Herein, we will look at some vaccines, the origins of vaccine hesitancy, the shit tier crap that Pharma is trying to sell us as vaccines which poison the well of public trust, and close with a simple way to solve this mess purely by the CDC following the CDC’s own rules.

Measles

From 2000 to 2019 there were 3,874 cases of measles in the USA, averaging 194 cases per year. From 2020 to 2025 there were 2,899 cases, averaging 483 cases per year. In 2025 we’re at 1431 and climbing, with four deaths through September 2nd. I do not think four deaths in a country of 340 million people is a huge problem, statistically speaking, but the trend of increased measles cases is alarming.

Why is measles becoming an issue? Measles vaccination is going down. Compiling data from several sources, we can graph it.

Measles over the last fifteen years in the United States stays relatively low, with the total number of reported cases hovering around a hundred per year with a few notable exceptions. The 2014 and 2019 outbreaks were known to be associated with proliferations of the disease in the unvaccinated population. Among all patients of both outbreaks, the vaccination rates were only 10% and 11% respectively. This should lead most reasonable people to believe that measles vaccination works, and that outbreaks are heavily associated with lack of vaccination.

Vaccination rates among kindergarteners prior to 2020 hovered around 94.6% nationwide and never declined in consecutive years over the sample set. After 2020, vaccination rates declined every year, and continue to do so. RFK Jr. did not suddenly undermine faith in vaccines, something after 2020 did. The numbers for 2025 in the above graph are only through the end of August. We already have the worst measles year in the last three decades, and if these trends hold we will probably close the year out worse than the early 1990s.

One dose of the measles vaccine is 93% effective at prevention of infection, and two doses is 97% effective. This is a top tier vaccine administered to 2% fewer children than the prior decade because of something that happened after 2020. To understand the impact of 2020, we need to look at the rules governing vaccine efficacy standards.

Vaccine Rules

There’s no formal, globally applied minimum efficacy bar for vaccines, although there perhaps should be. Most of the diseases for which we have standard vaccines have efficacy rates at preventing infection entirely of around 90% or more. Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Chickenpox, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Hepatitis A and B, and Polio vaccines all prevent spread in 90% or more of cases. Pertussis, Rotavirus, HPV, and Dengue Fever vaccines prevent it in 80% or more of cases. None of these vaccines exist merely to make symptoms less bad.

If I developed an AIDS vaccine tomorrow but its efficacy rate was only 50%, they wouldn’t allow me to call it a vaccine, even if it “made the AIDS symptoms less bad.” Angry mobs of alternate lifestyle San Franciscans would rightly and justifiably show up at my door with pitchforks and burning brooms accusing me of lying to them for profit. Yet the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) both establish a minimum threshold for “being able to call yourself a vaccine” of 50% for two diseases: Influenza and Covid-19. As far as I’m aware, those are the only two. The only vaccine close to that low is malaria, at around 75%.

The WHO and CDC give the malaria vaccine a partial pass on efficacy rates because malaria is a huge problem and kills half a million people per year globally. They give the flu vaccine a partial pass because the flu has a kabillion strains, they reformulate the vax every year by guesswork never knowing how well it will do, and it’s leaky, but they still maintain a 50% threshold. They pulled the 50% threshold out of a hat for Covid-19 and haven’t wavered from that, even though other comparable diseases have much higher thresholds. A cynic might say they did it because of the revolving door between CDC payroll and Pfizer payroll, or because of lobbying, or because a hundred congressional reps have major stock holdings in vaccine manufacturers.

When I buy ballistic body armor I do not want to have to flip a coin to see whether it stops the bullet. I don’t want airbags that only activate on “heads” but not “tails.” I don’t want smoke detectors that only work on odd days of the week. That’s what “50% efficacy” means, and those are the standards for the flu and Covid. Fine. I don’t get to set those standards; the folks at Fauci’s cocktail parties do.

But currently it’s very unclear whether they can even meet those intentionally debased thresholds.

Flu

In April of this year, the Cleveland Clinic dropped one of the most controversial vaccine study preprints in history which showed the flu vaccine had a negative efficacy rate in the 2024-2025 flu season. The unvaxxed did better. This study looked at 53,402 employees, 82.1% of which received the flu vaccine, and 2.02% of which caught the flu. Over the course of the study, flu rates among both groups were low, but towards the end the vaxxed population caught flu more than the unvaxxed population, leading to a final tally of -26.9% efficacy for the flu shot. Negative efficacy.

The antivaxxers went bonkers over this study in the spring, and the provaxxers responded with a wall of criticisms of the study. Politifact responded “yes but the point is so when you get the flu it isn’t as bad,” in as many words. They also defaulted to CDC historic data, and got some platitudes from healthcare experts to round their piece out. Most other outlets did something similar as a way to handwave away the antivaxxers.

The CDC does their own version of efficacy testing, and updates their website yearly. I took this graph directly from the horse’s mouth, and drew a red line on it.

The CDC’s study claims 56% efficacy for 2024-2025, a wildly different result from the Cleveland Clinic result. Why? The biggest difference is probably that the Cleveland Clinic trials don’t include children and the elderly. So both could be right. It could be that the overall net efficacy of the flu shot in 2024-2025 was 56% while the efficacy among working age health care workers is -26.9%.

But this draws a bullseye around two important points.

1. If it’s true that flu shot efficacy is concentrated among children and the elderly, and it’s so bad it’s negative among working age clinicians, then flu shots should probably be concentrated into the populations where they actually work. And if true, then the CDC should tell people that. They should especially tell the nurses and teachers in the middle to whom the flu vaccine might be doing actual damage.

2. According to the internationally accepted threshold for what does and does not qualify as a vaccine, the flu shot is not a vaccine. It only met the very minimum threshold to be called a vaccine in four out of fifteen years in the CDC’s own bar chart, even though the 50% threshold was set in part by the CDC.

If we’re going to call it a vaccine at all, it’s a really shitty one. If the CDC were being honest, they should tell everyone up front that it’s not a vaccine at all. Especially if they were worried about something like public trust in vaccines’ ability to prevent infection, or public trust in the CDC as an institution. Call it a “targeted temporary random immune booster that may or may not work” instead.

I ask you this. If someone were to hold the CDC’s feet to the fire about their 50% threshold for the flu vaccine, what would they do? Would they demand better vaccines, or would they lower the threshold even further so they could keep calling it a vaccine?

I think we know the answer.

Covid

Right now in 2025, the CDC’s estimates at Covid-19 vaccine efficacy vary by age cohort and fall off noticeably. But the problem isn’t the variation, or the fall off. The problem is the vaccines just don’t work well. Here’s a graph of the CDC’s own data on the topic.

Vaccine efficacy starts around 36%, drops a little for the young and a little for the old, and drops precipitously for working age people. This is reminiscent of the divergence between the Cleveland Flu Trial and the CDC’s Covid numbers in some ways. More critically, there is no time frame and no age cohort for which this vaccine counts as a vaccine at all according to the CDC and WHO’s own thresholds. If I had an AIDS vaccine and it only worked 36% of the time, I would be run out on a rail and accused of trying to make money by getting people sick.

And now I ask you this. If someone were to hold the CDC’s feet to the fire about their 50% threshold for the Covid-19 vaccine, what would they do? Would they demand better vaccines, or would they do a lot of mumbling about better clinical outcomes for the vaccinated, even though natural immunity still conveys 80% efficacy in reduction of infection?

I think we know the answer.

buy the author 182 cloth masks

Chain of Causality

The first flu vaccines were developed in 1945 for the military, but universal vaccination was not recommended for them. In 2001, 94% of Americans felt it was either “very important” or “extremely important” to have your children vaccinated. The first universal recommendation for influenza vaccination was issued by the CDC in 2010, and support for getting children vaccinated fell to 84% by 2015. That stayed steady until 2019. Then Covid happens, then the Covid vaccine comes out and also doesn’t work well, then the CDC changed the definition of “vaccine” so they could keep calling it one, then the CDC again issues another universal recommendation for another bad vaccine, and the number drops to 69%.

I think we all can see what’s going on here. The more shit tier vaccines the CDC tries to make “universal,” the fewer people are going to want to get their kids vaccinated, even for the good vaccines. It really is that simple.

I don’t discount that there are some people who think all vaccines are scams. I don’t discount that there are people who think vaccines are worse than the diseases they seek to prevent. I don’t discount that there are folks talking about autism, or other claims I personally consider speculative at best.

But you don’t get anyone to trust you by lying to them, and when they catch you in a lie they’re more likely to start listening to the other folks who’ve been calling you a liar this entire time. This has been the vaccine dynamic in the United States since the government first started pushing the flu vaccine that isn’t a vaccine, a dynamic that’s been magnified fivefold since 2021 when they pushed a Covid-19 vaccine that also isn’t a vaccine.

If you’re a provaxxer, you should be angry that you’re losing ground in your culture war against the antivaxxers. You should be alarmed that people who hold opposite opinions than you have leveraged power against your position. But your anger and alarm should not be directed at RFK Jr., who is merely a stand-in and a symptom. If it weren’t him it would be someone else. You should be angry the most at the people who make the shit tier vaccines you’ve been supporting, for making such shit vaccines and detracting from the good ones. The remains of your anger should be directed at the people pushing the shit vaccines in the CDC.

The first step to regaining the public’s trust is to throw the shit vaccines and their manufacturers under the bus. Hold the manufacturers of shit tier vaccines accountable. Next fire the CDC workers who push shit tier vaccines. Take their pensions away.

But above all else, stop calling them vaccines.

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We had nationwide riots and protests against the police in the wake of the George Floyd killing, with 5000+ demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrested, $2 billion in insured damages, an average of $100 of insured damage per protester, at least one burned police station, the founding of an anarchist autonomous zone, and a several month long siege at a court building. This included a number of protesters larger than the entire population of New York State chanting “All Cops Are Bastards” and “Defund The Police.” This in turn caused the total number of people willing to be police officers to shrink for two straight years, only stabilizing in 2022.

So that could have been it.

There is a known scientific correlation between increased police presence and decreased crime. It is impossible to prove causation for a murder spike like this because murder is a multivariate problem, but there are no other reasonable causes I can identify, and if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments.

I have recently been made aware of another theory by the Brookings Institute, and I think it’s well supported enough that it has forced me to challenge my priors. The lockdowns themselves were to blame, not the ACABs and BLMs. We will cover that study in a moment, but first let’s recap how to calculate 8,682 dead black people.

8,682 Black Lives Ended

First, we calculate the baseline murder rate in the United States across a long span of fairly regular fairly low (for us) murder rate. This is the expected murder rate for the country.

Then we figure out how many people died in excess of that murder rate, by analyzing the four year spike.

Then we take a look at the fact that black folks disproportionately bore the brunt of the spike, at victimization rates that varied by year but were always exceeding “normal,” and we multiply that ratio times the excess deaths to determine the excess number of dead black people within the spike itself.

8,682 is not the number of black people that died in homicide across that time frame. It is the extra dead black people exceeding what normally would have died without a spike. This is a pretty inarguable way to calculate excess dead black people. In fact, the number might be higher if the excess murders were concentrated in black areas.

The only question, really, is who is to blame for the excess dead black people. Is it BLM, as my prior article speculated? The Brookings Institute thinks not. They think it was the lockdowns.

The Lockdowns Killed Them

A month after the HWFO article was published, the Brookings Institute did a very interesting and very robust job of presenting an alternative analysis, in rebuttal to articles like mine, and I think they did a good job. Here’s the article.

Their opener specifically calls out other publications which were saying the same thing I was.

Some commentators have suggested the increase in homicides during 2020 was a response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May of that year. Others hypothesized that it was caused by a police “pull back,” in which officers chose to do less work in reaction to the protests that followed Floyd’s death.

I made the second case prior. It made sense to me. But Brookings identified something very curious when they looked at the data with a finer grain.

As more information has become available, these theories appear to be less supported by evidence than some initially thought.1 The evidence indicates that the national homicide rate was already on track to reach a peak far above the previous year even before Floyd was killed. (See Figure 1.)

Let’s look carefully at that graph. It shows 2019 murder and 2020 murder trends by day and month. The lines were very closely overlapped until the lockdowns began. Thereafter, the gap between the two lines grows, both before Floyd and after Floyd, until it establishes a new flat trend at a higher daily murder rate. The area between these two lines represents “excess murders,” which we know from the table above are 46% to 59% dead black people.

The Brookings article goes on to establish that (1) the excess deaths were concentrated in areas with higher poverty, and (2) teen boys and young men not in school or work were much more likely to engage in violence. They show some example maps of their finer grained geographical analysis:

And from these maps we can easily see why black people bore the brunt of the murder spike, by simply cross referencing them with demographic maps, like this:

Brookings goes on to compare Baton Rouge murder trends to other historical events such as floods or Hurricane Katrina that caused school and work closings, and shows how those also tie to murder spikes. It’s a robust analysis, and one that has me reconsidering elements of my prior position.

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Could Be Both? Who to Blame?

One argument against the Brookings case is that murder went down sharply in places like Rio de Janeiro and Cali Colombia as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns, so it’s possible that our lockdown was unique or different in some way, perhaps owing to all the national police hate. But Brookings analysis defenders might point to how murder rates here were rising before Floyd as a solid counter argument.

The blame for the 8,682 dead black people then is either the people screaming on Facebook to burn police stations and All Cops are Bastards and frantically sharing any instance of police misdeed to feed their clickbait engine, or it was the people screaming on Facebook about how “leaving the house is murder” and “reopening the economy is murder” and “opening the schools is murder” and so forth and so on, leading to a protracted economic and educational lockdown of the country which profoundly and directly damaged black communities.

Funny thing, that. I don’t know what your feed was like in 2020, but in my feed these two groups of people were the same people.

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We all know anecdotes are not a substitute for data, but the data we actually need about Omicron isn’t being gathered by anyone, so anecdotes are the best that anyone can do. And if you’re like me, you’re talking to all your friends and relatives and comparing your stories about how you caught Omicron variant, what it was like, how fast you got over it, and wondering what the big deal is. Herein, I will share my experience with Omicron in some detail, and then also give the accounts of ten readers constituting several dozen additional anecdotes. Add those to your own anecdote pool and maybe you’ll have data.

SHOT

On January 12th, I intentionally jinxed myself.

I had plane tickets to fly out the Sunday night before SHOT Show, had an invite to attend Range Day on Monday with folks from The Firearm Blog, and then had to figure out what to do with an impending snow storm in Atlanta on the day I was supposed to fly out.

Snowstorms in Atlanta are either a joke, or very much not a joke, and it’s impossible to determine in advance their relative jokeness. The snow was supposed to hit my area at 10 AM, and I wasn’t to fly out until 7 PM, so I was concerned I would be snowed in at my home. So I left early. I drove to the MARTA station in Sandy Springs, parked, walked a mile in the snow to a bar, spent 10 AM to 4 PM in the bar, walked back in the snow, got on the MARTA train, rode to the airport, got on my plane, and headed to Las Vegas.

The Covid hit me at about 30,000 ft over West Texas. Fever, chills, shakes, cough, while I’m in the window seat next to a couple of young liberal tourists rocking KN95s. Two hours into a four hour flight. By the time I deplaned I had my stocking cap on, jacket zipped all the way up, hands in my pockets to keep people from seeing how badly I was shaking so they didn’t throw me in a zombie camp. I Ubered to my AirBnb, put every blanket in the house on the bed, and went to sleep.

It’s important at this point to pause and talk about onset times. Nobody in my household got Covid, and I’d had no other outside exposure except for that day. I must have picked Covid up at the bar, which means the onset for my case was eleven hours or less from exposure to symptoms. Granted, I was walking around in the sleet so that might have had something to do with it.

I skipped range day Monday with fevers, chills, aches, and fatigue. Drank chicken broth. Kareem at Open Source Defense brought by some vitamins, Theraflu, and a thermometer that night. I continued to have chills and fatigue on Tuesday but no fever, and tested a very feint positive line on an at-home Covid test. On Wednesday I felt great, and given I was four days off from exposure I adopted the Nick Saban Protocol and went to SHOT Show. I have had a bit of morning crud in my throat since, but that’s it. I wore a mask, although I don’t believe they do any good.

In total, my experience with Omicron was less bad than my last experience with an influenza shot, which laid me out three days with worse fevers, worse chills, and the same overall symptom profile just more debilitating. Omicron was less bad that the flu vaccine. For me anyway. Remember, we’re talking about anecdotes here.

Israel’s Omicron wave is huge, national, completely un-phased by four vax shots, is blowing the doors off of all their records, and they’ve got zero Omicron deaths.

Israel has had a million Covid cases in the last 14 days alone, approximately ten percent of their entire population, in the most vaxxed and monitored country in the world. No deaths.

When I got back, I plumbed the HWFO Slack Channel, which is a walled garden internet community of readers of the blog, for their Omicron experiences to see how they compared. Browse through these, compare to mine, and compare to your own. In the early days of Covid-19, there was a great culture war over the phrase “It’s just the flu.” Based on every anecdote I’ve seen, read, heard, or had any exposure to, Omicron isn’t even the flu. It’s just a cold.

And I get that these are anecdotes, but nobody’s keeping data on whether this is just a cold or not, so anecdotes are the best we have to go on.

The Dirty Dozen

Whole family had covid - I noticed because the older kid and I had fevers, we grabbed at home tests, they were positive, confirmed with PCR.  Symptoms were pretty flu like - mild-moderate fever, sniffles, chills.  The youngest kid seemed to escape unharmed until about 15 days after we'd come down, when he had a fever of 99 for half a day.  (He never showed other noticeable symptoms, but did test positive).   This was early-mid December.

We weren't taking many precautions, were vaccinated (as is most of our circle) and so far as I can tell, nobody we were interacting with either gave it to us or got it from us.

When I got COVID, I had three symptoms.

1) headache

2) soreness

3) chills and frequent body temperature changes

I attributed 1) to drinking too much coffee, and 2&3) for deciding to go out on a run in the cold.

My first test was a negative, the second (taken on the second day, after my gf insisted it must be COVID) , was positive.

Lasted 48 hours, except for a lingering cough which showed up when the first three symptoms started to disappear.

Tested positive on home test (as were all the above) 10 days later, tested negative on rapid test 12 days later.

Edit: I am unvaccinated.

Edit2: it got easier after treating with C D Zinc and Quisertine

My whole family had covid. We PCR tested positive on the Dec 22nd and got results on the 23rd. I took a rapid test and tested positive on the 23rd before we got PCR results (I was feeling sick)

Day 1 (which was probably the 22nd) I had lethargy, the chills, a low fever, congestion, a mild sore throat. I'm 41. Most symptoms slowly waned over a 5-7 day period, though I think the lethargy stuck around a little longer.

My 38 year old wife (vaxed and boosted ~6 weeks before infection) had similar, but slightly milder symptoms.

My 10 year old son and 7 year old daughter (unvaxxed) had no or very minimal symptoms.

I took benadryl, vitamin D, beer, microdose psilocybin, thc edibles and lots of homemade turkey stock leftover from thanksgiving.

I'm unvaccinated, I had a week with sniffles and a lot of sneezing but no other symptoms. I thought it could be allergy to house dust after cleaning (common problem for me). I woke up with chills and a low fever (99.5 at the highest), felt light headed and dizzy when I stood up. I developed a minor dry cough, headache and sore throat, general aches all over, then a day or so later felt very fatigued. I rested for about 3 days and the symptoms went away, some fatigue lingered a bit for a few days after. I was supplementing vitamin C, D, Zinc, Magnesium. I didn't ever get tested but given the timing and symptoms I'm pretty sure it was Omicron. At least, it must have been something extremely contagious because I didn't have any prolonged contact with anyone outside the house at all before this.

My wife had exactly the same symptoms a day after me, and our 1 year old son also had a low fever and was a little ill at ease at the same time.

8 cases in my local extended family within the past month (5 confirmed, the other 3 not tested). All adults treated with Cuercetin, zinc, Vit D, and all the other drugs from [whatever that doctors pdf recommended] except Ivermectin, because we couldn't find any. No known prior COVID inflections except as otherwise noted. No vaccinations for the whole crew.

• 77yo male, diabetes, obese: ignored it for a few days, his blood sugar spiked and he got confused and dehydrated, hospitalized about a week into symptoms, treated for covid-related pneumonia, released after about 5 days (but he has good insurance, my wife suspects it would have been a 1-2 day stay otherwise). Recovering fine.

• 77yo female, obese: minor fatigue 3 days, fully recovered. (The only adult without a confirming test)

• 65yo female, hypertension: 2 days minor fatigue, fully recovered.

• 65yo male, no comorb: 3 days moderate fatigue, fully recovered.

• 37yo female, no comorb: Lost sense of smell for 2 weeks, no other symptoms. Sense of smell about 80% recovered (3 weeks since start).

• 37yo male, no comorb: Previous COVID inflection Jan '21. Minor fatigue 2 days. Fully recovered.

• 4yo male: 1 day fever, treated w/ children's Tylenol. Fully recovered.

• 2yo female: 1 day fever, treated w/ children's Tylenol. Fully recovered.

Summary: The kids' immune systems burned it away and ignored it. Adult females did better than adult males, and the worst case (3 comorbidities) was mainly because of ignored related conditions.

Me and a few of my friends contracted COVID from going out on New Year's Eve.  We had a group of 5 friends go out (we're all in our early to mid 20's).  I and 2 others started showing symptoms on Jan 3 (other 2 didn't get sick).

Me: On Jan 4 I felt like I had the flu (headache, achy body, chills).  Took a bunch of vitamins (C, zinc, etc) and a dose of ivermectin for my body weight (200 lbs).  The next day I felt a million times better and didn't get any worse afterwards (really just a stuffy nose and felt a bit cold at times).  Not sure if it was the ivermectin or if I got lucky.  I'm not vaccinated.  I didn't get a test but my friends were positive for COVID so I'm sure I was as well.  My dad (61 years old and vaccinated, not boosted) got sick a few days after me (I definitely gave it to him).  He had flu-like symptoms like me.  He took a dose of ivermectin and seemed significantly better the next day.

Friend 1: Felt like death and said he had extreme fatigue.  Didn't take vitamins or anything (though he lives a super healthy lifestyle) and couldn't do much for a week.  He's vaccinated but not boosted.  Tested positive for COVID.

Friend 2: Had flu-like symptoms like me but for a good bit longer (probably a week).  Not sure what he did to help combat the VID.  He's vaccinated and boosted.  Tested positive for COVID.

The 2 that didn't get sick are both women (not sure if that affects things) and I'm pretty sure they're vaccinated.

No idea if I actually had it or not, couldn’t find a test. Went to Monday night opening party for shot show with the expectation I would catch it, so preloaded with 40k vitamin D/day for 3 days starting day before, and 20k/day since. Started feeling a little weird Thursday, had a 100-101 fever that lasted until Early Saturday with some fatigue. No real cough or drainage though. Kept up with the vit D added vit B and C and aspirin, as well as some Dayquil. Drank lots of fluids, especially vitamin water. Post-fever I’ve had an very slight dry cough, that’s really been it. Otherwise feel 100% normal. I’ve had the notorious shot crud before, this wasn’t it. I almost feel like a hypochondriac even suspecting it may have been Covid.

Patient Zero in our house was our 8 year old. His symptoms were very mild - he said he had some discomfort exhaling, and he had a low grade fever (101) for a couple of days, but only in the evenings

Then I got it (37 y/o 2x shots). I had a cough that felt very different from any other upper respiratory infection I have previously had, best I can describe is it felt like I had poison ivy in my upper lungs. Day one I had to spend an hour inhaling steam in the shower, but by day three it was gone. Weirdly I never got a fever. Just the cough and some sluggishness that felt like a mild hangover.

Partner got it a couple days after me (34 y/o female, unvaxxed) and took a big hit to her energy for 3-4 days, but didn't miss work or anything else.

The 3, 5, and 6 year old never showed symptoms of any kind so we didn't test. The three of us were verified Covid + via PCR and home tests.

My roommate, 40 y/o man, felt like a mild cold for a couple days, followed by a couple days of fatigue. He went and got a test from the state-run testing center and it came back positive. Two weeks later, the rapid tests he's getting from an employer are still coming back with a faint but visible line for positive.

Multiple people working on the Olympics tested negative in the USA before departure, then tested positive in China on arrival and were quarantined for weeks, testing positive every day on the chinese-administered test, even though tests sent to them from the US came back negative. The US department of state organized a refugee flight to get them out, which was sent back because... The pilot tested positive on arrival. Zero of these people have any symptoms.

Came down with it after Christmas and visiting family. Little sister tested positive, and I was taking unusually long to get over my "long car trip" fatigue, so my employer asked me to get tested.

For the price of a stuffy nose and a VERY mild cough I got to save a bunch of gas and time that I would have otherwise spent on commuting.

And there you have it. Post your experiences below in the comments to add to the anecdote pile.

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In this call we heard testimony from several MDs in South Africa about the Omicron variant, how the media’s approach to it is overblown, how the government is interfering with their ability to give certain treatments, and how they swear they aren’t conspiracy theorists but they can’t understand why the institutions are behaving the way they’re behaving. We heard testimony from people on the ground in New Zealand, where the government is going to permanently ban all unvaccinated people from doing anything but going to the grocery store or gas station, despite the fact that Covid-19 can be transmitted among the vaccinated population. They too said they aren’t conspiracy theorists but can’t understand why the institutions would behave in this way. The topic of the call, largely, was about the idea that a large portion of the world is under mass psychosis, and what could be done to combat that.

They aren’t HWFO readers.

If they were, they’d have a crystal-clear understanding of what’s going on. I tried to explain it in my short time on the call, but I fear the explanation probably went over their heads, because they haven’t followed along with the HWFO explanation of how and why sensemaking about all things, not just Covid-19, is fundamentally broken. And the easiest way to explain this to them, and to the world at large, is to look very carefully at the case of the “Lab Leak Hypothesis,” as an explainer of why a thing that looks like a conspiracy may not be a conspiracy at all, but rather is just an expression of a broken system doing what broken systems do.

Lab Leak Sensemaking

We now know that Peter Daszak invented the idea for a thing identical to Covid-19 in 2018. We know that his company Eco-Health submitted a proposal to DARPA to build this Covid-19 like thing at laboratories in the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We know that DARPA told Eco-Health that the idea was dangerous and stupid and they weren’t going to fund it. We know that Covid-19 appeared in Wuhan in late 2019. We can deeply infer from this chain of known circumstances that either Eco-Health went ahead with the research with a different backer (such as the Chinese) or under a classified program outside of DARPA, or the Chinese stole the idea and ran with it themselves as they’ve been known to do in literally every other field of research. And we deeply infer it escaped the lab.

We also know that if a brand new never before seen pandemic virus emerged from a Pacific rim wet market every single year since the birth of Jesus Christ there’d still only be about a twenty percent chance that one emerged from the Wuhan wet market, purely because there are so many wet markets in East Asia. And we’ve known this tidbit the entire time. Simple statistics proved “zoonotic origins” false before the Floyd riots even started. Anyone capable of rudimentary critical thinking had “Lab Leak” as the most likely case by summer of 2020 if not sooner.

Further, we know that almost all the public facing “scientists” involved with virus research at the time said the idea that the lab leak hypothesis was a racist conspiracy theory. We know “Lab Leak Is Racist” was such a dominant position in our overall sensemaking apparatus in 2020 that scientists were literally not allowed to talk about it publicly without losing their jobs until Biden won, and that the former director of the CDC got death threats from other scientists for entertaining the lab leak theory. These are things we know.

So let’s start there.

All of those things are a tell. They are an indicator of who is being honest and who is speaking performatively. This problem of “speaking performatively” about Covid-19, parroting certain narratives to gain virtue within the overall social media organism, is interfering with sensemaking. We can use this tell, which is completely transparent, to prune our sources of the performative speakers and narrow our focus to who is speaking honestly. It’s a simple procedure. Build a list of every individual and every institution that said that the lab leak hypothesis was a racist conspiracy theory and remove them from the room. Ignore them. They are no more than robot NPCs and their opinions about Covid-19 are tainted, untrustworthy garbage. Here’s a list of people whose opinions you can completely throw out based on this one test.

• Anthony Fauci

• Peter Daszak and every coauthor of the now infamous Lancet Letter, which would include Charles Calisher, Dennis Carroll, Rita Colwell, Ronald B Corley, Christian Drosten, Luis Enbjuanes, Jeremy Farrar, Hume Field, Josie Golding, Alexander Gorbalenya, Bart Haagmans, James M Hughes, William B Karesh, Gerald T Keusch, Sai Kit Lam, Juan Lubroth, John S Mackenzie, Larry Madoff, Jonna Mazet, Peter Palese, Stanley Perlman, Leo Poon, Bernard Roizman, Linda Saif, Kanta Subbarao, and Mike Turner.

• The authors of the Nature Medicine snow job, which would include Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F Garry

• The Entire Chinese Government

• Any Chinese scientist allowed to speak publicly

• Washington Post

• New York Times

• Vox

• The Guardian (who, interestingly, gave Daszak a platform for that extremely ripe link)

• SCMP

• CNN

• NPR

• Slate

• Politifact

• Vanity Fair

• The New Republic

• National Geographic

• USA Today

• LA Times

• ABC News

• Vice

• CBC

• Mother Jones

• FAIR

• Telegraph

• ScienceNews

• FactCheck.org

• TodayOnline

• Snopes

• PBS

• MSNBC

• FiveThirtyEight

There are obviously more, but this is a good starter list, with historical links.

Fake News

The implication of the above list is pretty clear. All left of center media sources are not reliable sources of information about Covid-19. If you search Google with a specific 2020 date range for the terms “lab leak conspiracy” you will get a wall of basically identical articles to the ones linked above, with a scant few links saying that the lab leak hypothesis may be viable or shouldn’t be ruled out. Every single one of those scant few is right leaning. If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself.

Ad Fontes Media hosts the now infamous Interactive Media Bias Chart. You can follow that link, find each of those sources above, and identify their location on the graph. Every single one is left of center, many of which are even considered “reliable” by the chart. You’ve probably seen this chart before, in some form or another:

For something to be a “conspiracy,” there must be some secret cabal orchestrating the conspiracy. Conspiracy theorists are very good at picking out patterns, but often very bad at assigning blame for those patterns. They presume central coordinated action in cases where central coordinated action may be extremely difficult, or even impossible. What we see here, with lab leak denial, is instead a kind of a distributed conspiracy related to basic HWFO media analysis, rooted in game theory.

A Distributed Conspiracy

Fans of HWFO have heard this song and dance before, but I’ll try and condense it for new readers. Every organization in the above chart makes about a third of a penny per click. Each of them writes articles that seek virality, because they make their fractions of pennies from social media shares. Social media shares happen within information silos, known widely nowadays as “echo chambers.” Each media organization (across both sides of the chart) plays to a target audience, to try and get the shares, to try and get the penny fractions. At some point in 2020 Trump said that the virus came from a lab, so getting the penny fractions from the left-wing information silo required the left-wing media organizations to write articles that said the opposite. It was literally that simple. If Trump had said the virus didn’t come from a lab, they would have said it did, because their profits depend on it.

In a way, the only central figure in what became a distributed conspiracy to say one thing, was the one public figure who said the opposite thing.

We’ve seen an abundance of articles in mid to late 2021 within the overall media space that have attempted to explain how the media got lab leak so incredibly wrong. None, as far as I’ve seen so far, had the correct explanation. Robot NPC media writers farming clicks from outrage porn, because farming clicks from outrage porn is literally their job, never seem to enter into the discussion when the discussion is being held within the outrage porn click farming institutions. And every attempt at an explanation I’ve seen, in some way or another, was itself attempting to farm a different kind of outrage porn, for more penny fractions, because no media organization can quit this behavior without going out of business.

We don’t see this behavior only with the lab leak. We see it with mask efficacy. We see it with vaccinated transmissivity. We see it with Australian quarantine camps, both for and against. We see it outside of Covid-19 as well, with gun policy, with the facts of the Rittenhouse case, with “Russian Collusion,” and with the Hunter Biden laptop. On the other side of the coin, we see it with topics like climate change denial, and Q-Anon, and such.

And as we continue as a species to pivot our overall sensory experience away from real life and towards Zuckerberg’s Meta, this is just going to get worse. The poor folks in the Covid-19 conference call yesterday were struggling with how to escape mass psychosis, without realizing the forces they’re up against. Those forces are baked into our entire sensorium and cannot be fought. It. Is. All. Mass. Psychosis.

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A study by the CDC and the Federal Bureau of Prisons recently went back to this well, and the results of that study support the dominant narrative that “the vaccine won’t stop Delta, but it will make it milder.” And it’s important for heterodox anti-establishment thinkers to be honest when the establishment may have gotten something right. Let’s proceed.

February Flashback

On February 16th of this year, HWFO pointed out that the best possible way to study Covid infections would be in a controlled Covid-19 infected human rat maze with universal testing, and that would be horribly unethical, terribly illegal, and we were already doing that.

The best possible way to determine herd immunity threshold (HIT) would be to trap a large captive human population in a giant rat maze, let them all get infected, and count the infection rates and the deaths. Skip all this mathematical modeling, Rt projection, computer simulation, and such, and just run the experiment. We obviously can’t do that because it would be illegal and unethical and wrong and whoever even thinks about mentioning such a horrid experiment should be cancelled and fired and run out of town by angry mobs with pitchforks and brooms, so we’ll never see any data from such an experiment.

Just kidding, we already did it, and we already know the answer.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation does an admirable job of keeping their Covid-19 data up to date, current, meticulous, and freely searchable from their website. Anyone can go there and look at infection waves in each of their prisons. You can go there and search for infection waves that look, graphically, like Wuhan’s, and see the numbers. Here’s Folsom State Prison:

Folsom State Prison achieved HIT, the infection rate at which Covid-19 goes away, at a 65% infection rate. (654.6 out of 1000) San Quentin achieved HIT at 84% infection rate. LA County achieved it at 55%. The Supermax facility at Pelican Bay achieved it at 9.7%, because it’s less of a rat maze and more of a series of tiny individual isolated rat boxes. HIT varied by the nature of the prison itself.

Texas Delta Blues

The CDC and FBP’s study on an unnamed Texas prison was released four days ago, and doesn’t name the prison. It would be great if they did, and even greater if that prison had published data about whatever its 2020 infection wave looked like, as a true point of comparison, but they didn’t. Perhaps this omission was HIPAA related, and perhaps we could back our way into figuring out which prison it was by looking at inmate populations, but then the FDA might chase me down for end-arounding HIPAA so we’re going to skip that exercise and jump straight to their numbers. Here they are:

The Delta infection rate among the unvaxxed population in this unnamed Texas prison was a blazing 93%, and was even 70% among the vaccinated. Unvaccinated inmates had a 33% higher chance of catching Covid-19, but among those who did catch it, they were ten times likelier to be hospitalized. Nobody vaxxed died, and the sample size among the unvaccinated wasn’t large enough to ascertain a true infection fatality rate for that sample.

There are potential confounders. Poor Covid-19 outcomes flow from comorbidities and age, and we don’t know the relative rates of either for the inmates. Any uneven distribution of comorbidities or age in the two sample sets would heavily skew these results. But if the comorbidity rate and age distribution of the two samples is similar, then the official narrative that “the vaccines don’t stop Delta, but they slow it and keep you out of the hospital,” is absolutely born out in these numbers.

Here’s a comparison to the 2020 pre-Delta waves we analyzed in February:

The Delta variant infected vaccinated inmates at the unnamed Texas prison at rates about equal to the rates of unvaccinated infections in 2020, before there was a vaccine. This makes it look like the vaccine is garbage. And the vaccine is obviously not as advertised, when the advertisement said “90% effective!” But the outcomes for unvaccinated inmates in the prison was much worse than not only the vaccinated ones, but also the unvaccinated inmates in 2020 subjected to Covid-19 strains before Delta hit the scene.

None of this necessarily supports the argument for vaccine mandates, particularly for the young. None of this necessarily supports the booster shot argument. It certainly isn’t the bill of goods we were all sold on this vaccine back in January. And none of this considers what new variants could be like, which might reduce vaccine effectiveness even further. But a spade is a spade, and based on this data from a tightly controlled human rat maze, the official narrative fits the data. Delta’s a real bitch, the vaccine is “still sorta good” versus Delta, and because of those two the vaccine is worth considering.

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It Came from The Lab

A recent 900-page Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from The Intercept proves that Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to congress about funding gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that the research being funded by the United States was exactly the kind of research that could have produced Covid-19. They were adding spike proteins to existing coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans, tested them on "humanized mice," and proved that it worked. Here’s what Richard H. Ebright, a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, had to say about the recent Intercept release, nine hours ago, on Twitter:

The materials show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present. (This had been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant.  But this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and the full proposal of the 2017 grant.) The materials confirm the grants supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.

The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells ("humanized mice"). The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses--one not been previously disclosed publicly--was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed, and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity. The materials further reveal that the the grants also supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric MERS-related coronaviruses that combined spike genes from one MERS-related coronavirus with genetic information from another MERS-related coronavirus.

The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.

In combination with the recently exposed intelligence that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized with symptoms very specific to Covid-19 in November of 2019, the chance that this virus wasn’t created intentionally in a lab is so miniscule it should be disregarded.

It came from the lab. It was either built with United States money, or it was built one room over from things that were curiously similar being built with United States money, using techniques and technologies that were absolutely developed with United States money.

Period. Done. That horse is in the stable. Fauci knew. Therefore Fauci cannot be trusted.

HWFO already came to the conclusion that zoonotic origins were ridiculously improbable with solid statistical analysis in April of 2020. The analysis went like this:

The “official channels” have maintained for four months that this virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the world’s Mecca of studying emergent SARS coronaviruses that originate in bats. A lot of speculation by the media has gone into supporting this case, as well as the solid support of the Chinese government, but the case is obviously garbage. I grant that wet markets for exotic harvested wild meats are a great vector for something like this, but set that aside for a moment.

There are between a hundred and a thousand wet markets in China. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Vietnam. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Thailand. There are hundreds or thousands of wet markets in Laos, hundreds or thousands more in Cambodia, hundreds or thousands more in Burma and Myanmar and Malaysia. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s completely reasonable to estimate the total number of wet markets in East Asia being at least ten thousand.

But only one of these ten thousand or more wet markets is two blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The chance that a brand new never before seen SARS coronavirus variant would emerge at the only wet market two blocks from a laboratory whose primary function is to study never before seen SARS coronavirus variants, specifically from bats, is simply too astronomical to believe. If a brand-new world epidemic virus were to emerge every day from a wet market in east Asia, it would be three years or more on average before one emerged from Wuhan. No honest scientist would believe that coincidence given what we know.

Phrased another way, if we had one new novel bat coronavirus outbreak per year, every year since Jesus Christ was born, there’d still only be about a 20% chance that any of them came out of Wuhan. When presented with this analysis, some zoonotic origin supporters told me I was making The Lottery Fallacy but they didn’t understand the framework of the argument. I wasn’t talking about the chance of Random Bob winning the lottery, I was talking about the chance of Bob-The-Guy-Who-Pulls-The-Lottery-Balls winning the lottery. I got defriended by half a dozen smart people on Facebook over this argument, because their social media feeds were telling them I must be an anti-Chinese racist. And that social pressure was not only against me, it was against the very scientists attempting to raise the question within their own professional circles, and it was so severe that they had to self-censor to keep their jobs.

When confronted with preliminary inklings about this by Congressman Rand Paul, Fauci produced one of the most trafficked rebuttals in Congress this year. Here’s the exchange.

When confronted with studies by Senator Paul explicitly showing research where “functions were added” Fauci basically says “that didn’t count,” because presumably some virologists decided that those gains of function weren’t gains of function according to some nebulous semantic detail within the ban on researching gains of function. And when he said it, the Blues cheered and the Reds booed and nobody listened to the words either of them said.

Sensemaking becomes impossible because the truth of a thing in 2021 is not based on reality, it’s based on whether it fits a preferred narrative. It’s based on whether it gets clicks. One tribe has decided they trust Fauci because the other tribe doesn’t. The other tribe has decided they don’t trust Fauci because the other tribe does.

And nobody’s talking about the wider implications of this. Any multi-millionaire could seed fund an off-grid gain of function lab to develop Measles-19 and kill much larger swaths of the human population than Covid-19 if they wanted. The cost to do that is thousands of times cheaper than building a nuke. ISIS could be doing it right now. The Taliban could do it for a fraction of the resale value of the military gear abandoned in Afghanistan.

Virality

HWFO has spoken at length about the idea that internet memes, graphics easily conveyed, act as a kind of data compression for social media sharing. But up until recently I tried to stay out of the meme game, because I find it disingenuous. I tried it last week, and got half a million impressions and almost fifty thousand engagements. Here’s the tweet.

And here are the stats on the tweet.

Let’s do some meme analysis on it.

Every line of the image is a story the blue establishment told the public at some point or another during the pandemic. These stories were not, largely, authored by scientists. They were authored by policy makers in tandem with the social media organism itself, and the most prominent and most wrong messages in there are ones that flowed from the virality of the message. “It was never about Herd Immunity,” for instance, was a viral Blue Tribe social media organism response to the Red Tribe’s discussion of ending lockdowns by getting to herd immunity naturally. “Asymptomatic cases have long term damage” was a Blue Tribe social media organism response to the Red Tribe saying that Covid-19 is no big deal to most people. Science that supported the social organism’s argument got elevated, science that didn’t support it got suppressed, and the tail wagged the dog. Lab leak is only one of many obvious examples of the tail wagging the dog. What’s true is what’s viral.

I watched closely who shared the tweet above. Anti-vaxxers, obviously. And I am not an anti-vaxxer, I’m sitting on double Pfizer and may get a booster on it, depending on how things go. But I only got vaccinated because I spent a tremendous amount of time and effort breaking down the numbers on my own, because Fauci is not to be trusted, nor is the CDC, nor is anyone who ever said any of the things in that tweet, which means most or all of the Blue Tribe establishment. The messaging isn’t about truth, it’s about virality. Let’s look at a CDC webpage as an example:

I took a screenshot in case they change it.

Nothing in this web page is false. It is true that vaccinated people are less likely to contract Covid-19 than unvaccinated people. It is true that people who recover from a Covid-19 infection and then get a vaccine afterward are slightly more protected than people who recover and do not get vaccinated. But the most important piece of information for the purposes of the “vaccine passes” debate is intentionally withheld. You’re 13 times less likely to be a breakthrough case if you’ve achieved natural immunity than if you’re vaccinated. “Science Says” forcing recovered people to get a vaccine pass is stupid, but the CDC webpage is written as if forcing recovered people to get a vaccine pass is obviously the right thing to do.

This same thing shows up in the current Ivermectin debate. Media outlets, the CDC, and the FDA, are summarily trashing Ivermectin with abandon, recasting the entire miracle antiviral drug as “horse dewormer” and claiming there are no studies showing it works, nor even that it’s a drug safe for humans at all. Here’s a table of peer reviewed trials (in humans) showing that it works.

I’ve followed a tremendous amount of the Ivermectin debate, and it would take ten articles to cover it fully. Some of the studies in this graphic aren’t all that great. Some are wrong. Ivermectin is not a substitute for vaccination because you couldn’t make enough of it to supply the world with a regular dose. The idea of achieving any sort of global elimination of Covid-19 through a daily drug is logistically asinine. But Ivermectin may help some as a treatment. There are lots of anecdotes, and a bundle of studies, showing it may help some. And since Ivermectin is a completely safe drug at human doses when prescribed by a doctor, there’s no reason not to do it. It’s as harmless as masks – perhaps more harmless. If I contract Covid-19, which I postulate is extremely likely in the long run, I’m going to take it even if it doesn’t work because there’s no drawback.

Why is our sensemaking apparatus telling us it’s dangerous when it’s obviously not? Virality and social manipulation.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s pretend there’s a new drug called Miracletosin, which absolutely would improve Covid-19 infection results by 10% in treatment. Not much but enough to warrant taking. Let’s pretend the anti-vax community latches onto it as a vaccine alternate and uses the existence of Miracletosin to justify not getting vaccinated. Let’s pretend the existence of Miracletosin causes 15% less people to get vaccinated. The CDC, FDA, and the sensemaking apparatus looks at the bottom line and says “that’s 5% more dead people, we should trash Miracletosin to make sure nobody takes it,” even if taking it is beneficial.

And since tribal signaling in the social media organism makes it fun to share HORSE DEWORMER memes, the FDA rides this virality component to suppress a drug that is absolutely helpful and in no way harmful.

Is this what’s happening with Ivermectin? I don’t know. But it should be plain that in our currently fabulously broken sensemaking system, they would be against Ivermectin even if it did work. Even if they were good, nice, smart people whose only interest is in saving the lives of others, and had no financial ties to the vaccine industry, and believed personally that it might work, and would take it themselves if they caught Covid-19, they’d still trash it in the media as a method of social control. Trashing it in the media would fit their Hippocratic oath. They may feel obligated to do so. What’s true is what’s viral.

Is it a vaccine at all?

I took Pfizer and had zero issues so I’m inclined to believe the vaccine isn’t going to kill me, which inclines me to probably get booster shots. But it’s looking increasingly like vaccine conveyed immunity probably only lasts six months. I have never heard of a vaccine that only lasts six months. Our last great Vaccine Culture War was over the HPV vaccine, which cost $500 a shot and even if applied universally across over 300 million people would only avert a thousand or less cervical cancer deaths per year. Lots of people argued about the Return on Investment (ROI) on that one. But if the HPV vaccine only lasted six months, I don’t think the pro-vax community would have even allowed them to call it a vaccine.

Outbreaks in several of the most vaccinated countries in the world seem to indicate that this vaccine, even if universally applied, will not eliminate Covid-19. The best description for this treatment, based on what we know now, is that it’s a targeted temporary immune booster. And that the “vaccine mandate” should at least be changed in nomenclature to “targeted temporary immune booster mandate.”

And while I selfishly might seek out the booster, I have grave concerns about what this treatment is going to produce in the long term. The best science available for mandated vaccines in animal populations flows from the agricultural industry, where it’s been shown repeatedly that leaky vaccines create deadlier variants. I do not think vaccines caused Delta because Delta originated before the vaccine wave, but there is no doubt in my mind that our current “leaky vaccine” strategy is going to create more variants that bypass vaccines and kill more people, in the same way that heavy use of antibiotics creates antibiotic resistant superbugs. It’s the same evolutionary mechanism. Covid-19 is already in deer, by the way, so unless you plan on vaccinating them we’ve got a permanent nationwide reservoir of germs on our hands.

The only remaining path to a life free of Covid-19 is to move to an island country with secure borders and a very robust contact tracing program. New Zealand is nice this time of year. Outside of that, buckle up buttercup.

For now I personally recommend but would never dream of mandating:

1. Go ahead and get your targeted temporary immune booster shot, but

2. Never give an ounce of trust to Fauci again, nor or any individual or agency who used the phrase “horse dewormer” in the last month.

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Let’s refresh our memories of the actual truth, examine the vaccine’s politicization on both sides, and talk about what to do going forward both with vaccine sensemaking and sensemaking in general. By the time we’re done, I hope to give you a good look at what the future looks like and what you need to do to prepare for it, because there’s basically only one thing you can do. Vaccination is fine but it won’t solve the problem, and the single most important thing to do is lose weight.

Actual Truth

Trump was the most pro-vax president we’ve ever had. Trump literally attempted to buy BioNTech in March of 2020 to get a lock on their worldwide vaccine production. Trump issued an Executive Order in December of 2020 to seal the country and require that all doses manufactured in the USA didn’t leave our borders until we were all vaccinated. This is why US vaccination rates outstripped most of the rest of the world in the spring. All those liberal Karen Facebook vaccine selfies in the spring were because of Trump. Trump was banking on his October Surprise being the announcement of the vaccine, and medical professionals worked tirelessly behind the scenes to delay him from announcing it, supposedly for the health and well being of the public, but that’s not true at all. It was delayed to affect Trump’s vote totals in older populations. They didn’t want Trump taking credit for it. Proof:

For a thousand more such documented images of this Blue Tribe behavior, go here:

The vaccine “isn’t safe” if it’s announced the day before the election, but it’s “safe and effective” if it’s announced the day after the election.

Read that again.

The FDA is not to be trusted if Trump is the president, but the FDA is to be trusted if Biden is the president.

Read that again.

They literally said these things. I cannot trust people who say these things.

This is a problem bigger than Covid-19. This problem is fundamental to the way people in 2021 make sense of the world around them. The fundamentals of crafting a model of reality necessary for living life itself are now based on partisan signaling spilling through a smartphone. The truth of a thing is not related to reality, it’s related to whether the thing was written in red ink or blue ink.

Mandates and Counterfactuals

If the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) had been approved during Trump, then all the Red Tribers would have lined up to be the first to get their TrumpVax and a very large number of Blues would have continued to hide under the bed saying they didn't trust the vax, as evidenced by the vast majority of media behavior captured above. It would be an exact inverse of what we have now.

The current FDA approval is in fact rushed per their own guidelines because their guidelines require data collection until at least 2022, because the Phase III trials won’t be done until then. All the people saying “don’t rush it” pre-election are now rushing it.

Why?

Under the current Emergency Use Authorization, anyone who wants to take this drug can take it. I even know people who have vaccinated their children, regardless of whether that’s recommended or not. It’s freely available without restriction. Which means that the only reason to issue the FDA approval now, before all the data is in and the trials are complete, is to have that approval in their back pocket to push a vaccine mandate, because they can’t mandate a EUA drug.

It was political in the beginning, political in the middle, and still political now. Politics driving science does not make good science, regardless of which politician is driving it.

I did choose to be vaccinated, because I did my own research, I understood what an EUA means, and I figured I'd done enough experimental drugs in college that one more wasn't going to do me any harm. I'd have signed up to be experimented on mid 2020 if they let me. I do think it works, for probably a six-month window at the minimum, versus Covid Classic, and it works less well against Delta but it’s still probably worth taking.

But I do not see the value in vaccinating my children when the numbers aren't in yet on brand new untested technology, when the IFR for children is a fraction of the IFR for the ordinary flu. Vaccinating children is taking a risk with no real reward.

And I want to know what the goalposts are for vaccine mandates. People pushing mandates need to establish these now. The vaccine was originally 90% effective versus Covid Classic, but its effectiveness (at least versus Delta) drops significantly over time. If the vaccine is only 60% effective is it still worth mandating? What about 40%? What about 10%? The pro-mandate crowd must answer this question with a number, not platitudes, and must stick to this number when the Covid-19 Tango Uniform Variant shows up and the vaccine is only 17.2% effective versus it.

Let’s talk about this graph. I put in a trendline so we can forecast how bad this is going to get, and a projection that far out without better data is not trustworthy. But the R^2 value of the trendline is 1.00. It doesn’t get any better than that. If this is to be believed, and we want to keep immunity above 70%, we are all going to need booster shots at least three times a year, for the rest of our lives, with emergent, questionable technology.

The bulk of vaccination in the United States wrapped up around May. Somewhere around ninety days ago. And immunity from recovering from a natural infection doesn’t last either. I know at least two people who contracted Covid-19 a second time nine months or later after their first infection.

This is not a viable path to herd immunity. And as the virus mutates, it’s highly likely that new mutations will be even more vaccine resistant, for the same reasons that antibiotic resistant bacterial strains emerge from environments that heavily use antibiotics. Nature finds a way. Here’s a graph of nature finding it:

Each little dot is a mutation. Colored clusters are “variants” similar enough to group. Here’s a graph of the net ratio of variants versus Classic Covid, by ratio of total infections world wide:

Apolitical Sensemaking

First and most importantly, herd immunity to Covid-19 is a pipe dream because the vaccines don’t last long enough and the virus keeps mutating. A vaccine mandate is not going to stop it, although they’re definitely going to try, and then blame its failure on people who don’t take the vaccine.

If you have not caught Covid-19 yet, prepare to catch it because you are going to catch it. If you have caught it already, prepare to catch it again because you are going to catch it again. The only way you can prepare to catch it is by reducing your comorbidities. From the CDC:

Preexisting comorbidities significantly associated with increased odds of in-hospital mortality were:

• Metastatic solid tumor, 57% increase (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] =1.57; 95% CI, 1.20–2.05)

• History of myocardial infarction, 47% increase (aOR=1.47; 95% CI, 34–1.62)

• Cerebrovascular disease, 39% increase (aOR=1.39; 95% CI, 1.25–1.56)

• Congestive heart failure, 37% increase (aOR=1.37; 95% CI, 1.26–1.49)

• Hemiplegia, 34% increase (aOR=1.34; 95% CI, 1.05–1.72)

• Any malignant neoplasm, 27% increase (aOR=1.27; 95% CI, 1.09–1.47)

• Dementia, 20% increase (aOR=1.21; 95% CI, 1.11–1.32)

• Diabetes, 20% increase (aOR=1.20; 95% CI, 1.12–1.28)

• Chronic pulmonary disease, 16% increase (aOR=1.16; 95% CI, 1.08–1.26)

• Hyperlipidemia, 11% increase (aOR=1.11; 95% CI, 1.03–1.19)

Bolded emphasis is mine. Some of these things you can do nothing about. Some of them you can. You are more likely to die from this thing if you’ve had a heart attack, if your heart is gummed up with crud, if you have diabetes, if you have high blood pressure, or if you have high cholesterol. Every single one of the bolded conditions is tied to your weight and your eating habits.

I speak to Covid ward nurses. They are worn out, tired, frustrated, and angry with the number of insanely fat people who are showing up in Covid wards, who never looked after their health or their bodies, some of which are so gigantic that they can’t even fit in the ICU bed. There’s not much you can do to avoid cancer or dementia, but you can control your weight. The absolute best way to prepare to catch Covid-19 is to lose weight. There was never a reason to believe Wokeist “healthy at any size” rhetoric, but in light of Covid-19 becoming a systemic, permanent fixture of the landscape that is never ever going to go away, everyone has to try to lose weight, and do so as fast as possible.

If that puts “fat shaming” back on the table for socially acceptable behavior, so be it. And if we want to lock down the economy, maybe we should try locking down McDonalds first and taxing the sugar industry. Sorry, but science is science.

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We still don’t know the answer to this question, because this entire thing with Covid-19 is one giant human experiment, and we won’t know the answers of the experiment for a decade. We’re starting to get data, though, so it’s valuable to look at it, and then use our view of it to evaluate the public policy and public messaging decisions around it.

The Experiment

The Covid-19 vaccination experiment, wherein the human population is being coopted into what amounts to a global vaccine trial, is public. The FDA outlines this on their website, where they explain Emergency Use Authorizations. The money line in that link is here:

For an EUA to be issued for a vaccine, for which there is adequate manufacturing information to ensure quality and consistency, FDA must determine that the known and potential benefits outweigh the known and potential risks of the vaccine.

In short, they did an ROI on pushing out a partially tested vaccine against the drawbacks of not pushing it out, as best as they could figure at the time, and voila! We have a vaccine the day after Trump loses the election.

Like any experiment, there is a treatment group and a control group. People in the treatment group should be glad some folks aren’t getting the vaccine, so we have good data on the unvaccinated. People in the control group should be glad other folks are getting the vaccine, so we have good data on the vaccinated. This is how experiments work, although this may be the first experiment of any scale, to say nothing of the national or global scale, where the two groups (treatment and control) seem to hate each other on Facebook. Regardless, I’m glad these two groups exist. I chose treatment group, Pfizer in particular, and some of my friends chose control group, and we are all still friends.

Covid-19 is a super weird disease which kills some people, particularly those over age 65, and is basically harmless to some other people, particularly those under age 25, on an aggregate basis. Infection fatality rates (IFRs) for Covid-19 are approximately 7 to 8 times higher than influenza for every discretized age bracket age 65 and over, are approximately the same as influenza for those in middle age, and are 50 times lower than influenza in the under 25 bracket. Covid-19 can also sometimes cause long term damage to various organ tissues, which doesn’t show up in the fatality numbers, and for which we have no good prevalence data yet as far as I’m aware. Those things are certainly happening, but we don’t know how often at a population level yet.

The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are brand new, never before tested technology that probably would have sat on a shelf for a decade or more before being FDA approved were it not for Covid-19’s dramatic appearance. Their efficacy in preventing Covid-19 infection seems noticeably higher than any other vaccine method cooked up in 2020, and that’s good, but we have no idea yet whether they cause unforeseen long-term damage.

A very deep dive into the science of mRNA vaccine technology was hosted by Bret Weinstein here:

You may want to watch it before Youtube censors it for being anti-science, even though it’s literally an interview with the guy who invented mRNA vaccine technology. Why they might do something so tremendously stupid is covered several sections down. We’ll get there, but first let’s do some math on how many people probably die from the vaccine and what that means.

(post publication edit: YouTube banned Weistein recently after this article was released)

Vax Death Math

I expected people to die from this vaccine. I expected the deaths to be downplayed, and discussion of them to be censored. I expected alternate media to elevate those deaths to generate Handwaving Freakoutery about them and farm clicks. I expected a culture war to erupt around suppression of the numbers. All my expectations were met robustly, because this is the underlying mechanic that drives the sensemaking crisis. Here’s the best take I’ve seen so far on how many deaths there actually are from this, lifted without attribution from one of the places I hide in where we talk about the sensemaking crisis itself:

First off, this could be complete bullshit. It’s a statement on a discussion board with no references and no math shown. I have not independently verified any of these numbers, and if some journalist wants to actually do the legwork to do so themselves, I highly encourage it. But this number, one in five thousand vaccinated people die from the vaccine, seems reasonable to me and I’d like to move forward pretending it’s true to try to figure out whether it’s high or low, scary or benign. One day we might know what the real number is, and we can run back and rework the following analysis.

In February HWFO calculated herd immunity threshold (HIT) may be as low as 55%, based on studying infection waves in US prisons, instead of the 85% trotted out by Fauci and Friends. The Covid-19 crash predictions in that article turned out to exactly match reality, so this number is probably good and we are going to use it.

Case 1: YOLO Fuck It

In the YOLO Fuck It case, there is no vaccine and we all just catch Covid in the same way that the prison system did, generating HIT through natural means. As long as we don’t overshoot, we’re probably landing at a net total infection rate of 55% nationwide, or 181 million people out of our 330 million population. Presuming even mixing of infections across all age bands, and an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.5% as has been chronicled elsewhere, that probably yields a total death count of 900,000 dead people. Just under a million. Our reported death count is currently around 600,000, two thirds of this number, most of which happened before the mad dash to vaccinate.

Case 2: Magic Space Vaccine Fairy Version 1

In Magic Fairy Case 1, Tinkerbell comes down from space on January 1st 2020 and vaccinates the entire USA population at gun point with mRNA technology, killing one out of every 5000 Americans, and preventing Covid-19 entirely. Out of our 330 million population this would kill 66,000 people with mRNA bugs while averting the 900,000 deaths from Wuhan bugs. This is a noticeable difference. 14 times more people end up dead from the Wuhan bugs than the mRNA bugs.

Case 3: Magic Space Vaccine Fairy Version 2

In the second Magic Fairy case, she comes down from space on January 1st and makes the vaccine optional, and 55% of the population takes it. We still reach HIT, but only 36,000 of the brave intrepid volunteers who place paramount trust in Tinkerbell die. This is the best of the three outcomes.

We could derive even better outcomes if we wanted to. Perhaps Tinkerbell brings Shrek the Actuarial Space Orc with her, who decides to gunpoint vax those over age 65 and let the rest either opt in or YOLO, and we’d be down around 15,000 deaths or less. I haven’t done this math, reply in the comments if you’d like to LARP the actuarial science.

The takeaway here is important. Even if people die from the vaccine at a rate of one out of every five thousand, the vaccine still makes sense at a population level. Which creates an incentive for public policy folks to bury the truth in order to avert vaccine skepticism.

The Hippocratic Lie

Two shadowy CDC figures meet at the Clifton Road Boruboru for lunch. One is an evil man, bent on social manipulation of the populace because he earns a fat salary bonus from the Deep State Illuminati for every Covid-19 death he averts. The other is a beautiful kind lady doctor, committed to doing the least total harm because of her oath of profession. “First do no harm.” They’re staring at a Top-Secret CDC report on the table between their poke bowls, a report which shows definitively that mRNA vaccines kill one out of every 5000 people who take them. This evil greedy CDC man and beautiful altruistic CDC woman only agree on one thing: suppress this report.

If the report gets out, people might choose not to take the vaccine. If enough choose not to take it the country doesn’t reach HIT. If the country doesn’t reach HIT then more people die. The obvious thing to do, in both of their positions, is to lie to the public to reduce the death count.

Such a lunch meeting never took place. No two such people exist in the pure. But everyone at the CDC falls along some spectrum between those two, and both of the ends of the spectrum don’t want you to know what the vaccine death count is, because of the nature of their job.

And that is why Bret Weinstein gets censored regularly on YouTube talking about this stuff.

Peanut Gallery Advice

I chose “experiment” group instead of “control” group, not out of a cultural affiliation with either group, nor out of fear of death should I catch Covid-19. I chose it for much more benign reasons. I figured I did enough experimental drugs in college a few decades ago that one more experiment was no big deal, and the vaccine was free, and I’m so busy professionally right now I don’t really have time to get sick. The dice on dying from the vaccine were worth rolling, whatever those dice end up being in the long run.

But there is no way in hell I’m letting anyone vaccinate my kids with an experimental nanodrug, when pre-pubescent children have never once been shown to propagate this disease during contact tracing studies, and children get over the disease very quickly and with relatively small side effects on net. The push to vaccinate children is immoral and wrong until this vaccine moves out of Emergency Use Authorization stage, and anyone who disagrees with that doesn’t understand how science works.

We should continue to expect the official channels to lie out of a desire to manipulate us, because that is almost literally their job, but catching them in lies does not necessarily mean not to follow their advice. What it does mean is that we have to step back and perform our own version of what their job should be, and make decisions untainted by Handwaving Freakoutery on either side of whatever flavor of culture war is hitting Facebook on any given day.

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Now that Covid-19 is gone (I said it) we should be taking a look at who was right, who was wrong, what worked, and what didn’t for whenever it comes back. The national dialogue isn’t doing us any favors here. The NY Times are doubling down on mask rhetoric, Hillary and Biden are claiming power over vaccine mandates that they do not have, and the Covid Culture War rages on because humans like culture warring. But for those of you who are culture war agnostic, let’s take a look at HWFO’s performance, what the near future may hold, and what worked versus what didn’t.

HWFO February Predictions Confirmed

On February 16, 2021, HWFO predicted that the Covid-19 epidemic would be gone by the middle of May, and went so far as to make real five figure stock market investments based on that prediction. Pro tip: they worked. The logic was simple, but you can follow the link back to that article and read it in full if you like. The case went like this:

Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) was very likely not to be 85% as claimed by Fauci and friends at the time because the prison system reached natural herd immunity in places like San Quentin, Folsom, and LA County at natural infection rates as low as 55%.

Natural immunity to Covid was likely to be much higher than thought by the experts, because of asymptomatic spread and because of the lack of testing in the spring of 2020. The country probably started with around 36% natural immunity (see prior article), although it’s increasingly questionable how long that lasts. More on that below.

Vaccination in the USA was happening at “warp speed” but was likely to peg out at around 56% based on polling data. (again see prior article) Based on extrapolating linearly from vaccine velocity, presuming natural immunity gave us a head start, and using HIT numbers from prisons, HWFO predicted in February that the USA would trend towards a total vaccination rate of a little over half the population, and that that would be enough to crush Covid-19, and that we’d hit that in the middle of May.

It’s now the middle of May.

Everything came true.

Here’s your google snapshot:

38.2% of the country is fully vaccinated as of May 20, 2021. We’ve currently got 125 million fully vaccinated, an additional 27 million on their first shot, for a total of 152 million in the vax pipeline. That’s 46% current vaccination, creeping up on the 50% boundary in the middle of May just as predicted. Confirmed cases are cratering:

Confirmed deaths are following suit. We can’t compare spring 2021 rates to spring 2020 rates because in the spring of 2020 the CDC and FDA had cockblocked all efforts to make tests for so long that we were test rationing and our data sucks for that band. Cases in spring of 2020 were probably underreported by a factor of ten or more.

In February HWFO also predicted that we’d end up with over a hundred million vaccines we weren’t going to use, and one of the next Covid Culture War battlegrounds was going to be about giving them away to countries that don’t have them, as well as forced vaccination to push the numbers up beyond what’s necessary to try and do something with our unused vaccine hoard.

All of this is happening now.

Will Covid Come Back?

Yeah probably. Clues to why come from the overall social shift in the USA that Covid cemented, and what has transpired within these social groups. The Covid Culture Wars of 2020 funneled everyone in the USA into two basic disease tribes, because Covid-19 was an almost perfect Shiri’s Scissor of a disease. It’s just deadly enough to cause half the country to freak out, and just benign enough to make the other half of the country refuse to freak out. And in 2020 every single thing ever had to be about Trump somehow, so anything Trump said was either automatically adopted by one tribe or automatically opposed by the other, so again, the country became divided 50/50. Our Covid tribes looked like this:

Tribe 1: ZOMG GERMS!!!1!1one!eleventyone

The ZOMGs hid under their beds, wore three masks to the grocery store, virtue signaled to their friends on Facebook how much safer they were being than their peer group, applied social pressure to everyone they met, including strangers, and were the central fixture of what became known among its targets as “Covid Shaming.” It was a social distancing program vastly more macabre and effective than any government mandate, because they were running Cancel Culture dynamics in real time against their friends and family.

Tribe 2: YOLO SPEAKEASY

The YOLOs were a disparate band of rebels reacting against the ZOMGs. Some of them were people who didn’t think a virus with a 99.5% survival rate was worth this magnitude of fuss. Some didn’t think the fuss actually worked. Some thought that adding a few extra years to some old folks lives wasn’t worth sacrificing years off the young folks lives. Some were deep Trumpsters. Some were doing whatever the ZOMGs weren’t doing because they don’t like the ZOMGs. Some were simply extroverts of all stripes whose personality typing could not deal with locking themselves in a room for a year and a half.

And I’m sure some others were caught in the middle. I was in the middle but wasn’t caught. I just sorta grinned and popped popcorn and watched the thing.

Analysis

The formation of these two tribes was fascinating to watch from my point of view, because I’m allergic to tribal thought. The ZOMGs formed immediately and signaled their allegiance to each other by adopting one or more colored frames around their Facebook profile pictures, almost like getting a sports team tattoo. The formation of the YOLOs took longer, because they had to carefully feel all their other friends out in private to see who else was a YOLO, who was willing to sneak out of the house and have face to face contact, who was willing to risk ZOMG castigation and cancellation to have a drink with some friends. The YOLOs in border states were not fully formed as a social group until around October or November of 2020, because they had to form in secret, like ancient Christians avoiding being fed to the lions. And then they said “fuck it, Thanksgiving” and “fuck it, Christmas,” once they had a quorum. You Only Live Once.

And these two tribes had almost zero contact with each other. It was as if the country divided into two countries occupying the same land. And every epidemiological model that failed to account for that and presumed even mixing in a petri dish, which means every single one of them, was and is wrong. If any of those epidemiologists are reading this article now, they just had a sinking feeling in their stomach because they just realized I’m right.

It’s no secret that blue states were primarily ZOMGs and red states were primarily YOLOs, but states riding that boundary had a healthy portion of both, and they fought, and I live in one of these. Georgia. There was a great confusion among epidemiologists around a month ago when the blue states were outvaxxing the red states but the blue states cases were climbing while the reds were cratering. The YOLO/ZOMG model explains that trend very easily. In the blue states, natural immunity from the spring 2020 wave was expiring while they all still hid under their beds waiting for their shot, while a lot of the YOLOs had caught Covid in the fall and winter of 2020 so their natural immunity was still working. Effectively the red states had YOLOs getting natural immunity from one direction and ZOMGs getting artificial immunity from the other direction, and they met at the quarterback. The blue states only had one blitzer.

 Let’s wrap up “will covid come back” and then move on to an on-the-ground Georgia analysis.

Covid will come back because natural immunity lasts less than a year. I know a handful of reinfections so far, out of a sample size of about fifty infections, most but not all of which happened within the YOLOs. No reinfection happened sooner than around nine months. Covid’s only been around a year and change. There’s your reinfection boundary. What’s likely to happen going forward is the YOLOs don’t get vaccinated and the ZOMGs vaccine booster rate tails off lower than the current initial vaccination rate, and the country dips below that 55% (or whatever it is in reality) threshold, and Covid comes back in fits and starts basically forever. It will be fun and funny to watch the differences in how the red and blue states react to this permanent condition. Some may even call it an…

EXPERIMENT IN HUMAN SACRIFICE

When Georgia became the first state in the union to reopen, the blue media mounted the greatest dogpile in epidemiological media history, foretelling worse doom than the Black Plague, and literally accusing governor Brian Kemp of “experimenting in human sacrifice.” In the Atlantic no less. As HWFO readers already know, they were doing this because their entire business model is clickbait outrage porn, but Blue America totally believed them because that’s what America does, blue and red. Well, the experiment is done. Georgia opened first and came out about average.

(image from the IHME model)

Say this to a blue person in Georgia and they will reply “yes but Atlanta didn’t do what Kemp said and implemented their own regional controls.” That is an accurate statement. But the deaths per capita by Covid of the red and blue counties within Georgia are not too far off, outside some truly curious statistical outliers which probably have to do with the way the numbers are counted on military bases. “Yes but Atlanta is more dense, and has public transit, and such.” This is also true. If we wanted to find the best possible comp to compare the effects of diametrically opposite Covid management approaches, not only within Georgia but nationwide, we’d need to find two counties geographically adjacent with similar demographics, no rapid transit, within the same state mandate umbrella, which did things as opposite as possible, and then we could compare their numbers.

These counties exist. Cobb County and Cherokee County. I used to live in Cobb until October of 2020. Now I live in Cherokee. I know exactly what happened in both, because I watched it. Ignore the NYT, the truth is much more stark in every direction. This is what happened.

Cobb Under Covid

Mask use was 100% everywhere. You waited in line outside the barber shop to get in one at a time. Home Depot had a guy with a ticker checking store capacity and the line was in the parking lot. They cancelled school with only one week’s notice, throwing every parent into an insane bind with no time to prepare. Private schools immediately filled up to over-capacity. Day cares were running distance learning programs in pop up tents for parents who had to work. Two of the five school board members decided to make critical race theory training a requirement for all staff before the schools were allowed to reopen, and drug the county down into that shit show. I tried to put my seven-year-old daughter in a “learning pod” and the parents running it kicked her out because they decided she wasn’t washing her hands enough. Kicked her out. Pro tip: when liberal white women say the phrase “it takes a village,” what they really mean is “it takes a village unless there’s germs in which case fuck you.”

Even when the district did finally open, they mandated one distance learning day per week for all students, mandated masks, and reopened to a 15% net loss of enrollment from so many parents bailing on the shit show. Everyone was socially shaming everyone else if they ever left the house. Per the terminology above, Cobb was a unilaterally ZOMG controlled county, with some extra Blue tribe cultural race war thrown in for spice. It was and still is really, really nasty.

Cherokee under Covid

Cherokee is literally across the county line from Cobb. Very close. In October I moved forty-five minutes north. The Cherokee Kroger was 60% masks, Ace Hardware was 20% masks, Tractor Supply Company was 5% masks, and Waffle House was packed. No Covid shaming. Extreme red tribe signaling, including signs in yards berating the “Plandemic” and “Fake Virus” and such. I’m not saying I buy these signs. I’m just saying, there were signs. The schools only closed twice. Once for several weeks because literally too many teachers had Covid and there weren’t enough subs. Second for a district wide vaccination day. Masks in school were optional for kids. My children loved it, and the number of Covid cases at their elementary school was near zero.

Cherokee’s opening was so derided nationally that it even had multiple New York Times pieces trashing it. A middling county in Podunk Georgia. But when you read the NYT pieces, they made a tremendously stupid math error that nobody would pick up on if their reason to read the “news” is to culture bash. Their pieces references cases in schools that reopened as if those cases wouldn’t have happened if the school was closed. I pulled the Cherokee Schools Covid numbers up every single week my children were in school there, and they never once exceeded the per capita rate of the overall county. Usually they were lower. I know this because I know how to use a calculator. Despite there being Covid cases in schools, the schools were comparatively safer than the rest of the county. And because we mentioned Critical Race theory (CRT) in Cobb up above, I’ll note that I received an email today stating that Cherokee has banned CRT and also the 1619 project from the school system. I state this to give the reader an idea how fundamentally different these two counties are. Cherokee was squarely YOLO.

But Covid hit them exactly the same.

The numbers are the same. Here they are.

Per capita infection rate about the same. Death per 100,000 rate about the same. Cherokee actually did better on deaths but honestly that probably has something to do with retirement home ratio. All the things that Cobb put itself through during Covid had no discernable impact. And these “basically the same” numbers land both Cobb and Cherokee in the “about average” category for the USA, and also “about average” for liberal globalist Western Europe.

“But the CDC said mask mandates worked!” you say. Well, sorta. According to CDC studies comparing “mask mandate” areas with “masks optional” areas, the difference in spread was 0.5% to 1.5%. Not a lot. And that difference may not have had anything to do with masks, because of how we as Americans used the masks. We all now know, as those of us paying attention have known since May of last year, that Covid is an airborne disease that is transmitted primarily by sharing stale air with a symptomatic carrier. 24 of 25 transmission cases for Covid were from symptomatic carriers, indoors, in enclosed environments. It spreads among family, friends, and inside apartment buildings and subways. But in the USA we wore them out and about, and then took them off when we got inside our homes. We took the masks off when they were most useful, and wore them proudly when they were the most stupid to wear. The masks were largely not a health and safety measure, they were a tribal totem to display to others how proud we were to be in the “compassion” tribe.

Which is exactly why everyone is still wearing them right now even though the CDC said we’re done with masking. Nobody wants to be mistaken for an evil uncaring individualist, or worse, a Republican.

Bold Predictions

This time I have none. Covid will be back, probably around February of 2022 plus or minus a few months, but it’s hard to say how badly. Some states will try to run lockdown stuff, but this time around the lockdowns will hurt a Blue president instead of a Red president so the more lockdown inclined states may not go as hard in the paint towards economic disaster as they did in 2020. Hell, they may not have even recovered from the last lockdowns by then. I don’t travel to California, but I hear it’s fucked. Red states in the next six months are going to ball out economically. Georgia is fully open and going nuts. Nashville on any given weeknight looks like Spring Break in Daytona. Daytona probably looks like … Daytona. People in the red southeast are even working at their jobs, instead of sitting at home on welfare refusing to rejoin the economy like I’m told is happening in Virginia by this nice lady tending the bar I’m sitting at right now. (KC Crabs and Cues, shout out, Kilmarnock VA represent yo) I have no idea how long it will take California to return to normal. I sort of hope they fail to do so before the Covid reinfection wave hits in 2022, just so my stock in popcorn and 3d glasses will go up. Maskers will become a permanent fixture of the environment, because wearing a mask is a very easy way to signal your moral superiority without having to actually do anything to help anyone. The billionaires will prevent the UN from re-banning gain of function research and something worse than Covid-19 will hit the air waves in a decade or less. And the world will continue to become more absurd.

Nobody will learn anything. The CDC has become a permanent allegory to “crying wolf.”

And Measles-19 (or whatever) is going to be lit, because it might be the actual wolf, while nobody is going to want to do this shit again.

Let’s start by looking at who’s winning the vaccine horse race.

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Horse Race

Until recently the USA was solidly fourth, behind Israel, UAE, and the UK, in terms of total vaccine doses administered per capita. Our number four spot was overtaken the first week of March by Chile, who has now jumped ahead of even the UK. The European Union countries are way down in the bottom of the pile, being led by Denmark at 17.3 doses per 100. And when you look at who’s winning, a very clear picture emerges.

Are the most robust economies winning? No. Chile, Serbia, and Hungary disprove this theory. Are the western block countries winning? No. Chile, Serbia, and Singapore disprove this theory. Are the countries who did well containing the spread of Covid winning? No. Chile, the UK, and the US disprove this. Are the countries that did poorly winning? No. Singapore did very well containing the spread, and a huge pile of countries that didn’t earn a spot on the graph did poorly. Are the capitalist countries winning? Sorta. But there’s a laundry list of capitalist countries who aren’t doing well, and most of the EU would consider themselves a market economy. Germany did as well as many countries in the EU at containment, developed the EU Covid test that the WHO later adopted, and is proud of their capitalist infrastructure, yet are conspicuously missing from the graph. There is one and only one trend that’s clear in this horse race, as far as I can tell.

• Israel is led by a conservative, nationalist, me-first government.

• UAE is led by a conservative, nationalist, me-first government.

• Chile is led by a conservative, nationalist, me-first government.

• The UK is led by a conservative, nationalist, me-first government. #Brexit was literally a referendum on this very topic.

• The USA for all of 2020 was led by a conservative, nationalist, me-first government.

• Serbia is led by a populist, somewhat conservative, me-first government, although they do like being in Europe.

• Hungary is led by a conservative, nationalist, me-first government.

• Singapore is led by a nationalist, me-first government. I’m unclear how truly “conservative” they are, but they’ve been one-party rule for the better part of a century.

Want a vaccine? Elect a nationalist. The proof is in the pudding, and here’s how the pudding was made.

Pudding Recipe

I’m going to credit Dave Keating for catching me up to speed on a lot of the EU politics here, and I’ll summarize a chain of events he recently enumerated on Twitter.

AstraZeneca signed their purchasing agreement with the European Union one day before it’s agreement with the United Kingdom, but AstraZeneca is giving vaccine priority to the UK. The AstraZeneca CEO told the European Parliament in February that the UK priority is baked into their vaccine development agreement with the University of Oxford, signed in January of 2020, which was then inherited by AstraZeneca when it partnered with Oxford in May of 2020. Covid-19 infections were probably already deep in the underbelly of London by January, but nobody knew it. The UK was intelligent to start funding Covid-19 research before the infection was apparent in Europe, but their true intelligence was in prioritizing themselves in their funding agreement. Me-first nationalism was the winning move in the horse race.

Germany funded BioNTech at the same time but failed to put in a “Germany first” clause. They either chose not to, because they have globalist instead of nationalist leadership, or they may literally be prevented from doing so by their position within the European Union. I’m not sure. Globalist cooperation was the losing move in the horse race.

In March of 2020 Donald Trump attempted (and failed) to literally buy BioNTech, move their operations entirely to the USA, and have them develop a USA-only vaccine. Had he succeeded, this obviously me-first nationalist move would have been a winning move in the horse race, but it failed. He took his shot. Germany plodded along disregarding the move as inconsequential.

Oxford was originally going to partner with Merck, but was prohibited from doing so by the UK government, who forced them to partner with AstraZeneca. Matt Hancock, the UK health secretary torpedoed the deal because he didn’t want the USA to out-maneuver the UK in the me-first nationalism game.

This was a smart move, because Donald Trump signed an executive order in December 2020 giving all Americans first priority on vaccines made on US soil. This is classic me-first nationalism, an issue on which he literally campaigned in 2016. Biden has not rescinded this EO, and is currently reaping the rewards from it, but it’s unclear if he ever would have made the EO in the first place. His liberal globalist counterparts in Europe certainly didn’t make any moves like that.

Also in December of 2020, the UK and US used emergency authorization to approve the Pfizer vaccine, while the EU drug their feet and approved it almost a month later. The UK gave emergency use approval to the AstraZeneca vaccine on December 30th. When the EU finally gave AstraZeneca approval on the 29th of January, AstraZeneca said it couldn’t meet the dosage delivery promise because of production problems in the EU plant. Apparently some of the doses there were already earmarked for the United Kingdom. The contracts for delivery to the UK and the EU from AstraZeneca were signed three months apart from each other, so AstraZeneca was able to iron out process problems in their other vaccine plants before the EU plant. Because of the US export ban Trump implemented and Biden maintained, and similar efforts within the UK, the Canadian vaccine doses come from Europe. And the first 3.9 million doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine here in the USA also came from Europe, as J&J struggled to ramp up production in their Baltimore plant. Lots of liberals love Justin Trudeau, but not when they’re getting their shots.

Some version of this drama played out in all the countries leading the world in vaccinations, even the developing countries. Chile has no appreciable local vaccine production, but it does act as a kind of east-west economic crossroads, and it cut early deals with AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinovac, and CanSino for vaccine delivery priority in return for letting all four companies run trials there. Their current leadership is notoriously capitalistic, so much so that they dealt with a terrific populist uprising in 2019, but the folks in the driver’s seat there knew how to wheel and deal “me-first.” I speak with people in Chile, and they’ve had a rough go of it the past few years. I will not claim to support or oppose their current leadership, but it is clear that their leadership’s mindset is getting them vaccines.

Dave Keating, the very talented journalist from whom I ripped a lot of this research has a take that’s probably shared by a lot of people in the EU and Canada on this entire drama:

Thanks for the research Dave, but I don’t think you understand the rules. Yes, nations are artificial social constructs bound by invisible lines in dirt, but they exist for a reason. It is game theoretically advantageous for the nation to out-maneuver other nations, because that out-maneuvering benefits the people inside that dirt line. Period. This is the actual game. If your nation chooses not to out-maneuver, then your nation is the one choosing a suboptimal game play. The liberals here in the USA are happy as a pig in mud, posting their vaccine selfies. They just don’t realize who they have to thank.

The deeper question is this. In the game of nations, do you actually want things to be fair, or do you want your vaccine first? It’s an important question to ask.

If you’re Canadian or European, I do have good news for you. We’re going to run out of people to vaccinate in late May, right around the time Covid-19 is gone here, and we’ll have hundreds of millions of doses in warehouses collecting dust. We’ll probably let you use some of them. Math on that is here.

Thinking more on this, it seems to me as if the winning move, generally speaking is to be me-first right up to the point where other people get pissed off at you and also start going me-first as well, at which point you start to lose your advantage. It seems as if global diplomacy is the game of riding that line. Unless, of course, you need some damn vaccines.

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But when I look at the data, and do honest comparisons with other countries, the USA is objectively not the worst, and should rather be characterized as “pretty bad but vaguely in line with a lot of other countries in our predicament.” Let’s look at some honest graphs.

A common theme within the Blue Tribe is “Europe does everything better than the USA does.” And they almost always focus on prior Western Block countries, NATO members before the wall fell. Here we see Covid deaths per capita among these countries, with the USA in red. The UK is absolutely the worst, Belgium Spain and Italy are bad, we’re behind Italy and tied with Portugal, and France and Sweden aren’t faring too much better than we are. Finland is the only country over there that’s rocking it. How did Finland do it? It’s titty popping cold, hard to get into, they have more secure borders than most of the rest of the EU, and they did a whole bunch of contact tracing. Denmark doesn’t look to bad either, but they are a peninsula and an island chain with a very small and easily controlled contiguous border. More on that later.

The USA is “pretty bad but vaguely in line” in this bar graph.

Data in the bar graph comes from the IHME Covid-19 Model, which is one of the best resources available online to compare Covid-19 in countries over time.

This is a snapshot of the IHME model, with the USA in yellow and each of the bar graphed countries in grey, on a per capita basis. Covid-19 has varied throughout the epidemic, and the USA is again “pretty bad but vaguely in line” with our comp countries.

But we’re missing some other important comparisons. Australia and South Korea and New Zealand are all highlighted in the media as success stories for Covid-19 control. Let’s look at a wider batch of data, including all the world countries with a Human Development Index over 0.9, what we might call the top tier of the first world.

Singapore is an island nation with an easily controlled border. New Zealand is an island nation with a moat the size of the entire South Pacific. Hong Kong is an island with a tightly controlled military border. South Korea is a peninsula with a wall Trump could only dream of. Australia is an island nation with patrols to prevent illegal Philippine immigration against whom they’re marginally racist. Japan is an island country currently building warships since we finally let them, who is also tremendously racist against the Chinese. Iceland is an island nation with a moat the size of the North Atlantic. Nobody walks into Finland. Denmark is a peninsula with a very small contiguous land border, patrolled on the other side by Germans.

These are the countries where contact tracing worked. In the early days of contact tracing, South Korea was pushing out 100 tests per 1 confirmed case. No country in the world could issue that many tests unless they could completely lock down their borders before things got bad, and a lot of countries were screwed before they knew it. To test enough to do contact tracing during the USA December 2020 wave, we would have had to test 8% of our entire population every single day. No country could bear that burden unless their starting position for infections was very low.

And recall how this spread. It spread down the fashion industry through the world banking hubs. Wuhan is where the garments are made, New York and Milan are both banking hubs and fashion hubs, and London may be the biggest banking hub of all. Those were the places that got bombed first, before anyone knew anything about it, and Vox was still telling everyone it won’t spread here. Check the date:

Here’s the IHME plot for the prior bar graph’s data set:

The USA is going to end up about two thirds of the way up this plot, with the countries capable of contact tracing and border security clustered at the bottom.

The clear lesson from these two graphs is that the United Kingdom either vastly fucked up, or they were hit so bad so early that there was nothing they could do. With #Brexit booked they had the tools necessary to lock their border down by bricking up the Chunnel, they just moved too late. And if you wipe out the green bars, this comparison graph looks a bit like the first one. Again, the USA is “pretty bad but vaguely in line with a lot of other countries in our predicament.”

The other narrative I see a lot within Blue media feeds, and promulgated by those who are plugged into those feeds, is to wage culture war about relative vaccination rates of different states. While I think that vaccination rates by state are a valuable thing to look at, the first thing in this discussion should be that every state in the USA is completely spanking every EU nation.

There’s a pretty solid argument that Brexit seriously dragged the EU’s averages down, because they don’t get to ride on the UK’s vaccine numbers. Vaccine skepticism is all over Europe currently, if you take the time to Google it. It’s not just a USA thing. And no healthcare apparatus within the EU remotely compares to what the USA is doing currently in terms of vaccine velocity. Even worldwide, we’re fourth behind the UK, Israel, and the UAE.

The truth of the matter is that the United States has comparable deaths to France, Belgium, Spain, and Sweden, and is smoking those countries on vaccine distribution. It is unassailably true that the USA could have done better, but it is equally unassailably true that the USA is far from the worst country in the world in our Covid-19 response to date.

Just look at the graphs.

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Infected Rats in Mazes

The best possible way to determine herd immunity threshold (HIT) would be to trap a large captive human population in a giant rat maze, let them all get infected, and count the infection rates and the deaths. Skip all this mathematical modeling, Rt projection, computer simulation, and such, and just run the experiment. We obviously can’t do that because it would be illegal and unethical and wrong and whoever even thinks about mentioning such a horrid experiment should be cancelled and fired and run out of town by angry mobs with pitchforks and brooms, so we’ll never see any data from such an experiment.

Just kidding, we already did it, and we already know the answer.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation does an admirable job of keeping their Covid-19 data up to date, current, meticulous, and freely searchable from their website. Anyone can go there and look at infection waves in each of their prisons. You can go there and search for infection waves that look, graphically, like Wuhan’s, and see the numbers. Here’s Folsom State Prison:

Folsom only has one new case of Covid-19 in the past fourteen days, out of a little over 2,000 inmates. Covid is done there. It got done there because they had an infection wave that started around the beginning of August and ended the beginning of November. They reached HIT in three months, at a final infection rate of 654.6 per 1000 people, or 65%.

Here’s San Quentin:

San Quentin’s infection wave hit June and ended September, also around three months. Curiously similar to how long Wuhan was locked down, yes? They reached HIT at an 84% infection rate. Here’s LA County:

LA County’s Covid-19 wave started December, is pretty much done now, and hit HIT at 55%.

As you cycle through the different facilities at this website, you can sometimes see infection rates up above 90%, which have longer curves and multiple waves. These are probably facilities who have rotating populations of fresh victims. On the other extreme you’ve got Pelican Bay, California’s only supermax facility mostly occupied by angry violent lifers whose interactions are really controlled, and they capped out at 9.7%.

Pelican Bay, we can definitively say, is the epitome of what “lockdown” looks like. We get a ten percent infection rate in tiny individualized socially distanced concrete boxes.

Accounting for overshooting in some facilities, and for the density at which these things are packed, it seems very reasonable to set a herd immunity threshold for some place like New York City with prison-like population density at 75%, and rural areas at 55% or lower. Call it 65% average. The range we get from looking at our ghastly accidental controlled experiment in our own prison systems is notably lower than Fauci’s now hotly debated 85%, which may have been spitballed purely to move the vaccination opinion needle.

How Close Are We Really?

NPR recently ran a bit of handwaving freakoutery called  “The Pandemic is 10 Times Worse Than You Think.” HWFO readers should be pretty good at picking up on clickbait headlines by this point, but the article is interesting and relevant so let’s extremely crudely summarize it by talking about a couple of its graphs.

This comes from a researcher named Jeffrey Shaman at Colombia University, who did the admirable job of realizing that we have a lot of unreported cases, and then tried to back figure them with math and stuff. I think his analysis has the right idea, but probably somewhat wrong, because he doesn’t appear to be fully taking into account how god awfully rare the tests were in the spring of 2020 and how badly test rationing itself was. I know people in the spring who had it, their doctor told them they had it, and sent them home untested because there weren’t enough tests. I think he’s probably overcounting the winter and undercounting the spring, because up until June there were people who wanted tests and couldn’t get them. But let’s take his (not yet peer reviewed) research and presume those two balance out, and further presume that his bottom line is pretty accurate.

He's got the USA at a 36% net “already been infected” rate right now. NPR does what NPR does and talks about how this is all terribly horrible so they can peddle clicks, but I’m looking at the same graph thinking what great news it is that we have fewer vaccines we need to buy to get us to 65% HIT.

Vaccination Rate Tomfoolery

Biden recently scored 200 million vaccines to go along with the 100 million the government had already bought, raising the number of vaccines bought to pretty close to the total general population of the country. That’s a lot of vaccines, and I don’t think it’s too bold to predict that a bunch of these things are going to end up in the trash, or exported to Africa. According to a recent study in JAMA, only something like 56% of the country intends on getting vaccinated.

The reasons why assuredly vary by population group, and there are probably lots of different reasons within those groups. The media has pointed out that black folks have a general distrust of government sticking needles in their arms, owing to things like The Tuskegee Study where the government intentionally infected a bunch of black Americans with syphilis to see what would happen. But you’d imagine the amount of distrust in April 2020 didn’t change much by December, and the rates of those intending to get vaccinated dropped across every single category mentioned in that span.

The two most likely reasons for this drop aren’t the ones trumpeted by the media. For one, people are slowly becoming more aware that Covid rarely kills those under age 65, so the working age population are less likely to want to get vaccinated. And for another, a fair chunk of these people probably already got infected, so they have less need for it. Public health officials now are in a panic that we won’t get enough people vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, that we won’t be able to get them distributed through our current channels before the end of the year, that Covid may be around forever, and such. But their panic may be unwarranted.

Bold Predictions

Let’s say 56% of the population gets vaccinated. Let’s say half the 36% who have already been infected are within that 56% and are going for double immunity, if there is such a thing. That would give us:

• 18% infected but not vaccinated

• 18% infected and vaccinated

• 38% vaccinated but not infected

• 26% vulnerable

• 74% immune

That immunity ratio puts the country 20% more immune than LA County Prison, 10% more immune than Folsom , and 10% shy of San Quentin, while Covid-19 is basically gone in each of those places. 54% vaccination should be enough, and that doesn’t even count immunity granted by however many additional infections we accumulate between now and full vaccine rollout.

As of today, 11.5% of the US population has been vaccinated, and at current rates we’re dishing out about 1.5 million doses per day, a rate of a little under half a percent of the population daily. If we maintain that vaccination rate, we get to 54% vaccination in 94 days. By the middle of May 2021 the United States will have an immunity threshold that exceeds most of our prison population cases where Covid-19 disappeared, without even counting however many additional infections we accumulate between now and then. Note that figure doesn’t include possible supply chain hiccups, but also doesn’t consider improving them either.

Based on this, I find it unthinkable that Covid-19 makes it past the summer unless mutations emerge that are highly resistant to the immunities being spread today. Rejoice ye faithful, Covid-19 is almost over.

The Fun Part

The thing to watch in the summer will be what our institutions do when it’s gone. There will be strange tension between people who want to be done with all this, and the government agencies sitting on a pile of 162 million unused vaccines and no virus. The vaccine makers will either walk away quietly if their contracts have been paid in advance, or will shovel lobby money to mandatory vaccine politicians if they haven’t. The government will flush hundreds of millions of vaccines. The mandatory vaccination crowd on Facebook will scream and yell at the anti-vax crowd on Facebook as usual, but the folks in the middle who don’t see a need for this particular vaccine to be mandatory may start to see the anti-vaxxers perspective. Teachers unions will demand children get vaccinated in order to return to school even though this largely doesn’t kill kids and the teachers can protect themselves by getting themselves vaccinated. Teachers unions might get paid by vaccine manufacturers for trumpeting this. We still won’t have good studies on Long Covid rates. Facebook fact checkers will start monkeying with facts to fit narratives. There will be a great explosion of articles from conservative media trying to evaluate the lockdowns in retrospect to see whether the potentially millions of dollars lost in economic activity per life saved were worth it, and we’ll see an accompanying explosion of articles decrying those article writers as heartless bastards.

And the media machine which peddles freakoutery for clicks will continue to churn, and the anxiety level will remain pegged to the limiter, even though the virus is gone. Buy ammo if you can find it.

And if like me you can’t find ammo, consider cruise line stonks. That’s what I just did.

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