Dale, I just listened to you on Mark Hyman’s and Chris Kressler’s podcasts. I probably learned more about COVID in those two podcasts then I’ve learned reading hundreds of news articles since the start of the pandemic. Thanks for providing such thorough and thoughtful information on those episodes!
I know you’re working on a part 2 that will probably answer this but...what did you mean by #7 in your predictions? Are you saying there will be more deaths per population or that COVID will actually become more deadly? I would assume you meant more deaths per population because there will be less people wearing masks, etc. Also, I’ll be interested to see how you think pressure from private industries like airlines, sporting events, etc. might pressure more people to get vaccinated. Thanks!
What I mean (I'll soon have Part 2 up) is that if we drop mitigation efforts with only a fraction of the population vaccinated with vaccines that lack effective sterilizing immunity, then we risk seeing the virus go fully endemic.
So even if the vaccine confers a 10x reduction in the CFR (case fatality rate...the fraction of those diagnosed with the disease who go on the die), if we also see a 10x (or even higher) increase in cases, then the absolute number of people dying per week would be expected to rise well above current levels.
And this is without ANY impact from the new mutations!
Again, your data interpretation and "intuition " are strikingly non bias and logical, Thank you !
My intuition and terrible knowledge in statistics says that public health measures could have been and should be the number #1 mitigation here , vaccines are great but the next few months will tell us that 2-3 more shots maybe needed in the next year and may or may not help in a visible way . I am all pro-vax BTW , just not wearing my pink glasses !
I primarily work in molecular diagnostics and what I've seen is ALL the chips on the table were bet on vaccines with very little towards diagnostics, therapeutics, or mitigation efforts.
Not a very balanced strategy and we may pay the price for that this year. My concern is if the new variants start to develop general resistance to neutralization by antibodies.
There's preliminary evidence that may be happening with the P.1 and B.1.351 variants. If that happens, we risk losing the ability to make ANY vaccines. And we end up in a situation similar to HIV where there are no vaccines able to generate meaningful neutralizing antibodies to the SarsCoV2 virus.
That's a real possibility and would be a disaster. Nothing I've seen in the past year has been particularly scary...but the prospect of this potentially occurring scares the hell out of me!
Hi Dale, I just listened to you on Dr. Mark Hyman's podcast. Thank you for providing such detailed and easy to understand information. I'm going to send the podcast and this newsletter to all my friends and family. Thanks!
Thank you for the kind words! I hope it helps. There's so much that we still don't know and so much new information coming out daily that I know it can be hard to keep up with.
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are just about as perfectly identical in every way as one could imagine.
The J&J seems less effective, but that's likely because they only chose to do a single injection. My guess is that when the follow-up dual-injection study is completed, the J&J will look a lot like the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines.
There's some expectation that the common short-term side effects will be worse for the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines...but that neither should show the allergic reactions we're seeing with the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines. But those are only happening at the rate of about 1 in 200,000 patients.
It's too early to tell with any sort of absolute certainty.
But I think that's also not the correct way to frame the problem. It's about the relative risk of having the vaccine vs. choosing to not take the vaccine.
If this was a vaccine for the common cold, then the choice would be clear...let's wait for 5-10 years for more studies to know for sure. This is why we don't have seatbelts for bicycles and race car drivers wear helmets, but normal drivers don't. There's a gradation of risk...the higher the risk being faced, the more measures one needs to take.
But the risk of Covid is extraordinarily high...even for young people. Your same-year risk of death doubles if you catch Covid regardless of age.
We know that two categories of medically serious side-effects have been seen. Easily managed allergic reactions at the rate of 1 in every 200,000 patients...and an extraordinarily rare issue affecting platelet count that appears to be on the order of 1 in 25M or less.
That makes the SarsCoV2 vaccine among the safest vaccines available. Any longer-term risk that might appear over the next 5 years is going to pale in comparison to the risk of acquiring Covid during that same time period.
Many thanks for the valuable information and the effort you are putting into this. Is it possible to provide us with the concrete numbers based on experience in the Western world e.g. what is known now about the asymptomatic spread, what is the R0?, how these numbers are compared with influenza epidemics, the mortality rate according the number you mentioned in the slide is 0.28% which seems low. How this is compared to mortality from influenza?, what the age-distribution?. Why should the society be locked down and not just focused on persons with high risk for complications? It will be very helpful if you include some references that we can use if interested in studying these issues in depth. Many thanks. Your effort is highly appreciated.
The Mark Hyman podcast was very informative, thank you. You both stated 1/100 fatality rate. The numbers from many sources, including some Stanford studies, are an order of magnitude lower. Only the very old reach 1/100. Can you please explain how you are arriving at the 1/100 death rate? Second, you mentioned the reinfection rate in the Astra Zeneca study, saying herd immunity won’t be reached because we have no immunity from reinfection. The reinfection rate was based on testing, the accuracy of which has been questioned, specifically as reporting many false positives especially at high cycles. Did the Astra Zeneca study also report reinfection as determined by clinical illness? Is it possible that reinfection is non-existent when measured as clinical disease rather than a positive PCR test?
My recommendation would be a closer following of current scientific research.
Every single point raised comes from the conspiracy mongers and each point is not only completely false but trivial to dis-prove with only a few minutes of Google searching.
The Stanford paper was a complete piece of garbage...was rejected by peer-review and withdrawn from publication. Its many flaws included serious high-school-level math errors that once corrected actually REVERSED the conclusions the paper was claiming.
That astonishingly sloppy and deceptive paper has destroyed the professional reputations of the two senior authors. And yet months after being dis-credited, it's still being pushed on hundreds of conspiracy websites.
Right now the Covid CFR to date in the US is 1.6%...seasonal influenza is ~0.12%. These numbers are easily verified from dozens of authoritative sources including Johns Hopkins Medical, the CDC, the ECDC, the KDCA, and many more both public and private sources across multiple political jurisdictions.
Regarding the AstraZeneca study. A paper was published two days ago out of Oxford confirming what I've discussed since looking at the animal trial data back in early June. These SarsCoV2 vaccines ARE NOT sterilizing.
Their current estimate is that fully 1/3 of those getting the AstraZeneca vaccine will become infected and can re-transmit based on a full analysis of the original trial data. Actual performance in the real world will likely be around 50%.
There is no possibility of herd immunity for an upper-respiratory virus without a sterilizing vaccine. None of the current vaccines are sterilizing.
Finally, the "tests give a lot of false-positives" is both the BIGGEST lie and the lie most trivial to disprove. The false-positive rate is less than 1:100,000 tests and due ENTIRELY to either sample mis-labeling or sample handling issues on the robotics.
The tests have serious issues with false-negatives! But if you have a test-positive, it is absolutely guaranteed that active viral replication is has been underway within the past few hours.
A good starting place to get a detailed look at how SarsCoV2 testing works and what the issues are is this podcast from a colleague of Mark Hyman, Chris Kresser:
Dale, I just listened to you on Mark Hyman’s and Chris Kressler’s podcasts. I probably learned more about COVID in those two podcasts then I’ve learned reading hundreds of news articles since the start of the pandemic. Thanks for providing such thorough and thoughtful information on those episodes!
I know you’re working on a part 2 that will probably answer this but...what did you mean by #7 in your predictions? Are you saying there will be more deaths per population or that COVID will actually become more deadly? I would assume you meant more deaths per population because there will be less people wearing masks, etc. Also, I’ll be interested to see how you think pressure from private industries like airlines, sporting events, etc. might pressure more people to get vaccinated. Thanks!
THANKS!!!
What I mean (I'll soon have Part 2 up) is that if we drop mitigation efforts with only a fraction of the population vaccinated with vaccines that lack effective sterilizing immunity, then we risk seeing the virus go fully endemic.
So even if the vaccine confers a 10x reduction in the CFR (case fatality rate...the fraction of those diagnosed with the disease who go on the die), if we also see a 10x (or even higher) increase in cases, then the absolute number of people dying per week would be expected to rise well above current levels.
And this is without ANY impact from the new mutations!
And by pressure from private industries...I mean them requiring vaccination cards.
Again, your data interpretation and "intuition " are strikingly non bias and logical, Thank you !
My intuition and terrible knowledge in statistics says that public health measures could have been and should be the number #1 mitigation here , vaccines are great but the next few months will tell us that 2-3 more shots maybe needed in the next year and may or may not help in a visible way . I am all pro-vax BTW , just not wearing my pink glasses !
I primarily work in molecular diagnostics and what I've seen is ALL the chips on the table were bet on vaccines with very little towards diagnostics, therapeutics, or mitigation efforts.
Not a very balanced strategy and we may pay the price for that this year. My concern is if the new variants start to develop general resistance to neutralization by antibodies.
There's preliminary evidence that may be happening with the P.1 and B.1.351 variants. If that happens, we risk losing the ability to make ANY vaccines. And we end up in a situation similar to HIV where there are no vaccines able to generate meaningful neutralizing antibodies to the SarsCoV2 virus.
That's a real possibility and would be a disaster. Nothing I've seen in the past year has been particularly scary...but the prospect of this potentially occurring scares the hell out of me!
Hi Dale, I just listened to you on Dr. Mark Hyman's podcast. Thank you for providing such detailed and easy to understand information. I'm going to send the podcast and this newsletter to all my friends and family. Thanks!
Thank you for the kind words! I hope it helps. There's so much that we still don't know and so much new information coming out daily that I know it can be hard to keep up with.
Please compare Moderna/phizer vaccine with J&J upcoming vaccine. Pros and cons. Thanks
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are just about as perfectly identical in every way as one could imagine.
The J&J seems less effective, but that's likely because they only chose to do a single injection. My guess is that when the follow-up dual-injection study is completed, the J&J will look a lot like the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines.
There's some expectation that the common short-term side effects will be worse for the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines...but that neither should show the allergic reactions we're seeing with the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines. But those are only happening at the rate of about 1 in 200,000 patients.
So minor trade-offs...
Would like you to comment on long term risks of taking the vaccine
It's too early to tell with any sort of absolute certainty.
But I think that's also not the correct way to frame the problem. It's about the relative risk of having the vaccine vs. choosing to not take the vaccine.
If this was a vaccine for the common cold, then the choice would be clear...let's wait for 5-10 years for more studies to know for sure. This is why we don't have seatbelts for bicycles and race car drivers wear helmets, but normal drivers don't. There's a gradation of risk...the higher the risk being faced, the more measures one needs to take.
But the risk of Covid is extraordinarily high...even for young people. Your same-year risk of death doubles if you catch Covid regardless of age.
We know that two categories of medically serious side-effects have been seen. Easily managed allergic reactions at the rate of 1 in every 200,000 patients...and an extraordinarily rare issue affecting platelet count that appears to be on the order of 1 in 25M or less.
That makes the SarsCoV2 vaccine among the safest vaccines available. Any longer-term risk that might appear over the next 5 years is going to pale in comparison to the risk of acquiring Covid during that same time period.
Thank you
Many thanks for the valuable information and the effort you are putting into this. Is it possible to provide us with the concrete numbers based on experience in the Western world e.g. what is known now about the asymptomatic spread, what is the R0?, how these numbers are compared with influenza epidemics, the mortality rate according the number you mentioned in the slide is 0.28% which seems low. How this is compared to mortality from influenza?, what the age-distribution?. Why should the society be locked down and not just focused on persons with high risk for complications? It will be very helpful if you include some references that we can use if interested in studying these issues in depth. Many thanks. Your effort is highly appreciated.
The Mark Hyman podcast was very informative, thank you. You both stated 1/100 fatality rate. The numbers from many sources, including some Stanford studies, are an order of magnitude lower. Only the very old reach 1/100. Can you please explain how you are arriving at the 1/100 death rate? Second, you mentioned the reinfection rate in the Astra Zeneca study, saying herd immunity won’t be reached because we have no immunity from reinfection. The reinfection rate was based on testing, the accuracy of which has been questioned, specifically as reporting many false positives especially at high cycles. Did the Astra Zeneca study also report reinfection as determined by clinical illness? Is it possible that reinfection is non-existent when measured as clinical disease rather than a positive PCR test?
My recommendation would be a closer following of current scientific research.
Every single point raised comes from the conspiracy mongers and each point is not only completely false but trivial to dis-prove with only a few minutes of Google searching.
The Stanford paper was a complete piece of garbage...was rejected by peer-review and withdrawn from publication. Its many flaws included serious high-school-level math errors that once corrected actually REVERSED the conclusions the paper was claiming.
That astonishingly sloppy and deceptive paper has destroyed the professional reputations of the two senior authors. And yet months after being dis-credited, it's still being pushed on hundreds of conspiracy websites.
Right now the Covid CFR to date in the US is 1.6%...seasonal influenza is ~0.12%. These numbers are easily verified from dozens of authoritative sources including Johns Hopkins Medical, the CDC, the ECDC, the KDCA, and many more both public and private sources across multiple political jurisdictions.
Regarding the AstraZeneca study. A paper was published two days ago out of Oxford confirming what I've discussed since looking at the animal trial data back in early June. These SarsCoV2 vaccines ARE NOT sterilizing.
Their current estimate is that fully 1/3 of those getting the AstraZeneca vaccine will become infected and can re-transmit based on a full analysis of the original trial data. Actual performance in the real world will likely be around 50%.
There is no possibility of herd immunity for an upper-respiratory virus without a sterilizing vaccine. None of the current vaccines are sterilizing.
Finally, the "tests give a lot of false-positives" is both the BIGGEST lie and the lie most trivial to disprove. The false-positive rate is less than 1:100,000 tests and due ENTIRELY to either sample mis-labeling or sample handling issues on the robotics.
The tests have serious issues with false-negatives! But if you have a test-positive, it is absolutely guaranteed that active viral replication is has been underway within the past few hours.
A good starting place to get a detailed look at how SarsCoV2 testing works and what the issues are is this podcast from a colleague of Mark Hyman, Chris Kresser:
chriskresser.com/what-covid-19-testing-can-and-cannot-tell-us-with-dale-harrison