As reminders…

Alpha–Variant first identified in the UK

Beta–Variant first identified in South Africa

Gamma–Variant first identified in Brazil

Delta–Variant first identified in India

Omicron–Variant first identified in South Africa

Updating the chart above:

Ancestral: B.1.1.529 Omicron

Transmissibility: All the +

Immune Evasiveness: All the +

Vaccine Effectiveness: Check (for hospitalization)

Also as a reminder:

Hantavirus:

–Reader question this week as Twitter apparently caught up to stories in Xi’an from slightly before Christmas, one of the Chinese cities first locked down by new omicron cases. Shortly before the omicron madness broke out, authorities in Xi’an were requesting increased surveillance for hemorrhagic fever, and hemorrhagic fever renal syndrome (HFRS), both of which are caused by hantavirus, as increased cases had been reported in the region. There may still be increased cases of HFRS going on now in Xi’an. The city is still very restricted, so who knows for sure.

Regardless, Xi’an and the surrounding region is one of a few places on Earth where hantavirus is known to be endemic. In other words, this happens in Xi’an every so often. Hantavirus is transmitted by rodents, rats especially, and is not easily spread between humans. Forcing everyone to stay inside for longer to run from omicron only traps them closer to rats (and their poop) that may be carrying hantavirus, so if cases are still increasing during lockdown, like, I have some hypotheses on that to share with any interested Chinese colleagues.

We covered hantavirus in a previous update when a single case in Michigan last June made the headlines, because it is still the Time of Coronavirus and pandemic, and an exotic virus that high mortality (in some cases) that causes hemorrhagic fever is easy headline fodder.

You will note, with some relief, that you did not, in fact, die during the hantavirus pandemic of 2021.

Going out on a limb here, but am highly confident you will not die from a hantavirus pandemic this year either.

If you do, yes, you may totally hit me with the Nelson “Ha Ha”:

In the interim, once more avoid the temptation to play with rat poop.

Coronavirus:

–Around the horn, omicron is getting everywhere. Let’s just leave it at that. To keep this post more reasonable size, we’ll say that South Africa’s cases remain quite low. The UK looks to have hit its omicron peak. There are optimistic signs in Boston and New York that they are at their peak, or will be by mid next week. Indiana is also looking like it’s near the peak–we’ll see how things go next week. I very much doubt Indiana’s omicron peak will come much farther out than the week after. Out West, I would expect peaks by the end of the month. So, overall, staying tight to our original projections.

–More data piles up from South Africa as hospitals analyze their experience with the fading omicron wave, and again confirm lower case-by-case severity for all age groups versus previous waves.

–Hospitalizations in the US continue to be heavily among the unvaccinated, and are still dominated by delta. However, states with high omicron activity (like Indiana) have flat-lined hospital admissions, and I would expect them to go down over the next two months as omicron pushes delta out entirely.

–The government has at least gotten on the same page enough this week to concede that delta is still responsible for most current hospitalizations.

–In fairly breaking news, the US Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision struck down President Biden’s executive order for OSHA to enforce a vaccine mandate on businesses. By a 5-4 decision, the Health and Human Services vaccine mandate for healthcare workers has been allowed to stand.

So mandates on healthcare workers yes, mandates on businesses no.

–We beat the Dr. Malone interview on the JRE to death last week, but a couple of follow up points deserve mention.

So if you remember right before discussing some theoretical ways that the mRNA vaccines may interfere with women’s fertility (which real world experience with the mRNA vaccines thus far does NOT bear out), Dr. Malone mentioned that he was consulted by a Hasidic community in New York because some of their female members reported abnormalities with their menstrual periods immediately after receiving the vaccine.

I have heard some similar rumblings anecdotally, and didn’t want to get too deep into the weeds on that one beyond mentioning it.

Well, timing worked out, because after we went to “press” last week, the following study came out, which had been investigating these exact claims. You can find it here.

The long story short is that mRNA vaccine changed the total length of the menstrual cycle in these women by ~1 day, and closer to the one full day after the second dose in particular. The booster has not been studied for this effect yet. Unvaccinated women showed no change in the length of the cycle. The length of the period of actual menses was unchanged in either vaccinated or unvaccinated women.

That shift is small, temporary, and unlikely to result in fertility issues. But it is data close to a point that Dr. Malone raised.

On the other hand, I am not sure if the mRNA vaccine itself is the cause of that small shift, or if it’s the global, flu-like inflammation as the immune system trains to the large “dose” of spike protein that is the culprit. I can’t find any studies, but there are anecdotes on the internet of women with abnormalities in their period, including a skipped period, around the flu vaccines–which is the only other series where you get fertile aged women taking multiple doses of the same vaccine at anything close to this frequency. Which, admittedly, is only annual for the flu vaccine, and not a second dose a few weeks later +/- a booster a few months later with the mRNA COVID vaccines. The flu itself is also known to cause period abnormalities too, likely also by the immune reaction from fighting the infection. After all, if the body is busy fighting a foreign invader, it’s not likely to be all that interested in getting preggos just then. I’ve asked a couple Ob-Gyns what their experience is with other vaccine series or global immune reactions, but not a lot of replies just yet.

So they saw this one day shift in length with the COVID vaccines. Not sure if that is COVID vaccine specific, or just because the vaccine causes a systemic inflammatory reaction that is causing the shift, and you’ll see that with other vaccines and illnesses that have a similar inflammatory reaction.

–Also in fairness to Dr. Malone, the past week has seen major news outlets in Denmark and Germany apologize for not catching the difference between admitted “with” and “of” COVID, and thus presenting skewed statistics on hospitalizations and deaths. That “with” and “of” has made a mess of those stats, as we covered last week and before.

The week has also seen outlets like the New York Times document that the official government stance may be changing to emphasize reducing hospitalization rate rather than new case rate.

Yes, I know we have stressed that from the beginning as the most important metric in this pandemic, and main pandemic threat from SARS-CoV-2.

Baby steps.

The other part of that article is interviews with a number of immunologists, who sound as if they are approaching consensus that boosting too often may be counter productive and for the exact reason (de-sensitizing to the spike protein) that Dr. Malone postulated. Again in fairness to Dr. Malone. This was one of a number of articles, including one of the architects of the UK’s pandemic response and the WHO, stating that repeat booster doses of the original vaccines are not a viable strategy. The EU and UK regulatory authorities both rejected a 4th shot booster this week.

We appear to be moving towards a consensus that a seasonal booster for COVID, similar to the flu vaccine, will be the plan going forward–especially if the trend to heavier COVID cases in winter continues to hold up. This will be COVID truly shifting from pandemic to endemic phases. I think we will also get better steering towards who really needs the booster shot, and my hope is that one day, some day, some how, we finally manage to incorporate antibody testing to better direct booster shot need and resources.

Not mentioned yet in those articles, but just as important, will be diagnostic tests and early treatment, especially for those who catch acute COVID in small summer and spring bumps “off season” from the booster. And there will be some. But we can keep them out of the hospital with treatment, and we should do that.

–I did see the headlines about leaked documents suggesting NIAID was aware gain of function testing was happening with its grantee in Wuhan. I would argue we knew that already and have already covered it. Also saw the leaked military documents suggesting ivermectin is effective in all phases of COVID infection. I have not reviewed the documents, and prefer to let that settle for a bit, just make sure of authenticity. It’s also not clear to me if that was merely hypothesized in those documents, or if there is actual clinical data there showing it. There’s a big difference. Again, in the best Phase 3 study I have seen, ivermectin had a trend in its favor, but it was not conclusive, and yes, there are countries where it is approved and used for the treatment of acute COVID.

–I also saw the headlines about cannabis byproducts that may prevent COVID infection, and was sent a headline by a reader. I told the reader I wasn’t going to comment, but, well, I skimmed the science anyways. So the cannabis derived compounds prevented SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells in petri dishes. There is no clinical data on actual prevention yet. And molecules that can stop a virus from entering in a petri dish have the same caveat as all the reports you read of “Thing X killed cancer cells during in vitro (petri dish) testing”. Remember this comic every time you read those:

That said, I cannot find articles announcing that any of Seth Rogan, Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson, Cheech or Chong have tested COVID positive thus far in the pandemic. So… maybe? On the other hand, Joe Rogan definitely got COVID, and Joe definitely uses some cannabis products.

Clearly, clinical trials are warranted : ) Best of luck getting enrolled in that study before it fills up.

–There is another pre-print article from John Ioannidis, a deservedly famous biostatistician that made some headlines on his name recognition. The very long story short is that COVID has a higher than flu infection fatality rate (deaths per confirmed infection) for the elderly that drops down to flu or a little less the younger you get. That’s nothing really new, and it’s before peer review anyways.

–Same for the “misquotation” kerfluffle over the CDC director’s interview comments that “75% of those dying of COVID… had [multiple] comorbidities”. The correction is that 75% of those on one particularly study did; she was not talking about the population as a whole.

Suffice to say, it may not be as high 75%, but the more comorbid high risk factors for severe COVID you have, the greater the chance of a bad outcome. That, too, is nothing really new.

Socioeconomic:

–China continues to close down more cities this week as omicron continues to spread despite its “No COVID” policy. They now have 20 million locked down and counting. Volkswagon had to shut down a plant there; more manufacturers are likely to have to follow suit due to COVID restrictions. Yes, this is involving more port cities and port operations as well.

On the one hand, that will mean fewer container ships from China for awhile, which may help with supply chain back logs. On the other hand, that comes at the cost of fewer widgets flowing into the global supply chain overall. And this “help” is only temporary, helping right up to the point it doesn’t anymore, as the rebound congestion when everything re-opens and tries to unsnarl may be even worse.

To top it all off, China is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Committing to this stupidly restrictive “no COVID” policy of huge lockdowns for small number of cases to contain spread is causing these supply chain back ups. But imagine the couple months the world has if China just lets loose, and takes the omicron hit all at once like everyone else has, having not done that since -maybe- the original Wuhan outbreak.

The moral of the story is that supply chain issues are guaranteed to keep rolling, probably for the rest of the year, just from the knock on effects of what is going on in China now.

–And you can see it with your own eyes, and on the charts.

That’s the West Coast, which never really ever got fully uncongested. Now it has, or will soon have, omicron call off issues. And then China’s shutdowns are going to catch up. I have seen estimates that just as of today, it will take 5 full weeks to get the West Coast ports back to even on arriving container ships.

And now the East Coast is starting to catch up too. The Port of New York had a back log out to four days, an increase for them so far, mostly due to the amount of workers out for omicron right now.

–#EMPTYSHELVESBIDEN was trending on Twitter for a reason. And it’s not likely to relent any time soon.

Again, I think we are still in “cascading disruption” and not “cascading failure.” But there remains a non-zero risk of the latter if some hidden, but mission critical widget, gets withheld from the global supply system too long, and it turns out to be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

–Which brings us to the zeitgeist.

I read the headlines about more and more adults having meltdowns in the aisles over trivial things, especially as supply chain issues continue to roil. Certainly the last couple times I have gone to the grocery store the faces of the other customers have all reminded me of “Mad World.” There’s a sense of tension, exasperation, everyone in their own little world. There is less civility in the air. Less co-operation on everything, even the very trivial. It’s suddenly an existentialist angst universe. Are you getting that sense too?

Around this time last year, I mentioned Radigan Carter’s thoughts that the world would be collectively entering a state of mourning and loss, dealing with the trauma that has been all the twists and turns of the pandemic. I wonder if this is not collective stage 2 of the Kubler-Ross Model, and more people are at that “anger” stage.

As the poet once wrote,

“the waters have reached my neck.
I have sunk into the mire of the deep,
    where there is no foothold.
I have gone down to the watery depths;
    the flood overwhelms me.
I am weary with crying out;
    my throat is parched.”

I think with the holidays immediately past, but COVID here and more rampant than ever, supply chain issues here, but more rampant than ever… There was the hope of the holidays, but here it is almost mid-January and everything seems the same.

And that “everything” has truly been every thing. The invasion of the pandemic, the revealed fragile reality of a modern society run on global just in time supply chains, and the bonfire of the credibilities have burned through the pillars of the earth. A world that seemed stable and predictable just in 2019, 2019!, is not so now. Instead, we are all crammed on to the struggle bus together. It feels like the crust shifts wildly below our feet. We feel the damp wet cling of our clothes in the flood, and the rising sense of panic as the waters rise, and there is no bottom our stretching feet can find below us for anchor.

I am certain the outbursts on social media, and in the real, in the aisles and restaurants and airports and planes, are people feeling exactly that.

As uncomfortable as it can be in the moment, it is a blessing to have the opportunity to forgive.

Forgive you and others.

I think too that it’s not trite to say that the only way out is through. We will get to the other side. And it will be better. The world will not always be cranked to Maximum Stupid. It really does seek out a balance when it gets too heavy in one direction.

For myself, I’m trying to remember to pause and focus on what is still in control. I don’t have to give off that “Mad World” vibe, even if that is the feeling around me in places I go sometimes. I can still practice patience. I can try to recall Qoheleth when he concluded: “I praised joy, because there is nothing better for mortals under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be joyful; this will accompany them in their toil through the limited days of life God gives them under the sun.” All else is hevel.

Focus on the small, simple, daily steps while this zeitgeist persists.

After all, the poet also wrote:

“Thus we do not fear, though earth be shaken
    and mountains quake to the depths of the sea,
Though its waters rage and foam
    and mountains totter at its surging.”

–Which, yes, did also remind me of this song’s lyrics too… : )

–Finally, in 1963, a book by a pseudonymous author was classified by the CIA. In 2016, 57 pages of the book were declassified and released as a “sanitized” version online, which can even be downloaded at cia.gov. There is an associated FOIA request that shows the sanitized version was approved in 2013, and released three years later. The 57 pages are not the complete book, as there are numbered pages missing, and the PDF provided on the CIA website includes an order for tools that looks as if it is there by mistake. If you are wondering why and how the CIA classifies an entire book for 50 years, the dedication makes it very likely that author was a government employee at the time, and the work was likely submitted for official review and redaction as is required for government employees.

So what was so secret about this book to keep it under CIA wraps for 50 years?

Well, the book is trying to explain a geological theory popular at the time for a lay audience. In fact, the book is written to be a warning for the masses about the implications of this particular theory. This theory attempts to explain a wide array of observations across multiple different fields, ranging from the cause of decline for lost civilizations, the global common creation/re-creation story arising from a terrible flood that wiped away most of existing civilization, and natural science anomalies, like evidence of glaciation in rocks in equatorial areas, whale bones found in the Andes mountains, and frozen woolly mammoths apparently freezing so suddenly that they were still chewing their last meal when they died. The warning was about a predictably periodic cataclysm that strikes the Earth, killing most of life on it, and resetting human civilization then thriving at the time into a new stone age every 5-11,500 years.

So what geological catastrophe could do that–and so repeatedly–and why?

This particular book argued a variation of the crust displacement hypothesis, first advanced by Charles Hapgood in 1958 in a book with a forward written by none other than Albert Einstein. Yes, that Einstein.

The crust displacement hypothesis took the commonly accepted wisdom at the time that the Earth’s crust was one solid, unified piece, like a giant egg shell floating on the mantle below it. They knew at the time, as you no doubt recall from grade school science, that the Earth has a tilt to its rotation:

This tilt is what gives rise to seasons, and as you also recall from grade school science, the North and South poles are both really cold because the sunlight does not get to them as effectively as places on the equator, which are really hot.

Combined, according to Dr. Hapgood and this recently declassified book, these facts raise a problem for those living on the Earth. The parts of the crust that are at the poles will start to accumulate ice over thousands of years. At the time the book and Dr. Hapgood were writing, the poles and Greenland were piling on ice at a rate that actually had people at the time legitimately concerned about global cooling and a new mini-Ice Age that would hit sometime in the 1970s or 80s.

But according to crust displacement theory, it was much worse than -just- a mini-Ice Age. Soooooo much worse. Because all of that ice would make the poles heavy, but the Earth did not rotate through the center of that mass, meaning the Earth would wobble in its spin like a top running out of momentum.

Because the Earth’s crust “floats” on the mantle in this theory, the weight and the wobble periodically get to be too much. Dr. Hapgood postulated that the entire crust would suddenly shift 10 degrees or so as the weight at the top and bottom of the planet would shift towards where it -wanted- to be–around the equator. And by suddenly, I mean shift entire continents around (because the -entire- egg shell of the crust was moving as one piece) within 6-12 hours. Closer to the equator, the ice caps would melt until enough weight was off, and the egg shell would “reset” back into its normal off center rotation–again by shifting the poles back towards their current position, within 6-12 hours.

Hapgood published in 1958, but Einstein, having written the forward, quickly abandoned Hapgood’s idea once calculations showed you could not possibly pile enough ice at the caps to shift the entire crust around the way Hapgood claimed. There wasn’t enough weight to overcome the friction from the mantle, which, although liquid rock, is thought to be viscous and “sticky” like honey.

So the declassified book is a new twist, because findings between 1958 and 1963 suggested the mantle may behave like a plasma, which is to say sometimes like a sticky plastic solid properties (most of the time) and other times like the liquid Hapgood thought it was, with virtually no friction to the crust above it. Solid or liquid was determined by the strength of the Earth’s magentic field, which fluctuates periodically, especially when the poles are about to reverse.

Thus, the book claims, every so often, at fairly predictable intervals, the Earth and solar system would pass through a magentically strong part of space as our rock spins around the giant nuclear furnance and the whole thing whips through the void of space at rates of speed that are tough to comprehend. When it hit a magnetic “rough spot”, the Earth’s magentic field is disrupted. When this happens, the mantle shifts from sticky, tacky, plastic-like semi-solid to lubricating liquid, like the oil in your car. At that point, the entire crust can spin around it. Again, because the weight of the caps is heavy because of the ice, and the Earth’s rotation is tilted, the Earth’s crust is destabilized in its spin, like a top running out of momentum. The poles relocate to the equator–a shift of the crust by >40 degrees–within 6-12 hours. But they stay there this time, not resetting like Hapgood suggested. Instead, the new stable normal would be for Greenland and the North Pole, and Antarctica, to wind up on opposite sides of the equator, sweltering their ice sheets off in the equatorial sun. Meanwhile, just off the coast of Chile would be the new South Pole, while just off the coast of China would become the new North Pole.

This would be a mass extinction event, because while the crust would now be moving rapidly North-South, the wind and water (all of the oceans) would still be moving in the direction of the Earth’s rotation due to angular momentum. Thus, the oceans, and all of the atmosphere on the planet, would be moving West to East–at a little over 1,000 mph (the rate at which the Earth spins to get 24 hours in a day). That would cause tsunamis, world wide, 200 miles tall while winds 4-10x stronger than the most powerful hurricanes scourged the entire globe. Entire civilizations would be wiped out. Massive amounts of animals and plants would die. Only the strongest structures, like the pyramids made of giant stone, would survive, and the few members of the societies that made them would be back to the stone age almost instantly. Glaciation in current equatorial regions was thus explained by different parts of the globe taking their “turn” as the North or South pole, as this would happen over and over again, the Earth essentially tumbling due to this effect over millions of years. Whales in the Andes and flash frozen mammoths were consistent with the -speed- at which the continents would shift during these cataclysms. Eventually, the stories would come back through the ages as humanity rebuilt society as creation/re-creation cycles punctuated by Biblical floods and fires–perhaps why so many societies had those in common.

And oh by the way, the author of the 1963 classified book calculated that the Earth’s magnetic field was rapidly destabilizing, as we were at the end of a “calm” period, with this cataclysm likely to occur between 1970 and ~2163.

Yes, “dramatic twist” music indeed.

For the record, I am not making a single word of the above up. Seriously, not one. I’m not even at the “making stuff up” part of this section yet. That is the theory and the arguments put forth in this book, which does exist and was classified and released as I detail, and the history of where its ideas came from. You can find fringe conspiracy YouTube channels covering it right now, today.

Before you freak out though, plate tectonics piled up experimental proof that the Earth’s crust is NOT one big eggshell like plate and was the geologic consensus by the 1970s. So instead, as you recall, the Earth’s crust is not one free-floating shell as much as it is a bunch of “islands” carrying continents that float on the mantle. Thus they drift over time (which is why you get signs of ancient glaciers in equatorial regions) and can bang into each other, causing earthquakes and volcanoes (which is why you get whale bones in the Andes as a part that was underwater got pushed up in a big collision of plates).

And the mantle is consistently too sticky, and the ice mass too light, to flip the planet’s crust around, even if it were one giant egg shell.

So you may think that the book was classified for 50 years to avoid inciting panic, and is being quietly released now, even with the missing pages, because it’s a little embarrassing to have that kind of “end of the world” crazy being demonstrated to have worked for the government in some sensitive role, and because plate tectonics consigned the theories of crust displacement to the history books.

You would think.

But you would be wrong, my friends. For I can now reveal, for the very first time, what those missing pages actually show.

They are the -crucial- missing data, proving the theory of crust displacement put forth in this book is the truth, and are also the secret government plan to mitigate the impending global catastrophe. First, the work must be classified, and a plausible theory of plate tectonics put forward as scientific consensus to avoid mass panic and civil unrest. Secondly, most crucially, a co-ordinated, all out effort to cause global warming would have to be undertaken, starting immediately and accelerate for decades thereafter. After all, the spinning “top” of the Earth is only unstable because of the weight of the global ice caps, which is not centered on the axis of rotation! Melt enough of the ice, you make the poles lighter, and the Earth’s crust will remain where it is now, even if the Earth’s magnetic field is disrupted. The global warming would cause significant disruption, such as rising sea levels as the ice pack was deliberately melted to save human society, but instead of happening in a matter of hours, then just a few years, these unavoidable changes could be spaced over decades. To counteract public outcry over these slow changes (because the public would not know how it could be much, MUCH worse, and cataclysmically sudden, if the ice were not melted), towards the end, when enough ice had been melted, a giant popular front to combat global warming would then be permitted, to control the opposition. The goal of this socially engineered movement to fight global warming would not be to reverse the rise in temperature (for growth in the ice caps is inviting catastrophe per crust displacement theory), but merely to reduce its rate of increase to a level that controlled scientific experts would agree was “safe”.

Seem familiar to what actually happened between 1963 and now?

And the chances of that being the reason for classification, and continued withholding of the missing pages, are your chances of catching hantavirus this week.

–But seriously, your chances of catching coronavirus this week are excellent. Many of you have already in the last couple weeks, no doubt.

<Paladin>