CDC scientists plot to contain 'infodemics' as docs show agency dismissed COVID vax deaths

 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly warned the public to reject purported misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines even after contradicting its then-director's certainty that the rushed-through therapeutics stop infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2. 

Rochelle Walensky kept promoting the claim, which she knew was false just a month after emergency use authorization, as late as April 2023, several months after former White House COVID adviser Deborah Birx said she "knew" the vaccines wouldn't stop infection.

The agency is at it again, publishing two papers last month in prestigious medical journals on the threat of misinformation, shortly before its newly disclosed reviews of COVID vaccine-injury reports add a wrinkle to the CDC's claim it had no evidence the vaccines could kill people.

The journals are owned by The Lancet, the British medical publisher that ran a February 2020 statement decrying "conspiracy theories" that COVID didn't emerge naturally, written by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and signed by more than two dozen scientists.

The Lancet recused Daszak months later for failure to disclose "competing interests," that EcoHealth passed through U.S. taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a suspected source of SARS-CoV-2. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled Daszak this week on that failure and why he didn't identify himself as the lead author.

The publisher also convened a COVID commission that included Daszak, which its chairman, Jeffrey Sachs, shut down in fall 2021 due to concerns about Daszak's conflicts of interest and EcoHealth's influence.

While COVID vaccine makers invariably play down the frequency and severity of side effects, AstraZeneca recently admitted its vaccine causes a life-threatening combination of blood clots and low platelet counts in "very rare cases," in response to U.K. litigation by more than 50 families claiming it contributed to deaths or impairments.

The CDC turned over a spreadsheet to The Epoch Times containing nearly 3,800 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System reports of heart inflammation following COVID vaccination, including 101 deaths, that staff had investigated using "medical records, death certificates, and autopsies" from April 2021 to April 2023, with most reviews completed in 2021, the Times said. 

While the Freedom of Information Act production redacts some fields under an exemption for personal privacy, including lot numbers of vaccine doses that could link adverse events to specific batches, it leaves intact a plethora of other fields including age, specific vaccine, inoculation date by dose and healthcare providers' notes on each case.

The word "autopsy" shows up 120 times, though some of them appear in more than one field in the same report, and "death certificate" in 20 unique reports.

The Food and Drug Administration rejected a Times FOIA request for the autopsies themselves in 2022, citing the privacy exemption used to hide lot numbers, known as (b)(6). Kim Witczak, consumer representative on the FDA's advisory committee for new drugs, questioned why it couldn't simply redact identifying information at the time.

Several official records and providers' notes in the spreadsheet identify vaccination as causing or contributing to death, which CDC staff either rejected or said couldn't be tied solely to vaccination.

The CDC told the Times last summer that the "available evidence" did not verify that Pfizer or  Moderna jabs "caused or contributed" to any death reported to VAERS, most of whose reports are made by healthcare providers and manufacturers.

The agency takes "the exact opposite approach" for deaths following confirmed or suspected COVID infections, construing them as related to the virus even years later, U.K. National Health Service pathologist Clare Craig, speaking in her role as co-chair of the nonprofit Health Advisory and Recovery Team, told the Times.

"Epoch Times has mischaracterized the data available through VAERS and the response that CDC provided to them," according to a statement given Just the News by CDC senior public affairs specialist Rosa Norman when asked about the Times report and Craig's asserted double standard.

"COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective," as documented by "more than 676 million doses administered," the statement reads. 

It reiterates previous federal warnings that VAERS is only an "early warning system" whose "number of reports alone cannot be interpreted as evidence of a causal association between a vaccine and an adverse event" nor "the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines."

The agency "has not detected any unusual or unexpected patterns for deaths" following vaccination "that have not already been thoroughly described and made public in the published biomedical literature or public presentations," such as its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meetings, the statement says.

ACIP is widely seen as more deferential to the CDC than the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee is to the FDA, which has sometimes overruled or just ignored its advisers on major COVID decisions.

CDC scientists wrote papers published April 19 in The Lancet Public Health, proposing a framework for proactively managing "infodemics," and The Lancet Infectious Diseases, reviewing infodemics in relation to smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu and HIV pandemics, which show that misinformation did not emerge with COVID or social media.

The first paper does not appear to define "misinformation" but says it caused "improper use of medications such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment, negative attitudes toward masking, reduced vaccination intent or uptake, and stigma or discrimination against" high-risk groups for COVID.

The scientists propose "prebunking" against "specific false or misleading claims" as well as "manipulation techniques in general," "platform-based friction intervention" to prevent disfavored content from spreading, and "potentially" revoking licenses from health professionals who "spread disinformation."

The second paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract says past infodemics point the way to "expanding beyond the narrow scope of addressing misinformation to manage information ecosystems, defined as how people consume, produce, interact with, and behave around information, which include factors such as trust, stigma, and scientific literacy."

A former Senate Finance Committee investigator who exposed financial ties between pharmaceutical companies and doctors spotted the papers.

The Lancet is "hoping you forgot The Lancet and CDC spread pandemic misinformation," Paul Thacker wrote in his newsletter, noting the publisher retracted a 2020 study that claimed hydroxychloroquine was "associated with an increased risk of in-hospital mortality" for COVID patients after a medical student highlighted numerous data problems.

Though the New England Journal of Medicine quickly echoed the criticism, the World Health Organization had already halted HCQ trials for COVID based on the paper.

Brown University misinformation professor Claire Wardle is a coauthor on both papers, Thacker emphasized, noting she appears in the Twitter Files. 

They show Wardle briefed the advisory committee for the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which helped convene a private-led consortium to report purported misinformation to social media platforms for suppression. 

She also emailed Twitter executives her report on vaccine "conspiracy theories" on social media, including that vaccine mandates would follow mask mandates, shortly after Pfizer claimed its vaccine did well in clinical trials in 2020. 

After vaccine mandates came to pass, Wardle pivoted to describing criticism of mandates itself as misinformation, Thacker said.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/cdc-scientists-strategize-contain-infodemics-records-show-agency

Muni Mega Deals Set to Smash Record on Lower Rates, Higher Costs

 

• Issuers rush to refinance, pay for more expensive projects
• Buyers seize chance to add large, liquid issuers to positions

States and municipalities are demonstrating an explosive demand for debt two years after the Fed first suppressed bond sales with a series of 11 interest rate increases.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the number of bond sales of $1 billion or more, long a rarity in municipals. There have been 22 so far this year, putting the market on pace to smash the previous annual record of 26 set in all of 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Those deals account for almost one-quarter of the year’s $154 billion in long-term borrowing.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-09/muni-mega-deals-set-to-smash-record-on-lower-rates-higher-costs

Lilly's next-gen obesity drug brings Innovent a phase 3 win in diabetes

 Innovent has scored another phase 3 win for mazdutide as the drug showed its superiority to Eli Lilly's diabetes and heart drug Trulicity when it came to glycemic control in patients with Type 2 diabetes.

China-based Innovent secured the rights to mazdutide from Lilly back in 2019 for an undisclosed sum. Innovent kicked off this year showing success in a weight loss study that the company declared as demonstrating the drug is “the first GLP-1R/GCGR dual agonist succeeding in phase 3 trials.”

That success seems to have continued into the DREAMS-2 trial, which enrolled 731 patients in China with Type 2 diabetes, who received either 4-mg or 6-mg doses of mazdutide or 1.5 mg of Lilly’s own approved diabetes drug Trulicity.

After 28 weeks of treatment, patients in both the mazdutide cohorts showed improved glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels when compared to those on Trulicity, hitting the trial’s primary endpoint.

The key secondary endpoints also showed mazdutide's superior benefits in terms of the proportion of patients who saw weight loss of more than 5% and those whose HbA1c levels was less than 7%, Innovent explained in the May 8 postmarket release.

While gastrointestinal reactions were the most common adverse events, most of these cases were mild to moderate in severity, mainly occurring during the first 12-week titration period, the biotech explained.

Data from DREAMS-2 will go toward the ongoing review of mazdutide by Chinese regulators for weight management, Innovent said. A similar study, DREAMS-1, is due to read out in mid-2024, after which the company will also apply to the regulator for mazdutide’s approval as a diabetes treatment.

“In the DREAMS-2 study, mazdutide showed comprehensive superiority to dulaglutide, one of the most-described glucose-lowering drugs in the world,” Lei Qian, M.D., Ph.D., vice president of clinical development of Innovent, said in the release.

“We will further analyze the study data, and strive to submit an NDA for T2D as soon as possible this year, so as to help more Chinese T2D patients to achieve target blood glucose levels and acquire metabolic benefits,” he added. “At the same time, we look forward to the performance of mazdutide in the DREAMS-3 study, a head-to-head study with semaglutide."

Lilly has the rights to develop mazdutide outside of China and continues to list the candidate in its phase 2 pipeline as a treatment for obesity.

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/lillys-next-gen-obesity-drug-brings-innovent-phase-3-win-diabetes

We Need To Talk About Recession Risk Again

 by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

It’s time once more to increase vigilance for a US recession.

Soft, survey data is starting to deteriorate, while hard data is already fragile. Expectations of a downturn are currently low, but they could quickly swing higher.

Stocks – which experience their worst drawdowns in recessions – are not priced for such an outcome, while yields are biased lower in the coming months.

S curves are nature’s approximation of a binary on-off switch. They pop up in all sorts of places, from neurons in the brain to the progression of diseases, and from population growth to the adoption of new technologies. They also describe how recessions evolve.

Economies are typically believed to develop in a linear fashion, from a non-recessionary to a recessionary state. But instead they do so in a highly non-linear way, with recessions often happening abruptly. Downturns have either a low risk of occurring in the next 3-4 months, or a high risk, but rarely anything in between – much like the shape of an S as depicted below.

That is why most standard recession models don’t make a lot of sense, as they assume recession risk can evolve smoothly. But it is essentially meaningless to talk of the likelihood of a recession rising from, say, 45% to 50%, when we acknowledge their regime-shift nature.

Just now we are at the bottom-left hand side of the S, with a low risk of an imminent recession. But the data has evolved in the last few weeks to suggest we could soon move to the right and on to the steep upward section of the curve – meaning the probability could quickly climb much higher. If so that would make a recession more likely than not over the next 3-4 months.

Stocks are expecting a soft or no landing. They are currently behaving in a way consistent with the Fed’s first rate cut — the most likely move if it changes rates this year — occurring in the absence of a recession. However, rate cuts that happen when there is a slump have historically led to a much worse outcome for equities — both before and after the recession — than currently priced (white line in chart below).

Six months ago I wrote that a US recession was unlikely through most of 2024. That could still end up being the case, but if we are shifting along the S curve, then investors should be prepared for an environment that could quickly look more recessionary, even if an actual downturn doesn’t arrive for another six months. Remember: stocks sell off before the onset of a recession, and even longer before the NBER finally announces the economy is in one.

The upgrading of recession risk has been prompted by the weakening in soft data in recent weeks, coinciding with hard data that remains fragile.

The manufacturing ISM is one of the single-most important data points for the economic and stock outlook.

The headline survey dropped below 50 in April. It is led by the new orders-to-inventory ratio, which is turning lower and slipped below the important level of one, where orders are expected to be just enough to match inventory.

It was the rise in this ratio, along with other indicators, that fed the view last year that the US was likely to avoid a recession for a while yet.

Yet as much as it’s unhelpful to be a perma-bear and constantly expect a recession, it also doesn’t make sense to assume there will be no recession at all. As I have described, one can only have a reasonably accurate view on a downturn occurring over the next 3-4 months, and that view by its nature is likely to change abruptly, not smoothly.

Adding to the difficulty in forecasting recessions, the goods and services economies have fallen out of sync in this cycle. Normally the goods sector leads the rest of the economy into a downturn, which is why so many traditional recession indicators over-emphasized the risk of one last year. But at some point, the economy is likely to resynchronize.

Why it’s particularly important to be more vigilant now is that services might also be notably slowing, as flagged by the services ISM also slipping below 50 in April; it has only done so twice before outside of a recession.

The usual caveats apply. The ISM is quite volatile, and the PMI services survey is still above 50, even though it is also turning lower. But this drop in important soft-data points comes at a time when hard data is showing signs of fragility too.

Recessions occur when both hard and soft data are contracting at the same time. Using the inputs to the Conference Board’s Leading Index, growth in leading hard-data has been turning higher, but is still contracting, while leading soft-data is close to slipping into the contraction zone. That would be ominous for recession risk.

Revisions will also be key to monitor. Typically data sees its biggest revisions before and after the occurrence of a recession. Data can be revised lower very quickly which is why recessions can happen faster in revised time than in real time.

What does all this mean practically for investors?

It leaves stocks more vulnerable. As the chart below shows, even though equities see a sharp drawdown after a recession begins (which, remember, we don’t know when that is until after the fact when the NBER announces it), they begin selling off beforehand. Moving to the right of the S curve means more volatile stock prices with a bias lower, even if it does not ultimately mean a full recession-like decline and an end to the bull market.

It also means bond yields are more likely to see some retrenchment in the coming months. But with elevated inflation in the background, bonds are primed to not rally as much as in non-inflationary recessions (see chart below). Moreover, yields are still structurally biased higher due to waning interest in owning USTs at current prices, and an inundation of supply.

Investing is about gauging forward probabilities. The probability of a near-term recession is currently low, but in a month’s time it could be much higher. That would be a lot of new information asset prices would have to quickly digest. A more nimble investment stance is advised at this trickier part of the cycle.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/we-need-talk-about-recession-risk-again