Yves here. We very much appreciate IM Doc providing a rousing fundraiser post, but we also wanted to call to your attention that his article includes an important and what appears to be systematic gap in Covid data that has important implications for vaccine policy.
And the tomatoes and other vegetables are from IM Doc’s garden.
By IM Doc, a internal medicine doctor working in a rural hospital in the heartlands
I have followed this site since the financial crisis of 2006-9. I had been a lurker, never engaging in commenting until the COVID issues began to occur. I do feel qualified to discuss and moderate in this field and Yves and Lambert have been so wonderful in accomodating what I had to say. This site has always been a place where reality is foremost on everyone’s agenda (Lambert’s Mr. Subliminal: Please stop by the Tip Jar and give generously to help Naked Capitalism strengthen your resistance to elite-serving narratives).
So because I know so little about the financial world, I did not contribute any commentary on those topics. But then the COVID disaster began, and the reality being presented by our mainstream media and politicians was not in any way the reality of those of us on the ground. So, I began commenting. Soon enough, Yves contacted me to join the COVID “Brain Trust”. And we have been doing so for the past 3 years.
I have access to some of the best minds in medicine, to weekly conferences at some of our most prestigious universities, and colleagues and former students in all of the alphabet agencies. But I will admit that it has been this site and the commenters on this site and everyone’s grasp on reality that have been what has kept me going the past 3 years. I could not be more grateful. And a check is on the way right now to this site. We must keep this going. Can you do your part? Please go to the donation page and contribute bigly.
I have been giving frequent reports of what I am seeing on the ground to the Brain Trust this whole time. I get the idea at times that they cannot believe what is actually happening. I remember that feeling distinctly when it was clear in early 2021 that the vaccines were having a lot of breakthrough infections which I was seeing in abundance. It is a very discordant note when all of the media personalities, Biden, Fauci, and Walensky are all over the news talking about 100% efficacy and I am reporting “Guys, not so fast – we have a real problem here.” To their credit, Yves and Lambert let this discussion happen in public. And I think we all know how that story ended. Again, when reality is the most important criteria, the truth will always win.
Behind the scenes, Yves and Lambert and the whole crew work tirelessly to maintain the integrity of the comments. I do not know of another site where this is so. And trust me, I have seen a lot of the COVID whoppers that have come over the transom. Their time and energy in this endeavor is just an incredible gift to us all.
I distinctly remember one commenter in 2021 who was just all over the site for “getting people killed” etc. I remember comments from this person like “Real doctors don’t talk like that” insinuating I was a bot or something. That person was painstakingly tracked down and found to be a bot from Wikipedia. Yes Wikipedia. Yves and Lambert bring magical skills in this kind of thing.
It was at that point that I knew in my heart that this situation was going to get real ugly real quick. That same person berated me in the comments section for being concerned that vaccine mandates were soon on the way – “No one in their right mind would even think that”, etc. And then when they finally did arrive, “Unvaxxed people are horrible people and lots more besides mandates should be done to them.” Ahh, those heady days.
Again, ugly. And I know now for sure that we are nowhere near the end of this saga. There are so many ways that things are different than standard medical practice for ages that it is hard to keep up with. Along with countless others on the front lines, I feel totally betrayed by the federal health authorities. It is hard to put into words the depths of where they have taken the general public. I guarantee you that 60% or more of average citizens do not believe a thing the CDC or FDA says and they never will again. Generations of trust have been pulverized. And it will take generations to recover, if ever. Our entire medical system is on life support now, and this will soon be obvious to every American.
It is crystal clear to me that the public health datasets have been fatally compromised. All of the narratives being poured forth on your TV are very likely fatally corrupted. I will give just one example so you will know what I am talking about.
I have not personally admitted a single patient since June to the hospital who was not fully vaxxed and/or boosted. Not one. From talk in the Doctor’s Lounge and at meetings, I can tell the same thing is happening to others. There may be an occasional unvaxxed patient here or there – but the vast vast majority of admissions are vaxxed and boosted.
So imagine my surprise a few Mondays ago when it was announced in a medical meeting by the admin MBA types that over the weekend 70% of the admissions were unvaxxed. I happened to be on call over that weekend. I knew that was a complete deception. But they were planning to go to the public and announce that fact to all. And I knew exactly how this had happened.
Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have proven themselves over and over again to be completely incapable of handling any kind of data in any kind of reliable manner. Vaccine documentation is no exception. The “Star Trek” tech folks have bamboozled us into believing that we are living in a new reality where the computers do no wrong. But that is just not the case.
These conclusions are being driven by data that is being generated by the EMRs. But the data is wrong.
I took the admin person by the ear to the wards on that Monday and demonstrated myself what the EMR had documented as their vaxx status and then what reality actually was. In every single case on that day, there were obvious errors/differences/screw ups. This is not being done on purpose. This is a demonstration in blind faith in “technology”. But this is a critical error and can lead to massive misconceptions. This same disturbed data collection has been going on for the past 3 years – not just in hospital admissions but in every aspect of COVID. Our datasets are completely corrupted and I fear that there is absolutely no way to fix it. Even more disturbing to me is that the officials HAVE TO KNOW this is screwed up and have done nothing about it. As for me, I trust absolutely no data on any paper that is told to be derived from EMRs or any algorithm. It is not worth the paper it is printed on.
Again, we are nowhere near the end of this event. I am very concerned about some of the things I am seeing. I know how these things tend to play out in history. I have taught those things for decades. I will be right here continuing the discussion about these issues as we go forward. I am so grateful to Yves and Lambert and this site. And I am so grateful to the commenters as well do everything we can to keep everyone based in reality.
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Always appreciate your comments IM Doc. Your contribution is also why I keep coming back to NC when the sea of digital info is so vast. It’s a safe harbor with real people (I’m fairly sure you are not AI generated) adding their views/responses.
Your comment on “blind faith in ‘technology’” certainly resonates. I’m reading Jacques Ellul Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes and what he says there certainly puts me on guard on how/where I go to get my news fix.
Thanks for that book reference. A new addition to the “To be read” pile.
I too have always appreciated your comments, IM Doc. So I have just now chipped in with another donation for NC which more and more resembles an island of sanity in a sea of, well, I don’t know what the hell it is. But I know that I do not want any part of it.
With the corruption of data and suspect public information, do I get the latest booster or not? I have no one whom I fully trust to answer that question for me.
I am sorry to say that we don’t give medical or financial advice.
This is Florida’s new guidance, which I agree with and then some:
mRNA vaccines are associated with negative effectiveness.
Studies show vaccinated developed an increased risk for infection.
The shots present a risk of subclinical and clinical myocarditis and other cardiovascular conditions for healthy people.
There is an unknown risk of adverse events with each additional dose.
Elevated levels of spike protein persist in some people for an indefinite period of time, which increases health risks by an unknown amount.
My personal decision after having had two vaccinations and a booster in 2022, (and having had COVID multiple times afterwards) is that I will never take another MNRA vax.
Unfortunately alternative protein-based vaccinations seem impossible to get in this country, and I would surprised if turned out that Pfizer et al have been suppressing the competition.
Last sentence should read “would not be surprised“.
Thank you. In their weekly talks Taibbi and Kirn have been talking about the “good old days” when journalists were expected to stick to the facts or at least present both sides of an ongoing narrative. I think some of us read this site in hopes that the good old days can still exist. And when we think the facts have been violated we object in comments which, as you say, is allowed.
Of course in those good old days plenty of lies were being peddled and the term “yellow journalism” didn’t just pop up yesterday. But at least back then there was felt the need for such a term whereas now any number of rationalizations are put forward for lying to the public and done so by educated people who should know better but instead seem to even believe their own bs.
Once “truth” is considered optional we are lost. Many of us are grateful for the comments from experts such as yourself.
I think something a lot deeper than data and trust in institutions has been broken in medicine (and politics).
One of the most puzzling things (to me) has been the medical community. Reasonably intelligent people, educated on some of these matters, could easily confirm online in an hour or two from reliable scientific sources that infectious Covid is airborne, infectiousness does not correlate to having active symptoms, and masks and air cleaning help a lot.
And these medical providers, of all sorts, at all levels, are personally at risk–high risk actually.
Why would you not protect yourself? And your patients? And your family? And imagine how differently things might have gone if the medical professional associations had taken the lead to force clean air…..
But the culture in medicine seems to have become super anti-mask–actively hostile in many cases. I have seen many Tweets about hospital units that had masked, sometimes for decades, prior to Covid, that are now no longer masking.
Like this one:
https://twitter.com/neverending_ish/status/1699514131811012783
Doctors should not infect patients, especially the most vulnerable. How is that controversial?
What is really weird is the blood supply. They were (and are) extremely cautious to try to prevent the HIV virus from getting into the supply, but they seem to be doing nothing to prevent or even monitor the covid virus getting into it.
They don’t ask if you have had covid, from what I could see on the Red Cross site. Just wait two weeks after a vaccine, and don’t come if if you feel ill from any cause. I know there have been one or two documented cases of transplants causing covid in the recipient, even though the recipients are required in most centers to be vaccinated, and those donors I assume are screened.
In the world according to notabanker, healthcare for profit is immoral and the only possible result is trading the amount of acceptable deaths to make next quarters numbers.
I see tons of corporate sponsored charitable events with huge amount of money spent to generate dollars for fill in the blank disease research, complete with fundraising thermometers that show $50, $75, $100M plus dollars raised over the 5-10 years. Everyone high fiving over the great job they’ve done and the lives saved etc, etc…. Only to look at United Healthcare’s latest quarterly profit of $5.6 billion dollars and say why? Why should a health insurance company make any profit at all? And $20 billion+ a year?
Strip out all of the profit from insurance and pharma, forbid private equity from any healthcare investments and we are off to a good start.
Thanks for your post. I always look forward to your comments.
I’m one who will never again trust the high medical establishment after losing 3 friends to safe and effective – one was only 30 years old. / bah!
adding: your commentary is a great counterweight to nonsense issuing from… well… here’s a Politico story from 2017.
Meet the world’s most powerful doctor: Bill Gates
The software mogul’s sway over the World Health Organization spurs criticism about misplaced priorities and undue influence.
https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful-doctor/
He’s a doctor now?
Well good old Bill has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit (1996), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (2002), Waseda University (2005), Tsinghua University (2007), Harvard University (2007), the Karolinska Institute (2007), the University of Cambridge (2009), and Northern Arizona University (2023) and I am sure that IM Doc would agree that an honorary doctorate is just as good as a medical degree.
Makes ya wonder how many of those schools have a “Gates Computer Science Center” or some such.
Returning to the main topic, I would like to also express my gratitude to IM Doc, for so many patient, clear, and honest comments here in the NC forum. It’s been a real and meaningful knowledge boost. Thus armed, I’ve managed to protect myself from SARS-CoV-2 thus far, and this is largely thanks to NC and especially IM Doc’s clarity about the frankly insane ride we’ve been on with medicine and public health. I’ll be making a second visit to the tip jar soon.
And there is a quote: Who can trust these selfsame guardians
Disturbing but predictable. GiGo, Garbage in, Garbage out has been a factor computing since its inception.
The Banks suppress it in their systems, and recognize that errors happen.
Producing clean data is expensive as every morsel of data must be verified in a world of grey, as there is always room for error. When a desire for deception is also extant the is no chance of assembling accurate data.
Sometimes kept accurate by expensive dual data input.
Personally I have had errors in my Bank Account by the issue of inaccurately printed checks.
My Costumers were Insurance Companies and Banks where all few but (fraudsters) wanted corrupt data.. In the political world which, operates on unclear facts cannot possibly have clean data.
I have spent a career in the data management space, and we have a saying that I am sure you are all familiar with: Garbage in garbage out. It is generally quite difficult to manage the integrity of the data in optimal conditions, but its is exponentially harder when there is a institutional willingness to corrupt that integrity for political reasons. In my professional capacity I concur with IM Doc that all these datasets related to Covid are unsalvageable at this point. Furthermore any analysis that uses these corrupt datasets is not to be trusted.
Related to the comment on trust in public health and in the medical profession, I concur. Among my circle, like with most people, I have politically polarized acquaintences. I tend to be not politically aligned (as I heartedly despise both teams) but consider myself a member of the small caste of people capable of critical thinking. For my group at least, the left-aligned folks generally still have full trust in any establishment directives, will readily inject themselves with whatever the alphabet groups tell them to do, and will happily pump pharmaceutical products into their bodies for the most minor of twinges. The right-aligned universally will never see a doctor again outside of a legitimately critical life threatening emergency. For the critical thinker group, its becoming more obvious every day that most doctors are acting in their financial self-interest as sales people for the pharma companies. The patient’s health interest is secondary to the profit associated with that sales position. I mean c’mon, it was obvious early on that obesity, diet, and exercise were factors in Covid recovery, but I saw precious few accounts of doctors who would recommend those lifestyle changes – there’s just no profit in it.
So that leaves us who do not trust the medical profession with two poor choices 1) try to find ethical doctors not aligned as pharma sales people, 2) treat ourselves with the information we can research on our own.
In terms of unintended consequences, the destruction of trust in public health and the destruction of trust with ones personal physicians has to be the most catastrophic result of the last 3 years.
Naked Capitalism is, bar none, this household’s most important source of information; indispensable. For us IM Doc has become one of the site’s essential voices. Just added a second tip to the jar
Just want to say that I am very grateful for your presence here, IM Doc.
So, a bot from wikipedia? Things are even worse than I thought. I wonder how many other wikipedia bots are out there doing this nefarious crap… I know from my personal experience that medical issues are of major interest to wikipedia editors so in a way this is not surprising, yet I am still surprised by how deep this goes.
If I remember the events of the time correctly, it was the notorious “Philip Cross”.
I’m a little confused about this use of “bot”. To me, that means “robot”, i.e. something non-human (though of course created by a human). But in IM Doc’s and playon’s comments it seems to indicate a human. Am I reading their meaning correctly, and if so, is this general usage?
The poster’s name was indeed Philip Cross.
I would point you to this website for further information –
https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross
The salient sentence in the website –
Craig Murray, whose Wikipedia page has been repeated edited by Cross remarked that “the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs.
The Philip Cross “operation” – fascinating.
Why not come out and use his real name. The UK’s 77th Brigade.
This story is beyond fascinating. Amazing that the same name was used on NC comments as on Wikipedia. Some of “Phillip Cross”‘s comments on NC. Was there ever a post on NC about all this? I did an “allintitle” Google search for PC on NC and didn’t find anything.
But is it fair to say they are from Wikipedia when Wikipedia has now suspended their account? Like Angie, I am also confused as to whether “bot” can be applied to an account whose content seems to be completely human-made.
Wow, I went down the rabbit hole of looking at PC’s comments, and my conclusion:
The moderation must have been amazing because most of the comments that got through are pretty normal looking.
In fact, I think it shows an amazing commitment to the comments that PC wasn’t just comment-blocked after the first few offenses. It must be harder to decide when the offender is mostly making normal comments.
Also overlooked is the service that moderation does for the commenters, preventing them from embarrassing themselves.
Great article, thanks (and yes, I sent a contribution). I never believed the efficacy numbers since skimming the first report of the phase three trial. That 95% number came from not looking for infections. That’s one way to get the number up.
Personally, I’m done with mRNA. I’m waiting for Novavax or just continuing with NPIs at this point.
The comments about EMR are also welcome. I like Eric Topol, but his faith in software is troubling. As a retired software and hardware engineer, I know all too well what can and most likely will go wrong.
Thanks again for your contributions to the site.
Does anyone have any idea as to when the Novavax vaccine will be available in the US ? Also does anyone know of good information on them and how they compare to the mRNA ones ? Thank you in advance
Cui bono?
EHR’s have been a godsend to Healthcare Insurers!
Anecdotal but I have worked in healthcare over 30 years and it’s my belief that the HCA fraud /ric scott ceo , started a cascade of cases in the aughts. EHR was then implemented around 2011 and the rest is history. Insurers game system by coding (CPT and ICD10) and what better way to manipulate stats than EHR’s! Voila, mission accomplished as Healthcare Insurers rake in billions.
Thank you IM doc as your experiences/knowledge base is a true gift to NC.
https://news.yahoo.com/cdc-director-trust-takes-time-110000967.html
The CDC wants your trust back: It’ll ‘take time to rebuild.’
What a joke.
Thank you, IM Doc, for sharing your wisdom and expertise.
I only want to say thank you to IM Doc for all of his contributions to this community. More impressively, these are in addition to the heavy load of contributions that his physical community must be demanding of him. He (and the similarly tireless work of Yves, Lambert, et al. has inspired me, and I hope all who read this, to greatly increase our contributions to the Tip Jar this year.
IM Doc, thank you for contributing here at such a critical time. For the life of me I continue to not understand why just plain simple honesty from the CDC and other health agencies during the pandemic was seemingly not allowed. Just saying ” it’s a pandemic, we are doing the best we can”. Or simple acknowledgment of mistakes or errors.
But what also has just been almost heart breaking is to see the sheer, almost heroic effort put in by you and all your peers, RNs, med techs, EMTs during the pandemic, and see no real help from our government. It could have been something as simple as all medical school debt is wiped out for the next five-ten years if you get a job in the sector, tax breaks for people working in the sector that don’t have school debt. Anecdotally, most of the people I know second hand, third hand are getting out of medicine, and in my county the one remaining hospital remains understaffed (it made the national news by having to call 911 it was so short staffed), and has, as far as I know, failed accreditation. Our county recently declared a health care emergency, as care is both not available, and too expensive. It is not some small rural county, it is right in the middle of Puget Sound, adjacent to all the large metropolitan areas in the PNW.
So again, thank you for your vital contributions here, and for what you do every day.
Thank you IMDoc. Your comments as well as those from other brain trust members, and the comments from well informed, interesting and colourful commenters are one of the remarkable achievements of Naked Capitalism. It is one of the few sites where BS commenters are banned. Yes!
I see donations have picked up and hope the total will be generous. Yves scared me with the comment she might have to curtail the site, even shut it down! Yikes! The idea of losing this raft of sensible thought and analysis floating on an ocean of nonsense, propaganda and BS horrified me.
I am putting a second contribution in the mail today.
Thank you Doc, your writings are always clear and concise, which I appreciate.
Thank you everyone for your comments.
It is a pleasure to be involved with such a commentariat.
Now, go and donate. We must keep this site going.
Another thank you for your service, doc. Your anti-gaslighting has done a lot for my mental health.
Well, dangit, now I have to contribute a 3rd time, this time to register my fondness for IM Doc!