Tuesday, July 13, 2021

More Transmissible, Less Severe

How many times have actual subject matter experts in the field of virology told us that 1) to be a virus is to mutate, and 2) mutations always trend toward increased transmissibility and decreased severity? And how often have you heard on the MSM that the latest and greatest "variant" "may be" "more deadly"--contradicting all previous scientific knowledge?

I just found a study dating back to late April, 2021. It was conducted by two very reputable, mainstream institutions and, mirabile dictu, the study confirms what has long been known in the field of virology:

Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University’s New Research Says COVID-19 Variants May be Less Severe than Original Virus Strains￼

New research from the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University has found that while newer strains and mutations of SARS-CoV-2 are often more contagious than the original COVID-19 strain, they may also be responsible for fewer hospitalizations and deaths.  

The article is actually quite brief. I'll simply paste in the conclusion: 


Results from the research also showed that during the first six weeks of the pandemic’s first wave, early strains contributed to the most hospitalizations and deaths, but mutations of the original strains quickly surpassed the original strain because they were more transmissible, but less severe. 

“These findings offer greater insight into how COVID-19 infections significantly outpaced the rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths as the pandemic progressed,” said Dr. Esper. “The research also helps to validate how viral clades can play an important role in predicting patient outcomes.”

The Establishment doesn't want the pandemic to be over. Nothing to do with science.


  1. While I don't work in the field of Microbiology, I did get my B.S. in the field.

    I can honestly say it took me months to find a reputable source, Beda Stadler, that made any sense in regards to what I had learned in college.

    1. He ranks pretty high in the field, but the midgets ignore him now.

    2. @ anon

      Really? It took you months? Where were you looking? CNN? MSNBC? Washington Post?

      From the very early days of the Scamdemic there were many doctors out there, from Stanford for example, who looked at the Diamond Princess data and concluded from settled virology that the Wuflu was highly contagious but not particularly lethal. The doctors at the emergency care clinic in CA put out the viral video in April 2020 that said basic hygiene and early treatment w hydroxychloriquine aas the way to go based on their training and daily experience with the virus.

      The info was and is all around us but you have to plug into alternative sources, like this blog for one.


    3. I'll use the "I'm busy" excuse as to why it took me months to find a credible source.

      Should probably clarify, what I was saying. I was consistently confused by the narrative being put out, and it finally took reading Beda Stadler to realize what I learned hadn't changed. The virus was acting like it was supposed to act.

    4. I have never seen a comment/attack like Anon A2’s at this site. I hope that that is not a new feature...

  2. Our local fish wrapper's top of the page headline: Mask Mandates May Return. The paper is run by a bunch of liberals in of all places rural Tennessee. They managed to scare a good number of the true believers (in government) but a healthy majority refused to comply the first time around. Of course there was no enforcement but which might have led to some interesting interactions had there been.

    Watching things return to normal tells me a return to a dystopian past is not in the cards. Somehow I doubt our governor will allow these county executives such a long leash this time around...


    1. djl

      Let's play the Wauckian Democracy Game(r) here and imagine that it actually works. Have you or other voters you know contacted your state reps and demanded that they pass legislation depriving the governor and state agencies of their dictatorial powers to lock you down, mask you up, and shut you out?

      Just curious how this representative govt stuff works.

    2. I know how my reps feel about the heavy handed authoritarianism that swept many parts of the country, even here in TN initially. Whether laws are changed to limit the executive is yet to be seen here, but there is a movement to address the power and length of time for any future 'emergency.'

      For my part I wrote a letter to the editor of our local fish wrapper addressing the futility of wearing a mask against a virus, particularly the porous cloth masks that were mass produced with catchy slogans to make a profit during the lock down. I also called the TN secretary of state and informed him that if masks were required to vote, then that could be considered a poll tax as it would require a voter to purchase a product in order to cast their ballot in person. After that, wearing a mask was only recommended to vote in person.

      So yes, many of us have been active in pushing back against the over-wrought ignorance that captured the nation from the time the great scare began until the present.

      How about you?



    4. I would encourage every able-bodied adult to set up an account on substack and, not to compete with Mark, but in addition to commenting here, post your comments to your substack account with a link to Mark's article. If nothing else (but it will do a lot more than nothing) this will give the totalitarians in our government more traffic to search through to manage their suppression. Just link , comment and post. Imagine if you will 1 million conservative outposts on Substack all linking to each other but all adding their own individual comment / perspective to the item. Flood the Zone! Mark A

    5. Back in the day, when the FBI was tapping my dialup, I used to send random people the ascii version of War and Peace just to give them some data to go through.

    6. @djl

      Good to know. My point was that your original comment suggested that it would be left to the governor to dial back the authoritarianism next time rather than legislators stepping up and taking that power away or severely limiting it. I will eagerly await a move by the TN legislature in this regard as TN is a place I'm quite interested in moving to. My current state is Democrat controlled legislature and governor who have no thought of giving up any emergency powers ever.

    7. Governor Lee never instituted a mask mandate, but left it up to county executives and big city mayors. Of course many of these power hungry weasels did what we expected they would do - but out in rural TN they were ignored by those who weren't buying the propaganda.

      Should you move to TN, the metropolitan areas are highly taxed - Nashville instituted a 34% property tax increase last year in the middle of the 'pandemic' - and most if not all of the large cities are run by democrat mayors.


  3. I just heard Brian Wilson this morning report on the Nashville talk station that Governor Lee fired the state's medical director for preventable diseases and vaccinations who was encouraging vaccination of minors without parental notification or consent. Did a quick search and found several lamestream news articles all sympathetic to the fired secretary. Imagine that.


    1. Denninger today has a post on this:

      < "On June 25th, Fiscus asked about reminder postcards that were scheduled to go out to teens who had received a first dose of the COVID vaccine and were due to receive a second.
      State epidemiologist Dr. John Dunn answered: "Hold all program communications about immunizations until further notice."

      Do you know why?
      Because Fiscus decided to trumpet the so-called mature minor doctrine, and thus not require minors to obtain *parental consent* to get the Tard Shot.
      She also had TNDOH running paid Twitter ads aimed directly at minors which is a wildly inappropriate act.

      Problem: Said minor, if they had an adverse event, *obligated their parents* to pay for the adverse event, up to and including permanently obligating them to care for said person for the *rest of their lives*.
      This could trivially destroy said adults, both personally (through loss of their child) and financially, without them having *any input* into the process. > .

  4. So much credibility in institutions has gone out the window in the past year. The media has proven itself to be utter trash. And with COVID, the scientific community has proven itself equals vulnerable to political influence. We've always suspected that vis-a-vis global warming science. But COVID has put the nail in the coffin of unquestioned authority of science.

    Science in its pure form is the best way of learning new truths and challenging assumptions. But when leading scientists admit they held back investigating a lab leak hypothesis for the Wu-flu in order to avoid association with Trump, they have admitted to being political hacks.

    There is no reason to believe every variant is going to be more "dangerous" than the previous one. That's not how this works! Perhaps early high mortality rates were a true feature of the bug, but obviously this did not hold up as the virus mutated.

    But there are glimmers of hope...the lab escape hypothesis is finally being taken more seriously. The natural progression of novel diseases into higher transmissibility and less lethality should be a talking point we conservatives keep making until finally the truth of this is recognized by everyone.

    1. @anon

      Your faith in science is touching but way past its sell date. Reality is that "science" (whatever that is) has been compromised in almost every field for a very long time. In the so called West by money, either govt grants or private funding. In authoritarian nations, by political expediency and money.

      Further, the scientific method is well suited to discovering some things but completely incapable of discovering the most important things-- the soul, our place in the universe that gives meaning to existence. Society took a very wrong turn when it discarded anything not subject to science.


    2. @A2, I don't think Anon was pushing a naive "faith" in science, as you present it. I understand your critique of such "faith" and agree with it, but I think you're mistaken in attributing that view to Anon, as he specifies--like you--that science is "well suited to discovering some things" but not others.

  5. @ Mark,

    Mark A above makes a point of reposting your work but jogs something else in my head.

    If you were to pick up enough traffic I'm guessing blogger would yank the platform per it's typical user politics.

    Have you given consideration to mirroring? Backing up? Moving platforms? Etc?

    1. Interesting questions. For all its irritating limitations, Blogger has a few important virtues. 1) It's free. 2) It's easy to use, no maintenance. That means I can spend more time reading widely and living my life in other ways.

      Yes, I have experimented with backing up--seems to work easily. I've also done some research into alternatives. The impression I get is that free platforms are mostly unsatisfactory for my purposes. For pay platforms are more complicated, which means more time consuming for me. Monetizing is also more time consuming.

      The result is that I'm sitting where I am for now.

      Anyone is free to make suggestions, with those limits in mind--my time, in particular.

    2. Quote from Israeli Health Ministry is from .

    3. Mark,

      Substack may be one of several viable answers. It seems other conservatives are migrating there.

      I/we (our company) are specifically building for site, blog group migration but are too far off from beta to offer anything at present.

      Some things I'm noting substack...

      Their TOS is very general, that could be good of bad. I personally like more specifics.

      I've not tried the platform but it appears to be 100% free plus allow for paid subscribers to your work.

      I'm seeing that they use / allow RSS feeds for migration / posting. I'd like more detail but that may allow mirrored posting automatically. I doubt beyond "testing" you'd want to maintain two user groups / comments for long.

      I'm not seeing any speak of portability on users / comments. That can get tricky, more info would be needed. It would be horrible to move threads without comments. (Are your "backups" backing up user info/posts as well?)

      It would probably be worth signing up for as an author and playing with it. I'm sure there are several of us here (myself, ez) that could help with data alignment migration. (If you ever wanted to jump ship)

      Mostly if you see a service or site that pops out at you I'm sure all would be willing to help crawl over all of the pro/con.

    4. I may have found an alternative.

  6. Also from Denninger today, on

    < But we didn't know that the immunity conferred was equivalent or superior either, once again, because we intentionally did not take the time to find out.
    Now we know the answer to the question:

    By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get *infected after* the shot, than *after natural* infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated, getting infected in the latest wave."

    Natural infection is almost *seven times more* likely to result in actual immunity, than vaccination.
    In other words, taking the shot is grossly inferior, and thus deploying and using them, in other than very high (risk) persons, where the odds of a bad outcome from natural infection is extremely high, was stupid.

    Further since you can cut your risk of a bad outcome from natural infection by some amount, likely around 2/3rds or better if you hit it hard and *immediately with inexpensive* drugs, then natural infection (is) even more wildly superior to the jabs..., simply on the math. > .

    1. Yeah, kind of makes you wonder why experimental injections like this are being so fanatically pushed...hmmm

    2. If the early treatment drugs (HCQ and Ivermectin) had not been squelched, - had been available for use in treatment - there’d have been no granting of Emergency Use Authorizations to these “vaccines”.

    3. How much do you think that was worth to the Big Pharma countries? Do you think the bureaucrats did that for free? Or maybe got some sort of concealed reward? How many politicians were clued in to investment opportunities?

    4. To reuse that word, it would be naive to think that money didn’t change hands re the EUAs.

      Alerted by Anon’s mention of Dr. Beda Stadler (I had never heard of him) I went and found one of his articles from last June, translated and published in July 2020. His caveat: That he is writing this opinion piece about Switzerland. But he is talking about the human body and its immune response.

      I can see why the midgets would try to disregard him. He is so knowledgeable and so outspoken. He doesn’t tiptoe around. He has probably forgotten more about human immunity and diseases like our current version of Covid than the midgets know.

  7. Good grief! I got a newsletter from the NYT this morning (it can be interesting to know what the Others are thinking), and lo and behold, David Leonhardt writes in his The Morning column:

    Good morning. The Delta variant is more contagious. It does not appear to be more severe.

    Confusion over Delta
    There are two basic questions to ask about any variant of the Covid-19 virus: Is it more contagious than earlier versions of the virus? And is it more severe?

    When a variant is more contagious, it leads to a rise in the number of infections, especially among the unvaccinated. When a variant is more severe, it causes worse symptoms for the average person who gets the virus and leads to a greater percentage of cases that result in hospitalization or death.

    It is easy to confuse these two different concepts when a variant — like Delta — begins spreading. If the variant is more contagious, it often appears to be more severe as well because the increase in caseloads leads to an increase in the raw number of hospitalizations and deaths, as Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco, explained to me.

    In response, journalists and some experts talk about the new variant being “worse,” “riskier” or “more dangerous” — broad concepts that muddy the difference between contagiousness and severity. “Part of the problem is imprecision in language,” Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota, said.

    The difference between the two concepts is important. If a new variant is not actually more severe, it doesn’t present a greater threat to a typical person who contracts Covid. Vaccinated people would remain protected. For children too young to be vaccinated, serious Covid symptoms would still be exceedingly rare — rarer than many other everyday risks, like riding in a car — and still concentrated among children with other health problems.

    And he goes on for quite a while here:

    Nothing earthshattering - unless you consider that this long exposition is at the New York Times. Aren’t they supposed to join the others in the Delta end-of-the-world fearmongering?

  8. Denninger does it again today, in a quite long post at ,
    where he cites new evidence, about a slew of Positives on a completely *vaccinated* HMS (linking to a BBC story), and a Berenson tweet on a Bos. Globe story, on how, in MA since 30 Ap., "about ~20% of Covid deaths since then have been in the *vaccinated*. Not 1%. 20%."

    1. Thanks. I'll get to it, but I'm way behind today.

  9. For another good link, from L. Woodhouse, on "Doctor's Orders:
    The Surgeon General's benign-sounding advisory should have all our hackles up", on “health misinformation” online.
    At .