☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Tuesday, January 4, 2022 ☙ SHORT SELLING 🦠

Insurance numbers show excess deaths; two federal courts enjoin two more mandates; Florida pushes back on useless over-testing; N.Y. requires hospitals to report "with" Covid separately; & more...

Happy Tuesday! I really like the way 2022 is starting out. In today’s roundup: an insurance company blows the whistle on excess deaths; two federal courts enjoin two more mandates; Florida pushes back on useless over-testing; New York changes the way its hospitals report Covid; two more studies show negative efficacy of the injections against Omicron; and more…

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 Writer’s team update: thanks to everyone who sent their information in — it’s been overwhelming. We now have over 400 people who have volunteered to be on the writer’s team. That’s Coffee & Covid power! I am setting up a separate Substack newsletter for this group and working on a style guide and the initial assignment. Stand by!

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

📈 There’s a secret killer lurking out there somewhere. It’s the story of a LIFETIME. The fact that the media refuses to even acknowledge it exists is what fuels the wildest conspiracy theories, and it is hard to blame people. One day someone is going to write a book about this.

It took an insurance company executive to break the story.

Yesterday, life insurance company OneAmerica’s CEO Scott Davidson told the Indiana Chamber of Commerce that deaths among working-age people are off the charts.

OneAmerica isn’t some random player that doesn’t know what it’s talking about. It is a $100 billion Indiana-based life insurance company with 2,400 employees that started in Indianapolis right after the Civil war.

“[W]hat we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” Davidson explained. He said the deaths were “huge, huge numbers,” and not in the elderly or infirm, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64.” Most of the filed deaths claims are NOT Covid deaths, Davison said.

A 40% jump in all-cause deaths is a problem for a lot of reasons, but for a life insurance company, it could be devastating. Actuarially, working-age people are supposed to be dying in very SMALL numbers. Instead, what the insurance companies are seeing is comparable to four “black swan” disasters AT THE SAME TIME.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be a 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” Davidson explained. “So 40% is just unheard of.” In other words, it’s never ever happened before — mortality rates in younger people comparable to four simultaneous two-hundred-year catastrophes.

What could be causing this? There are some clues. Davidson also said that the company is seeing an “uptick” in DISABILITY claims, saying at first it was just short-term disability claims, but now long-term disability claims are also trending up. So, while we can’t say for SURE that the injections are causing excess deaths, whatever is killing folks appears to be something that ALSO causes some people to become DISABLED. Hmm. Whatever could that be? It’s a mystery. But whatever the ACTUAL cause, it is pretty clear that government Covid policy is to blame, one way or another.

Thanks experts.

So, it may be that the government is trying to hide the non-Covid deaths numbers and the media is helping, but OTHER folks — like insurance companies — are also carefully tracking the same data. Their businesses depend on it. Lots of insurance companies are publicly traded and by law must report financial performance to shareholders — including things like trends in claims paid and identified financial risks.

You know, it would be prudent for anyone getting the jabs — whether the first ones, the third booster, or the fourth, fifth, or sixth boosters — to get their disability and life insurance dialed in before getting the next shot. Actually, I’m considering opening insurance kiosks right next to drive-through injection sites. Seems like I could sell a bunch of it.

Maybe it’s time to short-sell some publicly-traded life insurance company stock. Just saying.

🔬 A new preprint Dutch study titled “SARS-CoV-2 Omicron VOC Transmission in Danish Households” found that Omicron is a lot more infectious than Delta. That’s no surprise. But buried in the otherwise obediently pro-vaccine study’s fine print is this little eye-opener:

> “Comparing households infected with the Omicron to Delta VOC, we found an 1.17 times higher SAR [secondary attack rate] for un-vaccinated, 2.61 times higher for fully-vaccinated and 3.66 times higher for booster-vaccinated individuals, demonstrating strong evidence of immune evasiveness of the Omicron VOC.”

The higher infectiousness for injected folks is not surprising; we’ve seen that Omicron appears to prefer the jabbed, based on hospitalization numbers and data from areas that track breakthrough cases. But this study shows a significantly higher infection rate for BOOSTED folks, which suggests that the more jabs you get, the more likely you are to catch Omicron, and presumably, any future variant derived from Omicron.

In other words, negative vaccine efficacy may increase with each booster.

🔬 A new Canadian preprint study titled “Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against Omicron or Delta infection” similarly found negative efficacy of the jabs against the Omicron variant, especially starting 90 days after the second shot.

That’s when the efficacy goes negative. The study also found protection from Omicron from the second shot dropped to essentially zero after 30 days. Regarding boosters, the study found that while protection increased immediately after receiving the third jab, its efficacy quickly fell to 37% after only seven days following the third shot. Coincidentally, seven days is the length of the only positive study on booster efficacy.

I have a question. Is the plan to vaccinate EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON PLANET EARTH every six months? If so, I’d really like to know how that is supposed to work.

🔥 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis held a press conference yesterday morning with the state’s surgeon general talking about early treatment for Covid. To my knowledge, DeSantis is the only governor in the country talking about early treatment as an option. For some reason.

DeSantis began by recognizing that “the vaccinations are not preventing infection.” He then announced that HHS had agreed to begin shipping monoclonal antibody treatments (mABs) to states again — but we haven’t received any yet. He spoke about educating providers about other early treatments options like fluvoxamine, which in trials reduced hospitalizations from Covid by 80%.

But — and I think this was the real meat of the presser — he and surgeon general Ladapo both stressed that TESTING is being overused and needs to be pared back to just where it’s “clinically indicated,” and I think that means “symptomatic.”

DeSantis said that “some people are going to testing centers two, three, four times a week,” and that is too much.

Anecdotally, I’ve been told by a nurse who said she worked at a hospital’s drive-through testing location that there were 200-300 people that they would see over and over, every single week, the “frequent flyers” who obsessively test and re-test, even though they have no symptoms (and are probably injected and boosted).

These “frequent flyers” are not well. They don’t need more testing. They need a mental-health intervention. And they are using up a lot of tests. DeSantis said that unfortunately the federal government has created inappropriate levels of demand for testing by healthy people.

I would suggest to you that contact-tracing has collapsed. It’s too late now to use testing of asymptomatic people to “stop the spread.” That ship has sailed. Testing at this point should only be used to confirm a diagnosis of symptomatic Covid so that early treatment options can be provided to patients. That’s it.

Finally, the CEO of a South Florida hospital chain spoke and said that HALF (50%) of their reported hospitalization figures are “with Covid” and not “for Covid.” If this proportion is common to other hospitals — and there’s no reason to think it isn’t — then actual Omicron hospitalizations in Florida are actually much lower than they appear.

🔥 Hahaha! New York, which has hospitalization figures that are OFF THE CHARTS, announced a “tweak” to its inpatient reporting requirements for state hospitals. Starting today (Tuesday), hospitals in New York are required to report numbers on how many people are hospitalized because of Covid SEPARATELY from those who were admitted for other reasons but tested positive for the virus in the hospital, and probably only have a mild or asymptomatic case.

New York’s messiah-complex-plagued Governor Kathy Hochul gave hospitals one day’s notice of the change. Now, maybe I’m being overly simplistic, but this sort of suggests strongly that the change in reporting could have been accomplished a long time ago. Oh well. I suppose it’s better late than never. It’s another Omicron miracle!

There was no mention though of tracking breakthrough hospitalizations — previously known as “vaccine failure.” For some reason.

🔥 Finally! A federal judge granted an injunction from the military vaccine mandate to a group of Navy seals seeking religious exemptions, saying “There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.” The judge seemed frustrated by the fact that the Navy has never granted to a religious exemption to ANY vaccine requirement, ever.

🔥 On Saturday, a federal judge in Louisiana enjoined the preschool “Head Start” vaccine mandate for staff, volunteers, and students connected to the program. The short order begins with that famous Ronald Reagan quote:

> “In the immortal words of President Ronald Reagan, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

It’s always a good sign when the judge quotes Reagan.

Have a terrific Tuesday! I’ll see ya’ll back here tomorrow for more.

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