Shorter update, typed faster than usual… but didn’t want to leave too much space from the last one.

Ebola

The Uganda outbreak continues to simmer along. The WHO remains rightly concerned about possible local spread, and Ebola is in major cities in Uganda, which is always dangerous. Most recent data is 136 confirmed cases with 53 confirmed deaths–however, there are 21 strongly suspected earlier cases that resulted in deaths that are not in that total. Add those as you will. Most important factor is that the rate of new cases slowed this past week, and is still not exponential. However, a one week relative plateau in a broader trend up would not be unexpected with the incubation time of Ebola, so we’ll keep the optimism but watch the next couple of weeks. Regardless, I still suspect this outbreak gets stopped out under 1,000 total cases, but a lot really depends on control in urban centers especially. Uganda is ending its school year early, on November 25th, nationwide, to try to contain spread among school children. Lockdowns have been extended in some particularly active towns–I would debate their effectiveness if we are already extending them past the incubation period of Ebola because cases are still spreading. Previous outbreaks have been contained first and foremost by contact tracing and quarantines of known close contacts, and vaccination of those contacts and health care workers when available, and education on how to avoid the extended close contact and contact with infectious body fluids that transmit Ebola. But Uganda is struggling to get trials of the Ebola Sudan vaccines off the ground, so I understand the desire to be aggressive here, especially with large metropolitan centers having active spread and about 1/5th of the cases involving school children thus far. Perception of effectiveness, again.

Coronavirus

–Again, apologies that this section will wind up being briefer than it should be due to time constraints on me these past couple weeks.

–Around the horn, China is still seeing active cases, with the CCP blaming its wildly unpopular and draconian lockdown policies still happening all over the country on local governments being over zealous in enforcing Xi’s “zero COVID” policy. When you hand one man that much power, and previous purges have made it clear that the only way to survive is do exactly what that one guy proclaims as vigorously as you can, trying to read the tea leaves of what he wants, well, this is what you get. This is exactly what you get. Elsewhere, cases in North America broadly remain very muted. For all the headline angst of possible maybe could be new emergent DOOOOOOOOOOM strains, nothing is really catching on.

That said, it is still very possible to catch COVID out there folks. It is still circulating at the same, mild but perpetually active rate we saw in South Africa over their entire summer. Early and late indicators remain relatively muted.

\If we don’t see lift off by New Year’s, no new omicron wave, I think we may be looking at the end of the coronavirus section of these reports, because herd immunity, available early treatment, and a virus that has given up on severity in favor of continued contagiousness (just to survive) will have won the day.

Elsewhere, Europe is relatively mild. Only a couple small spikes here and there in Japan, South Korea, and a smattering of other southeast Asian nations.

–So a couple big headlines worth mentioning. First is the US Congressional report that suggested that lab leak as the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only possible, but probable.

Put a gun to my head, I agree, but I don’t think there is a smoking gun there and neither does the Congressional report when you read it. They do acknowledge that a zoonotic origin is still possible, but I also agree with the epidemiology evidence they cite about the early known cases clustering geographically around the Wuhan Virology Institute as well as the absence, over the last several years, of an identified animal coronavirus with genetic features that make it the plausible intermediary when SARS-CoV-2 made the jump to humans. If it was a zoonotic origin, we should have found that–and certainly China has reason to have found that. Yet, that has not been conclusively found thus far. We also know about the gain of function work being done in coronaviruses at that Institute.

That said, I still doubt this was a weaponized or deliberately created strain. When I say “lab leak”, I think they were altering a number of coronaviruses, and this unexpectedly emerged and got out on them. That, to me, is more likely than not.

–But again, and I cannot stress this enough, there is plenty of geopolitical reasons for the Congressional report to have come out that way. And there is simply no way to confirm a lab leak without lab notebooks from the Wuhan Virology Institute, which will not be forthcoming, even if they have not been destroyed already. We may never know for sure in our lifetimes.

–Even if we find out, we don’t get a do over on 2020 and 2021. What Pandora let out of the box could not be put back in it.

–The other big headline “rabble rabble rabble!” of the media masses centered around an editorial in the Atlantic that basically suggested that those in charge during the pandemic were just human, making imperfect decisions with imperfect information, but with high impact and potential for catastrophe. We should all just cut them a break, and there is no need for any further inquisition.

I am fine with malice towards none, and charity for all. I agree that politicians and health officials were making hard choices with imperfect information. We have documented that from the very beginning of the outbreak on these pages.

However, there are some instances where there were CLEAR lies told, and with terrible consequence. I am thinking here of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose first deliberate lie was over the effectiveness of masks, but he did not stop there. He has done irreparable harm to the entire medical community by association.

That mofo ABSOLUTELY deserves to be made an example of, because deliberately lying, as he did, simply CANNOT happen. As a physician, you cannot lie to the patient. You want to know why misinformation proliferated? Why the vaccine rollout was mistrusted and terrible? It all goes back to Anthony lying, and thus squandering all trust in the medical leadership of the pandemic. Integrity is a funny virtue like that–by definition, one breach, and it’s gone, and it doesn’t come back. That malicious mistake was then only compounded when the hammer was not dropped IMMEDIATELY on him–even as he bragged about the “necessity” of his lie–and then he wound up being venerated, mostly for tribal reasons, for much of the pandemic.

But it didn’t stop with Tony. There were deliberate decisions made with predictably high risk of bad outcomes. Outcomes which then happened. I recall here the decision of “leaders” at Tyson Foods to bus and house its workers in close quarters with poor ventilation and work in conditions with no effort to contain the spread in the early days of pandemic. That absolutely resulted in deaths, and they have been rightfully, and successfully, sued over that.

Do we need a wide ranging, vengeful prosecution, seeking jail time and ruin for every mistake made in this pandemic response? No.

But we do need to acknowledge that a major, if not the most important, criterion for a leader, no matter what institution or group they lead, is wisdom. Leaders who made decisions during the pandemic that they knew were unwise, unsound, untruthful, or unnecessarily risky, and can be shown to have good reason to have known that at the time they made the decision, failed. Bluntly, they failed. And there were a lot of them that failed.

At a minimum, they should not be leaders now, if ever again.

Yes, that means some careers are over and legacies are ruined.

We don’t need to be malicious about that, with grand inquisitions, vengeful hearings, jailings and ruinous fines–although a few public defenestrations from the social and political heights for the most egregious are necessary, if only as examples to posterity that integrity and prudence are indeed cardinal virtues. Some mistakes were made in good faith; others we not. Some were minor misjudgments under pressure; some were clear indications that the person in the position lacks the requisite wisdom entrusted to that position. The former, in both conditions, we can show charity towards. The latter of both conditions does not get to say “oops, our bad” and continue in those positions–no matter how much remorse they might express, or our Atlantic editorialist wish it.

Not if we are to be a truthful and virtuous people.

–We have a choice here. We can do the solemn, necessary work to end the Bonfire of Credibilities, and recover the gold from the dross. Or we can choose not to, continue to be led by leaders who have proven themselves unwise in the crisis (because we like them as people, and feel bad that they failed, even if fail they did). If we go the former route, we go through to get through, and to a brighter future ultimately. As the Stoics would say, “the obstacle is the way.” But if we go the latter route, because it means acknowledging ours and others mistakes, then this <waves hand at the world lurching from own goal crisis to own goal crisis, with increasing incoherent leadership> is exactly what we should expect, because that is what we have chosen.

–So may we be wiser than some of our leaders have been.

–On the Sciencepalooza front, I will try to be succinct, but may risk being too succinct here.

I saw some conspiranoia headlines about the persistent rise in all cause mortality, which is immediately being inferred as associated with mRNA COVID vaccines. For the sake of brevity, this is yet another example of conflating correlation with causation, and here, even the correlation breaks down. The rise in all cause mortality began before the vaccines, and correlates most strongly with periods of relative lockdown, at least in the US. If the vaccines were the cause, we should expect all cause mortality to be steadily rising, in proportion with the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated. That has NOT been the case in the evidence. While the persistence in the rise of all cause mortality from 2019 and 2018 levels into this year is unexpected, we have highlighted how much of it is currently attributed to increases in later stage cancer (as screening and preventative measures went by the wayside during lockdowns–that will have a lag), chronic diseases that were insufficiently managed during lockdowns, and especially social/mental health associated causes like suicide, drug and alcohol abuse. The persistent increase in fentanyl deaths in the US, for example, still at epidemic levels, is not logically caused by the COVID vaccines–but is contributing to persistent rises in all cause mortality.

That being said, I am surprised that no one has published in the medical literature a deeper dive into the persistence of elevated all cause mortality into this year. But they may be waiting for a full year’s worth of data, and we can expect to see some of those hit press in early Q1 2023. That’s really low hanging fruit for some academics who need a certain number of publications per year.

Also to be clear, if the rise in all cause mortality was caused by the vaccines, there should be clear difference in all cause mortality for the vaccinated versus unvaccinated (there are still a population of them)–and again, we would expect COVID itself to show a similar increase in all cause mortality, because it, too, creates a lot of spike protein via RNA. I am not aware of data showing that clear association.

–No, it’s also not due to myocarditis risk either. As a quick reminder, the rate of myocarditis in early 2020, before the vaccines, was multiples the levels normally seen associated with viral diseases and attributable to COVID. COVID is still ~10x more likely to cause myocarditis (at least the more severe, non-Omicron forms of SARS-CoV-2) than the vaccines are, even in young males who are at the highest apparent risk from the vaccines.

–The literature reports from autopsy studies of actual or suspected vaccine associated deaths (yes, they have happened–that is to be expected in a vaccine given to billions) show the vaccine associated deaths are rare, and the most common cause in those autopsies directly attributable to the vaccines is vaccine associated immune thrombocytopenia, particularly the thrombotic form associated with the adenovirus vectored COVID vaccines (not the mRNA versions). To put that into English, the immune response to the vaccine went off target and attacked the patient’s platelets, interfering with clotting. Vaccine associated thrombocytopenia is a rare complication of other, traditional vaccines such as MMR, where it happens about 4x more often the rate reported for the COVID vaccines, for what it’s worth.

Socioeconomic

–This week in “best example of incoherent energy policies” is the following summary from Forbes, but the headline says it all:

“Biden Promises ‘No More Drilling’ Just Days After Demanding More Drilling“

–Generally speaking, profit = revenue – cost of goods sold

If oil and gas companies cannot make the extremely expensive investments in new wells, refineries etc., their cost of goods sold is going down. In their business, though, that also means the amount of their products available is going down too, as existing wells are pumped dry with no new ones coming online to replace them. Since demand for that energy is relatively fixed (the world needs a certain amount of energy to run the way our globalized, technological society does), but supply is going down, the price will go up, per the law of supply and demand. So the oil and gas companies’ revenues remain strong. Equivalent or better revenue, and a lower cost of goods sold, ALSO equals higher profits–without nefarious “gouging” that is currently being leveled at oil and gas companies as part of these utterly incoherent energy policies.

–Saw some interesting stats in the last couple weeks. In 2011, oil and natural gas provided 82% of the total energy used by the world. This year, after $3 trillion (with a “T”) of collective investment in renewable energy sources, oil and natural gas provided 81% of the total energy used by the world. This is a -little- misleading, because the total energy used by the world increased between 2011 and 2022, so renewables replaced a slightly more respectable total amount of energy.

But still not nearly enough.

If the goal, as has been stated by many leaders around the globe, is to replace oil and natural gas almost if not completely within 10 years, that rate of replacement by other energy sources is totally insufficient. That level of insufficiency will exacerbate many of the problems you are seeing now.

As a quick reminder, physics remains undefeated.

–A little more subtle in the headlines this week, FedEx and Maersk have been putting productive shipping assets into idle and down grading revenue expectations as global trade volumes appear a little shaky. The apparent decrease in total global trade is probably due to some combination of energy constraints (see headline above), inflation restricting discretionary income worldwide, and bullwhip effects through supply chains. I keep hearing supply chain stability is a major budget constraint across many industries.

Fortunately, the weather has continued to co-operate in Europe this winter. Hopefully that continues.

–In the US, diesel is running dangerous short in the Northeast. Insufficient investment in new refining capacity in the past years may be starting to catch up. Fortunately, for the US, there is a quick legislative fix as a quirk of trade law currently inhibits the ability to ship diesel, LNG, other oil products from oh, say, Texas to the Northeast. This law applies to shipping over the seas, specifically. Avoiding that quirky law was the purpose of many pipelines, where you could cheaply and directly ship oil and natural gas via the pipelines. But the pipelines got blocked, same for local refining capacity (California is going to have an expensive time at the pump for a bit with a fire at a major refiner there this week). Probably time to consider suspending the Jones Act (until the US Merchant Marine can be built a little bit more) or just repeal it, and let internationally flagged ships transport goods between two US ports.

–Number 24, striker for the Norwich City FC Canaries, is Josh Sargent. Josh is one of the no longer rare, but still not large number of US born soccer players in the major European leagues. With Josh recently selected for the final US Men’s National Team roster for the World Cup starting later this month, your chances of catching coronavirus are equivalent to the chances that more than just the Norwich City faithful will be taking up this chant for Josh in the near future:

Amazing: Norwich crowd chant “USA, USA, USA” at an ecstatic Josh Sargent whose 2 goals just dragged them out of relegation zone. 21-Year-Old has struggled this season. To watch him persevere and deliver today was humanly rewarding. Lovely bloke. May he score many more ??? pic.twitter.com/q7BUe9KtMh

— roger bennett (@rogbennett) January 21, 2022

–Finally, your chances of catching Ebola are consistent with the chances you thought your trip to London would include scenes from Indiana Jones movies.

<Paladin>