No, a healthy 20 year old man who had COVID19 should NOT GET a bivalent booster

 This week I saw a 20 year old man in clinic. He had normal BP and a healthy BMI. His LDL was 85. He runs 30 miles a week, eats well, and lifts weights. He had 3 covid shots, as mandated by his university, and, despite that, he still contracted and recovered from COVID (presumably Omicron) over the summer. What did I do?

I started Atorva 80mg qday.

Reading this, you just threw your coffee cup against the wall. You cursed me. You shouted, “why” and “what a ..…..” What word did you use? I texted a group of cardiologists this hypothetical, and they said many words I can’t repeat here. The kindest was… “that's aggressive.”

What if instead of the statin, I offered the same patient a bivalent booster?

Turns out this would be an even worse decision!

The risk to the patient from the booster is not zero. Very likely it will be comparable to what Katie Sharff (KP) found from the original booster (1 in 10k clinical myocarditis), and probably much more subclinical myocarditis. Meanwhile, the upper bound absolute risk reduction of the intervention is as close to zero as it gets. Why? Because the risk to such a young man is practically nil.

Turns out there are several doctors just this reckless. They are: Ashish Jha and Peter Marks and Rochelle Walensky and Bob Califf and the entire White House’s COVID-19 team. They have made a strong recommendation that this 20 year old man OUGHT to get a bivalent booster. As a result, some colleges have mandated it.

These ‘experts’ have no credible evidence that this decision is in the net benefit of this young man. And, they know for sure it won't help others. Why? Because no vaccine has been able to halt transmission. This gentleman, will transmit yet again. Without a compelling societal benefit, nor an individual health benefit, the White House is playing bad doctor.

It's like prescribing a statin to the hypothetical 20-year-old, but it's worse.

Because statins don't cause myocarditis. And no one mandates a statin.

America has always had a fundamentalist streak. Fundamentalism can lead to doggedly pursuing one goal even if it comes at your destruction. When it comes to vaccines the dialog is dominated by fundamentalists.

Of course there's fundamentalism on the antivax side. Some people honestly think an 80-year-old person who never had Covid should never have gotten the first dose back in Jan 2021. That's a deranged point of view. There was a reduction in severe disease in RCT. The absolute benefit was massive.

There's also fundamentalism on the vax side. The idea that we should boost young men in perpetuity is a fundamentalism that's unproven by evidence. The difference is that these fundamentalists are not on the dark corners of the internet, they are actually setting bad national policy!

This week three pieces of data undermined bivalent boosters further. First, the New England Journal Medicine published antibody titer data that shows the bivalent booster does not generate more Omicron antibodies than the OG booster. Expert speculate this is due to imprinting. Whoops!

Second, data from Israel shows the risk of hospitalization from Covid for someone who didn't get a bivalent booster is abysmally low (prob = 0.0005), and this came from an elderly population. (I'm setting aside the causal claims of the study which are entirely unreliable). I'm just looking at absolute risk in the control arm. Now consider, the risk is far lower in a younger population, and lower still in someone who had COVID.

Third, the FDA advisory committee is upset that the company and the White House withheld information that suggested that Moderna's bivalent booster may actually be associated with increased infections. Eric Rubin, NEJM editor says, “It’s not a group of children. We understand how to interpret these results.” This is a scathing article worth your time.

Fourth, at the end of last year, Pfizer was required to complete the post-marketing commitment to report subclinical myocarditis. That means how many kids have troponin rise without symptoms. That should have been submitted to the FDA. Those results are not yet transparent. This is a failure of government.

Ultimately, the people who made this decision chose to debut bivalent boosters in all populations, including young men and children, without evidence that that was a wise decision.

They did not demand appropriate randomized trials from Pfizer. They did not distinguish an 85 year old from a 5 year old. They do not appear to be knowledgeable in the principles of evidence-based medicine, or even basic common sense.

I worry they may be aspiring for future jobs at Pfizer. There is precedent for it. The recent FDA commish Scott Gottlieb is now on the Pfizer Board of Directors.

More than anything, these people are practicing like bad doctors. They are indifferent to absolute risks, and they continue to trivializing harms to healthy young men.

Fundamentalism is always wrong, and it's hard to make a healthy person better off. These are lessons that any wise doctor knows. Sadly, none of them seem to be employed by this White House.

Vinay Prasad is a Hematology Oncology Medicine Health Policy Epidemiology Associate Professor

https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/no-a-healthy-20-year-old-man-who

Multiple Young Athletes And Former Athletes Died Suddenly This Past Month

 Former Alabama Broncos star running back Ahmaad Galloway died suddenly this week at age 42.  Galloway was an eighth-grade English teacher at Compton-Drew Middle School in St. Louis, Missouri. When Galloway did not show up for work, the school contacted authorities. Police conducted a welfare check and found the former football star dead in his apartment.  The cause of death has not yet been made public. 

Compton-Drew Middle School Principal Susan Reid said she knew something wasn’t right.

“Ahmaad was always on time, very responsible, so we knew something might be wrong,” Reid told WVTM 13. “There wasn’t anything disrupted at Ahmaad’s apartment, so we are thinking that it could have been a medical issue.”

His passing is just one among a flurry of sudden fatalities in the past year among athletes and former athletes in particular, occurring at relatively young ages.  In the majority of deaths, heart failure or circulatory failure is found to be the culprit.

Jordan Brister, 18, died Sunday, Jan. 8, after suffering a cardiac arrest on Jan. 3 during the school day at Amplus Academy in Las Vegas, according to a statement by the school shared by NBC affiliate KSNV. He was found unresponsive in the school bathroom after attending gym class, his family told KSNV.

According to local reports from Campbell County, 17-year-old Max Sorenson died of a “medical event” at his home Monday, December 26. Campbell County Coroner Paul Wallem said that following the medical incident at his home, the high school basketball player was rushed to the Campbell County Memorial Hospital in Gillette, Wyoming.

However, despite efforts from the doctors, he was pronounced deceased.

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter Victoria 'The Prodigy' Lee has tragically died last week at just 18 years old, of a medical condition which has not yet been revealed to the public.

A 16-year-old girl in Las Vegas has died after “suffering a medical episode during an athletic event according to a message sent to families,” reported KSNV, the NBC affiliate in Las Vegas. The student has been identified as 16-year-old Ashari Hughes. The medical emergency occurred Jan. 5 during a flag football game, according to The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The newspaper also reported that Hughes collapsed during her team’s home game against Valley High School. She was taken to the hospital and died later that night.

The list goes on and on.

Excess deaths have jumped dramatically in the US (excess deaths being fatalities beyond the yearly average).  The majority of excess deaths in the past two years involving people under the age of 65 were not caused by Covid infection.  At least 32,000 excess deaths in 2021 have been directly attributed to heart failure and circulation related failures.  Circulatory deaths were a major contributor to additional deaths among ages 18 to 44.

The UK has released information indicating a similar spike in excess deaths last year - The highest in 50 years, in fact.  UK officials of course deny any connection to vaccine side effects (an often cited concern by the public), and instead claim that heart failure may be the after-effect of covid infection.  However, multiple reports and studies show that the covid virus causes no significant damage to the heart and is not a contributor to heart failure, despite rumors spread within the mainstream media. 

For example, In March 2021, a group of sports cardiologists reported on nearly 800 professional athletes who had tested positive for Covid-19. Less than 1% of these athletes had abnormal findings on cardiac magnetic resonance scans or stress echocardiography. None of these athletes had cardiovascular trouble when they returned to play. 

This means that there is some other cause besides covid which just happens to have started in 2021.  Studies do show a direct link between covid vaccination and Myocarditis.  This would help to explain the jump in non-covid excess deaths related to heart failure since 2021, but since most studies investigating vaccination side effects do not use unvaccinated people as a control group, there is no hard data on vaccinated versus unvaccinated negative events.

   

There will certainly be deaths among younger people for a myriad of reasons that are natural, and the cause of death of Ahmaad Galloway and others may be any number of culprits as many medical reports remain unreleased.  That said, it is important to note the ongoing and highly suspicious trend of heart damage to people well below the age of commonality and track it carefully.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/multiple-young-athletes-and-former-athletes-died-suddenly-past-month

Two NYU Langone cancer doctors sanctioned by state for ‘inappropriately’ prescribing meds

 Two NYU Langone cancer doctors have been sanctioned by the state for “inappropriately” prescribing controlled substances, according to state Department of Health documents.

Dr. Tibor Moskovits and Dr. Bruce Raphael allegedly prescribed the medications and failed to maintain proper records for the patients, state records show.

In the case of Moskovits, the allegations involved three patients between 2015 and 2017, and for Raphael, the charges concerned one patient between 2014 and 2018, documents show.

Raphael, 72, is the site director for NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center on East 38th Street. He specializes in blood disorders including anemia and cancers such as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, according to an online bio.

Moskovits, 62, is also a specialist in blood cancers including leukemia.

Both doctors had their medical licenses permanently limited to prohibit them from prescribing controlled substances to themselves and their friends, family, co-workers, or anyone else with whom they do not have physician-patient relationship, state records show.

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Dr. Tibor Moskovits is one of the doctors sanctioned by NY.

NYU Langone Health

The charges for Dr. Bruce Raphael concerned one patient between 2014 and 2018.

NYU Langone Health

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They were also each given a penalty of a censure and reprimand by the state Board for Professional Medical Conduct, which also required them to take continuing education. Moskovits was additionally fined $750.

Raphael declined to comment as did a rep for NYU Langone. Moskovits did not return a request for comment.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/14/two-nyu-langone-cancer-doctors-sanctioned-by-ny/

7-Eleven stores in Texas, California use classical music to shoo homeless

 Some 7-Eleven convenience stores around the country, including in Texas and California have started using roaring classical and opera music as a tactic to deter homeless people from camping out in front of their storefronts. 

One Texas 7-Eleven owner says the goal is to deter homeless individuals from being there and harassing customers. Some customers say they’re all for the music, while others are annoyed by it. 

The store owner, Jagat Patel, says no one from the Austin Police Department has shown up, despite officials receiving multiple noise complaints from blasting classical tunes. He doesn’t know whether the actual decibel level falls within city ordinance, but told FOX 7 that he is planning on lowering the volume. 

Patel says the homeless population has been a big problem. 

“Especially a lot of my female customers and my young customers are scared to come here, because there are people constantly hanging out in the parking lot soliciting for money,” he said.

7-Elevens that have begun playing music have noticed a difference with homeless around their stores.

Dünzlullstein bild via Getty Images

He says he’s had to pay a professional to clean up needles. Others who work nearby say they’ve been attacked by homeless people. 

“I have to carry this big old knife with me just to defend myself, it’s sad that you have to do that,” Joe Miranda, who works nearby, told Fox 7.

Patel says he started playing the music about 10 days ago and got the idea because other store owners around the country began doing the same. 

“Studies have shown that the classical music is annoying. Opera is annoying, and I’m assuming they are correct because it’s working,” he said.

Since Patel and other businesses nearby began playing classical and opera music, they’ve noticed a difference. 

“Now since they’ve had this music going on, we have less traffic down with the homeless out here,” Miranda told Fox 7.

Some 7-Eleven costumers find the music irritating, calling the music “obnoxious.”

Getty Images

Miranda says he thinks it’s the right solution.

“It’s helping out, it’s not annoying to us because it doesn’t bother us, but it bothers probably them because they’re doing drugs,” he said.

Others disagree, calling the music “obnoxious” while going shopping and filling up the tank with gas. 

“I believe, just talk to them, and ask them not to hang around, or not to live around, whatever, I think that’s the best solution,” Frederick Carter, who lives nearby, said.

He says he’s started going to another nearby 7-Eleven store that doesn’t have music playing.

“This music is not very good, it’s loud, it’s obnoxious to me, I don’t like it, you can hear it a long ways off, it’s very disturbing,” he said.

Texas convenience stores aren’t the only store tapping into Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, with 7-Elevens in California following suit. 

In Los Angeles, California, 7-Eleven owners began to play classical music to help employees and customers alike feel safe amid a continued spike in homelessness in the area. 

The owner of a California 7-Eleven, Sukhi Sandhu, told The Modesto Bee that he began playing opera and classical music last year in an effort to drive out panhandlers and other loiterers from the convenience store.

Once the music started, the riffraff left,” Manuel Souza told the local paper. “It’s hard to hang out and gossip and joke around.” 

https://nypost.com/2023/01/15/7-eleven-stores-in-texas-california-new-york-use-classical-music-to-shoo-homeless-people/

‘Like a Fixer for the Democrats’: Nunes Worries Biden Special Counsel May Be Biased

 Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday praised Robert Hur, the special counsel he appointed to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified records, as an "even-handed" prosecutor with a "long and distinguished career." But a top Republican who dealt with Hur during his last stint at the Justice Department has a much less glowing opinion.

In 2018, Hur was part of the Justice Department team that worked to stifle a House Republican probe of the agency’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. According to Justice Department emails reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, Hur, who served as principal associate deputy attorney general, helped draft a letter to Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee in January 2018 to block a report—the so-called Nunes memo—that poked holes in the government’s investigation of the Trump campaign.

Hur’s work to shut down the memo, which years later has been largely vindicated, casts doubt on his ability to impartially investigate Biden, according to the memo’s Republican author, former House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes.

"Hur looks like a fixer for the Democrats and the Deep State," Nunes told the Free Beacon.

Justice Department officials mounted an aggressive campaign to block the release of the Nunes memo, claiming it would have a "damaging impact" on national security. They also dismissed allegations that investigators had abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, saying they were "unaware of any wrongdoing related to the FISA process." Emails show that Hur proposed edits and other changes to the Justice Department’s letter to House Republicans.

Garland appointed Hur, who now works in private practice, to investigate "the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records" discovered at Biden’s home in Delaware and at his former think tank office in Washington, D.C. Garland said he was "confident that Mr. Hur will carry out his responsibility in an even-handed and urgent manner."

But according to Nunes, it’s hardly clear that the special counsel will maintain neutrality.

"Before Hur even begins as special counsel, Congress should use a subpoena to force him to explain his role in obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s FISA abuse investigation, targeting our staff and my lawyers, and helping to write an utterly false letter trying to stop the release of the Nunes memo," said Nunes.

The Nunes memo has largely been vindicated. The four-page report revealed that the FBI failed to verify allegations in the infamous Steele dossier, which falsely alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

The Justice Department and FBI cited the dossier extensively in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to spy on a Trump campaign adviser. The Nunes memo also revealed that federal officials failed to disclose that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had funded the dossier, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The Justice Department’s inspector general found that the Justice Department and FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about efforts to verify the dossier as part of its investigation into the Trump campaign. FBI and DOJ officials also omitted evidence that undermined the claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

The Justice Department, White House, and Hur did not respond to requests for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/like-a-fixer-for-the-democrats-nunes-worries-biden-special-counsel-may-be-biased/

Make wokeness expensive: Let victims sue organizations that bail out violent criminals

 In June 2020, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) unwittingly drew attention to a serious national problem. She retweeted a fundraising pitch from the Minnesota Freedom Fund. This group, in the name of social justice, pays bail for almost any accused criminals, including habitual and violent offenders.

There are several such faux-charities, harming society and routinely creating new victims.

The fund Harris cited sprang a career criminal last year named Sean Michael Tillman, a pervert with eight convictions for indecent exposure, including in the presence of a child. Tillman had also been convicted on gun charges when the "freedom fund" helped him make bail.

Once freed by these bogus benefactors, Tillman allegedly used his free time to commit murder, shooting his victim six times on a light rail platform in plain view of a surveillance video camera. He is awaiting trial in prison while serving a sentence for public masturbation

This is story is not an isolated or remarkable one. Freeing such people is what Minnesota Freedom Fund exists to do. It previously spent $100,000 to bail out an accused murderer, $75,000 to bail out an accused child rapist with a prior sex offense conviction, $350,000 to bail out a twice-convicted rapist accused of kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault, and $4,000 to bail out a man accused of assaulting a 71-year-old woman while burglarizing her home who subsequently violated bail.

Those are only a few highlights. The number of questionable decisions by this organization to bail out killers, domestic abusers, rapists, and serial bail-jumpers is lengthy. The organization does not apparently care about public safety. To this day, Harris has not removed the tweet in which she supported it.

Unfortunately, the Minnesota Freedom Fund is just one of many nonprofit organizations inflicting this sort of harm on society — exploiting court leniency and creating a dangerous public nuisance by making sure violent and unstable people are on the streets and can do harm for as long as possible. A waiter, the victim of a similar group's activities, is suing the Nevada chapter of the Bail Project after being shot 11 times by one of its bail beneficiaries. The Bail Project, he contends, freed his assailant on charges of burglary and grand larceny without considering violent crimes he might commit while on the loose.

In Minnesota, Republicans are talking about banning nonprofit organizations from paying bail. There is a clever idea in Oregon, where lawmakers proposed a bill creating a civil cause of action, which victims of bailed-out criminal defendants could bring against those who bailed them out (there is an exception for the defendant's family members).

Obviously, neither of these is a long-term solution to the delinquent judicial and prosecutorial leniency that makes low bail available to violent and career criminals who are a threat to society. The key to making the streets safe, aside from increasing policing, is to elect prosecutors and judges who take firm action against violent and repeat criminals, sending them to prison and thus ending their threat to the public.

In the meantime, it makes sense to attach legal liability to organizations that put others at risk by bailing out recidivist criminals. If the accused is a harmless Aladdin stealing bread to feed his family, there's no risk. But if these do-harm do-gooder organizations could face lawsuits, those such as Minnesota Freedom Fund and the Bail Project will have to consider public safety, not just pay lip service to it.

The public must forcefully reject the weird ideology that treats the desire to be safe as inherently racist. One of the tools for cleansing the nation of such faddish wokeism is to make it expensive. Let the lawsuits begin.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/make-wokeness-expensive-let-victims-sue-organizations-that-bail-out-violent-criminals

Bidenflation Remains Stubborn At 12.8%, Hurting Americans

 Commenting on the latest CPI data, Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said Thursday morning that he expected the "eye-popping" inflation readings of 2022 were behind us and that it made sense to slow down the pace of rate hikes.

Harker's comment is somewhat misleading and out-of-sync with the pain of inflation felt by average Americans. Keep in mind that when Harker makes the statement, he focuses on only the past 12 months and thereby ignores that the prices sharply climbed during the 12 months of 2021.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) released by the government last week showed a 6.5% year-over-year increase in prices from December 2021 to December 2022, edging down from a rate of 7.1% in November. The CPI has declined steadily from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June to 6.5% in December.

Prices have increased by 12.8% under President Biden's watch between February 2021 and December 2022. We developed the TIPP CPI, a metric that uses February 2021, the month after President Biden's inauguration, as its base and measures the rate of change.

While we recognize that CPIs are index numbers, for common understanding, when we refer to TIPP CPI and BLS CPI, we mean percent change.

Bidenflation, measured by the TIPP CPI using the same underlying data, stood at 12.8% in December. It was 13.2 in November, 13.3% in October, 12.8% in September, and 12.6% in August.

All TIPP CPI measures are anchored to the base month of February 2021, making it exclusive to the economy under President Biden's watch. Please note that we use the relevant Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)underlying data but recalibrate it to arrive at the TIPP CPI.

Significant inflation had already set in by the middle of 2021. In November 2021, CPI inflation was 6.8 percent. The official CPI year-over-year increases will compare prices to already inflated bases in the coming months. The year-over-year calculation may moderate the statistics, but you will still feel the pinch of inflation.

TIPP CPI vs. BLS CPI

The following four charts present details about the new metric.

The official year-over-year CPI increase reported by BLS is 6.5% for December 2022. Compare this to the TIPP CPI of 12.8%, a 6.4-point difference. Prices have increased by 12.8% since President Biden took office.

Food prices increased by 16.8% under President Biden's watch compared to only 10.4% as per BLS CPI, a difference of 6.3 points.

Energy prices increased 28.9% per TIPP CPI compared to 7.3% according to BLS CPI, a difference of 21.6 points.

The Core CPI is the price increase for all items, excluding food and energy. The Core TIPP CPI was 10.9% compared to 5.7% BLS CPI in the year-over-year measure, a 5.2-point difference.

Further, gasoline prices have increased by 28.9% since President Biden took office. However, the BLS CPI shows that gasoline price has slipped 1.51%, a difference of 30.4 points.

Used car prices have risen by 25.7% during President Biden's term. The BLS CPI shows that the prices have dropped by 8.8%, a difference of 34.6 points.

Inflation for air tickets under President Biden is 36.2% compared to the BLS CPI finding of 28.5%.

Americans' Concerns

The latest Investor's Business Daily/TIPP Poll, completed earlier this month, shows that nine in ten (89%) of survey respondents are concerned about inflation. Throughout the past year, inflation concerns have stayed above 80%. The share of "very concerned" has been over 50% for eleven consecutive months.

Most respondents (52%) say their wages have not kept pace with inflation. Only one in five (21%) say that it has. The share, who said wages had kept pace, has hovered in the 17% to 22% range since January 2022.

As a result of inflation, Americans are cutting back on household spending.

Most Americans are spending less on eating out (76%), entertainment (75%), purchases of big-ticket items (74%), holiday/vacation travel (72%), and memberships/subscriptions (64%).

Many (60%) are cutting back on even good causes such as charity giving. The high gasoline prices forced 58% to cut back on local driving. Nearly three out of every five (57%) households spend less on groceries.

Inflation Direction

The chart below compares the 12-month average of monthly changes against the 6-month and the 3-month averages. We also show the reading for December 2022.

The 12-month average considers 12 data points and presents a long-term reference, while the six-month and three-month averages consider recent data points.

To better understand, compare the three-month average to December 2022 data. For “all items,” the three-month average was 0.13 vs. -0.1 in December 2022. It is decreasing, and hence it is good.

Similarly, for "Energy," the rate is decreasing. The decrease in December 2022 (-4.50) exceeded the three-moving average of -1.43, indicating deceleration.

For "All items less food and energy," though the trend is down generally, the December reading of 0.30 was higher than the three-month average of 0.27, a cause for some concern.

The U.S. economy is in stagnation – high inflation combined with an economic slowdown.

To access the TIPP CPI readings each month, you can visit tippinsights.com. We'll publish the TIPP CPI and our analysis in the days following the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report. The upcoming release of TIPP CPI is February 16, 2023. We'll also post a spreadsheet in our store for free download.

https://tippinsights.com/bidenflation-remains-stubborn-at-12-8-hurting-americans/