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Posts tagged ‘death rates’

Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: Portugal as an enduring embarrassment of the failure of the mass vaccination campaign


Commentary by Daniel Horowitz | June 09, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/portugal-as-an-enduring-embarrassment-of-the-failure-of-the-mass-vaccination-campaign-2657482411.html/

Next week, the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet to likely offer emergency use authorization for Moderna and Pfizer’s biological products to be injected into babies as young as six months old. No amount of evidence demonstrating negative efficacy and enormous side effects will factor into its decision. Never mind the fact that there never was an emergency for young children to begin with, and there certainly isn’t one now.

Yet the FDA will undoubtedly approve a shot that has failed and is outdated – so much so that two weeks later, it will meet about updating the formula for new variants, of course, after having injected the outdated formula into the arms of babies and toddlers. One data point that certainly will be missing from the meeting is the observation about Portugal.

According to Statista, Portugal has the highest vaccination rate of any country in Europe aside from the tiny island of Malta. Nearly every adult is vaccinated in this nation of 10.3 million, 94% of all people (including young children) have received at least 1 dose, and 70% have received boosters. In fact, the New York Times ran an article about Portugal last year, noting that “there is no one left to vaccinate” there.

Yet, Portugal now has the highest case rate and COVID death rate per capita in Europe and the second highest COVID fatality rate in the world behind Taiwan, according to Our World in Data.

Here is the case rate map of Europe:

And here is the death rate map:

At 2,293 cases per 1 million individuals, as of June 7, Portugal’s 7-day rolling average case rate is seven times greater than that of the United States and is now higher than the worst peak of cases in America. Moreover, it’s not that Portugal never had a big wave – it has already experienced a peak in the winter that was three times as great as the worst days in the U.S. So even after many people already had the virus, officials keep testing positive for the virus despite – or perhaps, because of – the near universal vaccination rate.

It is true that Portugal has a high rate of testing, but not that much higher to account for exponentially higher case rates. As of June 1, Portugal’s positivity rate was nearly four times that of the U.S.

Then there are the COVID deaths. At 4.1 deaths per million, Portugal is now far outpacing all the other European countries with high case rates by over 60%. Its current death rate is more than four times that of the U.S. This simply should not be happening now that everyone is vaccinated and everyone who is vulnerable is boosted if the shots are anywhere near as effective as we are told.

The Portugal News reported that between May 24 and May 30, the southern European nation “recorded 175,766 infections, 220 deaths associated with COVID-19, and an increase in hospitalizations and intensive care.” Health Minister Marta Temido said last week that “Portugal is probably the European country with the highest prevalence of this sub-lineage and this partly explains the high number (of cases) we are seeing.”

But that really doesn’t explain it. Why would Portugal have a much worse problem with these variants than the country in which they were first detected — namely South Africa? Is this not a fulfillment of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche’s warning that the sub-optimal evolutionary pressure of these shots, originally designed for the Wuhan strain, would work against the body for future variants?

Let’s a take a look at South Africa’s BA.4/BA.5 wave from late May as compared to Portugal’s? Can you even detect it?

South Africa’s recent peak, which is now over with, was one-twentieth the size of Portugal’s – and this is after Portugal already had exponentially more cases from the previous wave. However, even as it relates to death rates, the afflicted country is outpacing South Africa.

Keep in mind that Portugal is still experiencing higher death rates even after having already incurred a lot of deaths from the original pool of vulnerable people during the first winter. It simply makes no sense for Portugal to be experiencing this many deaths with Omicron, which does not replicate well in the lungs. Remember, while Portugal has run out of people to vaccinate, according to the New York Times, less than a third of South Africans are vaccinated with very few having had boosters. Also, South Africa’s life expectancy is 18 years lower, and 20% of the population has AIDS.

For how much longer is the FDA going to be allowed to ignore a year’s worth of signals not just indicating cataclysmic safety concerns but negative efficacy – and downright perpetuation – of the virus? Just look at this week’s Walgreens COVID-19 testing index, and you can once again see that higher positivity rates are associated with those with more shots, especially as time goes on.

The mendacity of obfuscating the truth about these shots has gotten so ludicrous that the media and medical associations are now chalking up the rash of sudden cardiac deaths among young people as an unexplained “sudden adult death syndrome.” And now they want to inject these products into the final group of unvarnished children. What does that say about who we are as a people if we let it happen?

In the New York Times article from October crowing about “no one left to vaccinate” in Portugal, Laura Sanches, a Portuguese clinical psychologist, is quoted as bemoaning the fact that Portugal doesn’t “really have a culture of questioning authorities.” Well, here in America, we once did have such a culture. Reagan once said that “freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things,” an understanding “that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions … to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people.” Will we finally exercise that freedom?

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Health

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Horowitz: The CDC confirms remarkably low coronavirus death rate. Where is the media?


Most people are more likely to wind up six feet under because of almost anything else under the sun other than COVID-19.

The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.

Until now, we have been ridiculed for thinking the death rate was that low, as opposed to the 3.4% estimate of the World Health Organization, which helped drive the panic and the lockdowns. Now the CDC is agreeing to the lower rate in plain ink. Plus, ultimately we might find out that the IFR is even lower because numerous studies and hard counts of confined populations have shown a much higher percentage of asymptomatic cases. Simply adjusting for a 50% asymptomatic rate would drop their fatality rate to 0.2% – exactly the rate of fatality Dr. John Ionnidis of Stanford University projected.

More importantly, as I mentioned before, the overall death rate is meaningless because the numbers are so lopsided. Given that at least half of the deaths were in nursing homes, a back-of-the-envelope estimate would show that the infection fatality rate for non-nursing home residents would only be 0.1% or 1 in 1,000. And that includes people of all ages and all health statuses outside of nursing homes. Since nearly all of the deaths are those with comorbidities.

The CDC estimates the death rate from COVID-19 for those under 50 is 1 in 5,000 for those with symptoms, which would be 1 in 6,725 overall, but again, almost all those who die have specific comorbidities or underlying conditions. Those without them are more likely to die in a car accident. And schoolchildren, whose lives, mental health, and education we are destroying, are more likely to get struck by lightning.

To put this in perspective, one Twitter commentator juxtaposed the age-separated infection fatality rates in Spain to the average yearly probability of dying of anything for the same age groups, based on data from the Social Security Administration. He used Spain because we don’t have a detailed infection fatality rate estimate for each age group from any survey in the U.S. However, we know that Spain fared worse than almost every other country. This data is actually working with a top-line IFR of 1%, roughly four times what the CDC estimates for the U.S., so if anything, the corresponding numbers for the U.S. will be lower.

As you can see, even in Spain, the death rates from COVID-19 for younger people are very low and are well below the annual death rate for any age group in a given year. For children, despite their young age, they are 10-30 times more likely to die from other causes in any given year.

While obviously yearly death rates factor in myriad of causes of death and COVID-19 is just one virus, it still provides much-needed perspective to a public policy response that is completely divorced from the risk for all but the oldest and sickest people in the country.

Also, keep in mind, these numbers represent your chance of dying once you have already contracted the virus, aka the infection fatality rate. Once you couple the chance of contracting the virus in the first place together with the chance of dying from it, many younger people have a higher chance of dying from a lightning strike.

Four infectious disease doctors in Canada estimate that the individual rate of death from COVID-19 for people under 65 years of age is six per million people, or 0.0006 per cent – 1 in 166,666, which is “roughly equivalent to the risk of dying from a motor vehicle accident during the same time period.” These numbers are for Canada, which did have fewer deaths per capita than the U.S.; however, if you take New York City and its surrounding counties out of the equation, the two countries are pretty much the same. Also, remember, so much of the death is associated with the suicidal political decisions of certain states and countries to place COVID-19 patients in nursing homes. An astounding 62 percent of all COVID-19 deaths were in the six states confirmed to have done this, even though they only compose 18 percent of the national population.

We destroyed our entire country and suspended democracy all for a lie, and these people perpetrated the unscientific degree of panic. Will they ever admit the grave consequences of their error?

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