COVID Kerfuffle!

Photo from Pixabay.

Readers may have seen the kerfuffle between Dr. Robert Malone and journalist Alex Berenson. They were both guests on Fox News to talk about big tech censorship when Berenson, apropos of nothing, accused Dr. Malone of inflating his credentials and misleading people about ivermectin. After the interview, Malone immediately listed several of his patents and papers on his substack; Berenson so far hasn't produced any evidence to back up his accusations. And the accusations have blown up in his face: readers are unsubscribing to his substack, Unreported Truths, en masse and supporters are closing their wallets. Many of them have gone over to the substack of Robert Malone.

I haven't seen anything like this since Denise Minger debunked The China Study. Even the documentary Fathead, which debunked Supersize Me, didn't seem to cause such an uproar. But both Minger and Tom Naughton (who made Fathead) brought the receipts and neither The China Study nor Supersize Me stood up to their mathematical and scientific scrutiny.

So why did Alex Berenson make accusations without backing them up? My best guess, based on his book Pandemia, is that his physician wife and their New York City friends are very unhappy with his stance on the COVID vaccines and his appearances on Fox News. Perhaps he also wanted to shake off the wing nuts in his audience. Many of the comments on his substack are batshit crazy theories about depopulation and election fraud that would never be approved here on Pain, Pain, Go Away. Maybe he figured trying to discredit Dr. Malone would run off the nutters and placate his wife at the same time. If so, he's likely succeeded--more than he intended.

Dr. Malone followed up with a post about ivermectin in Uttar Pradesh. This site shows they've had a very low death rate compared to other Indian states, and other states mentioned in various news sources as using ivermectin likewise have had low death rates. So this is some observational evidence that ivermectin is helpful against COVID. (Others have dived far more deeply into this subject than I'm willing or able to.) He adds that a colleague on vacation in India sent him a picture of one of the COVID care packages distributed throughout the region:

Source: https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/socrates-thought-police-ivermectin

Assuming the contents of this pack are saving people from dying of COVID, could the other ingredients be having an effect? Paracetamol is Tylenol, so likely nothing more than a pain reliever. Zinc--possibly. D3? Two doses, even two big ones, may or may not have much effect since it takes time for your body to build up its vitamin D level. Doxycycline is an antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory; this study didn't show any benefit for COVID patients. So maybe ivermectin is helping people.

It may not matter much at this point. It's almost all Omicron now. Even here in Indiana, where we've lagged most other places, cases are starting to go down in Indianapolis and the outskirts of Chicago. My coworkers in the suburbs of Indy are catching COVID left and right, yet I haven't heard about a serious case among them. I feel left out! One person thought I had immunity from the colds I've caught; another thought my blood type (O) helped. Thanks to immunity and repurposed drugs being treated as stepchildren, we'll probably never get a good answer to any of these questions.

Alex Berenson has written recently that COVID is over and boosters are over. Be that as it may, COVID vaccine injuries, health agency malfeasance, and the effects of the government response, all of which he writes about, are all still important. He's done some terrific reporting (aside from his latest appearance on Fox News) and for that reason I'm keeping him on the blog roll. I still recommend his book Pandemia. If the quality of his reporting diminishes, though, I will revisit the decision to support his work.

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...

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...

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...

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog