“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
Albert Einstein – Physicist (1879 – 1955)
The “98.2% Long COVID Reduction” That Is Almost Certainly Missing the Disease Itself
A massive new study suggests that far fewer long-term conditions can be attributed to COVID-19 when researchers compare PCR-positive and PCR-negative patients. They are dismissing so much.
Walter M Chesnut
Sometimes something is published (more often so, these days) that is so seriously wrong that it must be addressed. No matter how ridiculous it is. A newly published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has generated considerable attention by reporting a 98.2% reduction in the number of clinical outcomes statistically attributable to COVID-19 when researchers changed how they selected their control population. This is one such seriously wrong, ridiculous example.
The study, Revised estimates of types and duration of long COVID symptoms based on claims records from 245 million US patients, analyzed an extraordinary 14.4 billion insurance claims from approximately 245 million Americans. The investigators compared patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 with patients who tested negative, rather than relying on broader populations that included people who had never been tested.
The results were dramatic.
Between 120 and 359 days after testing, the number of clinical outcomes statistically attributed to COVID-19 declined from 286 to just five.
A 98.2% reduction.
There is a crucial distinction we must acknowledge here: this was not a 98.2% reduction in the number of people suffering from Long COVID. It was a reduction in the number of outcome categories that met the researchers’ criteria for attribution to COVID-19.
The “authors” of the study are IGNORING (intentionally, they can’t be this stupid) some extraordinarily important FACTS.
Some of the people who tested negative had almost certainly already developed Long COVID from an earlier infection that was never documented. Some of the people who tested negative almost certainly had been given Spike mRNA/injections.
A Negative PCR Test Is Not a Negative Infection/Exposure History
The central premise of the researchers’ approach is absurd. People who undergo COVID testing may differ from people who never seek testing. They may have underlying medical conditions, more frequent healthcare encounters, or other reasons for receiving medical attention. They also may prefer apples to oranges…
All a negative PCR test establishes is that SARS-CoV-2 was not detected in that particular sample at that particular time. It does not establish that the individual had never been infected. Or that they had never been exposed to the Spike Protein via mRNA/vaccination.
Most importantly, it certainly does not establish that an earlier infection/exposure had not initiated a chronic pathological process. Indeed, the National Academies’ 2024 definition of Long COVID explicitly recognizes that the condition can follow an infection that was never clinically recognized or laboratory-confirmed. The CDC likewise states that a positive SARS-CoV-2 test is not required for a Long COVID diagnosis.
A person can have Long COVID without ever having had a documented positive SARS-CoV-2 test.
This is not a controversial proposition. It is part of the accepted clinical understanding of the condition.
From the CDC itself:
Long COVID is not one illness. There is no approved laboratory test that can determine if your symptoms or conditions are due to Long COVID. A positive SARS-CoV-2 test is not required for a Long COVID diagnosis.
Long COVID Basics
https://www.cdc.gov/long-covid/about/index.html
What If the Macrophage Was Already Smoldering?
This is where my Smoldering Macrophage Syndrome (SMS) hypothesis becomes relevant.
I have proposed that SARS-CoV-2 infection/Spike exposure may initiate persistent, tissue-localized macrophage activation that continues long after the acute infection has resolved or Spike exposure occurred. In this model, the initiating infection/exposure and subsequent disease process are not necessarily simultaneous.
The virus may no longer be detectable in the upper respiratory tract. Circulating inflammatory markers may be unremarkable. Yet macrophages residing in tissues such as the lungs, heart, brain, gut, and microvasculature could remain abnormally activated, contributing to persistent inflammatory signaling, endothelial dysfunction, and tissue remodeling.
This remains a hypothesis requiring direct validation. But consider what it would mean for the interpretation of this enormous epidemiological study. Imagine an individual who experienced an undocumented SARS-CoV-2 infection months earlier, or Spike Protein exposure.
That individual could now enter the study’s comparison population despite already having a post-COVID/Spike Exposure condition.
If this occurred frequently enough, the supposedly uninfected comparison group could contain people with the very disease processes the researchers were attempting to attribute to COVID-19.
I am absolutely stunned that this nonsense was published. (Or am I?) And yes, it’s dangerous. It not only is inaccurate about the potential prevalence of Long COVID, it also indirectly seeks to dismiss the suffering of millions who are dealing with this horrific disease state. The “study” should be immediately retracted and with formal apologies from the publisher. We will not tolerate such manipulation of data or dismissal of the anguish of millions of individuals.
A Good Man Without Strength
We Are Still In An Ice Age
Earth is still in an ice age right now — we are just in a warm pause and the glaciers will advance again
Click to view the video: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EhQQRt3Ro/
Quote of the Day
“There has never been a good war or a bad peace.”
Benjamin Franklin – Founding Father, statesman, diplomat (1706 – 1790)
The System Protects The System
The system acts to protect the system, not the public. Your increasing knowledge, expanding awareness and continued vigilance are your best defences against a system designed and managed to protect itself, not you.
Best Protein For Muscle Mass
Pfizer COVID Vaccine Deadly
Pfizer doesn’t want you to know this. This information doesn’t appear in any of their ads for the COVID vaccine for some reason. Baffling for sure!
Executive summary
The easiest way to tell if you are talking to someone who is intellectually honest about the COVID vaccines is to ask them for their assessment of the Levi paper.
If they claim, like UPenn Professor Jeffrey Morris does, that there is nothing to see here, then you are dealing with someone who is intellectual dishonest. The AI analysis of Morris’s attack on the Levi paper is absolutely devastating.
What the paper found
37% higher non-COVID mortality in people who got Pfizer.
That’s a train wreck.
There is no other way to spin this.
Possible explanations for the results:
The Pfizer/Moderna groups weren’t really matched
Moderna reduces non-COVID all-cause mortality by 37%
The problems:
They were matched. Barbra Dickerman wrote 2 papers on COVID vaccines and VA data showing that crude demographic matching creates extremely good morbidity matching to nobody’s surprise. But Levi’s matching was MUCH stronger than what Dickerman did (more attributes and tighter matches). And he confirmed the matching by looking at the single most devastating statistic: prior cardiovascular hospitalization rates were matched. This is not a random marker — it’s arguably the single most mortality-relevant clinical signal you can extract from administrative data. So we have no reason to believe the groups weren’t matched and every reason to believe they were.
There is no mechanism of action that could possibly explain how a COVID vaccine can reduce non-COVID all-cause mortality by 37%. If that were true, this would be the most amazing drug ever created. Moderna would be marketing their COVID vaccine as a fountain of youth. Everyone would be taking it. We’d have seen dramatic reduction in all cause mortality all over the world after rolling out the drug. No such data exists. If you plot cumulative COVID deaths over time for the world, the rollout of the vaccine didn’t change the slope one bit which means the COVID shots didn’t really save any lives. But people who opt to taking vaccines have lower mortality in general, but it is NOT caused by vaccines; it is 100% selection bias. People who opt for vaccines tend to have better access to healthcare.
The full discussion is here and it’s worth reading.
The bottom line
No two ways about it. The COVID vaccines were deadly.
They should be taken off the market.
It is absolutely appalling that businesses and schools forced people to take a vaccine that can increase mortality by 37%. But nobody is willing to talk about it, and no business has formally apologized for their mistake.
Those who want to talk about, like Professor Morris, cherry pick the evidence to support their point of view. These people are extremely dangerous. The AI analysis of Morris’s attack on the Levi paper is absolutely devastating.
Where is the outrage?
Every member of Congress should be shocked by this paper. They should be calling for replication of this study in all 50 states.
Don’t they want to know that they were responsible for over 500,000 American deaths?
Can you name one member of Congress doing that? With 535 members, you’d think that there would be at least one honest member speaking out asking for similar studies to be done, wouldn’t you?
Not one.
They don’t want to know.
Summary
The Levi paper is clear: 37% higher mortality if you got Pfizer.
None of the “explanations” can explain this difference.
Nobody is calling for more studies to replicate the Levi study.
And the Levi study was rejected by around 12 journals before being published showing you just how corrupt “science” is.
https://open.substack.com/pub/stevekirsch/p/levi-paper-showing-pfizer-is-a-toxic
You Can Still Change
Why Washington Ignores What 90% of Us Want
Story at a Glance
• Our political system is shaped by left versus right than by vested interests that capture whichever party holds power, which is why policies with overwhelming public support so rarely become law.
• Republicans lost both chambers of Congress, as the strategy their leadership bet on largely failed. Notably, voters ranked government corruption as the most important factor in their vote.
• Days later, Calley Means, who led MAHA implementation at the White House until October, went on Joe Rogan and laid out how a handful of former lobbyists who controlled the policy process blocked popular MAHA reforms while advancing the priorities of the industries paying their firms. Hours after it aired, Trump announced the chief of staff he named was out.
• Much of what he described is in the public record: the executive order shielding glyphosate, the administration’s brief that helped Bayer win immunity at the Supreme Court, the push for fruit-flavored vapes that preceded Marty Makary’s exit, the reversal on “gas station heroin,” and the record revenues of the lobbying firms tied to the chief of staff.
• Holding MAHA back “until after the midterms” was the same advice that cost Trump the 2020 election, when his advisers agreed the COVID policies were wrong but refused to “rock the boat” before the vote.
• The internet has broken the top-down messaging that once let a small group decide what the public cared about. This election (along with the data center revolt) showed voters are increasingly identifying the problems they feel matter independent of media messaging
• In this article, I will review what Calley revealed, why it reflects a structural problem in both parties rather than a single administration, and what I feel is the best path forward available to us now.
Three different views are often cited to describe our political system:
• Various factions have sinister agendas, and because those agendas are so harmful, it is vital to support the side opposing them even if you don’t agree with all of its positions.
• The same donor interests own both sides and constantly divert our attention to divisive topics so that neither side ever comes together on the major issues almost everyone outside the donor class supports.
• The nature of power and government causes vested interests and factions to emerge that do more and more to advance their interests at the public’s expense (particularly as government grows larger and larger).
For most of my life (especially since starting this newsletter and having numerous insiders share their experiences with me), rather than seeing these as mutually exclusive, I’ve believed all three are at work. For example:
• At every scale of government I’ve seen the inner workings of (e.g., an HOA, a small activist movement, a small business, a university, a small town, a city, a state, the national government, and many levels of the healthcare system), no effective mechanism existed to prevent waste, fraud, abuse, or corruption, and the people managing the money did not own it (so they had nothing to lose if it was misspent). As a result, people pocketed benefits they should not have, overpriced, poor-quality, or unnecessary work was done, and the solution was always to raise more revenue (e.g., higher taxes or HOA dues) rather than fix the actual problem. Likewise, competence at a role is very different from competence at advancing within a system, so you frequently find incompetent or emotionally underdeveloped people wielding far more power than is appropriate for them.
Note: a major reason this thrives is information asymmetry, as it takes a lot of time and work to expose even one small example of corruption or mismanagement (and doing so invites an immense amount of pushback), so most people never learn what is occurring or what it directly costs them. One thing I am very hopeful for is that AI will make it possible to breach this barrier, since provided the data is made accessible to it, AI can rapidly and impartially show everyone what is happening.
• I also concluded early on that game theory dictated all these parties preying on the public would adopt niches that hurt the public but did not threaten each other. So when an absurd policy is pushed (e.g., treating every infectious disease as a deficiency of vaccines), I frequently see many different interests each getting their slice of the pie at our expense, whereas whenever a pro-human policy is put forward, it’s like shaking a beehive, as so many different parties emerge to stop their grift from being threatened. This, for example, is why an unhealthy food system (and the massive healthcare costs it creates) is not only tolerated but subsidized, as while that spending is bankrupting the country and hence seems like something the government would never accept, so many industries profit from it that they are all incentivized to keep the food status quo in place.
Watching this play out again and again is extremely depressing and frustrating (to the point many inevitably become black-pilled and want to give up on everything). However, I also always try to clearly distinguish between “impossible” and “difficult but possible,” and much of what I’ve done here was built on watching decades of attempts to make things better fail and using those failures as guidance for finding what can nonetheless have a real chance of working. Put differently, the way I avoid falling into negativity and hopelessness (despite an overwhelming flood of frustrating and tragic events) is to stay focused on results and be grateful for each thing that happens (particularly the ones I had long felt were “impossible”).
With that context, Calley Means recently gave a very poignant interview on Joe Rogan about MAHA’s first two years in the White House, where he laid out the critical policies with immense public support (and backing within the administration and much of the government) that, again and again, lobbyists working through Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (and a few others whose firms profited immensely) torched, including things Trump directly supported. His account matches the details insiders shared with me over the last two years. Furthermore, as Calley noted, this problem is not unique to the Trump administration, as while Republicans were heading toward losing the midterms (after following the terrible strategy the lobbyists had convinced them was vital to “win the midterms”), those same lobbyists were already shifting to the Congressional Democrats.
None of this is new. For example, over a decade ago, a short online campaign (and a great Youtube clip) concisely showed that the chance of a bill passing has essentially no relationship to its public support, but is instead largely determined by what economic elites and the interests able to hire lobbyists want, since bribery is effectively legal in America:
https://open.substack.com/pub/amidwesterndoctor/p/why-washington-ignores-what-90-of