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Conclusions and Relevance In this multinational cohort study, COVID-19 in pregnancy was associated with consistent and substantial increases in severe maternal morbidity and mortality and neonatal complications when pregnant women with and without COVID-19 diagnosis were compared. The findings should alert pregnant individuals and clinicians to implement strictly all the recommended COVID-19 preventive measures.
Belligerent Savant » Fri Jul 02, 2021 8:09 pm wrote:https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1410986764890689538.html
DrEvil » 02 Jul 2021 22:08 wrote:Miscarriages happen early in pregnancy, so you would expect them to be clustered in the first and second trimester. Out of all the pregnant women 12.6% miscarried, which is about the same as before the pandemic.
On the other hand:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamape ... le/2779182Conclusions and Relevance In this multinational cohort study, COVID-19 in pregnancy was associated with consistent and substantial increases in severe maternal morbidity and mortality and neonatal complications when pregnant women with and without COVID-19 diagnosis were compared. The findings should alert pregnant individuals and clinicians to implement strictly all the recommended COVID-19 preventive measures.
As a side note: a website that considers Breitbart and Natural News as valid sources might not be the best source of information.
Belligerent Savant » Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:04 am wrote:.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of ... capture-on
A Case of "Intellectual Capture?" On YouTube's Demonetization of Bret Weinstein
YouTube's use of government guidelines to regulate speech raises serious questions, both about the First Amendment and regulatory capture
Just under three years ago, Infowars anchor Alex Jones was tossed off Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, marking the unofficial launch of the “content moderation” era. The censorship envelope has since widened dramatically via a series of high-profile incidents: Facebook and Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, Donald Trump’s social media suspension, Apple and Amazon’s kneecapping of Parler, the removal of real raw footage from the January 6th riots, and others.
This week’s decision by YouTube to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein belongs on that list, and has a case to be to be put at or near the top, representing a different and perhaps more unnerving speech conundrum than those other episodes.
Profiled in this space two weeks ago, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying — both biologists — host the podcast DarkHorse, which by any measure is among the more successful independent media operations in the country. They have two YouTube channels, a main channel featuring whole episodes and livestreams, and a “clips” channel featuring excerpts from those shows.
Between the two channels, they’ve been flagged 11 times in the last month or so. Specifically, YouTube has honed in on two areas of discussion it believes promote “medical misinformation.” The first is the potential efficacy of the repurposed drug ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. The second is the third rail of third rails, i.e. the possible shortcomings of the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer.
Weinstein, who was also criticized for arguing the lab-leak theory before conventional wisdom shifted on that topic, says YouTube’s decision will result in the loss of “half” of his and Heying’s income. However, he says, YouTube told him he can reapply after a month.
YouTube’s notice put it as follows: “Edit your channel and reapply for monetization… Make changes to your channel based on our feedback. Changes can include editing or deleting videos and updating video details.”
“They want me to self-censor,” he says. “Unless I stop broadcasting information that runs afoul of their CDC-approved talking points, I’ll remain demonetized.”
Weinstein’s travails with YouTube sound like something out of a Star Trek episode, in which the Enterprise crew tries and fails to communicate with a malevolent AI attacking the ship. In the last two weeks, he emailed back and forth with the firm, at one point receiving an email from someone who identified himself only as “Christopher,” indicating a desire to set up a discussion between Weinstein and various parties at YouTube.
Over the course of these communications, Weinstein asked if he could nail down the name and contact number of the person with whom he was interacting. “I said, ‘Look, I need to know who you are first, whether you’re real, what your real first and last names are, what your phone number is, and so on,” Weinstein recounts. “But on asking what ‘Christopher’s’ real name and email was, they wouldn’t even go that far.” After this demand of his, instead of giving him an actual contact, YouTube sent him a pair of less personalized demonetization notices.
As has been noted in this space multiple times, this is a common theme in nearly all of these stories, but Weinstein’s tale is at once weirder and more involved, as most people in these dilemmas never get past the form-letter response stage. YouTube has responded throughout to media queries about Weinstein’s case, suggesting they take it seriously.
YouTube’s decision with regard to Weinstein and Heying seems part of an overall butterfly effect, as numerous other figures either connected to the topic or to DarkHorse have been censured by various platforms. Weinstein guest Dr. Robert Malone, a former Salk Institute researcher often credited with helping develop mRNA vaccine technology, has been suspended from LinkedIn, and Weinstein guest Dr. Pierre Kory of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) has had his appearances removed by YouTube. Even Satoshi Ōmura, who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work on ivermectin, reportedly had a video removed by YouTube this week.
There are several factors that make the DarkHorse incident different from other major Silicon Valley moderation decisions, including the fact that the content in question doesn’t involve electoral politics, foreign intervention, or incitement. The main issue is the possible blurring of lines between public and private censorship.
When I contacted YouTube about Weinstein two weeks ago, I was told, “In general, we rely on guidance from local and global health authorities (FDA, CDC, WHO, NHS, etc) in developing our COVID-19 misinformation policies.”
The question is, how active is that “guidance”? Is YouTube acting in consultation with those bodies in developing those moderation policies? As Weinstein notes, an answer in the affirmative would likely make theirs a true First Amendment problem, with an agency like the CDC not only setting public health policy but also effectively setting guidelines for private discussion about those policies. “If it is in consultation with the government,” he says, “it’s an entirely different issue.”
Asked specifically after Weinstein’s demonetization if the “guidance” included consultation with authorities, YouTube essentially said yes, pointing to previous announcements that they consult other authorities, and adding, “When we develop our policies we consult outside experts and YouTube creators. In the case of our COVID-19 misinformation policies, it would be guidance from local and global health authorities.”
Weinstein and Heying might be the most prominent non-conservative media operation to fall this far afoul of a platform like YouTube. Unlike the case of, say, Alex Jones, the moves against the show’s content have not been roundly cheered. In fact, they’ve inspired blowback from across the media spectrum, with everyone from Bill Maher to Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson taking notice.
“They threw Bret Weinstein off YouTube, or almost,” Maher said on Real Time last week. “YouTube should not be telling me what I can see about ivermectin. Ivermectin isn’t a registered Republican. It’s a drug!”
From YouTube’s perspective, the argument for “medical misinformation” in the DarkHorse videos probably comes down to a few themes in Weinstein’s shows. Take, for example, an exchange between Weinstein and Malone in a video about the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer:Weinstein: The other problem is that what these vaccines do is they encode spike protein… but the spike protein itself we now know is very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic, is that a fair description?
Malone: More than fair, and I alerted the FDA about this risk months and months and months ago.
In another moment, entrepreneur and funder of fluvoxamine studies Steve Kirsch mentioned that his carpet cleaner had a heart attack minutes after taking the Pfizer vaccine, and cited Canadian viral immunologist Byram Bridle in saying that that the COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t stay localized at point of injection, but “goes throughout your entire body, it goes to your brain to your heart.”
Politifact rated the claim that spike protein is cytotoxic “false,” citing the CDC to describe the spike protein as “harmless.” As to the idea that the protein does damage to other parts of the body, including the heart, they quoted an FDA spokesperson who said there’s no evidence the spike protein “lingers at any toxic level in the body.”
Would many doctors argue that the 226 identified cases of myocarditis so far is tiny in the context of 130 million vaccine doses administered, and overall the danger of myocarditis associated with vaccine is far lower than the dangers of myocarditis in Covid-19 patients?
Absolutely. It’s also true that the CDC itself had a meeting on June 18th to discuss cases of heart inflammation reported among people who’d received the vaccine. The CDC, in other words, is simultaneously telling news outlets like Politifact that spike protein is “harmless,” and also having ad-hoc meetings to discuss the possibility, however remote from their point of view, that it is not harmless. Are only CDC officials allowed to discuss these matters?
The larger problem with YouTube’s action is that it relies upon those government guidelines, which in turn are significantly dependent upon information provided to them by pharmaceutical companies, which have long track records of being less than forthright with the public.
In the last decade, for instance, the U.S. government spent over $1.5 billion to stockpile Tamiflu, a drug produced by the Swiss pharma firm Roche. It later came out — thanks to the efforts of a Japanese pediatrician who left a comment on an online forum — that Roche had withheld crucial testing information from British and American buyers, leading to a massive fraud suit. Similar controversies involving the arthritis drug Vioxx and the diabetes drug Avandia were prompted by investigations by independent doctors and academics.
As with financial services, military contracting, environmental protection, and other fields, the phenomenon of regulatory capture is demonstrably real in the pharmaceutical world. This makes basing any moderation policy on official guidelines problematic. If the proper vaccine policy is X, but the actual policy ends up being X plus unknown commercial consideration Y, a policy like YouTube’s more or less automatically preempts discussion of Y.
Some of Weinstein’s broadcasts involve exactly such questions about whether or not it’s necessary to give Covid-19 vaccines to children, to pregnant women, and to people who’ve already had Covid-19, and whether or not the official stance on those matters is colored by profit considerations. Other issues, like whether or not boosters are going to be necessary, need a hard look in light of the commercial incentives.
These are legitimate discussions, as the WHOs own behavior shows. On April 8th, the WHO website said flatly: “Children should not be vaccinated for the moment.” A month and a half later, the WHO issued a new guidance, saying the Pfizer vaccine was “suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above.”
The WHO was clear that its early recommendation was based on a lack of data, and on uncertainty about whether or not children with a low likelihood of infection should be a “priority,” and not on any definite conviction that the vaccine was unsafe. And, again, a Politifact check on the notion that the WHO “reversed its stance” on children rated the claim false, saying that the WHO merely “updated” its guidance on children. Still, the whole drama over the WHO recommendation suggested it should at least be an allowable topic of discussion.
Certainly there are critics of Weinstein’s who blanch at the use of sci-fi terms like “red pill” (derived from worldview-altering truth pill in The Matrix), employing language like “very dangerous” to describe the mRNA vaccines, and descriptions of ivermectin as a drug that would “almost certainly make you better.”
Even to those critics, however, the larger issue Weinstein’s case highlights should be clear. If platforms like YouTube are basing speech regulation policies on government guidelines, and government agencies demonstrably can be captured by industry, the potential exists for a new brand of capture — intellectual capture, where corporate money can theoretically buy not just regulatory relief but the broader preemption of public criticism. It’s vaccines today, and that issue is important enough, but what if in the future the questions involve the performance of an expensive weapons program, or a finance company contracted to administer bailout funds, or health risks posed by a private polluter?
Weinstein believes capture plays a role in his case at some level. “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he says. He hopes the pressure from the public and from the media will push platforms like YouTube to reveal exactly how, and with whom, they settle upon their speech guidelines. “There’s something industrial strength about the censorship,” he says, adding. “There needs to be a public campaign to reject it.”
stickdog99 » Sat Jul 03, 2021 3:44 am wrote:DrEvil » 02 Jul 2021 22:08 wrote:Miscarriages happen early in pregnancy, so you would expect them to be clustered in the first and second trimester. Out of all the pregnant women 12.6% miscarried, which is about the same as before the pandemic.
On the other hand:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamape ... le/2779182Conclusions and Relevance In this multinational cohort study, COVID-19 in pregnancy was associated with consistent and substantial increases in severe maternal morbidity and mortality and neonatal complications when pregnant women with and without COVID-19 diagnosis were compared. The findings should alert pregnant individuals and clinicians to implement strictly all the recommended COVID-19 preventive measures.
As a side note: a website that considers Breitbart and Natural News as valid sources might not be the best source of information.
LOL. You completely and conveniently skipped over the fundamental problem with the paper's statistical analysis, which is that only 127 women were among those studied who got vaccinated before the third trimester. Thus, out of the 127 women receiving vaccines during their first or second trimesters, 104 spontaneous abortions occurred before their pregnancies hit the 20-week mark.
Based on the completely flawed 12.6% miscarried statistic the paper instead cited to assuage vaccination fears of pregnant women and their doctors, it appears to me that the New England Journal of Medicine might not be the best source of information.
The report by Shimabukuro et al. includes safety results for 35,691 v-safe participants 16 to 54 years of age who identified as pregnant and the first 3958 participants who enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry. In both cohorts, 54% of the participants received the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine and 46% received the Moderna vaccine. The age distribution, status with respect to race and ethnic group, and timing of the first dose were similar with each vaccine. Among v-safe participants, 86.5% had a known pregnancy at the time of vaccination, and 13.5% reported a positive pregnancy test after vaccination. Among v-safe pregnancy registry participants, 28.6% received vaccine in the first trimester, 43.3% in the second trimester, and 25.7% in the third trimester.
Among 827 registry participants who reported a completed pregnancy, the pregnancy resulted in a spontaneous abortion in 104 (12.6%) and in stillbirth in 1 (0.1%); these percentages are well within the range expected as an outcome for this age group of persons whose other underlying medical conditions are unknown.
DrEvil » 03 Jul 2021 18:24 wrote:stickdog99 » Sat Jul 03, 2021 3:44 am wrote:DrEvil » 02 Jul 2021 22:08 wrote:Miscarriages happen early in pregnancy, so you would expect them to be clustered in the first and second trimester. Out of all the pregnant women 12.6% miscarried, which is about the same as before the pandemic.
On the other hand:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamape ... le/2779182Conclusions and Relevance In this multinational cohort study, COVID-19 in pregnancy was associated with consistent and substantial increases in severe maternal morbidity and mortality and neonatal complications when pregnant women with and without COVID-19 diagnosis were compared. The findings should alert pregnant individuals and clinicians to implement strictly all the recommended COVID-19 preventive measures.
As a side note: a website that considers Breitbart and Natural News as valid sources might not be the best source of information.
LOL. You completely and conveniently skipped over the fundamental problem with the paper's statistical analysis, which is that only 127 women were among those studied who got vaccinated before the third trimester. Thus, out of the 127 women receiving vaccines during their first or second trimesters, 104 spontaneous abortions occurred before their pregnancies hit the 20-week mark.
Based on the completely flawed 12.6% miscarried statistic the paper instead cited to assuage vaccination fears of pregnant women and their doctors, it appears to me that the New England Journal of Medicine might not be the best source of information.
No.The report by Shimabukuro et al. includes safety results for 35,691 v-safe participants 16 to 54 years of age who identified as pregnant and the first 3958 participants who enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry. In both cohorts, 54% of the participants received the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine and 46% received the Moderna vaccine. The age distribution, status with respect to race and ethnic group, and timing of the first dose were similar with each vaccine. Among v-safe participants, 86.5% had a known pregnancy at the time of vaccination, and 13.5% reported a positive pregnancy test after vaccination. Among v-safe pregnancy registry participants, 28.6% received vaccine in the first trimester, 43.3% in the second trimester, and 25.7% in the third trimester.
Among 827 registry participants who reported a completed pregnancy, the pregnancy resulted in a spontaneous abortion in 104 (12.6%) and in stillbirth in 1 (0.1%); these percentages are well within the range expected as an outcome for this age group of persons whose other underlying medical conditions are unknown.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8220929/
stickdog99 » Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:59 pm wrote:DrEvil » 03 Jul 2021 18:24 wrote:stickdog99 » Sat Jul 03, 2021 3:44 am wrote:DrEvil » 02 Jul 2021 22:08 wrote:Miscarriages happen early in pregnancy, so you would expect them to be clustered in the first and second trimester. Out of all the pregnant women 12.6% miscarried, which is about the same as before the pandemic.
On the other hand:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamape ... le/2779182Conclusions and Relevance In this multinational cohort study, COVID-19 in pregnancy was associated with consistent and substantial increases in severe maternal morbidity and mortality and neonatal complications when pregnant women with and without COVID-19 diagnosis were compared. The findings should alert pregnant individuals and clinicians to implement strictly all the recommended COVID-19 preventive measures.
As a side note: a website that considers Breitbart and Natural News as valid sources might not be the best source of information.
LOL. You completely and conveniently skipped over the fundamental problem with the paper's statistical analysis, which is that only 127 women were among those studied who got vaccinated before the third trimester. Thus, out of the 127 women receiving vaccines during their first or second trimesters, 104 spontaneous abortions occurred before their pregnancies hit the 20-week mark.
Based on the completely flawed 12.6% miscarried statistic the paper instead cited to assuage vaccination fears of pregnant women and their doctors, it appears to me that the New England Journal of Medicine might not be the best source of information.
No.The report by Shimabukuro et al. includes safety results for 35,691 v-safe participants 16 to 54 years of age who identified as pregnant and the first 3958 participants who enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry. In both cohorts, 54% of the participants received the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine and 46% received the Moderna vaccine. The age distribution, status with respect to race and ethnic group, and timing of the first dose were similar with each vaccine. Among v-safe participants, 86.5% had a known pregnancy at the time of vaccination, and 13.5% reported a positive pregnancy test after vaccination. Among v-safe pregnancy registry participants, 28.6% received vaccine in the first trimester, 43.3% in the second trimester, and 25.7% in the third trimester.
Among 827 registry participants who reported a completed pregnancy, the pregnancy resulted in a spontaneous abortion in 104 (12.6%) and in stillbirth in 1 (0.1%); these percentages are well within the range expected as an outcome for this age group of persons whose other underlying medical conditions are unknown.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8220929/
Here is the whole NEJM article.
After carefully reading the whole thing for myself, it is clear to me that the original article I tentatively posted with a clear disclaimer that I felt it had to have been overstated presented **a clearly flawed analysis of these data, as you have suggested**. However, this scientific article is just as flawed in its presentation of the relevant data and especially in those data the investigators mysteriously chose to withhold from the published results. For example:
What percentage of women in the study who got their vaccination before gestation have already experienced spontaneous abortions?
What percentage of women in the study who got their vaccination in the first trimester have already experienced spontaneous abortions?
What percentage of women in the study who got their vaccination in the second trimester have already experienced spontaneous abortions?
The fact that only 12.5% of vaccinated women who **completed pregnancies** during this short study experienced spontaneous abortions is not at all surprising considering that spontaneous abortions are defined as miscarriages that occur within 20 weeks (less than 7 months) of gestation. This, the "bottom line" statistic this study presented is an inherently flawed metric, which was IMHO purposefully designed by the Pharma shills who published these data to falsely reassure doctors, pregnant women, and women considering pregnancy about the supposed safety of mRNA vaccines for pregnant women. The actual relevant safety data bolded above are for some reason being actively suppressed.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2107070
Given that there was a relatively small number of completed pregnancies and that live births were typically after vaccination in the third trimester, Shimabukuro et al. acknowledge the limitations in their ability to draw conclusions about congenital anomalies and other potential rare neonatal outcomes. Despite these limitations, this report provides important information that was not previously available. ...
It is notable that as of April 26, 2021, more than 100,000 pregnant women reported having received a Covid-19 vaccination and yet only a small fraction (4.7%) have enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry.7 This situation underscores the urgent need not only to include pregnant women in clinical trials, but also to invest in public health surveillance systems for pregnancy, involving much larger numbers of women. To prepare for the next pandemic and improve health outcomes for pregnant women more generally, it is past time to invest in maternal health surveillance and research.
IMHO, these authors could have released the most relevant data that they had available right now, but they chose not to and instead to focus on the most reassuring way they could possibly present the data they had.
They had data on almost 3,000 women who had received the vaccines before the third trimester, but they mysteriously avoided presenting any data on the rate of spontaneous abortions among just those groups, broken out by vaccine. Why?
Look at all of this comparatively irrelevant supplementary data:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/ ... pendix.pdf
Why did they not publish the most relevant data that they certainly had available?
Marionumber1 » 04 Jul 2021 02:35 wrote:Yeah, bodily autonomy is paramount!Except for people who are underage, they're all clearly too dumb to decide what to do with their own body and should have those decisions dictated by their parents instead.
^ Not a comment on the merit of getting or not getting vaccines, but on how hypocritical it seems to rightfully oppose mandatory vaccination policies on the basis of bodily autonomy and then advocate against those same principles for sufficiently knowledgeable children who might actually want to get it. The spokesman clearly said that it is children who are judged to be of sufficient mental competence to understand the decision, not just children across the board.
drstrangelove » Thu Jul 01, 2021 10:34 pm wrote:Society always wins out over institutions in the end.
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