Once Again, The Official COVID Narrative Goes Up In Flames

It's 2025 now, five full years after the "novel coronavirus" that became known as COVID-19 made its official debut.  Aside from a few dead-enders and true believers here and there, nearly everyone has long since moved on from the pandemic, which officially ended somewhere between the second half of 2022 and the end of the first half of 2023, depending on the country and whose source you follow.  

And just recently, a pair of new studies came out that were pretty damning indeed about practically everything that was done during the pandemic in terms of countermeasures.  That's in addition to all of the other studies we at the TSAP have cited over the years.

One new multi-country study found that school closures were basically useless or worse than useless, at least in the long run.  Specifically, they found no correlation between school reopenings during ether Delta or Omicron, and trends in adult Covid deaths and hospitalizations.  This is especially damning to the narrative because the biggest justification they had was that the school closures weren't to protect the kids themselves so much as to protect the adults around them, consequences to the kids themselves (and boy, were there plenty!) being a mere afterthought.  Thus, even on their very own Machiavellian and cold utilitarian terms of essentially using children and teens as human shields to protect adults, such medium- to long-term school closures have clearly been shown to be an EPIC FAIL, and need to be permanently removed from any serious consideration going forward.

Another study, this one in Japan (arguably the mask and jab champions of the world), found that the jabs were also quite counterproductive indeed in terms of contracting the virus.  That is, the odds of contracting Covid actually increased with the number of jab doses, which is negative efficacy.  Wow.  And adjusting for confounders only made this perverse correlation even stronger:

The odds of contracting COVID-19 were higher among vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals, with an unadjusted OR of 1.65 (95% CI: 1.27-2.14, p < 0.001) and an adjusted OR of 1.85 (95% CI: 1.33-2.57, p < 0.001).

That explains how Japan, a country with one of the highest jab rates in the world, has had roughly a DOZEN waves (!) of the virus, give or take depending on who's counting, and how the biggest (and deadliest) waves of them all didn't come until AFTER the jabs.  Let that sink in.  Oops, maybe they should have thought of that possibility BEFORE bringing these jabs to market in the first place.

But wait, there's more!  That same Japanese study also looked at other behaviors as well.  As one Redditor, MembraneAnomaly, put it so well:

This bit is very interesting:

Preventive behaviors assessed included regular gargling, mask-wearing, bathing frequency, avoiding crowded places, room ventilation, eating habits, sleep patterns, exercise habits, and maintaining humidity in living spaces.

Behavioral analysis indicated that a reduced frequency of bathing and exercising was significantly associated with higher COVID-19 infection rates (p < 0.05).

Now look at the table under "Demographic characteristics" to find p-values for the association between reducing bathing and exercise and contracting COVID (0.016 and 0.01), compared to mask-wearing (0.644) and avoiding crowds (0.664). Nuff said! Stay healthy, exercise, keep clean - and dump the mask!

Great advice indeed, which is basically what used to be called common sense.  Which unfortunately, is not nearly as common as it should be.  (For those who are unfamiliar with what p-values mean, this means that the effect of masks, even in the land of mask champions, was statistically insignificant, indistinguishable from being due to chance.)

And just in case anyone cries "but source control!", the fact that Japan has still had a dozen or so waves even with all of that masking really puts the lie to that specious claim too.

So jabs and masks are also revealed once again to be useless, and in the case of the former, worse than useless.  Again, masking for the general population should also be permanently removed from any serious consideration going forward, and any vaccines in the future for any disease need to be properly designed and properly tested before we even THINK about unleashing them on the public, and certainly never forced or coerced in any way.

And just like with masks, we have already completely laid waste long ago to any case for lockdowns and business closures and and stuff like that as well.  Those were the easiest to debunk, in fact.  And again, going forward, those need to be removed from any serious consideration as well.

And so once again, like the song says, the official Covid narrative goes up in flames...in 24 frames.

(Mic drop)

UPDATE:  One of the very few bright spots in the new Trump regime is that RFK Jr. (if confirmed) would of course be a decent bulwark against this sort of thing happening again under his watch.  And while Trump himself is not exactly trustworthy, to put it mildly, he did begin the process of pulling the USA out of the World Health Organization.

How Japan Beat COVID-19

One country that the lockdown enthusiasts seem to conspicuously avoid talking about is Japan.  Sweden is their favorite punching bag, as is Florida, but Japan?  It's as if they don't even exist.  And yet, they managed to beat the COVID-19 virus by doing everything "wrong".  And by "wrong", we actually mean RIGHT for the most part.

Despite being in the original geographical danger zone for the pandemic, and being one of the earliest countries to be infected that was not named China, their per capita death rate (the most important indicator) remains so low that it barely even gets on the chart relative to the rest of the world.  So how did they do it?

They did not impose a compulsory lockdown, opting instead for what they called a "soft lockdown" that did not even have the force of law (as their constitution, that they actually take seriously, strictly forbids doing such a thing), and even that was fairly brief and quite belated.  Nor did they close their borders either, opting instead for health checks at ports of entry and fairly modest visa restrictions early on.

What they did do, rather famously, is habitually wear face masks in public, as they did even before the pandemic began during flu season as well as allergy season.  Not everyone, but apparently enough to make a difference. And they are generally very good about hygiene overall there as well.  But less famously, and yet likely contributed even more to their success, was their virtually unique strategy of contact tracing despite doing relatively few tests for the virus.  Instead of going high-volume, labor-intensive, and prospectively, they quietly went after the larger clusters and traced contacts retrospectively, working backwards.  And that strategy really seemed to out-ninja this rather stealthy virus, since the spread pattern is highly skewed and heterogeneous, overwhelmingly driven by a fairly small number of "superspreaders" (10-20% of infected people), while about 70% of infected people statistically don't pass the virus on at all to anyone.  So this pattern lends itself more to that kind of contact tracing paradigm.  And best of all, they did it with excellent timing, unlike so many other countries that squandered and missed their chances to do so before it was too late.

Some cynics may think that Japan deliberately did as few tests as possible so as to make their numbers look good to the outside world, in the hopes of hosting the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo (which nevertheless got postponed to July 2021), thus sweeping it under the rug.  While that may or may not have been part of the motivation for running a low number of tests, their death numbers don't lie, and they seemed to have outsmarted the virus in any case.

And last but not least, despite having the oldest population in the world, they apparently protected the elderly quite well, and apparently did NOT screw up with their nursing homes like so many other countries (especially the UK and New York) unfortunately did royally.  That alone is worth its weight in gold, and the proof is in the numbers.

Now THAT is a shining city on a hill!

(The Wall Street Journal has another great article about Japan's success story here.)

OCTOBER UPDATE: While Japan still seems to have quite a lot of "cases" (positive tests), their per capita death rates are still very low and barely even get on the chart. Another good article can be found here.

2021 UPDATE:  We now basically take back anything we said about Japan "beating" the virus, especially anything about masks which turned out to be largely a red herring all along.  Japan had lots and lots of cases, even with low testing, but very few deaths and essentially no excess deaths, most likely due to low obesity and prior immunity from related coronaviruses common in East Asia.  That is a far better explanation than masks or ingenuity.  Their two worst waves so far both occurred in 2021, and they also had quite the surge in RSV in 2021 as well, despite a whopping 98% mask compliance.  Otherwise though, we still praise Japan for avoiding a hard lockdown, or even any serious mandates prior to 2021.  The virus was always destined to become endemic, and on some level they seem to be accepting that despite their initial elimination strategy.