And speaking of science: the study on which the CDC based its new mask recommendations

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s some news about the study that purports to explain why the CDC changed its mask recommendations to saying that even vaccinated people need to wear masks indoors in higher-COVID areas. Here’s a link to the actual study results.

I noticed a couple of interesting things on reading it. The first is that it’s a single study set in Barnstable County, Massachusetts after a series of July 4th holiday celebrations that drew many people to outside and inside venues in order to celebrate. The second is that almost all the COVID patients were male, and the median age was 42. That struck me as atypical (especially the huge male skew). But knowing the Cape somewhat it doesn’t take but a moment to realize that Barnstable County is dominated by Provincetown, which in turn is highly gay-friendly and has long been a center of gay culture. So of course the population there for the holidays is going to be heavily male and perhaps younger than typical in most towns. This may not matter at all in terms of the study’s results, but it’s a somewhat atypical population and that should be noted.

This is of interest:

The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations. First, data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak. As population-level vaccination coverage increases, vaccinated persons are likely to represent a larger proportion of COVID-19 cases. Second, asymptomatic breakthrough infections might be underrepresented because of detection bias. Third, demographics of cases likely reflect those of attendees at the public gatherings, as events were marketed to adult male participants; further study is underway to identify other population characteristics among cases, such as additional demographic characteristics and underlying health conditions including immunocompromising conditions…Finally, Ct values obtained with SARS-CoV-2 qualitative RT-PCR diagnostic tests might provide a crude correlation to the amount of virus present in a sample and can also be affected by factors other than viral load.††† Although the assay used in this investigation was not validated to provide quantitative results, there was no significant difference between the Ct values of samples collected from breakthrough cases and the other cases. This might mean that the viral load of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with SARS-CoV-2 is also similar. However, microbiological studies are required to confirm these findings.

So if I’m interpreting this correctly, the study didn’t directly measure viral load, but the researchers concluded from Ct values (see this for an explanation of what a Ct value is) that there might be a correlation with viral loads.

Note also point number three, which I’ll repeat here:

Third, demographics of cases likely reflect those of attendees at the public gatherings, as events were marketed to adult male participants; further study is underway to identify other population characteristics among cases, such as additional demographic characteristics and underlying health conditions including immunocompromising conditions.

They don’t say exactly what they’re talking about, but reading between the lines I infer that they are talking about gay men and the possibility of “immunocompromising conditions” such as AIDS, HIV, or medication for either of those things. None of this reflects on gay people themselves, but I question whether it’s wise to extrapolate from a single study at all, and certainly from one involving a particular demographic that is very possibly atypical in relevant ways such as immune status.

Other interesting findings include this: “Among persons with breakthrough infection, 274 (79%) reported signs or symptoms, with the most common being cough, headache, sore throat, myalgia, and fever” – in other words, basic flulike symptoms. Only five people were hospitalized (four of them vaccinated) and none died. So the hospitalization rate in a symptomatic population (which was almost certainly not everyone infected) was about one and a half percent among symptomatic breakthrough patients, which does not seem at all high. The death rate so far is zero.

It was always stated that between 5 and 10 percent of vaccinated people were vulnerable to getting COVID, depending on the type of immunization used. So these figures alone don’t seem to justify what the CDC is doing. It would be helpful to also know how many people attended the festivities, but all I’ve read is “thousands.” That covers a lot – could be a few thousand or hundreds of thousands. Without knowing that, we can’t know what the infection rate was among the unvaccinated or the vaccinated, and whether either was higher than expected or about what might be expected.

Queen Pelosi orders the Palace Guard to arrest visitors to the House side of the Capitol who don’t wear masks and refuse to leave

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the edict:

US Capitol Police officers will arrest visitors and staff members who refuse to comply with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s renewed COVID-19 mask mandate — heightening tensions with Republicans who call the mandate an unscientific power trip.

Police won’t arrest lawmakers or people on the Senate side of the Capitol, where masks are voluntary despite a resurgence of coronavirus cases linked to the Delta variant of the virus.

A bulletin for police says, “If a visitor or staff member fails to wear a mask after a request is made to do so, the visitor or staff shall be denied entry to the House Office Buildings or House-side of the U.S. Capitol. Any person who fails to either comply or leave the premises after being asked to do so would be subject to an arrest for Unlawful Entry.”

And what is the law that they are violating by refusing to wear a mask? There is no such statute. But they will be charged with “unlawful entry” under this DC law:

§ 22–3302. Unlawful entry on property.

(b) Any person who, without lawful authority, shall enter, or attempt to enter, any public building, or other property, or part of such building, or other property, against the will of the lawful occupant or of the person lawfully in charge thereof or his or her agent, or being therein or thereon, without lawful authority to remain therein or thereon shall refuse to quit the same on the demand of the lawful occupant, or of the person lawfully in charge thereof or his or her agent, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than the amount set forth in § 22-3571.01, imprisonment for not more than 6 months, or both.

So apparently Nancy Pelosi – or whoever is “in charge” of the part of the building she’s talking about (the House) – can be ordered out as she wishes, and if that person refuses he or she can be charged with a misdemeanor and fined or even imprisoned. In other words, it’s misdemeanor trespassing, like the charge against so many of the January 6th people who entered the building peacefully that day but were tracked down later and arrested anyway.

Is Pelosi planning to hold the new offenders for many months without bail, like the January 6th accused?

Some “People’s House.” Note that the Senate isn’t doing this – so far.

Did you know that Joe Biden used to drive an 18-wheeler?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, indeed:

Career politician President Biden is being mocked for claiming he used to drive an 18-wheeler truck — with the White House only able to show he was once a passenger in one.

The 48-year political veteran made the claim while visiting a Mack Truck facility in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

“I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man,” the 78-year-old commander-in-chief told staff, video of the exchange shows — with him clarifying that he “got to” drive one.

Puts me in mind of this, minus the charm:

The return of the mask: the CDC and the Biden administration keep saying to follow the science. But what science?

The New Neo Posted on by

During the Trump administration, the left demanded the most rigorous of clinical trials and controls before any possible treatment that the right – and Trump in particular – might have suggested was possibly helpful in fighting COVID. And yet this is the situation today:

The nation’s top infectious disease expert [Fauci] says the Indian ‘Delta’ Covid variant has the same viral levels in vaccinated people who have breakthrough infections as in those who are unvaccinated…

But the CDC has yet to publicly share new research on Delta transmission among the vaccinated that would back up its new mask guidance and outside experts are calling for the agency to show them the data.

Data? You don’t need no steenking data from us. We’re the CDC! We’ll show it to you someday:

A citation in the updated masking guidance simply reads, ‘CDC COVID-19 Response Team, unpublished data, 2021.’

These data come from investigations of recent Delta-caused outbreaks, in which researchers compared infections among vaccinated and unvaccinated people, according to the Washington Post.

The findings will be ‘published imminently’ per reporting from The Post.

Some scientists – actual, bona fide scientists – would like to check it out rather than take it on faith:

They’re making a claim that people with delta who are vaccinated and unvaccinated have similar levels of viral load, but nobody knows what that means,’ Dr Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Post.

‘It’s meaningless unless we see the data.’

Other experts aren’t convinced that a higher viral load actually leads to Delta’s transmission among vaccinated people.

There’s a whole chain of assumptions here by the CDC. The first is that the CDC’s data, whatever it is, holds up and that with the Delta strain the vaccinated and unvaccinated who get COVID have the same viral load. The second is that with Delta the nasal viral load really does reliably determine transmissibility, and that this means that both groups are equally likely to spread the disease to others. The third is that masking would significantly protect from such spreading with Delta. The fourth is that the Delta variant will cause a rise in serious cases and deaths and not just in cases and/or positive test results. The fifth is that there are a very significant number of breakthrough COVID cases in the vaccinated in this country, enough to justify requiring their masking.

I’m probably leaving out a few assumptions, but you get the idea.

More:

‘I feel like nasal viral load is one part of a lot of other parts’ that determine how infectious a person is, biostatistician Natalie Dean told The Post.

Dean added that she thinks other important factors may be how much virus is present in a patient’s throat or lungs…

…[T]he CDC is not tracking less-severe breakthrough infections. In May, the agency switched its strategy to only investigate and report those infections that cause hospitalization or death

Scientists have critiqued this move for leaving the U.S. without crucial data to monitor the cases caused by Delta and other variants.

Apparently this recent “masks even for the vaccinated” proclamation was also based on a study from India that was initially rejected by a Nature Portfolio Journal and is currently out for “revision”:

The study in question from researchers in India analyzed vaccine breakthrough in over 100 healthcare workers and claims to show that a COVID-19 Delta variant infection generates a higher viral load in comparison to other variants.

Despite no mention in the study of viral loads from the variant against unvaccinated individuals, the CDC cited it in yesterday’s updated brief as evidence that the Delta variant is transmissible from a vaccinated individual with a breakthrough infection.

This study does not compare vaccinated viral loads to unvaccinated viral loads; it compares Delta viral loads to viral loads in other variants and finds them to be higher. And the vaccination involved in India is AstraZeneca, not used in the US and known to be less effective against COVID than Pfizer and Moderna, which are used here. In addition, the abstract to the article says that “severe disease in fully vaccinated HCW [health care workers] was rare.” So, even if ultimately approved for publication, the relevance of this article to the situation here is highly suspect.

I can’t say exactly where I think the threshold should lie for a recommendation for restrictions like this, but I can say that I don’t think it has been met in this case at all. And on these slender reeds they base a recommendation for the vaccinated to mask up in places experiencing an upswing. Not only that, but a lot of people are taking this to mean that vaccines “don’t work,” which discourages vaccination rather than encouraging it.

What’s going on? Is it just that the authorities are in love with the sound of their own authoritative voices, addicted to restricting liberty and to telling people what to do? And to feeling oh-so-virtuous as they make their proclamations and get people accustomed to the habit of obedience? I think it’s at least partly that. But I think another reason is that they are terrified that the numbers will go up under their watch, and that it will have negative political repercussions for their side. Of course, all this back and forth, masking and unmasking and masking again, will almost certainly have negative political repercussions for them, too.

People arriving in this country illegally are being released…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the vast majority are not showing up again for hearings or other appearances at ICE offices.

No surprise whatsoever.

The White House is doing its best to say this is all just routine and everything will be fine in the end.

“We will always be a nation of borders, and we will enforce our immigration laws in a way that is fair and just. We will continue to work to fortify an orderly immigration system,” the White House said in a fact sheet released Tuesday morning.

Blah blah blah blah blah-blah fair and just. Blah blah blah blah blah-blah fair and just…

Why should we care how how the Capitol Police or members of Congress felt on January 6th?

The New Neo Posted on by

Their therapists should care. Their families and friends should care. But I can’t figure out why the rest of us should – at least, not in the legal, investigative sense of trying to find out what really happened on January 6th and why.

And yet that was certainly one of the major elements of yesterday’s testimony in the Congressional hearings on the matter. Of course, we know that the hearings aren’t really to investigate; they are political theater produced and directed by the Democrats, and the reviews are from their friends in the MSM. But I’m speaking on behalf of the public, and I even mean the Democrat-voting public: why should we care how they felt? It’s irrelevant, although obviously it’s a deliberate way to appeal to people’s emotions and empathy rather than to their logic and judgment.

A person can be part of an event and have a lot of feelings. It doesn’t mean that, in retrospect, those feelings are valid in terms of being an accurate reflection of what was happening that day in the objective sense. But we care less and less and less these days about the objective sense, and when I say “these days” I mean the phenomenon began at least thirty years ago and probably closer to fifty.

I’ve previously described an incident in my life when I recognized this. It happened in the early 90s, when I had gone back to school and was taking one undergraduate course in addition to my graduate courses. I was twenty years or so older than the other students, and we were discussing an incident at the school in which some female students had been offended by something a professor had said, and accused him of sexual inappropriateness. He had been suspended and the case was awaiting adjudication, but I was stunned to learn that all the people in the class who spoke on the matter believed that the students’ perceptions of harassment were all that mattered. No objective standard needed to be applied. It was enough that something he said made them uncomfortable.

His words, however, were not anything that most human beings would find the least bit objectionable. I thought he was being railroaded, and I thought the women who had objected needed professional help to get them to understand that the world didn’t revolve around their perceptions and their needs. When I stood up to say my piece in class I didn’t say it that harshly, but I pointed out that just because a person has a feeling about an incident doesn’t make that feeling objectively true, and that legal matters need to proceed using objective standards that are reasonable.

My words were met with silence and a shrug or two. That was it. Then the class moved on to the next person, who continued in the original vein as though I hadn’t even spoken. It was at that point, thirty years ago, that I realized something had gone very very wrong. I hadn’t been among college-age students for twenty years, but there had been some sort of vast sea change that I didn’t understand at the time.

I think I’ve come to understand it in more recent years, and we’re seeing it bear fruit now in so many ways.

Such as:

Yes, we’ve got voice records

The New Neo Posted on by

I was just on the phone clearing something up with my credit card company, and while I was waiting I got the usual “we will be recording this conversation” message.

I can’t remember when that first began, but I know it was years ago. I’ve always assumed it was for the sake of looking up the conversation in case there was some future dispute about what happened during the exchange, but today they added a new message that indicated my recording was being saved for voice recognition security purposes.

And that’s just my credit card company. I can only imagine what the government has.

It’s said that, before you expire, your entire life flashes before your eyes. But alternatively, if you want to view it while still alive (or at least the most recent decade or so of it), just call the government and ask them for a showing.

Frei and Barnes explain the Whitmer kidnap case, entrapment law, and the track record of the FBI (plus, I take a foray into the history of the Mark Felt prosecution)

The New Neo Posted on by

I know I’ve already written quite a bit about the Whitmer defendants and the issue of possible entrapment, but this discussion by Viva Frei and Robert Barnes on the topic is particularly good and not all that long:

And this is something I came across last night. I was looking up Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat,” who was second in command of the FBI at the time of Watergate. I had forgotten – if in fact I ever even knew – this incident in his life:

By 1972 Felt was heading the investigation into the Weather Underground, which had planted bombs at the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department building. Felt, along with Edward S. Miller, ordered FBI agents to break into homes secretly in 1972 and 1973, without a search warrant, on nine separate occasions. These kinds of FBI operations were known as “black bag jobs”. The break-ins occurred at five addresses in New York and New Jersey, at the homes of relatives and acquaintances of Weather Underground members. They did not contribute to the capture of any fugitives. The use of “black bag jobs” by the FBI was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in the Plamondon case, 407 U.S. 297 (1972).

The Church Committee of Congress revealed the FBI’s illegal activities, and many agents were investigated. In 1976 Felt publicly stated he had ordered break-ins, and recommended against punishment of individual agents who had carried out orders. Felt also stated that Patrick Gray had also authorized the break-ins, but Gray denied this. Felt said on the CBS television program Face the Nation he would probably be a “scapegoat” for the Bureau’s work. “I think this is justified and I’d do it again tomorrow,” he said on the program. While admitting the break-ins were “extralegal”, he justified them as protecting the “greater good”. Felt said:

“To not take action against these people and know of a bombing in advance would simply be to stick your fingers in your ears and protect your eardrums when the explosion went off and then start the investigation.”

Griffin Bell, the Attorney General in the Jimmy Carter administration, directed investigation of these cases. On April 10, 1978, a federal grand jury charged Felt, Miller, and Gray with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by searching their homes without warrants…

Felt told his biographer Ronald Kessler: “I was shocked that I was indicted. You would be too, if you did what you thought was in the best interests of the country and someone on technical grounds indicted you.”

Note Felt’s attitude towards illegal searches of people who were only related to the suspects. He seemed to think that the prohibition against such searches is a mere technicality, and that his motives – “the best interests of the country” – should justify a federal agency such as the FBI breaking the law. Not only that, but Nixon testified in the trial for Felt’s defense, saying that the Nixon administration had authorized Felt to do it, and that in doing so “was acting on precedents established by a number of Presidential directives dating to 1939.”

So this was apparently commonplace. The 1939 date indicates to me that it may have started in connection with the war in Europe and then our own entry into the war, and investigating possible spies or enemy agents in the US. In addition, during Felt’s trial:

…former Attorneys General Mitchell, Kleindienst, Herbert Brownell Jr., Nicholas Katzenbach, and Ramsey Clark, all of whom said warrantless searches in national security matters were commonplace and understood not to be illegal. Mitchell and Kleindienst denied they had authorized any of the break-ins at issue in the trial. (The Bureau used a national security justification for the searches because it alleged the Weather Underground was in the employ of Cuba.)

So in these older cases – which featured illegal searches by the FBI rather than possible entrapment scenarios orchestrated by the same agency (although the latter also occurred and are discussed by Barnes in the video above) – there was ostensibly a foreign country involved, and the permission was given by the president.

Felt was convicted, but the sentence was light – just a fine, and no prison time. Meanwhile, Reagan had just been elected, and not long after he took office he pardoned Felt (and Miller, who had worked under Felt and had also been convicted). Reagan said that they acted in the interests of the country and “in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government.”

I don’t think I followed the case at all at the time. One reason is that I was a new mother with a young baby, and I don’t think I was even watching the news. Even if I had followed it, I would never have understand that Felt was Deep Throat and the FBI source for the Watergate story as told by Woodward and Bernstein; his identity was unknown for many years.

I do recall, however, being perturbed by government overreaches. There is always a conflict between the need to apprehend actual plotters and terrorists, and the need to protect individual rights. Our legal system used to be based on the idea that it was okay if at times a guilty person went free in order to keep the government from infringing too much on the liberty of its people.

But of course, as is often said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Terrorists are sometimes real, and are willing to commit great violence.

By now, though, the government and agencies such as the FBI have amply demonstrated they have little to no respect for liberty, and that they consider infringements on liberty and rights to be mere “technical grounds” that are unimportant as long as the rights of the correct people are being violated. But the rules that are being flouted are not arbitrary. They are there to preserve against just that kind of government tyranny, which always employs rhetoric such as “the best interests of the country” as an excuse for doing whatever it wishes.

[NOTE: It’s also interesting that back in 1980-1981 someone as high up in the FBI as Felt was actually tried and convicted of anything. Of course, the trial was instigated by a later administration controlled by a different party, one that was reacting to Watergate and what was seen as abuse by the executive branch during Watergate. As far as I can tell after reading about Felt, even though he was Deep Throat and helped to bring down Nixon (who apparently was aware by the time of the 1980 trial that Felt had been Deep Throat, and yet testified in his defense), Felt was essentially on the right rather than on the left. And his illegal searches were in the service of apprehending terrorists on the left. Perhaps that’s why the Carter administration was intent on prosecuting him.]