Terms Of Individual Health And Quality Of Life

Surviving COVID-19 is one thing, recovering is another.

My frustration with those who would minimize the impact of COVID-19 is reaching an apex. I constantly have to deal with their baseless rationalizations that “it is just a cold,” or “it only kills 0.01% of people” (actually the number is 2% around the world), etc. And I constantly reply to these iconoclasts that COVID has become, by far, the leading killer in the US. I also explain over and over that treating simple mortality percentage as the only relevant statistic to consider is falderal. For example, the Spanish flu also killed “only” 2% of those infected, but in just 24 weeks, that virus killed more people around the world than were killed in WWI AND WWII together! The percent figure is meaningless without considering the percent of what. Why do they continue to ignore the devisor and, hence, the total number of deaths?

A small percentage of a very large number is, in fact, another large number.

Those who wish to downplay the significance of the pandemic only focus on this mortality percent, but mortality is NEVER the whole story for any pandemic. A serious person will also consider the morbidity caused by the disease. In fact, the major CDC publication on health in the US is called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Notice that it considers both morbidity and mortality, and further notice that morbidity is listed first in the title. I have made three prior posts in this series on Long COVID, about the significant lasting morbidity of COVID-19. You can see these posts here, here, and here. In those posts, I shared data showing that some ~10-30% of COVID survivors suffer serious health problems that last months.

In those posts, I mentioned the cases of a young, healthy MD, and of a young, healthy journalist, both of whom struggled with long COVID, and how it affected their careers and cost them thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses for the dozens of tests and doctors they needed. In an article in Maclean’s magazine, a reporter interviewed many Canadian long COVID patients and heard how their lives have been turned upside down. They reported that they are unable to live like they used to and care for their families, do anything mildly strenuous, or even cook their meals. They spend long stretches of time in bed. Many of those interviewed had not returned to work several weeks after recovering from the acute disease.

Anecdotes like these have been repeated millions of times around a world that, according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID tracker, has seen more than 330 million cases of COVID (and this is a significant undercount since many countries do not record these data well). Research has corroborated these anecdotes.

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Common long-term symptoms include debilitating fatigue; respiratory problems; and “brain fog.”  Other common symptoms include compromised function of the heart, and kidneys, which sometimes require transplantation. Wide-spread clotting problems can cause significant illness and even limb amputation. There also are frequent neurological and neuropsychiatric symptoms as highlighted in Part 3 of this series. Surprising manifestations continue to emerge, such as new-onset diabetes.

Lung scarring often occurs in patients who experienced COVID-caused acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a common problem seen in acute COVID patients who required ICU care. ARDS is a serious respiratory problem that can be caused by different respiratory viruses and other things. About a third of patients with ARDS arising from any cause were unemployed 5-years later because of their lung damage. It is fully expected that patients with COVID-related ARDS will be found to fare similarly.

There also is the dysfunctional immune response common in many moderate to severe COVID cases that can cause long-term multi-organ damage, particularly in the liver and kidneys. It can also disrupt coagulation control of the blood, sometimes leading to amputations, mostly in patients in their 30s and 40s. It was reported that amputations due to vascular problems have doubled since the CoV-2 virus arrived. Compromised coagulation control in COVID patients can also precipitate adverse cardiovascular events such as heart failure, or hemiplegia due to strokes. Data from the COVID Infection Survey on long-COVID suggest that the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events and long-term illness is about ten times higher in COVID patients (even after mild COVID) compared to non-COVID matched controls. A Dutch study found that 31% of COVID ICU patients suffered thrombotic complications. These problems can unexpectedly pop up in people who had completely recovered from COVID.

A global survey tallied 205 different symptoms across 10 different organ systems that can persist after COVID infection has cleared. Typically, these manifold long COVID symptoms do not appear in isolation, but in multi-symptom clusters. A long hauler typically has several of these problems at a time.

While it is estimated that overall, 10-30% of COVID patients become long haulers, reports on the number of people suffering long COVID vary widely. Depending on the report, anywhere from 30-90% of COVID survivors suffer long term health problems. And even at the lower end of that range, 30% of over 330 million people world-wide who have been infected is a very large number. It represents an enormous personal toll in terms of lost health and diminished quality of life. Some of these reports are summarized below.

• Half of 70,000 hospitalized UK COVID-19 patients experienced long-term complications, according to a study published in July. Complications occurred regardless of age group: For instance, 25% of adults aged 19-29 developed complications, as did 33% of those aged 30-39. Complications affecting the kidneys and respiratory system, liver injury, anemia, and arrhythmia were the most common.
• Many COVID-19 survivors require extensive and prolonged rehabilitation. An European study found about one-third of 1,837 non-hospitalized COVID patients (i.e., those with mild disease) needed a caregiver three months after their symptoms started.
• In April the CDC reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that 69 percent of nonhospitalized adult COVID patients in Georgia required
• one or more outpatient visits 28 to 180 days after their diagnosis.
• A study published last February in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that roughly one-third of 177 people who had mild COVID disease not requiring hospitalization reported persistent symptoms and a decline in quality of life up to nine months after illness.
• 70% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 in the UK had not fully recovered five months after hospital discharge. They averaged nine long COVID symptoms requiring continued medical care.
• A study in South Korea found that 90% of patients who recovered from acute COVID experienced long-term side effects.
• According to a report in the journal, Lancet, 75% of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Wuhan early in the pandemic, reported continued problems with fatigue, weakness, sleep problems, anxiety and depression six months after being diagnosed with the disease. More than half also had persistent lung abnormalities.

Data like these have been commonly reported around the world, pointing to a more chronic and expensive health problem than seen with the flu or common cold, which often is caused by different coronaviruses. A July 2021 article in Scientific American talked about how all of this indicates that long COVID will cause a “tsunami of disability” that will affect individual lives as well as create enormous strain on the health system. Consider the numbers: More than 60 million Americans (this is an underestimate since many COVID cases are not reported) have been infected with the CoV-2 virus. Therefore, if only 30% of these suffer long COVID, we are talking about 20 million long haulers and counting.

The related health care and disability costs of all of this are also still being calculated. How many “long haulers” will not be able to return to work for months, or at all? How many will need short-term disability payments, and how many will become permanently dependent on disability programs? As increasing numbers of younger people become infected, will we see a generation of chronically ill? This then moves us to consider the economic and financial cost of long COVID, which will be the topic of the next installation in this series.

Stay tuned.

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Gain-Of-Function Viral Research: What’s The Big Deal?

Senator Rand Paul and many others have raked Dr. Anthony Fauci, long-time director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), over the coals for supporting research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and especially for supporting “gain-of-function” (GoF) research at that facility.

This needs some ‘splaining.

First, Senator Paul and the anti-Fauci crowd need to give us their definition of GoF research and then explain why it is bad. If they mean research that gives viruses new capabilities, then most labs seeking to learn how a virus functions is guilty. For example, University of Wisconsin flu researcher, Yoshi Kawaoka, did research that exchanged genes from the 1918 H1N1 Spanish flu virus with less virulent H1N1 viruses in order to learn why the Spanish flu caused so much death back then. That is classical gain-of-function research and it was done under strict quarantine and safety conditions (disclaimer, your blogger was on the safety review committee that vetted and approved Kawaoka’s Spanish flu research). It is legitimate and important research.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a small bit of indirect funding from Fauci’s NIAID to support a genetic registry of coronavirus sequences that is freely available to all researchers around the world. As new coronaviruses were discovered and their genomes sequenced, the lab investigators cataloged them. They also inserted the new spike protein genetic sequences into incipient, harmless viruses to see how well the new spike proteins allowed a virus to infect mammalian cells in tissue culture. This was done to help assess how much of a risk a new coronavirus was for spreading among mammals. Strictly defined, this research gave the engineered test viruses new capabilities—they acquired new spike proteins and gained the new functions that came with that. This is legitimate research and not some nefarious plot to weaponize coronaviruses that Rand Paul, et al., dishonestly allude to in their allegations.

Furthermore, there are the thousands of other labs around the world, including mine at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin that use viruses as tools for gene transfer in order to study the activity of newly discovered genes. For example, my lab discovered an aberrant gene that was associated with a particular human leukemia that used to be untreatable. We wanted to learn how the abnormal gene affected blood cells, so we cloned it and inserted it into a virus that could infect mouse cells. We then gave mice leukemia by infecting them with a virus that expressed a human cancer gene. That recombinant virus gained the function of the human cancer gene. Rand Paul, et al., would call that sinister gain-of-function virus research. However, from that and other research, that incurable leukemia now is 95% curable. Sinister?

Sure, using modern molecular technology, a minacious actor could help a pathogen gain super-lethal function and develop a super-pathogen, or a weaponized bug, like antibiotic resistant anthrax or super-spreading Ebola virus. It would be pretty easy to do. But, by far, the GoF research routinely done in labs around the world is done for learning not for killing.

When Paul accuses Fauci of supporting GoF research, that accusation is attached, without evidence, to an implicit accusation that the Wuhan labs are creating more virulent pathogens for nefarious reasons. So, why does Paul not go after Kawaoka or me for using NIH money to create viruses that might be able to kill people (Kawaoka’s flu construct) or that could cause cancer (my virus expressing a human cancer gene)?  

Could it be for political reasons?

Has Omicron Rendered Vaccines Ineffective?

Early in the pandemic, when we realized that the CoV-2 virus was quickly producing mutated progeny, some of which were becoming more deadly and transmissible, some (including your humble blogger) warned that viral mutation could feasibly give rise to a variant that ignored immunity to previous iterations of the germ—in other words able to ignore the current vaccines. We have arrived—almost.

The so-called omicron variant partly avoids immunity conferred by the current vaccines (and by prior infection), meaning that we are seeing “break-through” infections in fully and partially  immune people. Popular news sources are running headlines declaring that vaccinated patients with COVID are filling hospital beds, leading many to leap to the conclusion that the vaccines have failed.

But, that is not fully accurate. Many vaccinated people are indeed getting infected with omicron, yet the vaccines are still quite effective, and much better than no vaccine. Let me explain.

First, about two-thirds of Americans are vaccinated—a definite majority of the population. This means that for a hypothetical virus that can fully evade immunity, there are more vaccinated than unvaxed viral “targets” available; meaning more vaccinated than unvaccinated people will be infected. The reality, however, is that the vaccines are still partly protective so that many vaccinated people still catch omicron COVID. Yet, compared to vaxed people, unvaccinated people remain at significantly greater risk of infection, hospitalization, and death. Numbers in my State of Wisconsin, bear this out.

Currently, 69% of the State adult population is vaccinated. According to the latest data* (as of January 15, 2022), out of 100,000 vaccinated people, 1573 caught COVID, 18.5 were hospitalized, and just under 4 died. In contrast, out of 100,000 unvaccinated people, 4,746 got infected, 176 were hospitalized, and 51 died. In other words, many more unvaccinated adults are feeling the effects of COVID, despite representing only 30% of the State population. Clearly, there were breakthrough infections in vaccinated people, but just as clearly, unvaccinated people fared way worse than they would have if they had the shot.

Yet, the headlines persist, proclaiming things like, “Similar numbers of vaccinated and vaccinated people hospitalized for COVID.”   Does this not show that the vaccines are no longer effective? Not at all. Because many more people are vaccinated and partly susceptible to the virus, more and more vaccinated people are showing up with infection, but at a much lower rate than unvaccinated people do. The graphic below illustrates how this works.

The benefits of the vaccines also are reflected in national and world-wide numbers. The US has one of the lowest vaccination rates among developed countries such as the UK, Canada, Norway, Denmark, etc. And despite omicron’s “milder” nature, which means it kills fewer people but still kills, the COVID death rate in the less vaccinated US is greater than seen in more vaccinated countries, attesting to the efficacy of the shots. Also, new hospital admissions in the US have now reached an all-time high and far exceeding hospitalization rates in better vaccinated countries. Current data from New York State shows that hospitalization among the unvaccinated is 14x higher than among fully vaccinated people.

All of this demonstrates how effective the vaccines remain at preventing infection, hospitalization, and death from omicron-driven COVID. Places with higher vaccination rates, such as the UK and Canada, are not experiencing an increase in base case rates of patients admitted to the ICU or deaths, even with omicron cases skyrocketing. The US is.

Get your Fauci boo boo.

*Note on Wisconsin State data sources: State data mentioned here are from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Public Health Madison and Dane County, and the Wisconsin Hospital Association as reported Jan 15, 2022 in the Wisconsin State Journal.