Great post! One of the best I’ve read on the scamdemic. Thanks especial for the risk/reward discussion and the due diligence tips. Most Americans don’t “get” the risk/reward concept for medical interventions. It’s all “magic goodness.” Secondly, most don’t have any inkling of the failings, tricks, and errors of the “expertocracy.” Once you “see” risk/reward and the intentionally wrong advice of the experts , you can’t unsee them... and there goes your trust. I know from experience that’s a painful, foundation shattering awakening. I’m afraid most folks don’t want to go there as they intuitively know the vertigo that awaits.
Thank you for the kind words! For those who reflexively trust institutions that foundation shattering awakening is all but inevitable (and I relate to your experience in that regard). I'd like to think people can lean ahead and rip the band aid off at the moment of their choosing, but it is more likely this is a lesson that needs to be learned the hard way.
Grant understood me correctly. IFR is a [relatively!] easily-measured proxy for infection severity. You are also right that death is not the only downside of Covid, and I have never claimed that it was. But aggregating all the other downsides of Covid is an impossibility, so it is necessary that we use a metric that both has some real world meaning and is feasible to measure. The young, especially in the healthier-than-average military population, almost never have a hard time with SCV2. And the 3 per 100,000 among the 20-29 year olds who do have some good reason for it. I suspect that the low double digit deaths the DoD attributes to Covid were service members who either had a coincidental infection while dying of something else or their PCR was a false positive. False positive PCRs are something we hardly discuss. They can be caused by the amplification of viral debris left over from a previously cleared recent infection (up to 60 days) or they can even be caused by non-specific binding of the primer to a nucleotide sequence similar to the target sequence. It is necessary to confirm that the PCR amplicon actually corresponds to a known nucleotide sequence of the virus. This last step is almost never done.
My second bout of frankenvirus was a little rough. Fevers, chills, baaad body aches, cough. Needed ivermectin for that; started IVM on symptom day 3 and was 95% resolved in 18 hrs. No 30 year old would have had my experience.
That is an interesting question... My take is that Capt Crozier, or rather his medical staff, probably over reacted, but then again, hindsight is 20-20. We know that COVID didn't pose a significantly greater risk than say, flu, to active duty servicemembers in general. The PT that co-signed that letter was one of my classmates, I suppose I could ask him. By all accounts Crozier was a great leader and highly respected. I don't think he should've been punished for acting on the advice of his medical staff. The impression I got is that the desire to not let COVID impact military operations came from the Trump administration. If they had been able to be consistent with that then things would've gone much better IMO, but with people like Fauci and Birx around they were able to shift into the "2 weeks to flatten the curve" bullshit which was always just a foot-in-the-door social engineering technique to get to "the new normal." I think the reason this was such a contentious issue is because USN has a pretty toxic culture, and Crozier was standing up to that and doing what he thought was right, protecting Sailors without regard for the cultural and professional implications, but it just didn't turn out to be the right hill. The right hill would come when the mrna gene therapies were coerced. That incident and how it fits into the whole covid story and later stories where Sailors were being told that ship water contaminated ship water was safe to drink and the initial interchangeability memo produced by Navy brass is all very interesting.
I don't know that I would have been able to save CAPT Crozier had I still been on active duty. My suspicion is that they would have fired me for my advice. I will tell you that both line and medical leadership have become extremely risk averse in recent decades. In 2003, 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unity, embarked on the IWO JIMA Amphibious Ready Group, was dispatched to Liberia to provide a stabilizing influence in the civil war. All other military assets were committed in OIF. A QRF was sent ashore in Liberia. Idiots did not take their malaria chemoprophylaxis. Had no idea the mosquitoes were having them for dinner. Total of 80 cases of malaria eventually diagnosed. I was flown from Sigonella, Italy to Liberia to do the on-scene investigation. Every Marine (and one Corpsman who worked under me in 1st Bn, 8th Marines a decade prior) who tested pos for malaria was medevaced. I told the Iwo Jima SMO and the surgical team there was no need to medevac uncomplicated malaria. I spent hours reading blood smear slides. My advice fell on deaf ears. Then, a couple contractors had positive skin tests for Tb. I said no problem, we do ring testing of people who work with and berth with those contractors. Very manageable effort. Did they take the advice of the most senior prev med physician in that quarter of the planet? Nope. The CO made the decision (and the SMO was a wuss) to test every swingin dick on IWO JIMA. What a shit show. They didn't have enough PPD so had to make an emergency order. They had Corpsmen doing PPDs who had no idea how to place the blister in the skin. It's all about risk aversion. On my planned day of departure, six ship's crewmen reported to sick call with GI upset. The SMO asked me to stay longer and help sort it out. I told him, "Fred, you blew off my advice on malaria. Then you blew off my advice on Tb. You're a doctor; the gastroenteritis is all yours. I tell you all this bc doctors, just like line commanders these days, can't stand uncertainty and are terrified of being blamed for something.
I agree that it was a total failure on the part of the medical staff, and I would assume that Chris' replacement would have been providing guidance to the SMO to assist with decision making.
After this all went down, I napkin calculated what the expected death rate would have been based off of current death rate I didn't have have age stratification, but nonetheless I came up with around 3 to 5 expected deaths if the entire crew got sick. If I recall, they may have lost a few more.
Capt Crozier's leadership failure was that he lost control of the narrative and allowing to become public knowledge that one our nation's most valuable combat assets was degraded to combat ineffective.. It is this latter number that would be useful to understand as it relates to covid. While mortality matters to the public, as you know, to the Commander what matters most is degradation of combat effectiveness.
I left Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center in 2013, left the Navy's public health system completely in 2016. The bureaucratic wars were exhausting. My relief at NMCPHC was an environmental health officer, not a prev med physician. He was a genuinely nice guy with all the downsides assoc with that, meaning no appetite for controversy or a battle. The environmental health officers have managed to keep a death grip on the prev med director billet at NMCPHC; I was the last prev med physician to sit in that seat (and did so for six years).
I developed a severe case of all-outta-shits-to-give in my later years. I was long retirement eligible and knew I wasn't making O-7, so I spoke my mind. Never varnished anything and sometimes didn't even sand it down.
"Given the IFR in ages under 29, prophylactic interventions simply couldn’t reduce the risk of death.¹ If there is no benefit, then the risk-benefit calculation becomes meaningless as we’re left to determine the overall risk of the treatment in question, which is all downside." This assumes that death is the only downside of Covid. Clearly, that is not the case. The military will consider not just mortality risk but the downtime of days or weeks from a symptomatic infection.
I agree with your logic as stated, but Chris being the subject matter expert I'm assuming in preventive medicine IFR is used as a proxy for disease severity. I'll see if I can get him to jump on here to expand on this as it is a good point, and I'm making an assumption to address it. That said, the fact that the treatment increases infection risk also obviates this point.
It is worth mentioning that missed work wasn't determined by symptoms at all throughout COVID, but a fixed number of days following onset of symptoms. I get the impression the entire mitigation of symptoms consideration narrative supporting the application of chemoprophylaxis generally was born in the COVID era to justify the policy with the assertion that symptoms were mitigated in the relevant population because this is essentially impossible to prove either way given the available data.
Again though, I'd be interested in hearing Chris respond. Thanks for the engagement!
Try not to fall too hard into despair and the moment will come. You and the nation don’t have time for too much grief when the mask drops... the truth ain’t 💩.
This morning a girl from USAA was nice on the phone, I thanked her, she said “you (military) people are the only thing keeping America going.” Off the cuff.
THINK ABOUT THAT.
(Hey, no pressure 🤣)
Being decent AIN’T ENOUGH.
We have to get them through this. So .... it ain’t enough to be right.
Great post! One of the best I’ve read on the scamdemic. Thanks especial for the risk/reward discussion and the due diligence tips. Most Americans don’t “get” the risk/reward concept for medical interventions. It’s all “magic goodness.” Secondly, most don’t have any inkling of the failings, tricks, and errors of the “expertocracy.” Once you “see” risk/reward and the intentionally wrong advice of the experts , you can’t unsee them... and there goes your trust. I know from experience that’s a painful, foundation shattering awakening. I’m afraid most folks don’t want to go there as they intuitively know the vertigo that awaits.
Thank you for the kind words! For those who reflexively trust institutions that foundation shattering awakening is all but inevitable (and I relate to your experience in that regard). I'd like to think people can lean ahead and rip the band aid off at the moment of their choosing, but it is more likely this is a lesson that needs to be learned the hard way.
Further proof of the failings of the experts. https://open.substack.com/pub/boriquagato/p/kitten-corner-control-alt-fraud?r=2mv26&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Grant understood me correctly. IFR is a [relatively!] easily-measured proxy for infection severity. You are also right that death is not the only downside of Covid, and I have never claimed that it was. But aggregating all the other downsides of Covid is an impossibility, so it is necessary that we use a metric that both has some real world meaning and is feasible to measure. The young, especially in the healthier-than-average military population, almost never have a hard time with SCV2. And the 3 per 100,000 among the 20-29 year olds who do have some good reason for it. I suspect that the low double digit deaths the DoD attributes to Covid were service members who either had a coincidental infection while dying of something else or their PCR was a false positive. False positive PCRs are something we hardly discuss. They can be caused by the amplification of viral debris left over from a previously cleared recent infection (up to 60 days) or they can even be caused by non-specific binding of the primer to a nucleotide sequence similar to the target sequence. It is necessary to confirm that the PCR amplicon actually corresponds to a known nucleotide sequence of the virus. This last step is almost never done.
My second bout of frankenvirus was a little rough. Fevers, chills, baaad body aches, cough. Needed ivermectin for that; started IVM on symptom day 3 and was 95% resolved in 18 hrs. No 30 year old would have had my experience.
Had Chris not retired, I wonder if the Capt Crozier of the Roosevelt would have kept his job?
That is an interesting question... My take is that Capt Crozier, or rather his medical staff, probably over reacted, but then again, hindsight is 20-20. We know that COVID didn't pose a significantly greater risk than say, flu, to active duty servicemembers in general. The PT that co-signed that letter was one of my classmates, I suppose I could ask him. By all accounts Crozier was a great leader and highly respected. I don't think he should've been punished for acting on the advice of his medical staff. The impression I got is that the desire to not let COVID impact military operations came from the Trump administration. If they had been able to be consistent with that then things would've gone much better IMO, but with people like Fauci and Birx around they were able to shift into the "2 weeks to flatten the curve" bullshit which was always just a foot-in-the-door social engineering technique to get to "the new normal." I think the reason this was such a contentious issue is because USN has a pretty toxic culture, and Crozier was standing up to that and doing what he thought was right, protecting Sailors without regard for the cultural and professional implications, but it just didn't turn out to be the right hill. The right hill would come when the mrna gene therapies were coerced. That incident and how it fits into the whole covid story and later stories where Sailors were being told that ship water contaminated ship water was safe to drink and the initial interchangeability memo produced by Navy brass is all very interesting.
I don't know that I would have been able to save CAPT Crozier had I still been on active duty. My suspicion is that they would have fired me for my advice. I will tell you that both line and medical leadership have become extremely risk averse in recent decades. In 2003, 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unity, embarked on the IWO JIMA Amphibious Ready Group, was dispatched to Liberia to provide a stabilizing influence in the civil war. All other military assets were committed in OIF. A QRF was sent ashore in Liberia. Idiots did not take their malaria chemoprophylaxis. Had no idea the mosquitoes were having them for dinner. Total of 80 cases of malaria eventually diagnosed. I was flown from Sigonella, Italy to Liberia to do the on-scene investigation. Every Marine (and one Corpsman who worked under me in 1st Bn, 8th Marines a decade prior) who tested pos for malaria was medevaced. I told the Iwo Jima SMO and the surgical team there was no need to medevac uncomplicated malaria. I spent hours reading blood smear slides. My advice fell on deaf ears. Then, a couple contractors had positive skin tests for Tb. I said no problem, we do ring testing of people who work with and berth with those contractors. Very manageable effort. Did they take the advice of the most senior prev med physician in that quarter of the planet? Nope. The CO made the decision (and the SMO was a wuss) to test every swingin dick on IWO JIMA. What a shit show. They didn't have enough PPD so had to make an emergency order. They had Corpsmen doing PPDs who had no idea how to place the blister in the skin. It's all about risk aversion. On my planned day of departure, six ship's crewmen reported to sick call with GI upset. The SMO asked me to stay longer and help sort it out. I told him, "Fred, you blew off my advice on malaria. Then you blew off my advice on Tb. You're a doctor; the gastroenteritis is all yours. I tell you all this bc doctors, just like line commanders these days, can't stand uncertainty and are terrified of being blamed for something.
I agree that it was a total failure on the part of the medical staff, and I would assume that Chris' replacement would have been providing guidance to the SMO to assist with decision making.
After this all went down, I napkin calculated what the expected death rate would have been based off of current death rate I didn't have have age stratification, but nonetheless I came up with around 3 to 5 expected deaths if the entire crew got sick. If I recall, they may have lost a few more.
Capt Crozier's leadership failure was that he lost control of the narrative and allowing to become public knowledge that one our nation's most valuable combat assets was degraded to combat ineffective.. It is this latter number that would be useful to understand as it relates to covid. While mortality matters to the public, as you know, to the Commander what matters most is degradation of combat effectiveness.
I left Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center in 2013, left the Navy's public health system completely in 2016. The bureaucratic wars were exhausting. My relief at NMCPHC was an environmental health officer, not a prev med physician. He was a genuinely nice guy with all the downsides assoc with that, meaning no appetite for controversy or a battle. The environmental health officers have managed to keep a death grip on the prev med director billet at NMCPHC; I was the last prev med physician to sit in that seat (and did so for six years).
I developed a severe case of all-outta-shits-to-give in my later years. I was long retirement eligible and knew I wasn't making O-7, so I spoke my mind. Never varnished anything and sometimes didn't even sand it down.
"Given the IFR in ages under 29, prophylactic interventions simply couldn’t reduce the risk of death.¹ If there is no benefit, then the risk-benefit calculation becomes meaningless as we’re left to determine the overall risk of the treatment in question, which is all downside." This assumes that death is the only downside of Covid. Clearly, that is not the case. The military will consider not just mortality risk but the downtime of days or weeks from a symptomatic infection.
I agree with your logic as stated, but Chris being the subject matter expert I'm assuming in preventive medicine IFR is used as a proxy for disease severity. I'll see if I can get him to jump on here to expand on this as it is a good point, and I'm making an assumption to address it. That said, the fact that the treatment increases infection risk also obviates this point.
It is worth mentioning that missed work wasn't determined by symptoms at all throughout COVID, but a fixed number of days following onset of symptoms. I get the impression the entire mitigation of symptoms consideration narrative supporting the application of chemoprophylaxis generally was born in the COVID era to justify the policy with the assertion that symptoms were mitigated in the relevant population because this is essentially impossible to prove either way given the available data.
Again though, I'd be interested in hearing Chris respond. Thanks for the engagement!
East Of Eden... starring...
look, you’re decent men.
This isn’t a decent time.
Try not to fall too hard into despair and the moment will come. You and the nation don’t have time for too much grief when the mask drops... the truth ain’t 💩.
This morning a girl from USAA was nice on the phone, I thanked her, she said “you (military) people are the only thing keeping America going.” Off the cuff.
THINK ABOUT THAT.
(Hey, no pressure 🤣)
Being decent AIN’T ENOUGH.
We have to get them through this. So .... it ain’t enough to be right.
Good luck, me be around.