38 Comments

I have been going back and forth with brainwashed Covidians on the Nextdoor app and there are some people who are wearing N95s all day every day even in their cars while driving alone. They are still shunning contact with the public and refuse to eat in a public restaurant. It cannot be healthy to hide from germs for years. Doesn’t a well functioning immune system need to be challenged occasionally to maintain optimal efficiency? This thought seems to never occur to these people. All this to avoid feeling crappy for a few days. It is basically a religious cult at this point.

Thanks Dr. Prasad for the regular doses of common sense. I love hearing from intelligent sane people.

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Nextdoor? You mean karens.com?

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Exactly!

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Hilarious!

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There is a social media app that people in your neighborhood/small town, can communicate. Think of it as FB or twitter for a small geographic area.

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SL, as a retired pediatric lung specialist, I can assure that your supposition is correct. It is quite likely that the severity of this year's RSV and influenza season are due to the gap in immunity that naturally develops in young infants each year through repeated viral respiratory infections. We teach frustrated and stressed parents that it is normal -- and, by extension, essential -- for infants to experience 10 to 12 intercurrent viral infections in the first year of life. The vast majority are mild and self-limited. Parents quickly learn how to manage without going to the doctor's office with each illness. Thus, there is a presumed vulnerability when individuals avoid infection altogether for extended periods. This is exactly what is happening in China today in its adult population which was protected from SARS-CoV2 by societal lockdowns and not protected by effective vaccines. Same lesson. It is fascinating to see the inner vulnerability of people at this time. In my home community, masking seems to be disproportionately frequent in Asians and the Black populations.

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I think this study reflects what you are talking about. Adults exposed to children seem to have stronger immune systems. Thank you for the excellent response.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20196428v1

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"... for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before." Vinay, I'm at a loss to understand why you remain blind to the many vaccine-damaged people - including older adults - who regret ever having been vaccinated at all. Is it "science" to ignore one side of the risk/benefit equation?

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Thank you. Unfortunately it seems the deluded are also determined to share their “mitigation” plan in perpetuity.

In my area, just yesterday the National Park Service mandated mask wearing at the Harpers Ferry National Park. This is an outdoor rural park that borders the Shenandoah River in West Virginia.

This idiocy has to end.

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Vinay, Sadly you do not read these comments. I am sure I could get funding for you to run an RCT on masking at UCSF. You run dozens of RCTs and often complain that this one, clearly the most obvious, has not been run. Why not run it yourself?

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"All things being equal, for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before."

I thought you were evidence based Vinay? What evidence exists to support this statement?

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As a 64 year old oncologist I cannot express how awkward, unnecessary, draining, useless, stupid, insane, anti-social and frustrating it is to have to wear a mask in the hospital and the clinic. I don’t even know what my patients in the past 2 plus years look like!

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Daniel, I am now retired but agree with you and wonder why your colleagues and you have not spoken up to medical center leaders about peeling back the masking. For instance, ED and ICUs yes but out-patient clinics and general medical wards where every admitted hospital patient has been tested negative for COVID? Hospital cafeteria - No! The public has concluded that the entire medical profession are lemmings and it is up to us to bring our profession back to common sense.

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Hospitals are still aligned with the CDC. I doubt the legal team would recommend going against “policy “. The CDC has not said that hospitals can make decisions on their own. Covidians would be all over social media calling out an institution for trying to kill grandma and trying to make more money by spreading Covid. Even the AMA hasn’t endorsed changes. I did go to an orthopedic office and masks were optional , imagine that.

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I wonder if Katie Porter spread the virus to anyone else, even inadvertantly? She should probably just be fired, to be on the safe side, to maintain the integrity of her personal policies.

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"All things being equal, for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before."... So here's the rub, all things aren't equal. These transfection products cause severe reactions in some people up to death. Death in younger adults who were never at any significant risk from the viirus. It is unpredictable, who will be severely impacted (beyond the proven increased risk of myocarditis in adolescent and young men). There is nearly daily news of a 30 or 40 something year old in a highly vaxxed profession (entertainment, medicine, professional sports) dying suddenly and unexpectedly. Now we have the new research on IgG class switching that looks like multiple injections may lead to immune tolerance and possibly an impairment of body to recognize and destroy cancer cells (IgG3 goes away and IgG4 ramps up big time). When you write statements like the one above, you encourage people who thus far, have not taken 1 of the shots or encourage people who received earlier shots to get a booster, which is at best useless and at worse dangerous with negative efficacy. I realize you know all of this, but just ask you to please consider revising your public stance on the safety of these products. You have people paying attention to you, and they deserve the whole story.

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“Some point to sustained Covid-19 deaths, but this is incorrect. No one is hospitalized with ARDS anymore, deaths are largely incidental.”

I think you’re right, Vinay. I’ve suspected for a while that current “Covid-19 death” figures share the same problem as “Covid hospitalization” stats: counting people who did test positive for Covid-19, but died of something else.

Is there any published evidence to back this up? If so, we badly need to know about it.

The media constantly push the narrative that ordinary Americans have become numb to unacceptable numbers of deaths. These could be prevented if everyone masked up, or got multiple boosters, but we selfishly choose not to – and public officials are too cowardly to force us to do the right thing. And so we are throwing society’s most vulnerable (especially the elderly) under the bus.

It very well may be that unacceptable numbers of older people ARE dying, but for different reasons: healthcare and income inequality, social isolation, hospital understaffing, lack of primary care, etc. If so, we need to tackle these problems instead of blaming ordinary people for their supposed callousness.

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What I'm seeing in the media narrative you describe is the media think it is terrible when old people die from Covid, but perfectly okay if they die from something else even more preventable.

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What REALLY blows my mind is that so many believe in fear that is still being pushed by media - “Tripledemic” is about the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life, but people seem to beg for that kind of info to keep wearing masks and act like every single human is a cesspool of flu, Covid, and RSV. I find it sad more than anything. Long Covid, in my opinion is long fear. I have crohns and take inflixumab. I’ve had Covid - it’s no joke - but I can live in a world WITH it now. I took the moderna shot and a booster being a healthcare provider but will not take anymore at this time, and not likely ever again. Of note - the antivaxxers are just as nuts in my opinion, but that’s another thread and one I hope you write about.

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Anti-experimental gene therapy product is not "anti-vaxxer". I have a Ph.D. with my training in genetics and molecular biology and a career in drug/biologic development. If you had even a fundamental grasp of the complexities surrounding the cell biology underlying the action of mRNA and DNA vector/transfection products and how much of a "pass" the regulatory bodies gave Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AZ with regards to testing, you would have run in the opposite direction from these products. We just ran the world's largest uncontrolled clinical trial in which actual informed consent was given by no one. The Declaration of Helsinki and ICH were completely ignored and massive lies were told by entities that should be protecting people. The entire medical profession should be hanging its head in shame at what they supported. Truth time - the public has lost faith in your profession, and "anti-vaxers" will grow in number. Doctors, the FDA, and the CDC have done more damage to the case for preventative vaccinations than any tin hat conspiracy theorist could ever do.

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Yeah, well - I don’t have a phd just a masters degree in addiction. And I’m quite aware of how corrupt pharma is there; a prime reason why I left the field. Trading dealers wasn’t recovery in my opinion and I wasn’t going to stay around to watch pharma’s opioids continue the opioid epidemic (bupe and methadone for u non phds). I watched pharma dupe well meaning docs during the pain crisis when opioids were the rage; paid experts claiming that addiction doesn’t occur when treating chronic pain. The healthcare industry has been corrupt for a long time. I did my best for 2+ decades to help others with chronic pain and addiction.

As for the initial Covid shots, there was hope because plenty of other vaccinations had done us well over the decades and sadly some hospitals forced them as they do flu shots, which I also wasn’t fond of.

I wish I’d been as smart as you; however I relied on the information given at that moment in time and made my own decision based on my ID doc’s advice - who I continue to trust.

I have lost faith in a helluva lot more things than I wanted to and am sad to see the world in the state it’s in. I often wonder if a cure for chrons is already out there but for now I’m as much a slave to pharma as I ever want to be - sux having a neurogenic colon with crohns so I’ll keep playing the game so I have a reasonably decent life with what I have left. All kidding aside, it’s been amazing considering I wasn’t supposed to live beyond 9 days old. Even without that consideration I wouldn’t change a thing.

Best of luck to you and your new career.

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I’m not defending pharma but I’ve done clinical research. What large uncontrolled trial without consent are you referring to? Like a good scientist, please be specific instead of vitriolic.

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Really? Anyone familiar with clinical trials, clinical protocols, informed consent, would immediately recognize a massive uncontrolled experiment in which a good portion of the planet received an unapproved experimental therapeutics - many of which received them against their will to keep their jobs and life.. How about the billions of people who were vaxxex without having full info on the products risks, and the 10's of millions forced to take an unapproved therapy or lose their job or education. The "refusers were ostrasized, fired, and had death wished on them to coerce compliance. This is a massive violation of GCP and the elements of informed consent. Heck institutions won't even let you being bagels to a site initiation visit any more so the investigator isn't biased, but public health officials were passing out Amazon gift cards to coerce people to take an unapproved gene therapy product. Go back and read the elements of informed consent and brush up on GCP. And I speak no vitriol, just truth. Angry truth, I admit, and that's is OK. We should be angry. Unfortunately, the next several years will make plain the damage done by these products. I just hope you and yours are not among the victims.

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Terrific, crisp, clearrecapitulation of our current situation. Thanks for writing this!

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I still see quite a few kids and young adults wearing masks outside, even when alone. My bro saw someone wearing a mask in the sauna and plenty of people wearing them while using the stairclimber or treadmill at the gym.

And I've said this time and time again ... if someone is that worried about catching what is essentially a cold for most people ... then why go to a crowded indoor place at all? Why not just work out at home or outdoors? Why not have groceries delivered to your home or to your car in the parking lot?

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They are either 1) virtue signaling or 2) lonely for the company of other but suffering from covid-BS trauma. Either way they deserve prayers for healing.

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Except they changed the definition of dying with Covid in March 2022. You can confirm this by looking at graph of Hospitalizations and Death.

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I still know people and see people I don't know who insist upon wearing masks "just to be on the safe side" or for other silly unscientific reasons. I've stopped trying to discuss it with them as they are still in a state of fear nearly 3 years after the initial pay-op. Several things remain clear to me about masking:

1. The public health department has failed miserably, possibly on purpose, or possibly through incompetence to delineate clear science-based guidelines on mask usage. Naturally, people remain confused. This state of confusion is a public health problem that has been created by our public health (should we call them public illness?) departments.

2. Mask-wearing is harmful to others, by engendering baseless fears in people who are confused and don't know what the true dangers are because the public health officials have kept them in the dark. They are instruments by which people have been coopted into fulfilling what is essentially a terrorist agenda by government. Mask wearing is a veiled (pun intended) form of terrorism by proxy.

3. Mask-wearing is harmful to the mask-wearer, by raising CO2 levels, possibly causing hypoxia, exposing oneself to higher inoculums of germs by rebreathing one's own mice-organisms, and by keeping oneself in a state of fear, which probably lowers immune functioning.

4. That this has been permitted to go on by politicians and no clarity insisted upon so the public isn't left thinking that masking is a matter of choice, like gender is a matter of choice, and such nonsense is contributing to the dissolution of truth, responsibility and integrity in our society. This kind of moral relativism (you can mask if you want to) has no place in sane society. The risks and benefits need to be ascertained, explained and acted upon by public officials in an appropriate manner. All else is insanity.

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Mark, the allegation that masks cause CO2 retention and lowered oxygen levels has been completely debunked. Rebreathing one's own healthy bacteria is not of clinical significance. Fear is the issue and an uninformed belief in the degree of protection are the greatest impulse to mask wearers. On the other hand, in our free society, we do NOT need mask enforcers to insist on or forbid the wearing of masks. In the operating room, the standard mask, which is most commonly used in public, protects the patient and her open wound from one's own naso-oral bacteria and never was designed to protect the wearer from others.

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George: I agree with the use of masks in the O.R. One doesn't want one's sneezes or coughs sprayed on the operating field. However, I do believe that the CO2 retention has some reliable data supporting it, mostly from reports of individuals who have tested their own CO2 levels. We also have the Brown data on lowered cognition in children, which could be multifactorial, but may still result from chronic masking effects. I don't think I am ready to exonerate masks as a cause of harm. In addition, rebreathing one 's own health oral or respiratory microbiome may not pose a risk to health, what if you are infected with a virus which you are rebreathing and is retained in the mask? This is highly likely to increase the size of the inoculum. There are many case reports of children developing peri-oral rashes after chronic mask use. The fact that we do not see more health problems with masks may well have to do with the fact that they are being improperly applied. I do agree though, that the primary harm from masking is the psychological one, terrifying people into thinking there are dangerous pathogens out there which they should fear and possibly protect themselves from with a mask, notwithstanding the data that shows they do nothing.

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Vinay, You and Monica Ghandi are getting closer to agreement than ever.

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A related problem: Over and over, I hear the percentage of Covid deaths that involve older folks is rising fast. This is then used to imply that the number of Covid deaths in elders is skyrocketing—and our post-Covid lifestyle is what’s killing them. But if overall deaths were way down in 2022 compared to 2021, then the numbers of elders dying of Covid should be down as well – even if they are 90% of the dead in 2022, compared to 70% in 2021. Right?

Let’s say total deaths were 450,000 in 2021, and 200,000 in 2022. And let’s say 70% of the dead in 2021 were over 65, compared to 90% in 2022. Those figures (whether true or not) are pretty close to the ones I’ve heard bandied about. That would mean 315,000 elders died of Covid in 2021, and 180,000 in 2022. The percentage is going up, but the overall numbers have gone way down!

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