Nature published a comprehensive study this week on cardiovascular risk including a total of over 11 million patients that has made a few headlines. The aim was to identify the cause of increased cardiac pathology. It should have been a very simple study comparing four groups:
- Not infected and never vaccinated
- Not infected and vaccinated
- Infected but not vaccinated
- Infected and vaccinated
It is hard to believe the authors did not look at these groups, but whatever was found when comparing them remains a mystery.
Instead, the following groups were compared:
- Not infected and never vaccinated data from 2017
- Not infected, including vaccinated and not vaccinated
- Infected but not vaccinated
- Infected with vaccinated people included but using modelled adjustments
When studies with huge datasets use modelling and fail to share data prior to their adjustments alarm bells should start ringing. Therefore, I took a deeper dive to see what else was questionable.
There were serious biases in the paper which need addressing but first let’s look at the critical question of myocarditis (heart inflammation).
Because of the known risk of myocarditis from vaccination it is worth looking particularly closely at the data presented on this. Oddly, for the issue of the day, the data on myocarditis was all hidden in the supplementary appendix to the paper.
The risk of myocarditis appears to be an autoimmune (the immune system attacking the heart after interaction with the spike protein) rather than direct damage by the virus/vaccine spike protein. Therefore, myocarditis could result from the virus or the vaccine. The key question that needs answering is whether vaccination protects or enhances the risk from the virus.
The authors report 370 per million risk of myocarditis after Covid infection in the unvaccinated. The contemporary control rate was 70 per million and the historic one was 40 per million. What was wrong with the contemporary controls?
They made it clear they removed those who had been vaccinated from the calculation in the Covid arm but they did not state they did this for the control arm. Did vaccination lead to a 30 per million increase in myocarditis in the control arm? Given the cohort appears to be old and we know myocarditis incidence is worse in the young a one in 30,000 incidence is significant.
What about those who were vaccinated and had Covid? Once vaccination (and modelling) were included, the rate rose to 500 per million. It is not entirely clear whether supplementary Table 22 excludes those who were not vaccinated, but given that it does not state the unvaccinated were excluded from this data it is fair to assume the 500 per million relates to the whole population.
Given the higher risk of myocarditis after vaccination one might wonder whether this study showed protection from infection due to vaccination, as this would lower risk from the virus. Hidden in the legends of the supplementary tables the authors reveal that 62% of the Covid patients had been vaccinated compared to 56% of the non-infected controls (not a great advert for vaccine effectiveness against infection).
Using the fact that 62% of the Covid cohort were vaccinated and that the unvaccinated had a rate of 370 per million, to get to an overall rate of 500 per million the vaccinated 62% must have had a rate of 580 per million (580×0.62 + 370×0.38 = 500). Therefore, in those with Covid and vaccination the rate (even after modelling) was 210 per million higher (58% higher) than the unvaccinated with Covid. (If supplementary Table 22 did exclude the unvaccinated the incidence of myocarditis after Covid would have been 35% higher in the vaccinated.) An extra 210 per million works out as an additional risk from vaccination of one in 5,000 among a relatively old population. The 35-58% higher myocarditis rates seen in the vaccinated after Covid compared to the unvaccinated was based only on diagnoses made more than 30 days after their positive Covid test. Any rise in risk in the first 30 day period was censored from the study. How high was it in the first 30 days and for the younger men? This critical question was left unanswered.
The data comprised medical records for U.S. veterans who were 90% male, three quarters white and had a mean age of 63 years.
Two control groups were selected:
- Patients who had used healthcare in 2017 and were still alive in March 2018.
- Patients who had used healthcare in 2019 and were still alive in March 2020.
These groups were compared to patients who tested positive for Covid after March 2020, with each patient being matched to one patient from each control and measuring beginning from the same day as the positive test but two years earlier for the 2018 control.
There was a significant bias between these two control groups and those who tested positive.
The Covid patients (not just those who were sick with it – all those who tested positive) were more obese, saw doctors more often, had more cancer, kidney disease, lung disease, dementia etc.
There are two ways to deal with such biases. One is to match the 150,000 Covid patients with similarly sick patients from the over five millions controls. This reduces the size of the control group but when it is already so large this should not be a concern. Instead, the authors modelled the data until the groups seemed similar. Using an algorithm they claimed the same total number of people were present in the Covid cohort, but whereas 49,407 actually had diabetes in the raw data, 11,903 (24%) no longer had diabetes according to the weighted data. Similarly, 14% were ‘cured’ of lung disease, 14% of cancer and a full 35% of the dementia patients no longer had dementia.
There was no discussion in the paper about the reasons for this unhealthy bias among the Covid patients. All positive test results were included and anyone can catch SARS-CoV-2, so the factors that increase the risk of serious disease and hospitalisation should not have biased a dataset based only on infection. Instead the authors discuss the hypothetical issue of people in the non-infected control group having Covid but not getting tested such that the damage caused by Covid could be worse than the paper reports.
It has been well established that hospital transmission dominates as a source of spread and SAGE has reported that up to 40.5% of cases could be traced back to hospital spread and a majority of hospitalised patients in June 2020 were linked to hospital spread. In Scotland, in December 2020, 60% of the acutely ill with Covid acquired the infection in hospital. Patients accessing hospital are highly likely to be less healthy than the general population. Indeed, we know that the Covid patients in the study accessed hospital more frequently than the controls. If the bias was related to hospital acquired infection then the whole study is called into question, as people who attend hospitals are more likely to be sick.
The authors picked some control conditions to attempt to show they had not introduced a bias. Given the study was about cardiovascular diseases, including those that are an immediate threat to life and those that are very common, I would have picked conditions that might kill you within a year, like lung, pancreatic or oesophageal cancer and common conditions e.g. urinary tract infections, diabetes or prostate cancer.
The authors chose three rare malignancies, all with a one-year survival rate of over 80%, and pre-invasive melanoma – why not include invasive melanoma? They then included rare conditions and odd selection of: hypertrichosis (‘werewolf syndrome’ with excessive facial hair), sickle cell trait and perforated ear drums. When the choices are so niche it begs the question of what the results would have been if more obvious choices had been selected.
The group that tested positive for Covid did badly: 13% ended up in (or began in) hospital and 4% in ICU. The mean age was 63 years which may explain part of the high percentage of sick Covid patients, but it does, again, suggest this group may have been more vulnerable than the control.
They then compared the risk of various cardiac outcomes against the controls. However, they used the same control to compare non-hospitalised patients as patients who had received ICU care. Of course, people who have needed ICU care will be more likely to have cardiovascular complications. Indeed, many of the patients may still have been in the ICU when the measuring period began 30 days after the positive test. A fair study would have only compared the ICU outcomes with the sickest people within the control group, not the average of the whole control group.
The risk to the non-hospitalised Covid patients was low for almost all the cardiovascular risk factors.
The risk to the hospitalised was higher (but remember the controls had significant biases).
Those on ICU had a much higher risk. What is not clear is how much of this is because of the virus.
It is not a surprise for people who have had an ICU stay to be unwell for some time afterwards. The risk of ICU admission for Covid was higher than for influenza, but it is important to understand how much of the cardiovascular risk resulted from the virus and how much from the stay in intensive care per se. How do these Covid ICU patients compare to other ICU patients? The paper did not say.
Similarly the paper makes no attempt to unpick how many of the Covid patients tested positive only after being admitted to hospital. If, as in other studies, a significant proportion acquired Covid in hospital, then a higher risk of being diagnosed with other conditions would be highly likely.
Having failed to examine the above two questions – how much cardiovascular disease was a confounder of hospital transmission and how much is secondary to ICU harm – the overall risk of consequent cardiovascular problems included all the above cardiovascular conditions and thereby inflated the average for the Covid population as a whole.
Nature has published this paper which presents data in an obtuse way that should never have passed peer review. The results were presented as showing how dangerous the Covid virus was for cardiovascular complications without suitable controls to enable that conclusion to be drawn. The evidence on vaccination risks was hidden and not presented in a meaningful way for different age groups. Even then, they demonstrated a significant risk of myocarditis after vaccination, particularly after then encountering the virus but this key finding was hidden in the supplementary appendix. Why?
Dr. Clare Craig is a Diagnostic Pathologist and Co-Chair of HART.
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There is a strange increase in the reactions of people – the more their cherished beliefs or desires are shown to be at variance with facts – the more fanatical they become.
Applies to:
Trump
Brexit
Global Warming – or at least the idea that carbon dioxide is the sole driver of climate change despite ever more evidence that it has little, if any, effect on the planet’s climate.
–
The world is Topsy Turvy and I wish to be buried upside down, so that I will be the right way up when the world has sorted itself out.
Don’t forget Covid!
“People who make the rules made a rule which said nobody – not even they themselves – could break the rule so that means the rule was not broken because they said so, so there.”
If nothing makes sense, it’s usually money wot did it.
Eugyppius has some substantial reservations regarding Hersh’s article too.
Why is it so difficult to believe an underwater device could survive 3 months? Flight data recorders carry on transmiitting underwater for 90 days. An explosive device would need only enough power to pick up the detonation signal and to detonate the charge.
The legal argument is predicated on the assumption that those involved are honest and honourable, and as we know politicians and those in the security services are the epitomy of honour and honesty. It seems a bit like defending a criminal on the grounds that he knows crime is illegal so why would he commit one?
If the start assumption is that the people in power will violate the rules, anyway, the whole maneuvering to avoid doing so described in the Hersh-article could have been avoided by simply violating the rules.
Why did the US try to get a resolution passed in the UN to invade Iraq if they were going to do it anyway?
Why is it so difficult to believe an underwater device could survive 3 months?
Indeed. In fact such a device would be very simple to design and construct. There may even be off-the-shelf versions available.
“The legal argument is predicated on the assumption that those involved are honest and honourable”
The C1984 was authorised despite every law and rule in the damned world being broken.
“Rule of law?”
Give me a break – Jeez!
I seem to remember that the West has instituted a “rules based order” because the “international law based order” doesn’t get us what we want. But it’s still useful to wave the law flag bacause Joe Public has not been told about the new rules.
That sums it up.
Agreed. The Baltic at this site is not particularly cold or deep. 67m give or take a few metres. and bottom temperatures in June will be about +3degC. Thermoclines capable of accoustically masking a submarine are improbable in these shallow depths.
Presumably it would be a fairly straightforward technical matter, given US resources, to get an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) to do the job, which could be launched from many miles away.
I spoke to a merchant navy guy who does underwater engineering/maintenance stuff, and he said yes they’d use an ROV. But I’m not sure. For one thing, Russia has sonar sensors on those pipes (but I suppose there could be stealthy ROVs). Another thing is that Sweden has said these were larger, non-precision bombs that were placed near the pipes, not on them, so they could have been dropped from a ship (or perhaps a sub). In fact, the pipes are so vulnerable that anyone with some explosives and a small boat (no transponder) could have done it and probably got away with it. There’s an NYT article with a few more details. Maybe we’ll never know for sure who did it.
I think an AUV would be more likely than an ROV (which would be tethered to the mother vessel and have very limited range, thus necessitating the mother vessel to loiter over the site while the explosives were being laid. I agree with RichardTechnik that a submarine, at least a full-size submarine, would be an unlikely platform to use for this task.
If the explosives were indeed large, non-precision bombs then perhaps (as alluded to in the NYT article) the best way to lay them would be off the back of a motor vessel, tracking along the top of the pipelines (which could be visible on a multibeam sonar). On a second run over the target the multibeam could be used to check the explosives were sufficiently close to the pipelines to do the deed. No doubt such an exercise would have be practised to perfection in some secret location.
Detonate some time later, perhaps months later, at a moment of choice. The technology would be similar to that of an acoustic mine, adapted to fire in response to a given acoustic transmission rather than a ship passing overhead.
The technology isn’t difficult, but given the extent to which most Western navies have been run down, their independent technology bases hollowed out by spending cuts over decades now, my guess for the culprit would be the one nation that has more or less kept up to speed – the US.
I agree almost anyone could have done it, via a small boat and divers for example, but if the explosives were large this rules out divers. And getting away with it – absolutely vital in the circumstances – would be another matter.
I do wonder how effective the protective sonar sensors would be, in that whether there were enough of them to detect if something untoward was going on – simple dumping of explosive packages from above for example.
An oft-stated reason Putin did not go for the Donbas in 2014 was to keep the gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines which Nordstream would eventually replace. Thus the Trump administration under legislation proposed by Senator Ted Cruz applied sanctions to Nordstream 2 which – the very next day – halted the construction process. In an act of almost childish stupidity, Biden lifted those sanctions – with 100pc Democrat backing – simply because they were a Trump policy, and despite warnings, and the pleading of Zelensky that such a move would be a green light to Putin to move on Donbas. And so it proved. No wonder Biden blurted out that Nordstream could be taken out…You look a fool to deny otherwise.
The Russians doing it doesn’t add up either. It would be quite easy to dismantle the case that the Russians did it.
So where does that leave us?
The fog of war, people believing what they want to believe, chaos..
Cui bono?
A bit like the origins of covid, it may remain a mystery for a long time/forever. Also a bit like the origins of covid, it seems important to know so you’d expect those that govern us to be pulling out all the stops to find out the truth. Funny that doesn’t seem to be happening in either case. I’m sure it’s just a cock-up though. They did manage to fully investigate the Salisbury poisonings and established beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Russia wot dun it, same with US election interference, Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy theory. All completely believable.
and the excess deaths – due to eating too many eggs.
Cui bono?
The Yanks.
Therefore they did it.
Exactly. No need to overthink this.
So in addition to being a military specialist, Rons is also an expert in the interpretation of US law. Very impressive.
Further to Ian Rons’ well-researched points about the Hersh article,
A) Basing an entire journalistic investigation and its conclusions on revelations from ‘an unnamed source’ has exactly the same credibility as ‘it all came to me in a dream’.
It is perfectly possible that an individual did approach Seymour Hersh and present him with all the ‘information’ contained within this piece.
But without verifiable bona fides and corroborative evidence – of the sort that Mr Hersh would presumably have presented if available – the likelihood is that he was having a chat with a member of the FSB masquerading under the cunning guise of ‘Senior Agent Matt ‘The Rock’ Reacher, Deputy Sub-Director CIA Clandestine Section 14XJ, Undermine the Russian Federation With Extreme and If Necessary Illegal Prejudice’.
B) Even if it does turn out to have been a conglomeration of Western liberal democratic countries which were responsible for the destruction of this pipeline as Mr Hersh alleges, the intention was clearly to hamper the totalitarian Russian Federation’s neo-fascist project of mass destruction, murder and annexation / conquest in an independent and democratic member of the United Nations.
To put this moral and practical point in another way, how many genuinely life-preserving gas pipelines (to individual properties for central heating, hot water, cooking etc) have Russian Federation ‘liberation’ forces destroyed in Ukraine since the completely unprovoked invasion of February 2022;
And as a corollary of all this pipeline destruction (via aerial and artillery bombardment etc) –
How many lives?
Yes, there’s no indication Hersh ever tried to verify this source’s status in any way. And he clearly hasn’t asked experts (legal, military, engineering, etc.) about the key claims. There’s a reason he doesn’t write for the New York Times or the New Yorker any more, and it doesn’t look as though the NYT has even mentioned his claims this time, despite the fact that he was an excellent investigative reporter.
As to whodunnit, I’m very uncertain about all that (there are several possible culprits), but if it was the U.S. then I’d applaud them for having the audacity, and two fingers to Putin.
The ‘as to whodunnit’ cop-out implies you simply can’t be bothered to put together an argument that Russia destroyed their own pipeline because that would be ridiculous. And yet you refuse to jeopardise your own stated narrative by admitting all the evidence points to the Biden White House, not least of all its track record in disaster.
https://youtu.be/IAiZvKouZRw
P J Watson’s view.
Four minutes.
I’ve been reading this week about the Mỹ Lai massacre because I’m visiting the area this weekend. Hersh played such an important role in shedding light on that atrocity and subsequent events that I find it hard, not insulting to dismiss him as ‘gullible’.
It’s not a secret that the US has worked hard to make LNG from Qatar the primary source of Europe’s gas. So we have motive, something we don’t have in the case of Russia. For balance, maybe Rons should scrutinise the claims that it was Russia. Except he won’t, because he’s partisan.
Compared to what US strategic air warfare, ie undirected bombing of everything which could seen from the air, culminating in just unspecifically bombing the countryside after all of that had been eradicated, did to the people in SE Asia, the so-called Mỹ Lai massacre is a historical footnote. It’s also not really more gruesome than what invading Russian soldiers did to villagers in Eastern Prussia 1945. That’s just a lot less popular because they targetted The Right Kind of Victims[tm], ie, Germans.
Similar scenes have always occurred (and will likely keep reoccuring) whenever regular forces have to handle guerilla warriors, ie, enemies who dress up as non-combatants and prefer ambushes. When every supposed civilian could suddenly pull out a gun and start shooting at you, at lot of probably innocent civilians will end up being killed, either because they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or in retaliatory actions.
Another outstanding article from Mr Rons.
There are, in fact, only two countries that stood to benefit from the Nordstream destruction:
Russia: a ‘false flag’ operation to sow discord within NATO.
Ukraine: to remove the leverage Nordstream afforded Putin.
These are also the only two ‘hot’ protagonists engaged in this European war.
Take your pick.
But in the event, only the US economy has benefited from increased sales as well as German de-industrialisation, NATO members have murmured about US involvement but daren’t say it out loud, Ukraine has been largely destroyed, and Russia’s massive investment in the pipeline is lost. Pretty duff planning on both fronts – US false flags never cost them that much.
Still, it’s a relief to know that there are no other participants in the war, and that the stated US intentions for regime change in Russia and the breakup of the federation are just whistling in the wind and trusting Zelensky to deliver. The weapons, advisers, trainers, technical input and intelligence, “deserters” serving on the front, visiting leaders etc, are just to keep us informed.
Did you see Zelensky entering Westminster Hall with pretty much all 650 of our sycophant pretend MP,s clapping cheering & whistling in support of the Hero in a green tracksuit . There’s nothing else to say , we are living in cartoon world ! 🤮
Those barstewards in Westminster do NOT speak for me – Andrew Bridgen excepted. Bloody cowards.
one of the most shameful sights in the history of this nation.
Yes – the hero who is now conscripting 16 year olds for the meat grinder. When it happens in Uganda it’s a war-crime.
Yes, indeed. Startling prescience, strategic grasp and administrative grip from a President who can barely tie up his own shoelaces……
Controls are for those following the flowchart of decision making. Bearing in mind how the Biden administration has treated the US, I can see how they might bypass all the controls to make this happen. I can also see, on the technical issues of getting devices planted on the pipeline and detonated. The idea that they would need some super leading edge prototype device to achieve the detonations, and then discount that as a possibility because they didn’t have time to make them or to a quality that would permit them to work is absurd. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you couldn’t just go to a storage room somewhere in the US Military, pick two, and heve them FedEx’ed to your mini-sub the following day.
I remain sceptical of everyone, but there is a strong smell of USA around this whole incident. It is really surprising to me how little has been made of it politically, diplomatically, and of course in the obedient media. I would be fuming if it was my pipeline and I’d want answers.
How can anyone doubt that lying Biden sabotaged NordStream 2?
When he officially promised that he would do it!
That it was a criminal act of sabotage, eco-terrorism and war is indisputable.
Few nations have the ability to pull off a stunt like this – so which ones profited from it?
Certainly not Russia, Europe or China – but America did, both financially and politically.
Why on earth would Putin sabotage a recent multi-million dollar investment that gave him huge political and financial sway over Europe? His “special op” practically depended on just that.
Why does Putin do anything? Why did his army not wear uniform when taking over Crimea? Why did he invade a country when he already occupied (uncontested, internationally accepted) a significant part of it?
Why did Russia do any of these things:
1921-6 Operation Trust, creating the pseudo-“Monarchist Union of Central Russia” (MUCR) in order to help the OGPU identify real monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks.
1939 False flag shelling Mainila before invading Finland
1968 Operation Progress, deployment of 20 KGB illegals to Czeckoslovakia
1999 Apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk were bombed by FSB, killing hundreds of Russian civilians, blamed on Chechens.
2014 Little green men, in fact Russian soldiers pose as freedom fighters in Eastern Ukraine
2017, Russia used footage from video game as evidence of the United States colluding with the Islamic State.
2022 Two explosions destroyed two radio antennas in the disputed Moldovan region of Transnistria.
Sorry but you lost me at “The most glaring issue is a legal one.” The Biden administration (and others before him) don’t care about the rule of law and most of Congress doesn’t either. Even if they were caught breaking the law, there would be no consequences. It’s laughable to think that “breaking the law” would stop them from doing it. Also, enforcing the law in this case would mean proving that the US did it and Biden covered it up. No one responsible for enforcing the law is going to do that.
Like the other commentator who brought this up, you’re missing the point: The Hersh-article goes to great lengths handling this legal issue. Hence, pointing out that the text doesn’t really make sense is a valid criticism of the article. Whether or not US politicians break the laws supposed to regulate their actions is unrelated to that,.
As RW said, that’s not really the issue, Walrus. The issue is that Hersh’s source is lying (and obviously so), because there’s no such exception to the Covert Action Statute of the sort he claims, never mind whether Biden would be prepared to break that law or not — although Hersh’s source implies he wouldn’t have been prepared to break it, so perhaps he’s being naive?
Ian Rons the globalist apologist strikes again…..is this just to wind up the (awake) non woke on this site.
It’s odd that someone this naive works at the daily sceptic.