Rochelle Walensky: Not With a Bang but a Puddle of Tears

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Rochelle Walensky is ending her sorry tenure as Director of the CDC with an admission of failure: crying at the staff meeting announcing her exit. And the Biden Administration isn’t trying to cover for her apparent defenestation: an abrupt announcement (albeit with an “in control of her destiny” end date of June 30), no nice speech and analogue to a gold watch, no fawning or at least supportive press stories. A tell came in the Washington Post: White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, who the Post depicted as having been frustrated with her when he was Covid coordinator, had met with her earlier in the year to discuss her future with the Administration. ‘Nuff said. If she’d been doing a good job at the CDC, there would be every reasons to keep her on.

The current pervasive and pathetic weakness among senior bureaucrats and soi disant political leaders is a weird impediment to working up the lava-hot fury warranted for the colossal harm they’ve inflicted. During and after the financial crisis, yours truly and others ran the register on outrage against its gallery of rogues like Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, HUD chief Shuan Donovan, and their media enablers such as Andrew Ross Sorkin and Adam Davidson.

The financial crisis arsonists as rescuers at least projected competence and were working to exhaustion trying to patch up failing finance machinery. By contrast, we called out Walensky as not being up to her job at the outset (see The CDC’s Mission Impossible). There’s no evidence she’d managed anything much bigger than her desk before becoming head of a 21,000 person agency. She was touted as “head of infectious diseases” at the prestigious Mass General. But Mass General org charts, which show an impressively large number of boxes for units, didn’t have one for “infectious diseases” or anything remotely like that. So this appears to have been a title for grant-soliciting purposes, and not an operating role. Perhaps she did run some studies where she oversaw large teams. That’s not the same as running a large or even medium sized unit, where you have to worry about things like policy, long-term objectives, staff recruitment and development, budgets, and turf wars.1

Walensky played a major role, arguably larger Anthony Fauci, in destroying faith in public health and vaccines in particular. Walensky lead the agency tasked with collecting data about diseases and drug performance, particularly vaccines. That included, critically, the now-infamous VAERS, where IM Doc reported at length examples of non-medically trained administrators rejecting his reports (including of a vaccine death) and second-hand reports from colleagues and former students of similar rejections.2 Because IM Doc had been on the front lines during the early AIDS outbreak, had a father who was a public health official and was Mind you, this came despite promising to do better on the transparency front. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, based on an exclusive interview:

The CDC will hold regular press briefings, release current data, and will announce changes in recommendations, said Dr. Walensky, who is moving on Friday to Atlanta, where the CDC is based. “There will be way more communication, the science will be out there,” she said.

But Walensky herself later admitted to not even reviewing critical underlying data. From early March 2022:

From IM Doc via e-mail:

This is the classic example of the final common pathway of the “evidence-based medicine” approach and how it can go really bad. This is the kind of thinking I will never let a student get away with. But it is so commonplace in our era of EBM. Big Pharma does all the number work – we just repeat. Anything in a journal or on TV is fully vetted evidence. No thinking needed. The hard work of really crunching numbers is no longer valued.

This, however, is not a student. This is the director of the CDC. I am overwhelmed with rage.

”When the CNN feed came with it was 95% effective, so many of us wanted it to be helpful, so many of us wanted to say, “this is our ticket out”.

The CNN feed? Are you kidding me? The CDC director is relying on the CNN feed to alert her to one of the most monumental medical issues in history? And the 95% effective part? Did the CDC director not go to the source documents and do the research herself. I certainly did. Even at this late date, does the CDC director not understand the concept of a relative risk reduction and its limitations. Would the CDC director like to acknowledge how many of my colleagues were censored or timed out by Facebook and Twitter for spreading vaccine misinformation because they were simply trying to alert their patients and friends that the media was grossly misreporting what the 95% meant. And while they were censoring those who were competent, she tells us all in this clip, “we had too little caution and too much optimism…”

This is every bit as bad as it looks. Walensky didn’t even task a subordinate to look at the research and give her a write-up. And the worst is she clearly has no idea how bad this makes her look, that she was perfectly willing to base her campaign on cherry-picked Big Pharma data laundered though the media.3

It’s hard to know where to begin with the litany of horrors that can be pinned on Walensky, as opposed to the “all in on vaccines” Biden strategy devised before she stepped into the CDC role (although she implicitly accepted that). Walensky clearly and loudly propagated the myth that getting vaccinated prevented infection and therefore contagion. This started early on, as documented in a March 2021 missive from IM Doc:

Then yesterday we were all offered the director of the CDC crying, admitting she had an impending sense of doom, and telling us all how afraid she is. A mere 24 hours later today on the news feeds I am watching – there is the self same CDC director stating – “Our data from the CDC today demonstrate conclusively that vaccinated people do not carry the virus.” Of course the running chyron on the bottom of the TV is screaming that multiple dozens of fully vaccinated patients in Orlando are now positive – and ill – and somewhere in America multiple fully vaccinated seniors in a nursing home have become positive for the virus in a large outbreak. Literally right under her face while she is stating this.

Here you see her encouraging super-spreading over that Memorial Day:

Even worse, she was all-in with the demonization of the unvaccinated, and attributed mask-wearing (a continued important precaution regardless) with an admission of being among the sinning, and presumed dangerous unvaxxed by depicting continued mask wearing as a scarlet letter:

And one wag added re Walensky’s dig:

And let us not forget, that Walensky went all in with the Biden Administration early May 2022 “Mission Accomplished” which included telling the vaccinated to take off their masks and go out and spread Covid. She had to reverse that within two months when the CDC discovered that the viral load for Delta for the vaccinated and unvaccinated was virtually the same, which the CDC took as a proxy for how contagious they would be. The CDC tried to reverse gears and recommend masking, but after having been lukewarm about it and then treating it as unnecessary, the public was in no mood for advice flip-flops.

And that’s before getting to the CDC fail on recommending proper mask wearing, and for Delta and Omicron, the need for at least a KN95 and better yet, an N95. NYC cabs were full of signs showing proper mask wearing. By contrast, when my mother was hospitalized before death over Christmas 2021, I saw non-mask wearing doctors, nurses wearing masks below their noses, and her MD pulling his mask down to speak to her when she had COPD and was on oxygen.

Walensky was also all in on misrepresenting vaccine efficacy. She never questioned mandates based on the false premise that the vaccinated could not spread the virus.4 Neither she nor anyone in the public health officialdom acknowledged that getting Covid also conferred some short term immunity, which per the UK’s large scale REACT population surveys before there were any vaccines (as in a clean control) showed disease-conferred immunity to be about as durable as the immunity from the initial round of shots.5 This also led to objections by those who had a recent documented case of Covid why they were required according to the Federal mandates, eventually successfully challenged in court, to get vaccinated immediately, as opposed to an interval after their case.

That led an additional and large fail, the effort to deny vaccine injuries by rejecting MD submitted entries to the VAERS database and demonizing those who described their own likely vaccine-created problems as anti-vaxxers.

As IM Doc said via e-mail in April 2022. Forgive the length but IM Doc is a clinician and therefore believes in detail:

In early January of this year, in my own patients, I began to notice in COVID vaccinated patients a small number of folks who were having significant complications from various blood clotting issues…As has been my usual practice when there is a problem like this, I began following the VAERS system very carefully. And to my great concern, I saw a very large number of cases of death and complications that were similar to what I was seeing. And the ratio of complications was quite startling – 100-200 times or so more than the control group of 2020 flu vaccines. The VAERS system is currently reporting over 3000 deaths related to the Pfizer, Moderna and COVID vaccines. The numbers in the European registries are almost exactly in line with this as well. I would guess from a simple perusal that about half these reports – both death and morbidity – are directly related to blood clotting issues.

VAERS is never a system that is meant to be perfectly accurate – but having a 100-200X difference in mortality rates should be attention-getting to everyone in medicine. And yet instead of addressing this issue head-on, our medical leaders continued right on with the party line that EVERYTHING IS SAFE and GOING SWIMMINGLY – nothing to see here. There were days that I felt like I was living in The Twilight Zone.

Because the nation’s medical leadership was not addressing the problems, others noticed the VAERS reporting and started to publicize….

My grim job this week was to report a vaccine related death to the authorities. I have had to do this type of reporting on other occasions in my career, with other drugs, both approved and research trials, with both deaths and morbid complications. In every single instance in the past, without exception, I have been contacted within 1-2 hours by either the FDA or the CDC. They questioned me, discussed the particulars with me, and a collaboration was begun.

This death was much different.

A little about the patient situation. She had her vaccine about 8 AM on a weekday. It was the 2nd shot. About noon, she called the office stating that she was feeling electric shocks over her entire body but especially her face. I told her to lay down and to have her daughter come over to watch her. About 3-4 hours later, the daughter called stating the patient had awoken from a nap and had profoundly slurred speech and could not stand up. I told them to immediately go to the ER. I will not go into details here but suffice it to say, she was having a profound neurologic problem. It was not a simple stroke. She was diagnosed with a condition that is very very unusual and is often associated with vaccine administration. She had 5 weeks of very severe pain and did not recover. She was eventually placed on hospice and passed away. Before she died, she told me to make sure that everyone knows that these vaccines are not as safe as advertised…

I am a licensed physician in a US State. I am Board Certified in Internal Medicine. I made every effort to immediately report this death to the federal officials. I called the FDA and ended up in voicemail hell. I called the CDC and was literally hung up on twice. Again, please contrast that reception to what I describe above in previous “non-crisis” years. After multiple attempts, I finally decided to report to VAERS. This was almost a week ago. To date, the VAERS has no record of my patient. All that I have received is an email to confirm my submission….

What am I trying to say? The system is broken. Therefore, we have no idea what is the actual safety around this vaccine. The patients who have been affected know it. Word is getting out that there are problems. Social media is filled with all kinds of stories. And our federal officials keep right on with the same “All is well – everything is safe” mantra. We have media figures everywhere spouting out safety numbers that I can assure you are not accurate. All in an environment when they are trying to convince as many as possible to take this vaccine.

IM Doc gave regular updates on the run-around on merely getting this case entered into the VAERS database. Finally:

Someone from VAERS did just call my office. It was an administrative level person. I initially reported this case on APRIL 12th. It is now MAY 19th – so we are going on 6 weeks later.

That is better than nothing.

She was basically requesting where she could get medical records.

She also had 2 questions for me –

Was the patient depressed at a baseline? – their investigator had looked over my report and written in his section that if the patient was depressed there was no way the vaccine was involved.

Issue #2 – She wanted to know my definition of Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome. Although very clearly associated with herpes zoster reactivation in every case – (there is a severe shingles outbreak over the ears and temples) she reported to me that this was not one of their vaccine related complications in their omnibus database – and was likely to be dismissed out of hand. I asked her if shingles was on their list – and she said absolutely – that is an obvious well-known vaccine complication. I informed her that Ramsay Hunt is a very severe shingles manifestation – and is 100% a horrific type of shingles.

I was then politely informed that their investigator did not agree with that assessment but thank you for your input.

I then asked her what the medical qualifications of the investigator were and I would love to talk to them – I was informed that they did not have qualifications (not an RN MD DO or MPH – or whatever) just an administrator that had been there for a long time.

I feel a sense of despair. I have done everything possible that I could and I am just going to have to let it lie. This is absolutely an example of the absolute joke we are dealing with in every way with the epidemiology and care these people are taking.

I will reiterate – I have had to report things to the CDC/FDA on multiple occasions in my life. It has never taken this long to respond – and I have always been communicating with an MD or MPH or RN – someone who knew what they were doing – and more importantly what I was talking about.

This is a new day in America.

Mind you, even if these negligent practices didn’t start on Walensky’s watch, she owned them by virtue of having no interest in fixing them. And the clear subtext of this communication to IM Doc is that the only vaccine problems that will be considered are one that fit their Procrustean bed of acceptable.

The reason this sort of wholesale rejection of cases (and medical institution self-censoring6) is bad is not just that is leads to understating Covid vaccine risks. It ALSO leads to failure to identify how vaccine risks can be mitigated.

For instance:

There is effectively no testing of whether anyone who gets vaccinated had a recent Covid case. Even under wild type, half the cases were guesstimated to be asymptomatic. That ratio is likely to be at least as high under Omicron. At home tests have a very high rate of false negatives. It’s possible that a considerable proportion of Covid vaccine injuries is due to administering the vaccines too close to an unrecognized infection, overtaxing the immune and potentially other systems.

Some have argued that vaccine problems could result from bad batches. If that were happening, it would be possible to identify that and prevent recurrence, But can’t detect that very well with delayed and incomplete reporting.

Some have suggested vaccine maladministration as a cause, particularly mistakenly injecting the vaccine into a vein. Again, crappy information capture means that can’t be dismissed as one of the causes.

Good data capture would also make it possible to isolate if particularly populations seem to be having bad outcomes at high rates. Again, with good data it might be possible to see if it was merely demographic or whether other factors, like medications or even dietary supplements could be co-factors.

Lambert has chronicled another aspect of the Walensky/CDC failure in nauseating detail in Water Cooler: the terrible job they’ve done of tracking cases, including not even providing a mechanism for reporting positive cases with the lousy home test kits.

It does not seem to be too cynical to attribute this behavior to a desire to treat the vaccines as a magic bullet to get everyone back to work, partying, and vacationing. A telling factoid from IM Doc in August 2021:

I was informed today by the Health Dept that they have absolutely zero way of tracking correctly vaccinated cases. In that they do not have the ability to retrospectively find out which vaccination the person has had. So there is no way the CDC will be having this kind of detail, unless other states are doing this. I seriously kind of doubt it.

And that’s before choosing to know nothing about variants either. Due to the hour, I won’t look it up, but the US was at the bottom among advanced economies in sequencing capabilities, and by a large margin. We’re flying blind on many fronts.

This list is getting long so sadly we are forced to give short shrift on sins of omission. Again, Lambert has documented in exhaustive detail how the CDC had stuck to droplet theory and neglected masking, ventilation, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. The likely explanation for much lower Covid rates across all of comparatively poor Southeast Asia is they regard masking as polite and therefore continue to practice it at much higher rates than we do.

Walensky also operated on the “one set of rules for me and my class, another for everyone else”. She worked at home during much of Covid, from Newton, Mass, which is certainly not very motivating to CDC staff in Atlanta, particularly the ones not afforded that luxury (think at a minimum sys admin types). She also took 17 days off for her Covid case at a time when the CDC guidelines for isolation had been cut to 5 days. I can confirm many nurses who reported getting sick were told to come back to work if they still wanted to have a job.

Walensky and her ilk were also clueless by design about lousy vaccine uptake among low-income, often essential workers and first attributed the limited participation to lack of access, then the catch-all, “hesitancy”. Gee, if this was really so important, did you not work out that getting a shot for most resulted in not being able to work for a day or two due to the intensity of a routine reaction? And people in hourly jobs don’t have the luxury of not turning up? How about mandating that employers give vaccine days off and providing hourly workers directly with income replacement if they won’t get paid for missed work? The failure to consider obvious issues like that shows an inability to manage their way out of a paper bag.

Not quite last, we have Walensky seeming not to understand that public health is a state responsibility and she was ever and always going to have to work through and with state public health officials. Perhaps it was not well reported, but I see no evidence of outreach. A little interaction buys a lot of good will. Regular Zoom calls, better yet in person visits (with heavy duty masking) would have increased her and the CDC’s cred in the heartlands. Even more important, had she been willing to listen (a dubious proposition), she might have been forced to reconsider some of her priorities.

Finally, the crying. It’s one thing for a woman to cry (say as an alternative to lashing out) because they are overwhelmed. It’s still extremely poor conduct in a boss and warrants an apology to the staff later for dumping your inability to cope on them.

I have zero sympathy. Women crying in a workplace is typically, whether conscious or not, a gambit to have people stop holding them accountable or make demands on them. It’s a classic strategy for someone about to be reprimanded to get the manager to back off. For Walensky to resort to this sort of thing confirms her poor leadership skills. She expects to get a waiver when things get rough. That’s not an option during a crisis.

So I’m glad to see her gone. Sadly she will continue to fail upward, certainly in monetary terms. Expect a cushy NGO board or director position in her future.

____

1 After this post went live, Lambert found that Mass General now presents itself as having an Infectious Diseases Division, despite my inabilty to find any information about it whatsoever despite diligent searching on the Mass General site in 2021. One wonders if this came about due to others independently finding no evidence that Mass General admitted to its existence when Walensky was elevated to the CDC. It show 17 employees, including a web designer (although one runs a clinic and another, two “centers”). This is still not a large group, so our general observations still stand.

We did point out then:

Some people step up successfully to battlefield promotions. A high profile example was when Elizabeth Warren started up the CFPB. There was nothing in her background to suggest that she could execute an administrative task of that magnitude, let alone in six months. But this is an even bigger skill jump.

2 Because IM Doc had been on the front lines during the early AIDS outbreak, had a father who was a public health official and was active in commenting on news and research, and particularly the misdeeds of the CDC, I mined his e-mails for the to find the low points of Walensky’s tenure. There was so much material a great deal was left on the cutting room floor.

3 Recall that the 95% efficacy was not against infection but against “serious disease” and death. Those were not end points for the clinical trial. The focus on that measure is an admission the vaccines underperformed on the original targets.

4 Recall, for instance, NYC opening restaurants and bars to the vaccinated, and businesses requiring either the presentation of a vaccine card or mask-wearing.

5 Antibody levels in the REACT surveys suggested pretty good immunity for at least six months; the carefully-kept data in Israel, a Pfizer monoculture, showed real world immunity of five to six mo

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75 comments

  1. H. Alexander Ivey

    crying at her last staff meeting

    Not on point of the blog, but dang it women, you must learn to resign dry eyed. Walensky, the Premier of NZ, and that Scottish person, Sturgeon, all weeped.
    WTF?!?
    Be emotional, yes, but like Nixon: Mr you-won’t-have-me-to-kick-around… then 4 years later he’s President.
    Jee-louisee…

  2. John R Moffett

    All of the federal agencies have been captured by the oligarchs, so it would be expected at the CDC which would obviously be the focus of big pharma. Once captured, agencies such as the CDC become non-functional, which was the whole purpose of capturing them in the first place.

      1. jsn

        Yes, Disease Control for profit, better managed from some Center somewhere.

        There is no higher principle than “profit”.

        The Oligarchy has made itself a death cult.

        1. some guy

          Actually, ” Jackpot” comes higher than “profit”. “Profit” is a very close second.

          Of course they hope to profitise the Jackpot all the way down. But on this one point let us be clear. There will be Jackpot. ( Unless a vast mass uprising can Jackpot all the oligarchs and their willing helpers first).

  3. Pavel

    Let’s not forget other sins of omission. Nothing about recommending Vitamin D (many if not most people have low levels regardless of covid issues) or sponsoring studies on it. (Or other potential cheap pharmaceuticals e.g. nattokinase.) And to my recollection *zero* serious advice on losing weight and its importance. Just compare the Japanese vs US covid mortality rates and think about the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

    The CDC’s legacy is creating a new generation of vaccine and pharma skeptics. Brava, Rachel!

    1. zagonostra

      The CDC’s legacy is creating a new generation of vaccine and pharma skeptics.

      Well at least in my eyes, that’s a good thing. But, It won’t last. Next pandemic/epidemic will come along and they will use the carrot (free ice cream) and then threatening you (“you want to work here don’t you?”) with losing livelihood, people won’t remember, they’ll just push to the front of the line and do and take whatever they are told to do or take.

      Fear is the mind killer to quote Frank Herbert. It works every time, count on it.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        Pharma yes, vaccines no.

        The big problem is these Covid vaccines, which have been super widely administered. No respiratory virus vaccine has ever been very successful. Nasal vaccines would probably do better but they have been de-emphasized.

        Having said that it is important to note the other very hyped vaccine, the flu shot, has on average not very good efficacy but at least seems to do no harm. And on top of that, some studies have found that taking it LESS often produces better results.

        I do have a big pet peeve about overtesting and overprescribing, I feel like a one-woman vigilante v. health care costs. Recently I had a workup and they saw I had no Hep B antibodies, which = never having been vaccinated, Much consternation over that, as if I should of course get the vaccine now.

        Huh? At my age? Go look at how you contract Hep B and get back to me. When I was having casual sex it might have been a good idea (even then was careful re condoms) but those days are long past.

        1. Arizona Slim

          My mother got the flu from a flu shot. Believe me, that was the last flu shot she ever took, and Yours Truly has never had one.

          1. Other JL

            My understanding is this used to happen when live-attenuated flu vaccines were in use, but shouldn’t any longer as only deactivated virus flu vaccines are available (in the USA).

            I consider this yet another own-goal by health administrators who think people can’t handle the truth on their own. People should know this information because it’s important in deciding if a vaccine is appropriate (both yes and no, live-attenuated vaccines are still used for some other diseases). Instead we get whitewash “vaccines can’t cause illness” competing with personal experience.

          2. Jason Boxman

            I generally had a poor reaction to the flu shot when I’d gotten it, but whoever administered it would always robotically remind me that you cannot get the flu from the flu shot. No one seemed to believe it might, you know, have some kind of side effects. With the Pandemic, I don’t bother, because it’s hard to get infected when you never leave the house or ever interact with another human unmasked.

            1. LifelongLib

              I’ve had what you might call mild flu-like symptoms after the flu shot, but luckily not a full-blown case.

              CVS sent me a text the other day about getting another covid booster, supposedly something the CDC authorized.

          3. Robert Gray

            Slim

            > My mother got the flu from a flu shot. Believe me, that was the last flu shot
            > she ever took, and Yours Truly has never had one.

            Back in 1976-77, I worked for a spell as a telephone-answering clerk paper-shuffler in a small clinic. (I was not then and never became a health care professional.) That winter there was a big epidemic — swine flu, if I remember correctly. Our lab tech, who was very serious and also very nice, wanted to do a pre- and post-vaccination blood analysis so she recruited as many of us as she could to give her the two requisite samples. I played along and had absolutely no complications of any kind. Unfortunately, that was not the case with one of our nurses. The night after she was vaccinated, she got clobbered by that flu. Of course, she knew what was happening and she knew what to do but when she came back to work however many days later, the horror stories she told were absolutely dreadful. Was it enough to make her renounce such vaccines forever? I don’t know but somehow I doubt it.

            1. Arizona Slim

              One of my mother’s teaching colleagues took the swine flu shot during that mid-1970s epidemic. She developed Guillain-Barre syndrome, and, according to Mom, had a very lengthy recovery.

              1. flora

                I remember that time and remember then pres Gerald Ford heralding the swine flu vacs. Being young and healthy I decided to wait. Don’t know why. Something about the sales pitch I guess. Glad I waited. From BBC back then.

                The fiasco of the 1976 ‘swine flu affair’

                https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200918-the-fiasco-of-the-us-swine-flu-affair-of-1976

                It was a lesson to me then that I’ve never forgotten.

                (Note to anyone who thinks I’m a dyed-in-the-wool anti, no. I’ve had every time tested vacs you can think of, including yellow fever (yes, I have my yellow card), cholera and typhoid vacs from when I was young and traveling in tropical out of the way places.)

                1. flora

                  adding: my wonderful old family doc always managed to impart a bit of med wisdom even in simple talk to us kids when we went in for a tetanus shot or a check up or whatever.

                  Maybe my recognition of the disconnect between his many earlier comments about medicine and the full on swine flue sales pitch then going was the thing making me wait. Who knows.

                  He was a great doc. He practiced well before the age of PE and EHR.

              2. Yves Smith Post author

                Yes, and they very quickly pulled that vaccine. IM Doc describes how his father was on the front lines then.

                There was also a batch of bad polio vaccines.

                The officials recognized the the paramount trust of keeping public trust in vaccines and being hypervigiliant over any signs of bad effects. Not now.

        2. Ed S.

          Yves,

          My quick story on vaccines and “oh, you need this now”:

          Several years ago went for an annual physical (large NorCal teaching hospital); at the end the physician walks in with a syringe and says, “OK, going to give you the Shingles vaccine”.

          I replied, “Never had chicken pox. And Red Cross always wants my blood because I don’t have some virus so it can be transfused to children. I think it’s because I don’t have the chicken pox virus.”
          Physician, “Well even if you never had the chicken pox, I’m sure you have the virus.”
          Me: “Well why don’t you find out if that’s true”.
          Physician: “OK I’ll have it tested. But if you don’t have the virus then you’re getting the chicken pox vaccine”.

          Test result – no chicken pox virus. Have no idea what a Shingles vaccine would do if I’ve never had chicken pox (and don’t want to find out).

          As I’m a 60+ guy, no kids or grandkids and virtually no interaction with children, there was no way I was getting a chicken pox vaccine. And needless to say, my last visit to that physician.

      2. flora

        “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

        ― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forget

        I won’t forget this 3-year episode.

    2. harrybothered

      >And to my recollection *zero* serious advice on losing weight and its importance.

      Wouldn’t that interfere with the food/big ag lobby?
      There’s some sugar in everything we buy pre-packaged from the shelves of the grocery store. 15 years ago I noticed sugar in chicken broth. This year it’s spread to my Kraft mayonnaise. It’s in everything and, if you don’t have time to cook from scratch everyday with unprocessed foods, you can’t avoid it.

      I remember a video I saw where two researchers were telling the food companies the results of the research they’d done that the food companies themselves had commissioned. They told them that it was their products that were leading to the increase in obesity in the American population. The food companies rejected that saying that they offered the consumer choices and it wasn’t their fault and responsibility. I believe it was from the late 70’s or early 80’s.
      I looked for the video on YouTube but couldn’t find it. :(

        1. Pavel

          Thanks, harrybothered, for your very insightful comment! It is spot on.

          I was never overweight or even chubby (thank goodness). At my peak I was 89.9 kg following several weeks eating too much food on a Singaporean/Malaysian holiday. My height is 1.88m.

          For the last 3 or 4 years I have been following an intermittent fasting regime (“16/8” and sometimes “18/6” and occasionally “20/4”). Apart from holidays and travels I had pretty much a 100% fasting success rate. My current weight is 77 kg. As other IF followers will attest, one rarely if ever feels hungry. The other week I fasted 2.5 days (water only) and felt fine. I was walking for 30 minutes or an hour each day but (shamefully!) did no regular exercise due to various constraints.

          All this is to say that weight loss is possible, and I recommend looking up Sten Ekberg’s videos on YouTube and especially reading the comments. Ekberg notes as well (as does harrybothered above) that Big Gov works hand in hand with Big Ag and Big Pharma basically to keep people obese. (Cf allowing food stamp participants to buy Coke and other sodas — probably the No 1 dietary poison in the world) in response to junk food lobby bribes and threats.

          Here is Ekberg discussing a NEJM article reviewing the benefits of IF. Again, read the comments by people who achieved significant weight loss.

          Of course there are numerous ways to lose weight successfully. One first step is to convince the overweight and obese that it can be done — without pharmaceuticals — and give them incentives and encouragement. The CDC, FDA, and others seem to be doing precisely the opposite.

          (Of course the other huge problem in the US is the size of food portions and the “all you can eat buffet” culture. European and Japanese friends who visit the US are shocked by how much people eat at a single meal.

          1. harrybothered

            My ex-husband liked All-You-Can-Eat Buffets. We went to CiCi’s Pizza in Lubbock, TX one time back in the early 2000s and I saw the fattest people I’d ever seen in my life up to that point. One diner had a plate full of discarded pizza crusts as I guess he only ate the toppings. His partner had an ENTIRE plate piled full of cookies. I personally thought the pizza was terrible so hubby went by himself thereafter.

          2. flora

            I like the research and theory behind IF, which in layman’s terms if I understand it correctly is that 14-16-18 hours without any food, sugar or cream in coffee or tea, etc allows the body’s insulin level to fall to its natural baseline. At the first meal after 14-18 hours of no food the body’s insulin level rises from baseline instead of rising from a still elevated level. I think I’ve got that right. This is good for health (letting insulin fall to baseline every day) and weight loss (no calories for 12-14-or more hours). (Noting that type one diabetes is a different insulin situation regarding a body’s natural insulin levels.)

            It makes sense to me. I’m not a medico.

        2. JBird4049

          It is even harder when they keep putting increasing amounts of sugar into food, which means even eating the same amount still means eating more calories. It is even worse when it is the affordable food that gets the most corn syrup.

          1. some guy

            Here is an example of anecdata I read here and there about how Europeans who come to America for even a little while start gaining fat on the more fatogenic food here.
            https://strommeninc.com/do-europeans-gain-weight-when-they-move-to-the-us/

            Making food from scratch can be hard. It can be harder when one is descended from several generations of strategic and tactical information denial and destruction aimed to strip Americans of food preparing skills and knowledge. A culture-rebellion might involve learning how to make some from-scratch things quickly and easily, involving cutting up and mixing whatever to begin with and then letting it simmer unwatched for hours in a crock pot.

            The Democratic Socialists of America could achieve some real good by handing out crockpots and simple food-making instructions and teaching in the spirit of their brake-light clinics. It is unfair to ask poor and time-stressed people to make their own good food in the teeth of a system designed to make them eat crisco, white flour and high fructose corn syrup ( with natural and artificial flavoring agents). But the only non-disease-o-genic food the poor and the time-stressed will ever get is the food they can make for themselves and/or eachother in the teeth of a society designed to prevent them from getting it.

      1. Rip Van Winkle

        I remember which product types were the biggest commercial sponsors of The Saturday Morning Cartoons on all stations back in the day 60s-70s.

      2. sjh

        In the early aughts (Bush 2 tenure) WHO declared a worldwide health emergency for obesity. Teaching a med socy class at the time and we followed the WHO news and countries’ responses. As I recall, examples of policy responses included; Britain and some others passed VAT taxes for high sugar content foods, eliminated TV ads for high sugar snacks etc. from childrens’ programming and some very creative health policies. The US sent two representatives from the food industry and declared ‘individual responsibility’ for people to choose whatever food products they wanted. Made for some interesting class discussions – many echoed the ‘individual responsibility’ mantra.

      3. NYT_memes

        No time to cook? Not as hard as you think, at least for one meal a day. Take a big helping of mixed greens, cut up some cucumber and zucchini slices then add some grape tomatoes (or sliced tomato).
        Forget the dressing. Drink water with your lunch (or light dinner or even breakfast). That’s it!

        Drink lots of water and nibble on fresh veggies all day – not a lot of time to prepare.

  4. Kurtismayfield

    The flip flopping on masks recommendations for a respiratory disease related pandemic is an unforgivable offense to me. I don’t care about the limited supplies, they should have been coming out day #1 recommending some type of mask. Instead they caused the disease to spread more, and also undermined people’s ability to believe the CDC in the future.

    A mask timeline from the LA Times

  5. Piotr Berman

    Quickly mutating virus is a moving target. In the last year, April to April, 0.5% of diagnosed cases led to death, so “no-vaccine” is 99.5% effective. Of course, there are long term effects for some of those who went through the infection. However, recommending vaccine is much a different issue now than in initial months when (a) lethality was 5-10% (b) there was a hope of “containing”. Now it is very much like flue or rhinovirus.

    Actually, when vaccines became available, the susceptibility and lethality was already different, but it was established that risks are NOT uniform, and unlike some other infections, COVID19 has very regular distribution of risks: younger and fitter people have lower risks, with vast difference between school children and infirm elderly in nursing homes. And there was no good science that universal vaccinations would stop the infection, while it would vastly increase the population exposed to side-effects.

    Pavel mention the key issue: while vaccines have decreasing value, treatments of the disease should have lasting value, so it would have enormous value to have reliable information of efficacy of generic drugs, food supplements (zink, vitamins) for different combinations of age, sex and risk factors, instead of small studies with results pointing all over the place.

  6. flora

    Walensky sounds more like a salesperson than a scientist. “Here’s the best thing since sliced bread. The manufacture told me so.”

  7. Hayek's Heelbiter

    If you want to read a very interesting article about the “horse medicine” ivermectin suggest you check out: “COVID-19: The Ivermectin African Enigma”
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33795896/

    The low frequency of cases and deaths from the SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 virus in some countries of Africa has called our attention about the unusual behavior of this disease. The [sic – I think they meant “that”] ivermectin is considered a drug of choice for various parasitic and viral diseases and shown to have in vitro effects against SARS-CoV-2.

    “28% reduced mortality” in countries which participated in World Health Organization (WHO) sponsored African Program for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC), which used ivermectin as a preventative.
    It’s only an enigma if you are paid shill for Big Pharma.
    Ps. I’ve found Pubmed to be fantastic resource. The website reported Japanese studies on Covid aerosolized transmission and infection rates a year to 18 months before the MSM would admit that there might be something to this.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      The problem with any study in central Africa is it makes CDC data look good.

      And the populations there skew VERY young, natural level of Vit D extremely high (20 mins of full body near equator sun = 20,000 IU of Vit D, vastly high than any dose routinely taken here).

      I checked Kenya only as a proxy, but they have stunningly low levels of diabetes campared to any advanced economy, only 3.3%.

      So terrible data and a lot of confounders. Hard to conclude anything.

      That does not mean taking ivermectin would be a bad idea given its great safety profile. It’s safer than aspirin so why not? It’s just that I would not abandon any precautions because I was taking it.

      1. Hayek's Heelbiter

        Definitely true about the sunshine and demographics. One aside, diabetes is predicted to rise by about 1% per year in Kenya till 2025, and Uganda is also struggling
        Similar to most developing countries, where Big Food starts to replace healthy local food with cheap processed food, and youths start staring at their phones and computers instead of working in the fields.
        Another confounder of which I was unaware until your response prompted me to investigate: “The antiparasitic drug ivermectin is a novel FXR ligand that regulates metabolism”.
        https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2924
        Money quote:

        Treatment of wild-type mice, but not of FXR-null mice, with ivermectin decreases serum glucose and cholesterol levels, suggesting that ivermectin regulates metabolism through FXR

        So there might a beneficial loop going on. Prophylactic use of ivermectin, being protective against diabetes and heart attacks, reduces the chances of Covid infection.
        Interestingly enough, the article is 10-years old, so there is little chance of funding bias.
        And agreed, I’m not going to start closing all my windows just because I might be taking ivermectin.

    1. tevhatch

      In Cuba, so definitely not going to show up in North America.

      SaNOtize is a Canadian/Israeli firm, but they are an outside firm so big pharma is blocking them still in Canada.

      1. lambert strether

        Also in India, where iNCOVACC is approved and on the market, manufactured by Bharat, using technology licensed from Washington University in St Louis. Which I have posted on many, many times, I might add.

        Not a peep about iNCOVACC in the West, oddly.

        SaNOtize is not a vaccine nut a “morning after” nasal spray.

        Read the blog regularly, and you’ll master this detail!

        1. tevhatch

          SaNOtize: Yes, I am aware of that. My bad for not expressing it clearly. I’d like to emphasize two point, that like the nasal vaccines it is a prophylactic treatment, and like the nasal vaccines, because it does not come from revolving door to CDC & US Senate, it’s very unlikely to gain regulatory acceptance in the USA or any of it’s more securely controlled colonies. At least not until the firm is taken over and the price tripled.

  8. IM Doc

    A word about VAERS.

    This system was never meant to be 100% accurate. It is meant to be an early warning sign of problems either with new vaccines or with comparing year to year with the same vaccine…..is this 2023 flu shot having more deaths? Is it a batch problem?, etc.

    When the VAERS started throwing off 2 or 3 sigma problems literally right off the bat with the COVID vaccines, we should have taken a deep dive. This was not done. Instead, the entire system was held up for ridicule and disdain. It must be noted that I would guess it is 1990s tech. It is very difficult to use. But I use it all the time.

    One of the instant social media tropes that began and has never died down is that “ antivaxxers” were making up tons of entries. Trust me, it is very simple indeed to tell real entries from obviously fake ones. I saw a few suspects when I was on, but not many.

    But there is another piece of data since the COVID vaccines that should put this “tampering” theory to rest. In late 2021 and into 2022 were the introduction of multiple new pneumococcal vaccines. These, like COVID, are meant for the entire population eventually. 60 and up for sure. Since they are all new and I am wary of things in their first year or two, I only gave these to the most high risk in my practice, all the while doing a monthly check on the VAERS system for issues. And they all seem to be behaving in exactly the same way as the older ones. There appear to be no safety signals at all. I feel much more comfortable with their safety and will likely begin widening their use soon. If there is an antivaxxer conspiracy to bomb VAERS, why are we not seeing it with these vaccines as well?

    The blowing off of the VAERS signals and the widespread ridicule of VAERS by the medical system was one of the worst things I have seen in my career. The only word I know is shame.

    1. Objective Ace

      If there is an antivaxxer conspiracy to bomb VAERS, why are we not seeing it with these vaccines as well?

      This obviosly doesnt change the larger premise of your post, but I doubt many anti-vaxxes, or lay people in general, know about the new pneumoccal vaccines. Given that, its hard to expect them to create false reports about them

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        IM Doc said in one of his earlier messages that it’s easy to tell clinician reports from patient reports, and among the latter, fake reports. It is really not an issue despite all the hysterics about anti-vaxxers:

        The VAERS system is very cumbersome to use – both reporting and data presentation. Every step of the way, you are reminded it is a federal crime to put false information. It is also clear as a clinician that there are false reports there but they are a very distinct microscopic minority. You can easily tell that most are submitted by fellow clinicians and it is very helpful to quantify issues in a general way and see if there are similar threads with your patients and the other reported ones.

    2. LY

      I did get a call back from V-Safe after I reported new health symptoms months later after my booster.

      I have no idea what the relationship between VARS and V-Safe is.

  9. Roger Blakely

    Isn’t Rochelle Walensky the daughter of a Washington, D.C., spook family? I got the impression that being a professor of public health at Harvard was appropriate women’s work. The son of a spook family would be climbing the ranks of the intelligence community.

    I got the impression that she tapped by the Biden administration to be the director of the CDC because she was spook-adjacent. She was a safe member of the Washington-insider class.

    I don’t know why they are throwing her under the bus. Hasn’t she done exactly what you would have expected her to do? My guess is that she is going down as a good soldier. My guess is that the Biden administration is not actually unhappy with her. My guess is that throwing her under the bus is good optics for the reelection cycle.

    1. Lambert Strether

      Her father worked for Titan, a telecoms firm with DOD connections. You may remember Titan from Abu Ghraib days, where they supplied some torturers as contractors, but there’s no suggestion I can find in my extremely cursory research that her father was involved in that.

      I don’t think throwing Walensky under the bus matters for re-election one way or another. Covid isn’t an issue.

  10. Societal Illusions

    So where does this lead now that it appears irrefutable our agencies are captured? What does even more capture look like?

    Where are we heading?

    Is there a grand objective besides profit? And short term profit at that as none of this appears sustainable.

    Trust is fine yet so many don’t see it. Perhaps it is time to remove oneself from the Titanic, as the bridge is secured and there seems no way to actually make a difference any longer.

  11. Ignacio

    Frustration is not good enough to describe the feeling that such disastrous management might have inflicted in knowledgeable people like IM Doc. Rage is possibly more accurate. I have had the privilege to read many communications from IM Doc and can’t do anything but feel solidarity for him and so many more in his situation as well as sadness for the many victims of such failures that include those socially excluded by the vaccine mandates and those that suffered after multiple rounds of, basically useless, and frequently harmful boosts.

    One might think, naively, that the people who are hired to manage an institution like the CDC should be first and foremost guided primarily by technical/scientific evaluations secondarily by economical limitations and try to overcome the political considerations and pressures specially when these are at odds with the scientific evidence. Frequently we find it is exactly the opposite and there is no mechanism available to ensure that these rather technical positions are shielded from the political circus. The politicization of Covid has been an issue worldwide, but in the US it has been brutal, to a point I cannot find parallels in the history of epidemic management. Walensky is just one of the pieces in this puzzle. Will her substitute be able to improve anything? Doubtful.

  12. Eustache de Saint Pierre

    I only watched a presentation from her once which gave me the impression of someone hysterically reciting the words given to them to express, by a maniac in the room holding a large axe.

    Be scared, be very very scared.

  13. Marc Shulman

    Footnote 3 above states that “the 95% efficacy was not against infection but against “serious disease” and death. Those were not end points for the clinical trial. The focus on that measure is an admission the vaccines underperformed on the original targets.”
    The foregoing statement is not entirely accurate. This publication on the Moderna vaccine, “Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine” (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389) reported that the phase 3 trial of the Moderna vaccine used symptomatic infection, not death or “serious disease”, as the “endpoint”, and these results indicated 94% effectiveness. The results for the Pfizer vaccine were similar (https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-conclude-phase-3-study-covid-19-vaccine). Of 170 cases of COVID-19, 162 cases were in the placebo group versus 8 cases in the vaccinated group. There were 10 severe cases of COVID-19 observed in the trial, with nine of the cases occurring in the placebo group and one in the vaccinated group. Indeed, and consistent with footnote 3, these results indicate that the protection against severe covid disease was about the same as protection against more typical covid. My memory of later results that I do not have citations for is that vaccination afforded an additional two-fold protection against serious disease compared to ordinary disease. That is, the death rate from covid among unvaccinated people who contracted covid was ~2%, while the death rate from vaccinated people who contracted covid was ~1%. It was, of course, a great disappointment that vaccination did not confer a much greater protection against serious disease. The other disappointment has been that immunity conferred by vaccination is not very long lasting.

      1. Late Introvert

        And clearly dangerous to a small but as yet unknown number, because as IM Doc testified, they are not tracking it, accidentally on purpose.

        Letting even the wastewater sites go blank. Lambert’s post yesterday about New Orleans advertisers threatening to pull their ads from the newspapers comes to mind.

        1. GramSci

          I said it last year, but the allegation bears repeating: when the CDC announced a grant to biobot.io, it was for the unstated purpose of tightly tying and gagging that system with red tape.

  14. Carolinian

    Thank you for this very detailed commentary. There’s nothing this commenter can add except to point out, once again, the founders’ belief–based on the ancients–that there’s no democracy without virtue and virtue is in such short supply. To me this suggests that when it comes to matters of life and death our post New Deal drive toward centralized government is a problem. Those who disagree would say that in an epidemic everyone in the country, or for that matter the world, must be on the same page. But who decides what that page is and can we trust them? It seems we can’t.

    In a time of constant “moral panics” the society seems to have lost all moral compunction when it comes to lying. This makes it much easier for mediocrities like Walensky or Biden to prevail and gain power. Now she’s out the door and Biden is at 36 percent showing that lies only provide a temporary advantage.

    1. GramSci

      I don’t think centralization would be a problem if we still had New Deal policies in effect.

  15. Bsn

    Being a recently retired public school teacher, I have given up trying to discuss this whole vax/pandemic situation with nearly everyone. I’ve made up my mind and am sticking to my conclusion until someone shows me very strong evidence to the contrary. This has been a sheit show from the get go. I slightly understood in early 2020 that “well, we’re not sure” about the virus, it’s origin, and treatments. I am no dummy and my hubby’s a doctor – we know how to read scientific papers and can follow discussion such as in NC. After a couple months of study and listening, we realized it’s all BS>
    So now, as I’m sure with many people, we ignore the walenskys & fauchis and only hope (against hope) that they somehow go to jail. Until and after then, Vit D, masks in crowds, Corsi box running, retired from teaching, watching FLCCC. Have a nice day.

  16. anon in so cal

    From the start, virologists warned the Covid vaccines “may not prevent spread of the virus.”

    December 2, 2020

    COVID-19 vaccines may not prevent spread of virus, so mask-wearing, other protections still critical.

    Jake Ellison

    UW News

    Excitement and relief over news of vaccines that help prevent people from getting sick, winding up in the hospital or dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, are warranted, says University of Washington’s Dr. Larry Corey. But, these messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines may not prevent people from getting infected or spreading the virus.

    Larry Corey

    Answering questions around how vaccines affect transmission of the virus is “of obvious importance” and research will be conducted once people begin getting vaccinated, Corey writes in a new COVID-19 Vaccine Matters blog jointly produced by Johns Hopkins University and the UW. But we all must still wear masks, physically distance, wash our hands frequently, and avoid large gatherings — even when most people have been vaccinated.

    https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines-may-not-prevent-spread-of-virus-so-mask-wearing-other-protections-still-critical/

  17. The Phoenix

    I think documenting her failures – and she was a spectacular one – is very important. A little over a year ago I wrote on a facebook post commenting on one of her policies a question: “Is this incompetence, corruption, or both?”. In her case I think it was both.

    That said, I believe we shouldn’t lose sight of two very important things:

    1) She is a sacrificial lamb, put there because of her incompetence and facility in being manipulated – sadly like many of our purported leaders especially “Brandon” – and not because of her intellect and integrity. Did we really expect any different? If their policies succeeded, she gets some glory and the deciders get the outsized benefits. If she fails, she gets sacrificed but assured some cushy job so she doesn’t say things she’s not supposed to say.

    2) When things go bad and assuming no exogenous shocks, there is a line of explanation that goes like this: Incompetence (I) -> Corruption (C) -> Malfeasance (M), with each bucket possibly encompassing elements of the previous. You only move from one to the next as the accumulating evidence can no longer adequately be explained by the current bucket. Taking into account all the available evidence on pandemic origin + response, I have reluctantly moved through all three explanations reaching the conclusion that, although most, not all decision makers are in the I & C buckets.

    IMO Walensky is in the first two buckets .. However, and more importantly, who is in the Malfeasance bucket?

    1. tevhatch

      A sacrificial lamb on one of hundreds of trojan horses in and out of the revolving door at the upper levels of executive branch? The next few months of her career will make that clear. I’m more of a systems scholar; the failure is the system which attracts such creatures.

    2. GramSci

      I think Venality breeds Corruption that hires Incompetence with the desired result that Feasance is Mal.

  18. Laura in So Cal

    So I consider Walensky just another example of widespread incompetence everywhere, but especially in government it seems. What is the most stunning thing about it is how unembarrassed those individuals are. I’m guessing that competence is immaterial and only political credentials matter? I’ve watched congressional hearings where the government officials or candidates for confirmation didn’t appear to have prepared at all. Candidates didn’t study up even those their confirmation hearings were scheduled well in advance. The most embarrassing one I saw was a women up for a federal judgeship of some kind who apparently didn’t know the contents or application of several US Constitution amendments….she seemed unfazed by her ignorance.

    It is very hard for me to understand.

  19. JBird4049

    The refusal to receive and the manipulation of information does remind me of the problem with disability. Sometimes the information one gives the agencies seems to disappear, be ignored, or is interpreted in interesting ways. This includes testing ordered by the very agency that ordered the tests, which are already on file, which is then ignored again. Information goes in and something comes out that is not congruent with it. I could just think of the human errors that are in any bureaucratic process, but it always seems to favor against helping people. Weird, that. And California is much better than many other states. However, just as with the collapse of the unemployment system in some states, like California during the Covid shutdown, ways are found to get the wanted results.

    1. JBird4049

      I forgot to add that the CDC, FDA, and other federal agencies new habits might come from the various states’ attempts to block assistance or even just doing their jobs. The lead poisoning in Flint, the land, air, and water poisoning in East Palestine, the difficulties in applying for aid from FEMA after the severe flooding in Appalachia. No one said anything about denying aid, but the process of getting it is often hard to even apply for, of great duration, and is often meager, even pathetic with the problems apparently increasing over the decades.

      I just love getting means tested to near death, but, hey, I might be some criminal mastermind like some bankers. I am also very fortunate in getting enough help in time (barely) to survive. Too many people don’t in our America.

  20. some guy

    Why should I believe her tears are anything but crocodile? It seems to me that her tears are in the spirit of Greenspan’s pretense that ” there was a flaw in my theory of regulation” or however he put it. There was no flaw. He achieved the Mellonite crash and crisis he was engineering for the benefit of his Class Masters right from the start.

    I think I will channel my legacy holdover “tribal Democrat” spirit and direct it at Walensky. Since I am helpless to have any effect on her whatsoever, I can only beseech the “Moral Arc of the Universe” to give her the long covid which she worked so hard to give to others.

  21. Tom Finn

    It would seem that under the pervasive “fail up” culture which is DC, that Walensky is due a position of even greater importance.
    Is the CIA needing a new leader?

    1. some guy

      Maybe she could become Secretary of Health and Human Services.
      Or maybe Surgeon General of the United States.

      Think how much “stealth Jackpot” she could secretly entrench and accelerate from either of those two postions.

  22. Antagonist Muscles

    she called the office stating that she was feeling electric shocks over her entire body but especially her face.
    I will not go into details here but suffice it to say, she was having a profound neurologic problem.
    She had 5 weeks of very severe pain and did not recover.

    This quote from IM Doc caught my eye because I suffer rare neurological overreactions to seemingly everything. Nearly all sensory sensations for me have augmented, and I suffer neuropathic pain, which is mild in intensity but prolonged in duration. There were several instances where I experienced symptoms similar to trigeminal neuralgia, unbearably intense pain in the face that felt like electric shocks for one second. As such, I have been avoiding Covid like the plague because I suspect an infection will cause neurological overreactions.

    We know that immuno-compromised individuals, diabetics, the elderly, and the obese tend to have increased probability for severe consequences due to Covid-19. Can any commenters enlighten me on long Covid causing horrifying neurological consequences? I already know from the daily links and Yves and Lambert’s work about fatal immune system overreactions and repeated infections leading to a compromised immune system which leads to increased incidence of seemingly everything. What about the nervous system?

    1. J.

      Covid indeed causes horrifying neurological consequences, including:

      – schizophrenia https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9398553/

      – accelerated dementia https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-19-dementia-22938/

      – peripheral neuropathy https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1756-185X.14409

      – transplacental transmission leading to brain injury in neonates https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/151/5/e2022058271/191033/Maternal-SARS-CoV-2-Placental-Changes-and-Brain?autologincheck=redirected

      and of course long covid dysautonomia, reviewed here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/long-covid-now-looks-like-a-neurological-disease-helping-doctors-to-focus-treatments/

  23. Val

    Walensky departed crying, but she came in crying too. Perhaps she wept the entire time. First time I saw her on the glo-box she was weeping and carrying on about how we were all going to die. This was as Biden & handlers were pushing the “Dark Winter” thing. Histrionic, performative incompetence at the head of state agencies and public health organs was perfectly consistent with the parade of technical and moral absurdities that characterized the entire operation to that point and beyond, but to learn today that the CDC head considered CNN a data source is, holy crap, a luminous detail.

    The good news is that Fauci was here this past week, and for a substantial honorarium exhorted the most recent crop of PhDs to “trust science”! By which I can only assume he means, “turn your mind into a weathervane, watch CNN and avoid critical thinking”.

  24. Daniil Adamov

    The CNN bit is extremely damning. Well, all of it is, but that part in particular is something I’d expect to read in The Onion.

    Thank you for this collection.

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