(2022-11-24) ZviM Covid 11/24/22 Thanks For Good Health

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 11/24/22: Thanks for Good Health

Executive Summary I’m feeling much better now. China looks to be headed for more lockdowns, here we go again. Person leaving WHO apologizes for denying Covid is airborne.

The Numbers

Booster Boosting

Here is what passes for public health messaging: ‘Because I said so.’

They are ‘better.’ So get them. How much better? You don’t need to know

one could point out that age and other risk factors are a much bigger impact on risk of death than whether you got a properly updated booster, even under the most generous possible interpretations of booster effectiveness, so this seems like clear misinformation as stated – and misinformation directly intended to change someone’s behavior.

Physical World Modeling

Demanding a 40k person RCT of the new booster implies at minimum months of additional delay on top of delays that were already so long as to ensure we will never have a properly updated vaccine or booster.

The right solution would be to make Pfizer do the trial, while also approving the update months earlier, and also running a trial with a fully updated booster as a third option, and seeing what happens.

Our booster strategy is a disaster. Monovalent Omicron boosters would be superior. A 4-to-6 month interval would have been superior

CDC’s new system for communicating Covid risk fails to communicate risks it is not communicating, says new CDC survey

China

In Other Covid News

WHO’s departing chief, now that they are leaving, ‘regrets errors in debate over whether SARS-CoV-2 spreads through air.’ Thank you. Yes, you should have done it, and apologized for not doing it, and been loud about it, much earlier, and this was very bad and did a ton of damage. Her explanation for why this did not happen is ‘it was not my role and neither did anyone ask me to get involved in that stage.’ Which is absolutely not how any functional organization or responsible person runs

Other Medical and Research News

It sure would be convenient to have an at-home flu test. One guess why we do not have them. That’s right. FDA Delenda Est

Mr. Mastodon Farm

Medical Twitter is talking a big talk about moving over to Mastodon.

It makes sense. Medical Twitter is all about ‘this particular thing that we are in a panic about is completely unacceptable and we should completely change everything to stop it no matter how high the cost and no matter what the consequences.

If you demand a walled garden that is strictly policed by a central authority, a plan without a central authority might not be for you.

I continue not to take the Twitter ‘alternatives’ seriously.