Comment on Dr. Dan Stock’s Testimony before the Mt. Vernon School Board by Peter.
You implied that I doubted covid deaths…I didn’t, I doubted the methodology that was being used to count them, ie a guy dying from a motorcycle crash and the cause of death being reported as Covid….such things should be called out in your profession, no?
I’m also not expecting ‘a perfect’ vaccine. Likewise, I would say my natural immunity is effective, having had covid…and being that absolute perfection is mutually agreed as unreasonable, I’m often confused at the inconsistency of messaging when it comes to lowering risk that ultimately leads to moving the goal posts to eliminating it to zero. Slow the spread anyone? Two weeks to flatten the curve? All that is out the window now apparently.
It’s more than disingenuous of you to add up all of the covid deaths since the beginning of this in an attempt to make your point (over 600,000). People are catching on to this. If we applied that same methodology to the flu…it would dwarf covid. Sticking to seasonal numbers will still make your point without overly exaggerating and putting your credibility on the line, besides it’s the only way to apply apples to apples.
That being said, according to the CDC, COVID-19 was reported as the underlying cause of death or a contributing cause of death for an estimated 377,883 (11.3%) of deaths, with a reported excess death for the year of 15.9%. Comparing historical years of mortality, it’s not unusual for the difference to be +/- 4% so the 11.3% is probably pretty close…Im sure the over counting offsets the undercounting. Perhaps we can attribute the additional 4% difference to deaths of despair due to the lockdowns?
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
The chart you used is much more deceiving than the one on the CDCs page above due to the scale on the right of yours starting at 50,000, effectively cutting off the massive area below it attributed to ‘expected’ deaths which distorts the overall perspective. We have all come to expect this deception in this post covid world…but I wanted to point it out as it’s part of the reason there is a credibility decline in your professional field, be it intentional or not…there is observably a problem.
The battle of my study is better than your study has lost its effect as well and again is part of the consistency problem within the health science field pitting experts against experts where each of them attempt to gain ground by tearing the other down…it only adds to the decline of the credibility of the overall profession. Despite the one study you found, one that I would wager a coke that it will be less accurate a month from now as history seems to show with these studies…I would ask why the top Israeli Health Official said vaccinated account for 85-90% of all new hospitalizations and why the Chief Scientific Advisor to the U.K. government attested during a press conference (in mid-July…the same time as your study) that 40% of those being hospitalized with COVID-19 were “fully vaccinated”?? We haven’t even peaked with Delta here in the US, so to make any premature assertions before the data is in would be the common mistake we have seen the entire last 18 months with the CDC.
People know when we are no longer comparing apples to apples. Science requires congruency and standardization. It demands consistency. There has been absolutely no consistency in anything coming from the CDC or our government or our so called experts, and certainly not the media, although many health professionals have become apologists for them…which just makes it worse…for the health professionals. Without acknowledging these inconsistencies, the decline in credibility only escalates faster. There is no consistency in how we count deaths, how we test for positives (cycle thresholds), how we count cases, how or when we use percentages to show or hide perspective, who the rules apply to and whether they are social justice gatherings or Thanksgiving gatherings, whether they are presidential birthday parties or sick illegal immigrants coming across the border…and that lack of consistency is what is ruining the credibility of science.
You can’t blame people for the skepticism when the profession is destroying themselves from within with lack of consistency and standardization. That inconsistency by the way, seemingly is only coming from one side. I would say, in general, you’re all doing it to yourselves and its high time to get your crap together as a profession because I don’t think science or doctors or health care professionals in general will be able to recover their credibility for years if not decades with all the finger pointing happening within.
Because the fact is, you all now fall into the untrusted category. You’ve done it to yourselves. You now have to earn back that trust and its going to be an uphill climb. You certainly aren’t going to change any minds unless health experts stick to the facts, don’t over state them, stop over exaggerating, stop dismissing unknowns, acknowledge the grey, admit when they don’t know, admit where experts disagree, admit that its complicated, admit when they are over simplifying something, admit when they are being overly cautious, admit that not everyone will share the same risk management or risk tolerance measures, admit that what happens in a lab is not always what happens in real life and for gods sake stop shaming others for not sharing the same opinion. Every doctor and scientists is individually pounding their chest in righteous pride and by doing so the entire profession suffers.
I honestly don’t think it’s possible for the profession to gain back it’s credibility. All the best to you in that venture, I’m rooting for you because what it will absolutely lead to is mandated public health measures by our government due to mistrust of health professionals. I don’t think we are far from it, but I hope we can turn it around.
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Peter Also Commented
Dr. Dan Stock’s Testimony before the Mt. Vernon School Board
So when the CDC says that “400 is a HUGE amount” you seriously don’t think the word HUGE is just a bit overstated? Exaggerated even? It’s so obvious an example and yet you can’t even bring yourself to admit it…that is hilarious! I mean, you’ve calculated the percent yourself at 0.06%? Its extremely low…yet the CDC Director says its HUGE…in an article with the most click-baity headline ever “Children are not supposed to Die”…and yet you can’t make the connection why people accuse the CDC, the media and health science experts of fear mongering??
I’m speechless.
Dr. Dan Stock’s Testimony before the Mt. Vernon School Board
“One thing just I want to note with the children is: I think we fall into this flawed thinking of saying that only 400 of these 600,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been in children. Children are not supposed to die, so 400 is a HUGE amount,” said the director of the CDC.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/children-not-supposed-die-cdc-213203164.html?guccounter=1
Trying to brush off the fear mongering campaign conducted by the CDC, the media and health experts as if there is ‘no disagreement’ is to ignore the absolute reality that every American has observed on the television for the last 18 months.
I guess smart people can have low emotional intelligence, unable to accurately perceive the world around them and to use that information to guide their thinking, but wow…no disagreement? Fascinating. I’m beginning to honestly think that you really can’t pick up on this stuff. I sincerely don’t think you’re being disingenuous at all either. I think you really only see the numbers and not the tone of the delivery. If that’s the case, then congratulations for being tone deaf to the fear campaign…I maybe beginning to see the disconnect with some of our health science experts.
I understand your unwillingness to discuss the flawed CDC PCR testing and the walking back of their testing policies, etc…it’s pretty indefensible given the black hole of refuting evidence available to a busy guy like yourself. I would ignore it as well if I were you…not much out there on Goolge to cut and paste from.
All the best to you Dr Sean.
Dr. Dan Stock’s Testimony before the Mt. Vernon School Board
Now we are are getting somewhere.
Thank you for finally conceding that childhood covid deaths are rare…thus the fear-mongering of such for the last year was just that. Although the CDC, media and government health experts continue to say otherwise…you at least have conceded rare is in fact rare and for the time being appear to disagree with the CDC. I am happy to see that…kind of the overall big picture point Dr Dan Stock was making as well though btw…not sure you can see it, but it is.
And thank you for finally conceding that the CDC hasn’t been tracking breakthrough cases…thus making that data incomplete and renders any analysis related to the effectiveness of the vaccines (including your comments above on them) bunk at best. Something the CDC, media and government health experts also continue to spout off with great confidence….but you and Dr Dan Stock seem to finally agree on that as well.
You say you don’t know what I am talking about, but perhaps its because you’re focusing in too close on the topic…rather than seeing the larger points I’m setting up to make.
Take a step back…I could care less of the vaccine-related deaths, I’m using it to illustrate the inconsistency in the logic that has been used elsewhere.
Here is your statement from the link you provided above: “The fact of the matter is that even if I were to simply wave my hand over the foreheads of a population the size of the United States that nearly 8,000 people would die that very same day. So, it only stands to reason that, out of the 178 million Americans who have currently received at least one dose of a vaccine against COVID-19 (54%) that many tens of thousands of people would have died, for various reasons, within three days of being vaccinated.”
What you are basically saying is that our country has a lot of people…and a lot of people die everyday for various reasons, so to conflate that all of these people died from the vaccine simply isn’t fair to say…because many of them probably died as a result of something else, it was just happenstance that they had been vaccinated not necessarily their cause of death. I think that fairly sums up your point here, wouldn’t you agree?
Would it surprise you if I said…I agree with you!?
So why aren’t Covid deaths treated with the same logic? This has certainly been a criticism of the reported numbers. Where were health professionals support when others tried to use the same logic? Why is the same logic that was shunned a year ago attempting to make that case…now being embraced to defend vaccines? There within lies more inconsistency. Do you see it?
The CDC and others don’t take into account “random chance” when counting covid deaths…but when dealing with the same “law of large numbers”…suddenly health professionals are all about factoring that in for the defense of vaccine safety. Well isn’t that just convenient. You accuse these Doctors of fear-mongering vaccine safety and misinformation for not taking this into account…and yet the same faulty methods and logic has been used in counting Covid deaths, suspected covid deaths, suspected Covid deaths without any test…and deaths that occurred naturally days, weeks, months after recovery from Covid. The hypocrisy of this should be glaringly obvious Dr. Sean.
And we have yet to even touch the subject of these PCR tests…thats a whole other issue. Unprecedentedly high cycle thresholds being used for PCR tests. A Ct of 40?! A recent study (Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/11/e921/5912603) shows exactly the concern that many health science experts have been criticizing…and only now has the CDC started to listen to. Comparing PCR results to cultures, the accuracy of the PCR test to accurately predict a positive at Ct=25 was shown to be just 70%. So already, all of our data is at risk of being off by at least 30%. Deaths…cases…all of it. Considerably lower.
Above Ct=30 accuracy fell to 20% and above Ct=35 accuracy was below 3%. And yet the CDC guidance was to ramp it up to 40 cycles. This is exactly what experts have been trying to signal, but has been absent of media coverage, if not altogether censored.
And yet we’ve been testing people at cycle thresholds well above 30 and 35, so you do the math on how accurate we really think our data is.
Previous to the pandemic the norm was Ct between 25-30. Interestingly that the CDC has quietly capped the Ct for vaccinated people getting tested at 28. That;s a heck of a lot below a Ct of 40. Not only that, but 3 times revised guidance in late 2020 (as the vaccines were getting ready to be released) to cull the number of positives, by saying that the clinical observation should match the PCR…if it doesn’t…another test should be taken and emphasized that the PCR should ONLY BE USED AS AN AID. Yet for almost a year it was our primary mechanism of counting Covid this whole time…and at a Ct of 40 no less. Surely you are aware of all of this, right?
There is only one affect that this could possibly have if you went back and applied this new standard of measurement (Ct=28) to all previous cases and deaths counted…even after accounting for “law of large numbers” and subtracting out “random chances”….all of a sudden this fear mongering looks a lot less necessary overall. Much, much lower numbers of deaths and of cases attributed to Covid for sure…a much more survivable virus overall.
For many people accusing folks like Dr Stock of spreading misinformation…of whom I’d venture to guess 70% of the country never saw or heard of…I’m inclined to think that it’s all a distraction to pick apart petty disagreements of medical nuance vs the plethora of the more damaging misinformation that has spread from our own CDC of whom the entire country and world is listening to and has unfortunately been parroted by health experts out of a blind over-abundance of trust. The gap continues to widen between their messaging and the current data, but even more telling is what is happening with their quiet reversal of testing policies and means of measurement. Some may think the CDC are all a part of a greater conspiracy, but I’m more inclined to think it’s just pure incompetence.
