Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 193

[ecosophia]

We are now in the fourth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary more than three years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health are anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; public health authorities government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion. 

Comments

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[(Anonymous)]

If you're randomizing by those things, you aren't really randomizing. Randomization must assign people accepted into a study to treatment groups at random. Like with coin tossing, if a study is small, you could have, say, 70% male in one group and 40% male in the other by chance, and that can affect the results. Sex and age really are hugely important variables influencing responses to treatments. But if you have hundreds or thousands of participants, the M/F ratio, age distribution, etc. should be very similar in both groups. (Though rarely identical - that would be a red flag for data faking.)

Researchers must supply the results for the whole group, all demographic categories. They will also usually break down results by different demographic categories, and should do so. You don't want them, for example, to use overall-positive data from a mostly-male study to justify jamming devices into women that actually kill them, without ever admitting that. (Or to claim that a product very rarely causes myocarditis, let's say, without admitting that 18-to-25-year-olds are very different from 70+-year-olds.) Sometimes this breakdown seems to show benefit for one subgroup and not another and if the overall study was negative, they will spin that heavily as justification for treating the first subgroup, but properly, it can only be hypothesis-generating data.

Non-randomized data-dredging studies use sex, age, race to categorize people from medical record databases, to try to match pairs of similar individuals who do and don't get various interventions. They may also make half-assed attempts to correct for socioeconomic status (a giant confounder) and various disease labels, treated as binary yes-no conditions. But as you indicate, there are vast numbers of things affecting health that are not included in those records at all, such as diet and health attitudes, or that are far more complex than yes-or-no. Such studies can never be definitive

The issue of how clinical trials are designed to reduce the apparent side effects is a separate one and there are multiple mechanisms by which it is done. I can think of at least five off the top of my head. (1) Exclusion criteria that kick out people most likely to have side effects. (2) Active-drug run-in period before the study starts, kicking out anyone who has side effects. (3) Asking about side effects in a way that minimizes reports of problems, or asking very few questions at all. (4) Asking about side effects in a way that *maximizes* reports, which obscures differences between subgroups. (E.g., aromatase inhibitors don't really cause crippling muscle and bone pain, because in a 5-year study 65% of users reported some level of pain at some time point vs. 62% of placebo users, not significantly different. Who the frack goes 5 years without ever feeling any pain?) (5) And the still-seen Just Don't Mention Side Effects At All.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[(Anonymous)]

Your last paragraph brought back memories for me: it is so very important to ask the appropriate questions that actually address the study - whether it is a randomized clinical trial, survey (i.e. opinion or political poll), etc. To my eternal shame (and even though I was young, new at the job, I should have been quicker to get the implications): The question the supervisors asked as whether or not patients of certain institutions were getting adequate care. To answer the question, I was asked to summarize a set of surveys of these institutions and present the results; trouble is, the survey addressed 'level of care appropriateness' but NOT adequacy of care.