And about that COVID vaccine study that supposedly shows 3000% more myocarditis post-vaccine than previously reported

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article from Hot Air that got a lot of links yesterday. An excerpt [emphasis mine]:

We keep being told that injury to the heart from the COVID vaccine is very rare, but a study done in Basel Switzerland indicates that the rate of subclinical myocarditis after the COVID vaccine is hardly rare at all.

In fact, in a study with only 777 participants with a median age of 37–all medical professionals getting the COVID vaccine–the incidence of elevated cardiac enzymes 3 days after injection was pretty substantial, at almost 3%.

The CDC did a study and from that, they claimed the rate was 0.001%, or one out of 100,000.

2.8% is a lot higher than 0.001%. Another 0.3% had “probable myocarditis,” putting the total at over 3%. That is 3000 times higher than the US government claimed.

Sounds terrible, right? But it’s actually a very misleading analysis of the data by the author of the Hot Air critique. If you don’t read carefully, you might not catch the problems, but they’re quite blatant and become more so if you follow the links and read the studies involved.

The key is that the “injury to the heart” in the Swiss study was subclinical. That means it had no clinical consequences but was a function of measurement alone. And it was temporary and resolved on its own.

And let’s look a bit closer [emphasis mine]:

In this small study, nobody had serious complications, but with a myocarditis complication rate of 3%, you would have to expect that giving out hundreds of millions of doses is a pretty risky proposition.

Yes, like maybe a risk of actual clinically noticeable complications in one out of 100,000, just like the government claimed. Oh, and what did the government actually claim? (And was it actually the government claiming it? When I look at the authors, I don’t see that it was the US government doing the research, anyway.) Let’s follow that link:

In this study, the incidence of vaccine-related myocarditis was 0.95 per 100,000 individuals and was highest in men aged 18–24 years, who had received two doses of the vaccine.

This sounds as though they are talking about actual myocarditis that is measured by actually having symptoms that bring a person to the doctor. And indeed, it seems that’s what’s being measured in this study; I read the bulk of it and that is apparent.

So the Hot Air author is comparing apples and oranges. In the study that found 3% elevated enzymes, no one was ill – and ordinarily these people would not even have had their enzymes checked. The elevations subsided on their own. In the other study being compared – the one that had found a much lower level of problems – they were talking about the level of symptomatic myocarditis itself, not just elevated enzymes. No one checks the enzymes of everyone who got a vaccine, nor does that study purport to have done so.

The smaller Swiss study did something quite different; researchers took a small group and checked the enzymes of everyone in it after getting the vaccine. But only after getting the vaccine. It would have been better to have also checked those levels in those people before getting the vaccine so they could compare the actual changes in those levels post-vaccine. But they did not. Instead, the way they determined there were elevated enzymes was to compare the people’s levels to norms in the population for the age groups involved. In addition, no patient in the Swiss study “had ECG-changes, and none developed major adverse cardiac events within 30 days.”

Researchers prior to this have been quite upfront about there being a very small elevated risk of symptomatic myocarditis in certain populations after getting the vaccine, almost all cases very mild and temporary. And in that linked government study, the authors also say this:

We hypothesized that COVID-19 mRNA-vaccine-associated myocardial injury following booster vaccination may be much more common, as symptoms may be unspecific, mild or even absent, escaping passive surveillance.

What that means is that the authors are saying there may be a higher incidence of asymptomatic changes post-vaccine that were not measured in the study, because the study only looked at symptomatic cases. And that’s exactly what the Swiss study did measure: asymptomatic changes that were temporary. So of course the number of people with such changes was higher.

So there is no contradiction here at all between the two studies. And, as with nearly every single one of the articles I’ve read purporting to say how awful the COVID vaccines are in terms of side effects – and I’ve probably checked at least fifty such articles – I have never found a single one of the claims about such articles that isn’t quite flawed, sometimes very flawed. As is this one.

Unfortunately, most of my lengthy discussion of such things has been in the comments rather than in posts, so it’s very hard for me to go back now and find them and link them. But I’ve written about such things many times.

Look, the government lied about plenty of things connected with COVID, particularly the lab leak origin that was always likely and yet was strongly denied. They lied and/or were mistaken about the efficacy of lockdowns and of masking. Initially they claimed that vaccines would make the vaccinated person unable to transmit COVID and would have a very low chance of getting it in the first place, but with the newer strains that turned out to be false. There were lies about how many people were dying of COVID versus with COVID.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of these articles about how the government lied about so many other things connected with post-vaccine side effect, articles that purport to crunch numbers and understand research, are simply mistaken or lying themselves. And yet so many people seem to believe them.

Just because one side lies and/or is mistaken doesn’t mean the other side doesn’t lie and/or is mistaken. However, I consider government lies more serious, because they are the supposed experts and they influence policy and many more people. But I still don’t like to see research misrepresented by anyone, whether on the left or right, and I see it almost constantly.

[NOTE: By the way, there’s also symptomatic myocarditis as a complication of getting COVID itself. See this, for example; the indication is that the incidence is higher post-COVID than it is post-vaccination.]

RIP Sinead O’Connor

The New Neo Posted on by

The singer has died at the age of 56:

Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor has died at the age of 56, her family has announced.

In a statement, the singer’s family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”

The acclaimed Dublin performer released 10 studio albums, while her song Nothing Compares 2 U was named the number one world single in 1990 by the Billboard Music Awards.

I really have never followed her music and know little about it, but I know who she is and that she often seemed the center of some storm. The article said she had manic depression, which makes me think this may have been a suicide. Manic depression can be a dreadful thing. I also noticed that one of her four children, a son, died last year at the age of 17. Terrible terrible heartbreak and tragedy, and I can’t help but think that her death is also related to that, particularly since he had committed suicide.

RIP to them both.

What’s going on in the Hunter Biden trial?

The New Neo Posted on by

There was a lot of back and forth there that made it hard to sort it out for a while, but this seems to be the gist of the outcome – at least for the moment:

As we reported, the first news out of the courtroom was that the plea deal was not going to happen because there was a difference of opinion between the parties as to exactly what the deal covered and whether additional charges, potentially related to FARA violations, were covered in the agreement or not. Then we heard that a revised deal might be on.

It has now been learned that no plea deal was entered during the hearing on those charges, and that Biden pled not guilty to the charges. According to CNN Judge Maryellen Noreika “said she could not accept the plea agreement as it was structured as it just had her as a rubber stamp.” The original deal was for Hunter Biden to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors, receiving no jail time, and diversion on a felony gun charge. Apparently Hunter’s attorneys believed that the plea agreement would provide their client with blanket immunity on other criminal charges, but after prosecutors told the Court that some of the matters were still under investigation, Judge Noreika questioned whether it was appropriate to grant immunity for matters still under investigation …

Fox News contributor Sol Wisenberg posits that the DOJ, Hunter Biden, and his attorneys were all banking on Judge Noreika not asking questions before accepting the plea and noted that it is essentially unheard of for the parties to not have an extremely specific and mutually-agreed-upon understanding of what the plea agreement encompassed before showing up in court.

In addition, Wisenberg tweeted the following:

Some thoughts: Now we know why DOJ didn’t show us the plea agreement terms. What didn’t they want us to know ahead of time? A) a global immunity deal for Hunter; B) A binding plea (that is, the judge must accept the specific terms if she accepts the agreement); C) Misdemeanor probation; D) Other unusual plea terms.

Highly unusual and highly irregular. But hey, this is about Prince Biden. So at this point, nothing really should shock us.

More from Wisenberg:

Think about this. DOJ was about to sanction a plea deal where Hunter would get misdemeanor probation on serious tax charges plus pretrial diversion (no time served or criminal record) on the felony gun charge. Hunter would also get complete immunity on all other charges. And he would not have to cooperate with the government’s ongoing investigation. Totally disgraceful. Merrick Garland and David Weiss should be ashamed.

Ashamed? I don’t think they know the meaning of the word. Proud, rather. Except for now it backfired.

Will there be a trial? Will it be a jury trial or just in front of a judge? Remember, this is in Delaware, a state not only heavily Democrat but heavily Biden-dominated and Biden-influenced. Is there any chance of a Hunter conviction? I have strong doubts.

Plus, it seems to me that – since these are federal charges – Joe can always pardon Hunter. What’s to stop him from doing so? The Democrat machine would always protect him. Or, if they do end up abandoning him for the 2024 nomination, it won’t be for principle – it will be because he’s become too obviously foggy, and polls show he won’t win.

ADDENDUM: More on the subject here; please read the whole thing. I am reminded of the rather obvious fact that in the Hunter Biden case the two sides – prosecution and defense – aren’t really opposed to each other. The prosecution wants to give Hunter a tiny little wrist slap rather than make him responsible for his actions. It’s only because the House is in GOP hands – for now – and there are whistleblowers who have testified, that we are seeing even this much pushback to the sweetheart plea deal.

Biden cures cancer and the White House transcript office won’t even give him credit for it

The New Neo Posted on by

First, the claim:

Next, the transcript:

“If you could do anything at all, Joe, what would you do?” I said, “I’d cure cancer.” And they looked at me like, “Why cancer?” Because no one thinks we can. That’s why. And we can. We can end cancer as we know it.

Winston Smith at the Minitrue.

It certainly could be the case that that’s what Biden meant to say. It definitely is true that that’s what his handlers wish he had said. But it’s also true that it’s a bizarre error to have made, indicative of a trait Biden has had for his entire life: being a grandiose braggart.

Trump is a grandiose braggart too, but on a smaller and more understandable scale. And I’ve never seen any evidence of dementia in Trump, although his critics – the same ones who are silent on Joe’s cognitive decline – kept pointing out supposed evidence of Trump’s senility. Trump’s bragging takes a more ordinary form than Joe’s, and is more in the nature of exaggeration: the crowd attending his speech was the biggest, he was the greatest – that sort of thing. In that regard, Trump reminded me and still reminds me somewhat of Mohammed Ali, and much like Ali he often has been able to accomplish what he said he would accomplish.

Biden reminds me of no one and nothing. He doesn’t even remind me of the many cognitively challenged people I’ve visited over the years in nursing homes. There is something more odd and repellent about Biden, and it was present even before his current slow fade: something arrogant, bold, sly, mendacious, and cunning.

The case for a Biden impeachment

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not usually in favor of impeachment when it’s a foregone conclusion that there will never be a conviction. But Margot Cleveland makes a good case for impeaching Biden nevertheless:

The evidence of President Joe Biden’s corruption during his time as vice president is now so overwhelming and the implications so serious, the disparate investigations underway in the House and Senate can no longer suffice. Nor can the Department of Justice and the FBI — even under the auspices of a special counsel — be trusted to oversee the investigation given the overwhelming evidence that they obstructed the probe into the Biden family.

There is only one option left that can deliver truth and transparency to the American public, and that is an impeachment inquiry that investigates not just President Joe Biden, but Attorney General Merrick Garland, U.S. Attorney David Weiss, and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

In other words, because the MSM, the DOJ, and the FBI are in corrupt collusion with the Bidens, all of them need to be bypassed in order to get the word out to the American people.

A special counsel won’t do, either:

A belated appointment of a special counsel is untenable because, beyond interfering with congressional oversight and delaying a transparent accounting to the American people, the necessary investigation includes both the DOJ and FBI, the heads of both agencies, and, at minimum, one U.S. attorney. Thus the attorney general’s control over any special counsel appointment creates an untenable conflict of interest.

I think that reasoning is quite convincing. However, I’m not at all sure that even an impeachment inquiry would get the word out to enough people. Would the MSM cover it? And wouldn’t it just be framed as “Republicans pounce!” and “Republicans are just acting to avenge the impeachments of Trump, which of course were completely valid whereas this one is not.”

I still think it needs to be done.

NOTE: I just saw this article, “Speaker McCarthy Warms Up to Impeaching Joe Biden.”

Jonathan Turley on the media’s protection of Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

From Turley’s latest:

The media’s desire to “move on” from the scandal is reaching an almost frantic level, as millions in foreign payments and dozens of corporate shell companies are revealed, and incriminating emails are released.

The same plaintive demand was made in congressional hearings.

What was most striking about the last hearing involving two respected IRS whistleblowers was how Democratic members avoided virtually any specific questions…

…Any question would now trip a wire on the Bidens, so most avoid the allegations in favor of talking about Trump or other shiny objects…

Now, Archer is expected to testify that Joe Biden participated in actual telephone calls with them…

No matter the severity of the revelations, the liberal media calls the investigations a “clown show.”

Others have continued to tell the public that there remain no alleged ties from Hunter to President Biden despite emails, pictures and witness testimony.

Yet it is becoming harder and harder to avoid these details.

I agree with what Turley wrote, and I suggest you read the whole thing. But although, as Turley says, it’s become harder for them to avoid those details – and I’ll add that it’s also become more outrageous and ludicrous – I believe that the Democrats are fully up to the task. Helped by an MSM which echoes their message as well as ignores the details that implicate the Bidens, and instead makes the story into “Republicans pounce!” And “Republicans malign our glorious FBI and DOJ!” as well as “evil Trump this and evil Trump that,” they might be quite successful in continuing to minimize and/or coverup the biggest US political scandal of my lifetime.

NOTE: The Federalist has two articles on much the same topic: this and this. From the latter:

The lead stories from The New York Times and The Washington Post, however, are not focused on the credible allegations of bribery, the more than 200 alleged interactions between Joe Biden and his son’s business partners, or the bombshell testimony from veteran IRS whistleblowers who testified publicly. Instead, Monday’s lineup included a story in The New York Times about how the pair of IRS whistleblowers were prepped by former Grassley staffers (who’ve also worked for Democrats) and a column in The Washington Post about Republican efforts to “impugn Biden.” On Tuesday, readers had to scroll to the politics pages of each paper to find anything about the president’s Ukrainian scandals. Even then, readers were met with skepticism of Republican charges instead of the pro-impeachment coverage that defined the corporate media’s approach to the Trump administration.

On political affiliation as a birthmark

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Jamie” writes: “My father-in-law is utterly convinced that he’s a Democrat and that Republicans are, minimally, bad people,” and then she lists a set of beliefs he holds that seem very consistent with being on the right. She adds:

Doesn’t he sound center-right? But there is NO convincing him that he might consider voting for a (California!) Republican for ANY office, including dog catcher.

My point being, he begins with an unexamined belief in something that doesn’t hold up to even a little scrutiny, because it’s core to him. He is a Democrat, his father was a Democrat, his father before him… To challenge that “truism” is to challenge his sense of identity.

That is extremely true for a lot of people I know. They are consistent Democrat voters and believe people on the right are mean-spirited, bigoted, money-grubbing, ignorant and/or stupid. And yet, when one actually speaks with these Democrats and explores their beliefs – which I sometimes do – it seems they are far more conservative than their voting records would indicate.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve said to such a person, “You know, you’re actually a closet conservative.” And I meant it. They sometimes have chuckled in response. But still, they would never ever vote for a Republican.

I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2005 in this post entitled, “The birthmark: an identity is a difficult thing to change.” An excerpt:

So, the groups to which we belong–social, ethnic, religious, racial, class, professional, recreational, familial, political–all are pieces in the puzzle that creates our sense of identity. The majority of people are probably most comfortable when they perceive the elements within them as cohesive, and are uncomfortable when they see them as clashing with each other. But all sides–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, “progressives” and anarchists and libertarians–take on an affiliation which becomes a basic part of personal identity and is consequently often very difficult to give up.

An excellent illustration of this phenomenon is Democrat Zell Miller, who gave a speech nominating G.W. Bush at last year’s Republican convention. This earned him the enmity of most of his fellow Democrats, who considered him a traitor to the party.

Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.

Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate…

That’s because a liberal political identity tends to be so much more than a political identity–it’s also a moral and personal identity. Liberals tend to equate their own position with such abstract (and non-political) qualities as goodness, kindness, lack of bigotry, intelligence–oh, a host of wonderful virtues. Any identity that is so identified is going to be particularly difficult to shed. Do some conservatives feel this way about their identity? Of course. But my impression is that it is a feeling even more basic to the political identities of liberals–at least the ones I know, and I know quite a few.

My sense is that this is one of the main reasons that my attempts to talk to my friends have so often been met with rage: to many of them, my espousing of any conservative causes means 1) I must be a bad (i.e.: selfish, racist, classist) person; and 2) if I ever were to convince them of the rightness of my arguments, they would be faced with leaving the fold, also, and becoming a bad person, too. Much better to let the whole edifice remain in place than to remove one little brick and risk the whole thing toppling down.

As I said, that was written in 2005. What’s changed about the phenomenon during the ensuing years is that the gulf is now even wider and the feelings more entrenched for the vast majority of people. Democrat pundits, politicians, and activists realized quite some time ago that their strongest appeal was to this phenomenon of virtue-signaling and demonizing of the other side, and so over the years that’s become an especially prominent part of their campaign tactics.

It works.

“Barbie”: another movie I don’t plan to see

The New Neo Posted on by

Pity. The ads made me think that it might be something like the movie “Enchanted,” which I enjoyed. The latter was a charming film about a character from a fairy tale who’s transported to the real world and has to function there. It was made in 2007, which seems like a century ago in some ways.

“Barbie” is also about a pretend character living in a fantasy world – in this case, the doll Barbie – transported into the real world for a while. But the ads lied. It’s rather short on the charm, to say the least:

The plot of the movie is that Kens are second-class citizens in Barblieland. but then they see in the “real world” that there’s a thing called “the patriarchy,” where men are on top (and routinely sexually assault women), so they make Barbieland into a patriarchy.

The plot then becomes all about returning the Kens back to their rightful place, on the bottom of society.

The plot isn’t about making men and women equal — it’s about fixing society so that women are on top, as they should be, and men are slaves again.

And this is the Feminist view of the ideal state of the world.

Let’s not limit this to modern feminism. It’s the case with the leftist viewpoint in general, and/or postmodernism. If there is no truth except that we belong to identity groups and the only thing that matters is power, the only solution is to be a member of the group in power. Turning the tables is fair game, and in fact it’s the only game.

A nasty and reductionist point of view. But that’s the way it’s been playing out in many areas these days, as the Gramscian march keeps charging forward.

Sagan on changing one’s mind

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day, commenter “AesopFan” offered the following quotes from astronomer Carl Sagan, who died in 1996:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
…
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.”
…
“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know, that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again […] I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

I’ve seen these things play out prominently in my life, so the quotes really got my attention.

For example, I recently had a conversation that demonstrated the first two, and it’s certainly not the first time. The form such conversations take is that the person states an opinion that is based on some things that I have found to be untrue, but also tells me that I shouldn’t offer any rebuttal. Sometimes the person says there is nothing that would act to change that person’s mind. In the recent conversation, when I tried to say that perhaps what I would add would actually make that person feel better about things, or at least understand what the other side thinks and believes and why, the response was that I don’t understand that person’s feelings.

Depressing.

For Sagan’s third quote, I couldn’t help but think how outdated it was. Nowadays, I don’t think it often happens that scientists change their minds, at least not in any field that has become politicized – and a great deal of science has become more politicized. And of course, I (and others) have changed my mind in politics – or at least, my political designation, although not really my basic principles. That change was based in large part on evidence and arguments by conservatives such as Thomas Sowell.

And surely people change their minds regarding religion quite often – there are converts, for example, or people who come back to the fold of their original religion, or people who lose their faith. But Sagan is correct, I think, in indicating it doesn’t usually happen as a result of someone presenting a good argument about religion.