Who ya gonna believe? Very few.

8/25/2021; De Blasio says infections among vaccinated New Yorkers are “incredibly rare”.

Coronavirus infections and serious illness from the disease among vaccinated New Yorkers are “incredibly rare,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday, citing newly released city data.

Breakthrough infections — when someone contracts the coronavirus despite being immunized for it — account for few of the Big Apple’s COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations resulting from them, new figures compiled from January through August show.

Just 0.33 percent of New Yorkers who have completed their vaccine series have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, the data shows. Among those forced to the hospital from virus complications, 97 percent were not vaccinated, according to the tally.

“There are some breakthrough cases, that’s true, but the bottom line is that vaccines overwhelmingly work,” de Blasio said during his daily press briefing, held remotely Wednesday morning on Staten Island.

“What the data proves is that breakthrough cases are incredibly rare.”

The promising numbers for vaccinated people hold even after the virulent Delta variant emerged in the five boroughs earlier this summer. 

Data collected from Jan. 17 through Aug. 17 shows the COVID-19 vaccines have warded off infection and illness among New Yorkers. During that time, unvaccinated people accounted for 96.1 percent of all COVID-19 cases, 96.9 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 97.3 percent of COVID-19 deaths, according to the city’s health department.

“Our new health department analysis shows that the vaccines continue to be highly effective against the coronavirus, including the Delta variant,” said Dr. Dave Chokshi, the commissioner of the agency.

SO WHAT RE WE TO MAKE OF YESTERDAY’S NEWS?

8/24/2021. Yale New Haven Medical System press conference: COVID-19 Update: Stark Increase in Covid Cases, Almost All Delta Variant

O’Connor said the health system had 137 Covid positive in-patients as of Tuesday, which was three times the total of about a month ago when there were just 52. Of the 137, there were 37 patients in ICU and 23 on ventilators.

Of the 137 Covid-positive patients, 37 – almost 27% – were fully vaccinated.

“We need to focus on getting those who haven’t been vaccinated vaccinated. The vast majority – more than 75% of folks we are admitting – are unvaccinated. That’s empirical evidence that joins other scientific evidence that the vaccine continues to be extremely effective at preventing infection from Covid, but more importantly, serious disease and death.” 

So which is it, NYC’s statistics showing “96.1 percent of all COVID-19 cases, 96.9 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 97.3 percent of COVID-19 deaths”, or Yale’s numbers of 73%? One clue may be in Yale’s use of the term, ““covid-positive patients”. As we’ve seen, time and again, hospitals are admitting hordes of patients who have been injured (Motorcycle crashes, eg), or are sick or dying from other causes, who test positive for covid. These patients are all included in the Covid cases and death count because (a) there’s a $15,000 bonus paid by the government for each such case and (b) the hospitals and their hired gun physicians want to keep up the panic.

Not that I’d believe De Blasio if he told me that the sun will set in the west tomorrow, but I’ll go with his health department’s number over azaleas, simply because Yale lied at least twice at that news conference: once on its case count, and again on the issue of masking school children.

As for school age children, [Yale spookesman] Balcezak said masking worked. 

“Sticking with the science, there is evidence now that kids can be severely impacted by Covid-19,” he added. “Thankfully we have had no deaths at the system among pediatric patients, but we’ve admitted more than 180 patients under 18. [Covid-positive or there for other problems? He doesnt or won’t say.] Currently there is one 16-year-old in the pediatric ICU [Why is he there? Crickets.] This is not a trivial disease. Kids can get ill from Covid and multi inflammatory disease weeks after they come down with Covid-19.”

Also, he said that although the majority of children don’t get sick or have mild symptoms, they can be an active reservoir for the disease and spread it to family members who are at great risk.

“I think if you’ve over 12, vaccine is available to you. Masking is still adjunct to that, and if you’re under the age of 12, masking works.” [He cites no eviudence for this because no such evidence exists — “sticking with the science, or fleeing it?]

Over at City Journal, my pen pal, and one of the few people I do trust for honest reporting, John Tierney asks “Will Policy Makers Ever Let the Covid Cris End?”. His answer is discouraging.

KEEPING FEAR ALIVE

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.

The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”

Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year—and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.

“I’m an anesthesiologist,” he tweeted last weekend. “And a dad. And I can assure you in both capacities that your child will be far more comfortable if they’re in a face mask, than on a ventilator. If you’re making a choice on behalf of a child, please choose based on their comfort, vs yours.” He offered no new evidence that children are at heightened risk from the virus, much less any evidence that a mask would make any difference, but he did make sure to include a gruesome photograph of a child on a ventilator.

It was a new low in public-health demagoguery, but unfortunately not so different from the fearmongering of other officials, the press, and social-media platforms. They lament that a minority of the public remains reluctant to get vaccinated without recognizing that their own tactics are likely a chief cause of this reluctance. They have been misleading people for so long—and censoringchallenges to their misinformation—that it’s no wonder polls show that an overwhelming majority of unvaccinated Americans say they don’t trust Fauci or the CDC.

Many of these unvaccinated people have mistaken ideas about vaccine side effects, but they’re not wrong when they tell pollsters that the dangers of the virus have been exaggerated and exploited for political purposes. The White House and its Democratic allies in the press have seized on the seasonal surge in the Sun Belt to attack Republicans for not mandating masks—while largely ignoring surges in Democratic strongholds with mask mandates and other restrictions, like Hawaii, Oregon, and San Francisco.

This political cherry-picking of data has been the norm during the pandemic. During surges last year, Florida and Sweden’s failure to lock down and mandate masks was blamed for the outbreaks—never mind that both places did better than average in limiting mortality over the course of the year. In Sweden, which kept its schools open without masks or social distancing during the spread of the Delta variant this year, the overall mortality rate this year has actually been lower than normal.

The CDC continues to undermine its credibility by claiming strong evidence for the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates. Dozens of studies have found that lockdowns are ineffective, and one recent analysis of trends in the United States and other countries found that lockdown policies are associated with an increase in excess deaths. The evidence offered by the CDC for mask mandates is weak, as Jeffrey H. Anderson has documented, and the most rigorous research—from more than a dozen randomized clinical trials—suggests that masks are ineffective (and possibly counterproductive) at stopping viral spread. One recent study, which tracked Covid case growth across the United States, concluded that “mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level Covid-19 spread during Covid-19 growth surges.”

Even Robert Redfield, who made unsubstantiated claims for mask efficacy last year while he was directing the CDC, now concedes that there is a “paucity of data” to support mask mandates. When asked if the CDC is wrong to be recommending masks for schoolchildren, he replied, “I’m saying that I haven’t been able to review data that supports that recommendation.”

His successors at the agency, unfortunately, seem less interested in reviewing data than in hiding it. As David Zweig reported in New York, when researchers from the CDC compared Covid-mitigation techniques at 169 elementary schools in Georgia, they found no statistically significant reduction of infections in schools that required masks for students, enforced social distancing, or installed barriers between desks. Those were important findings because it was the first such large study, but the CDC did not even mention them in the summary of research that it published. Instead, the agency went on recommending masks for all students.

The European Union’s equivalent of the CDC, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, has sensibly recommended against masking students under age 12 because of the physical, psychological, and social harms to children, but American officials have made no effort to weigh the costs and benefits. The National Institutes of Health hasn’t even bothered to study the negative impacts of its mask policies on children. Dozens of other researchers, though, have demonstrated an array of problems called “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.” The problems include decrease in blood oxygen saturation; increase in blood carbon dioxide; increase in heart and respiratory rates; difficulty breathing; dizziness; headache; drowsiness; and decreased ability to concentrate and think.

Masking children at minimal risk from the virus was justified last year on the grounds that it might prevent infections of vulnerable adults who had no defense against the virus. But now that vaccines are readily available, why harm children for the sake of adults who have deliberately chosen not to protect themselves? Since when do children bear responsibility for adults’ decisions?

The mask mandates for children can’t be justified on ethical or scientific grounds, but they persist because they serve the interests of a certain class of adults. The purpose of this hygiene theater was described with blunt accuracy by Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and one of the few politicians who has actually been following the science during the pandemic. “Politicians,” he explained, “want to force you to cover your face as a way for them to cover their own asses.”