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In Waterford, Ireland, a Covid Story That’s Inconveniently True
Waterford city, Ireland is fast becoming popular online for these two pictures attached to each other. Waterford is the largest city in the South East of Ireland, famous for its crystal, its ancient status as the first city founded in Ireland, and for its local food, namely a bread called the blaa (true story). It is also my city as I am within 20 minutes of its centre, albeit in a different county.
But Waterford is now becoming popular in an unwanted fashion. Over the last week, these two images have circulated as a reply to the covid vaccine mandaters, Covid vaccine pushers, and pro-Covid vaccine extremists (or fascists if we are honest). The reason is simple enough.
Waterford county and Waterford city have one of the highest take-ups of Covid vaccine in Ireland. So high that it’s above 90%. I think the county rate of Covid vaccine take-up is higher than the city’s which is being possibly conflated in the pictures, but it doesn’t really matter, as numbers are nearly the same.
The vast majority of Waterford people got the shot as a means to get back to normal. Full disclosure, I too got the shot. Not that I wanted to, I had severe doubts about its effectiveness. Nevertheless, I got it due to personal reasons. I don’t judge anyone who has taken it or anyone who has refused or will not. It’s not my place and it’s not my job. I’m not a CNN worker, vaccine denier, or vaccine fascist.
Anyway, something is amiss in Waterford. As one can see with one of the highest uptakes of the vaccine in Ireland, something strange is happening. The Covid rates and cases in Waterford have rapidly gone up. In fact over the last week, Waterford now has more Covid cases than Ireland’s capital city Dublin and its second city Cork, with each having a far higher population. In short, the Covid vaccine, where a huge percentage of the population is vaccinated, has failed to cut the number of Covid cases. Rather the number is now climbing right as winter kicks in.
This story is now becoming one of the most commonly searched topics in Ireland and I’m sure is being seen abroad. What does this mean? Why is this happening? What does it say about the effect of the vaccine? People are rightly curious. As of now, the fourth estate in Ireland is downplaying or ignoring the story. A common tactic in both the USA and Ireland to inconvenient news. And this is if we are honest; very inconvenient especially to the Joe Bidens of this world. A vaccine that does not seem to reduce Covid numbers in a population where the vast majority are using it raises disturbing questions.
Perhaps risk compensation is involved. That is as so many Waterford people have the shot they are forgetting to do the anti-Covid basics: washing hands, social distancing, and taking risks. Many more people of all ages are congregating in Waterford now that did not do so last October. Perhaps the vaccine has reduced their threat sensors. As a result, they are doing things that lead to numbers rising. Perhaps it’s the new variants. It could also be the vaccine has cut the death rate for Covid (to be fair, it has worked in that regard) and is not designed to fully block Covid, merely turn the virus mild for those who have taken it.
But for many Covid pushers, this shouldn’t be happening. The vaccine is supposed to stop the virus. That’s what the media and many politicians’ narratives have been. That’s why they justify mandating or putting in legal restrictions against the unvaxxed.
Yet Waterford is proving them as ignorant or liars. The honest truth seems that whilst the vaccine is lowering the death rates of Covid across the world but it is not killing the disease. That means Covid is going to stay with us. This isn’t what the Covid masters were insisting for months. They have said it does both.
But Waterford also raises another question. Take out the risk compensation and the relaxed attitude of people here as causes for the spike, or the new Covid variation; we may have to look at the vaccine itself. Have the vaccines affected the increase? I honestly don’t know but it’s time for people to ask that question.
Published in General
Bathos: “The question is – what have we got left in our arsenal?” Lunn said.
What we have left in our arsenal is Ivermectin and HCQ, which have been proven at stopping COVID.
The NEJM study touting 90% plus infection prevention seems a bit dated already. The Israeli data with Pfizer showed a lot less effectiveness against delta. Viral load and thus presumed infectiouness was high in the infected vaxed even though severity was greatly reduced.
All vax-induced immunity against infection declines over time especially in the elderly. It will be interesting to see how vax-immunity holds up in November-December when COVID-19 makes its last hurrah as a pandemic when most vaccinations are over six months past.
That vaccines substantially reduce severity of infection is indisputable. However, that anyone under 30 is better off with the small risks of serious adverse outcome from the bug instead of the risk of serious reactions from the vaccine is an open question.
Arahant, this is an extraordinary observation. Allergy to ALL “caine” anesthetics is unusual, because they fall into different chemical groups. There are alternatives. You should consult an allergist.
https://www.clinicaladvisor.com/home/the-waiting-room/alternative-treatments-for-patients-with-lidocaine-allergies/
Youse guys are overlooking my point. A “case” is generally defined as anyone testing positive for the virus. A more truthful definintion would be someone who has the symptoms and then tests positive.
In the hospital where I work, every employee is tested weekly. The test has a 1-3% false positive rate. We have had 3 positives in the last 1600 tests, which is way below the false positive rate. NONE of those three employees was sick and NO ONE they dealt with became positive or sick. One could argue that we have three cases, or that we have no cases and three likely false positives.
I really don’t know what the status of particular treatments options/combinations is. The “arsenal” for public health authorities was distancing, closures, masks and quarantine presumably until a vaccine or herd immunity could end it all. The vaccine helps but was not going to end the spread. The other stuff was never effective. It will be interesting to see if our professionals learn and admit how much they don’t know about transmission.
You’re right, I probably should. But I avoid physicians since they have tried to kill me so many times before. And if I hear something like “Oh, That can’t happen. . .” one more time. . .
The issue is that mRNA vaccines have a “narrow” function when it comes to how it interacts with the virus. Essentially, there’s just one part of the virus it effects: the spike protein. Some medical professionals have theorized that this makes even minute changes in viral structure renders the vaccine far less effective. If this is the case, then a major mutation in the spike protein could make the vaccines near useless. The narrow function of mRNA vaccines could also explain why natural immunity seems to be so much more durable. Natural immunity, after all, creates antibodies to the entire virus.
Which, of course, begs the question: is our overreliance on vaccines accelerating the mutation process?
Neither have been proven to work- in fact HCQ has been proven NOT to work. The final result isn’t in for ivermectin, but it doesn’t look all that promising-the best studies to date failed to show it worked. A good review:
https://www.businessinsider.com/ivermectin-studies-for-covid-19-see-the-flawed-evidence-2021-10
The best on going studies include the PRINCIPLE study and ACTIV-6, they should settle the question. Hopefully, we will get some good anti-virals soon- there are 3 promising candidates in trials right now (remdesivir isn’t very good). I wouldn’t hold my breathe on getting control of the “cytokine storm” real soon-we have not made much progress on ARDS/MSOF for years now.
While perhaps not applicable to your case, it is important to realize that a huge amount of the so-called “reactions to local anesthetics” are not allergic reactions at all-and it is rare to be allergic to both of the broad classes of local anesthetics. The referenced article covers the 2 broad subgroups and that allergies do not typically cross react among the 2 groups-but fails to mention that allergy to the amide group (lidocaine, bupivicaine etc) is actually more uncommon than allergy to the ester subgroup. Additionally, many “reactions” to local anesthetics aren’t local anesthetic allergies but are in fact due to inadvertent intravenous injections (heart racing & other effects) or reactions to other items placed in the injection-like epinephrine or preservatives. Dental injections have a fairly high rate of intravenous injection because the oral cavity and face are so highly vascularized. An allergist can help to sort them out and prevent you from being unable to use local anesthetics. I once lived in the 3rd world and had to have many dental procedures without local anesthetics and now greatly appreciate the use of 1st world dental techniques.
The illusive proven negative. I have heard of such things hidden in a magic forest and protected by unicorns and fairies.
Hard to know who to trust. Are docs who claim success for the “cocktails” of HCQ and Ivermectin just committing a post hoc fallacy? And why have mask afecionados never made the slightest effort to acknowledge must less explain the complete and undeniable failure of mask mandates and instead cite absurd “studies” (Kansas, Bangladesh) to deny that failure. And how the hell are there still MDs who think a serious lockdown at any point in the pandemic would have made a difference? Why are we still getting bogus advice about non-existent “superspreader” circumstances? Why haven’t all docs came out in support of pediatricians’ calls for zero school closures of other useless disruptions of kids’ lives and attacked the nonsense that kids are at risk or that they are spreaders?
From transmission to treatment we are not much ahead of leeches and mercury. The politics of COVID have not just caused horrific economic, social and personal damage but doctor-patient trust may have also taken a hit.
Lockdowns & mandates are not primarily a medical call- they are public policy decisions and MDs have no special competence to make such calls. Medicine can tell you vaccines will decrease the death rate, that HCQ doesn’t work and that masks have a limited beneficial effect- but that doesn’t mean that doctors (or scientists or experts) can, of their own, provide definitive opinions on wether we should “lock down”. Lockdowns & mandates have widespread systematic effects on society (economic, psychological, legal, medical etc) and no single field of expertise has such encompassing knowledge- and that is the real problem. On the left we have the cult of “credentialed experts” and on the right we have a culture of opposition AND BOTH cultures are getting in the way of dealing with the epidemic.
The bad public policy is based on bad paradigms of transmission–who is in charge of that scientific issue? We did this crap because both MDs and the public policy people stubbornly cling to a cough/sneeze/proximity to a sick person model of transmission that does not appear to count for most “cases.” Whatever the modes/vectors/reservoirs of the bug are, it clearly gets around in ways we don’t understand and are not capturing by tracing or random testing. If that were conceded earlier, we could have saved a lot of damage, maybe focused more on comprehensive in situ PPE for the vulnerable, and wound up with the same or a modestly better result at a hell of a lot lower cost.
What makes you think the Bangladesh study is absurd? It is far from definitive, and may or may not be applicable to us, but we far as I can tell, it’s a legitimate study.
No. The claim that 0.7% positive in one group versus 0.8% in the other proves that mask use reduces spread is outrageous. I looked at the numbers and methodology here. I believe that there was a program to encourage mask use and they tacked on a poorly conceived study to try to prove it worked.
We don’t have a time frame for the reported symptoms or for mask use. We don’t even know if the intervention group serotested individuals were actually among the mask wearers. And that the others were not.
It was not legitimate to claim significance from that mess. It was absurd to claim significance from that mess. They sought to squeeze a politically correct result from data which clearly did not support it. I am under no obligation to respect that no matter how carefully the numbers were assembled.
The villages were randomly assigned to treatments. With an n=200 villages and ten thousand or so individuals in each of two treatment groups and one control group, that is a reasonable job of taking other variables into account. And we do have the time frame. The first paragraph of the abstract you linked gave it. (5 and 9 weeks)
Sure it’s legitimate. I challenge you to even imagine doing a better study on that kind of topic, if you can imagine getting the funds for it. 7 percent positive vs 8 percent in another group (you misplaced your decimal point) can certainly be statistically significant given the number of villages and people involved. (I didn’t check the math.)
I presume you also read that the cloth mask group was not statistically significantly different from the control group. Only the n95 mask group got a 10 percent reduction in covid.
I read that study and concluded that n95 masks worked as well as I expected. They result in about 10 percent less covid. At least in Bangladesh villages, but I wouldn’t be surprised if similar results would be shown here, if it was possible to do such a study in our society. (It isn’t, for reasons starting with the fact that ours is not a village society.)
A ten percent reduction! I read that study, and then went to a series of social events, unmasked. Ten percent is real, but I figured it wasn’t worth masking up for that little reduction in risk.
As to the study being politically motivated, note that one of the study authors wrote a NYT article that misrepresented his own study, saying that any masking is better than none. (I heard about this from Vinay Prasad, and didn’t read the NYT for myself.) That was political, but it isn’t what the study said. So the study seems to have been reasonably isolated from the politics.
How about skipping the absurd step of a symptom question questionnaire as the first selection step and serotesting randomly over time.
I am not the only one to notice problems with this study.
And you missed my point about time—it was not the length of the study but whether the positives occurred before of after actual mask wearing. We needed sequence not aggregate to demonstrate effect.
And not checking the math is kinda the whole ball game.
Please use some common sense here. Mask usage even in where high has shown little or no measurable benefit. A population that had mask use never above 42% up from 13% claimed a statistically significant result with two months. If your bs detector did not buzz it needs retuning.
I used to spend a lot of time on climate issues. Before that I was often spending days in the NIH library and Library of Congress on toxic exposure and medmal cases. The net result is that I do not share your apparent near-automatic deference to whatever the prevailing professional zeitgeist happens to be.
The state of published research in this country is bad and getting worse. And even in that state of affairs the Bangladesh study could not find it’s way into a serious peer-reviewed journal.
It wasn’t N95 vs cloth- it was cloth vs surgical masks- N95 would probably have given a larger reduction. Many think the effectiveness of masks was underestimated in the Bangladesh study b/c:
1. the low rate of testing of symptomatic patients-only 40% of patients with symptoms compatible with COVID agreed to be tested. The study would entirely miss asymptomatic or atypical cases of COVID.
2.even in the intervention group (villages where mask use was promoted) the rate of mask wearing was <50%. Greater compliance would have likely significantly increased the effectiveness of masks.
3. the protective effect was 35% in people over 60 years old. Bangladesh has a younger population than most Western countries.
https://www.poverty-action.org/study/impact-mask-distribution-and-promotion-mask-uptake-and-covid-19-bangladesh
Maybe the fact that this study was not done by epidemiologists or MDs is why it is still not in a medical journal, even a pre-pub. Look at the authors. Sociologists? Economists?
Your cite above is from the same org that foisted this study— it’s just rehashing their claims. Not really a credible corroborating link.
And a whopping 35% reduction only in old people where masking never hit 50% doesn’t strike you as odd and improbable? Especially since we have no serotesting baseline, no before and after.
And per @thereticulator, the claim of effect was not based on the 7.6% and 8.6% who reported symptoms but on the percent within the two groups who tested seropostive: the whopping 0.76% and 0.68% respectively. That this was considered significant is a travesty.
And I am fed up with the refusal of so many to take into account the inherent ebb and flow of COVID waves that have NEVER responded to NPIs anywhere. Aside from the absence of any trend data in this mess of a study the claimed period (April to November) exactly coincides with a period of steady decline in Bangladesh as a whole. Shouldn’t the alleged effect have been even more pronounced given that it was on top of an existing steady decline?
The effect would not be more dramatic if the baseline rate was dropping b/c they are comparing otherwise similar villages- the baseline drop should occur in BOTH masked & unmasked villages- it is a comparative effect. Furthermore, the 35% drop can easily occur with 50% mask wearing- it isn’t like 100% of the unmasked caught COVID-again the drop d/t to masks is in comparison to the unmasked villages- so perhaps like 6.5% infected vs 10%.
But the supposed drop was not from actual mask-wearing. It was a number said to be associated with villages where less than half the people were masked.
We don’t know when their seropostive infection/antibodies were acquired–pre or post-mask.
We don’t know if or when the allegedly masked began wearing a mask or if they actually did at any time (again, most did not).
We don’t know how many in the non-intervention group were actual mask wearers–at least 13% were. Given that the group of symptom reporters was actually less than 1% COVID positive at any time before or during the study period, and given that the reporting persons were self-selected in a non-blind study, would such persons (worried about COVID) be a higher share of actual mask wearers in the non-intervention group? There was not a lot of room to accommodate selection bias here.
Was mask use increased to 42% right away or gradually (average 27.5% over the period). The latter makes a claim of dramatic drops in COVID infections by any group even more preposterous.
The bottom line is that a half-assed self-selection process generated a difference in the aggregate infection rate of just under a tenth of a percentage point which was trumpeted as a ten percent success rate as if there were no way that 0.68% and 0.76%% could have differed by chance.
Whether it’s counties or countries what we do not have is a data set where the curve from one group (masks, lockdowns etc) departs from the other within the same COVID seasonality region over time as a function of pct mask use. We do have a hell of a lot of instances to the contrary.
If mask devotees are reduced to defending the Bangladesh “study” then the debate about masks is well and truly over.
Thanks for the correction. I had assumed the two were the same thing.
Probably mostly unvaccinated people? I see that the population is now about 23% vaccinated, compared with 65% of the United States.