COVID Bright Spots: Kids, Comorbidities and Getting on with Life

Lately I've seen concerning videos about the hazards of COVID vaccines: that the spike proteins the vaccines create once injected don't stay at the injection site; that the spike proteins are prevalent in ovaries and bone marrow at 48 hours (though it's not clear how long they remain); and the spike proteins themselves are damaging. I haven't been able to track down the accuracy of these claims--generic fact checkers all state "no evidence," and more technical refutations from scientists are beyond my pay grade. The original report on spike proteins in ovaries and bone marrow is in Japanese. But none of the fact checks I've read explain why the VAERS system is blowing up with reports of death and permanent disability following COVID vaccinations--why there are more deaths reported after COVID shots than after all other vaccines combined over the past 30 years or more. The VAERS list includes 17 deaths from smallpox vaccine, which hasn't been given for 50 years--so the data must go back even further than 1990.

Deaths reported following vaccines (top 38 vaccines). Some repeated names are different kinds of vaccines for the same illness. Data Source: United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Public Health Service (PHS), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) / Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) 1990 - 06/04/2021, CDC WONDER On-line Database. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html on Jun 13, 2021 8:49:09 PM

Could it be false reports? That's a possibility, but 1) it's a crime to make false reports to VAERS, 2) the VAERS system isn't well-known to the general public, and 3) almost every time I go to YouTube I see a news story about someone who had a heart attack or died or both right after their shot. One of my coworkers died of a heart attack a few days after her shot, and even some young people are rarely getting myocarditis (inflammation of the heart). The latter reaction is rare and as far as I know, no young person has died of it, but all of this suggests something is wrong with these vaccines. This is exactly the reason many of us took a wait-and-see approach.

Of course, all risks are in comparison to available alternatives--or to comparable situations for some perspective. Remember the H1N1 outbreak of 2009-2010? (No? Neither did I.) That season saw 288 pediatric deaths from the flu in the US. COVID has claimed 380 kids in the US as of June 16, 2021, which averages out to 304 for one year. For every million kids under 18, 4.1 kids per year have died of COVID. But as many as 7.7 per million died in some states during the H1N1 outbreak.

I've looked at various videos, studies and news reports on kids and COVID, and so far, I haven't seen any cases of kids dying of COVID without comorbidities, though it's possible that has occurred. So if you have a healthy child of normal weight, it looks like they're at less risk of dying of COVID than they would have been from the flu in 2009/2010--or most other years.

In fact, most of us without comorbidities are at far lower risk of dying than the media suggests. The CDC says, "For over 5% of [COVID] deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death." The "fact checkers" were quick to jump on sites that said that 95% of the people didn't really die of COVID. That claim is a little inaccurate, but so is the media giving the impression that we're living through a black plague.

Lately, though, I've also seen headlines that over 99% of hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated. The stories carry the whiff of schadenfreude and superiority, but as I see it, it means the finger waggers can shuck their masks, drop the pretense that they're being put upon by anti-vaxxers, and find some business of their own to mind. Whatever the risks, the vaccines look like they do a good job of preventing COVID.

Comments

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh. Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good. I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds. Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Infrared Light: How much is too much?

It's the sort of thing that sounds like quackery: a pad with tiny red LED lights and a few buttons that's supposed to help you heal, just $30 on ebay. I never would have bought it, but Dr. Davis gave a presentation on infrared light late in 2024. Since I was still suffering from achilles tendonitis after being floxxed , I decided to try it. I wrapped it around my ankle and turned it on the lowest setting for five minutes. Nothing seemed to happen, but the next day, I wrote, My tendonitis is GONE after one 5-minute treatment! I didn’t feel it doing anything, I didn’t think it was going to do anything (at least not that quickly), but for the first time in several months, I’ve gotten out of bed and started walking normally and didn’t have any pain reaching with my left arm. I'd been shuffling around like an 80-year-old woman after getting out of bed in the morning. The tendonitis returned, but it was improved. I eventually had physical therapy for it, and now, apart from a l...

Gym Influencer Doubles Down and Should Have Regretted It

Jennifer Picone isn't the most abusive gym influencer--far from it--but she may be the most annoying. In a video she posted that went viral, she was working out in a gym when another member appeared in the background by the free weights. The member was minding her own business, not looking in Picone's direction, when Picone got up and told her to move. After filming, Picone edited the video with a note about "Gym etiquette lesson #47" and accused the other gym member of "[doing] that 💩 on purpose." Shaming other gym members has gotten to be such a big genre that Joey Swoll has a YouTube channel, with half a million subscribers, dedicated to calling out these content creators. Just for Picone, he took a break from his vacation to tell her to mind her own business. This may be the first time that Joey Swoll has taken one of his followers to task. The fact that she follows him and still doesn't know better than to treat the gym like her personal studio sh...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Stay in your car!

If there's ever a lunatic outside your vehicle, do not engage. Stay in your vehicle. Drive away or call the police. Drive over the curb, lawn or median if necessary; just avoid putting innocent bystanders at risk.* Save yourself from lunatics like a boss. Screen grab from video by Fredrik Sørlie on Youtube . That advice might have saved a 69-year-old delivery driver from being attacked by former NFL player Mark Sanchez, who for unknown reasons was in an alley after midnight in downtown Indianapolis and decided to pick a fight over a parking space. I say might have because I haven't seen any video of the attack. But other incidents over the years bear out the safety of staying in your car. A neighbor was assaulted and robbed after she got out of her car after someone followed her home and blocked her driveway. And remember Reginald Denny from the LA riots? The victim maced and stabbed Sanchez, but suffered a bad cut to his face and tongue and looks like he was badly beaten. Bo...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog