Silly things people say about covid 19

School re-openings, myocarditis, social media censorship & more

Some silly things people say…

On school re-openings:

Our ancestors did not attend school and did fine— If you go back long enough, our ancestors also did not wear clothes, did not have fire, did not have language, and were single celled organisms, but things change.

But 50k kids lost a parent— That is tragic, but it was most certainly not due to keeping schools open. Millions of kids lost 1-2 years of school, and some also lost a parent. Had we kept schools open, the same number of parents would have been lost, but more kids would have attended school.

More kids died of COVID19 than the flu in the last year (or two). Interesting comparison of a pandemic during pandemic years against flu in years of wide-scale societal disruption. You might want to compare flu season years (aka all prior years) to the last 2 seasons of covid19, or the IFR by age, if you were interested in a real comparison of how to respond to risk.

On masks

Thanks to masks, we didn’t have flu or colds. Sure, it was either the cloth masks— that didn’t work in the Bangladesh RCT and only had negative data prior to the pandemic—or it might have been the entire disruption of global society, travel, children interacting, etc etc. Either-or.

You don’t need a randomized trial of masks b/c they are like parachutes. Fascinating, I didn’t know parachutes only opened 11% of the time (Bangladesh cluster RCT result - surgical mask result. Cloth = 0%)

Masks would have worked better had people worn them more in Bangladesh. Yeah, but, uhhh, they didn’t. It would also be better if I could fly.

On myocarditis

Myocarditis is more common from COVID19 than the vaccine. Untrue- as shown by UK authors here. Dose 2 and 3 of Pfizer and 1 and 2 of Moderna have more vaccine induced myocarditis for men <40 than infection.

Myocarditis is rare… , if you take cases in men <40 and divide by men under 40 + women under 40 + men and women over 40. It’s even rarer when you divide by the number of ants, cows and sheep. Among all organisms, myocarditis is rare!! Brilliant. If only there was a way to identify men < 40.

Most myocarditis is mild; Most covid is mild too. The problem with both is that sometimes it is not mild.

Myocarditis is better than getting covid19, 2 doses of vax better than 0. If only there was some way to get most of the benefit of 2 doses with far less harm. If only there was a way to take 2 doses, and perhaps give half? or delay the second half? But how can one divide 2?

On social media censorship

We need a bunch of group-thinking ideologues with limited scientific experience and scant publications who work for big technology companies and live in coastal cities to police scientific disputes! Of course we do, what could go wrong!

Miscellaneous

Even asymptomatic cases of Covid19 can cause cognitive dysfunction in young people. This one is true, it’s just that the mechanism is not what you think.