Peter Skurkiss writes at American Thinker One reason for the push for COVID vaccination may be to eliminate a potential control group.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

There are a number of reasons to explain the intense push from the Biden administration and the government medical bureaucracy to get people to take the COVID vaccine. From a wide search of the information available, I find it hard to believe that the actual health of people is one of the reasons.

For example, why demand that people with natural immunity get vaccinated? And why insist on vaccinating children when their risk of serious effects from the virus is minuscule? It make no scientific sense, especially when the vaccine itself can cause serious health issues for the young.

This brings up one of the less talked about reasons behind the vaccination mania. It’s to eliminate a possible control group of non-vaccinated people to which the vaccinated can be compared. Let me explain.

From the highest levels of the government to the public health authorities like the WHO, FDA, and CDC to professional medical groups (American Medical Association, etc.) to the corporate media, the vaccines have been heralded as safe and effective. Already, the health authorities and the medical establishment have had their reputations sullied with their wrong-headed advice on stopping the virus via lockdowns, mask-wearing, and social distancing.

And the number of deaths from the Wuhan virus did not come close to matching their early projections even when the actual COVID deaths were greatly inflated.

Now it’s down to the vaccines. They already have egg on their faces due to their earlier pronouncements. Now they’re desperate that people never find out about the possible damage these inadequately tested vaccines may be inflicting on humanity.

There are already clues that the vaccines are causing many near-immediate adverse effects. Credible scientists, immunologists, and doctors are also saying even more vaccine damage could surface down the road. This is because the man-made engineered spike protein in the vaccine causes the body to produce more of it, and this toxic protein compromises the immune system as well as weakens other aspects of the body.

The thing about long-term effects, however, is that their cause may not be clear cut. For example, say a vaccinated person dies of a heart attack two years from now. The death is recorded as a heart attack. But the fatal heart attack might have been brought on by the spike protein acting over time. It’s the same with other causes of death and the development of diseases like Parkinson’s and so on. This picture is muddled. So can blame be affixed to the vaccine if justified?

Yes. It can be determined statistically, but a control group is needed.

It’s done by comparing how a sampling of those vaccinated fared compared to a sample of those who weren’t. The general statistical approach would be to take a large random sample from the millions who were vaccinated. Call this the experimental group. A control group would also be needed. It would consists of an equal number of randomly selected people from all those who were not vaccinated. Then a comparison is made of how these two groups performed relative to each other at various intervals of time — say, one year, two years, five years, and so on — in terms of mortality and other health factors.

It should be noted that both the experimental and the control groups will have a mix of people. They will be of various ages, both sexes, races, pre-conditions, etc. But if they’re randomly selected and the sample size is large, these differences balance out, meaning that the groups can be statistically compared.

Such a statistical analysis won’t tell if any specific person’s heart attack was due to the vaccine. But it will show whether or not the vaccinated population had a higher incidence of heart failure compared to the unvaccinated. That is, if the vaccine had no adverse effect on the heart, then both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated group would have the same rate of heart failure. This is vital public health information, is it not?

It’s also exactly what the powers-that-be do not want.

They fear that the vaccinated group will have a statistically significant higher mortality as well as rates of serious health conditions down the road than the unvaccinated. If so, this will expose the lies, deceptions, and incompetence of medical establishment, Big Pharma, and much of the political class. And if the critics of the COVID vaccines are correct, this will be a butcher’s bill none of them want to face.

To conclude, if just about everyone gets vaccinated, there can be no control group to make the comparison. Hence, the push is for maximum vaccinations.

Of course, the establishment has other ways to muddy the waters even if a control group could be assembled. Public health authorities are the central collection point for data. They can have the data collected (or not collected) in such a way so as to make a comparison difficult, if not impossible. But since these people are sincerely interested in the public’s health and guided by impartial science, they would never do such a thing just to save face…or would they?

 Footnote: Not Only Comparing Safety, But Also Effectiveness

It will also be important to compare those with immunity after infection without vaccines, and those vaccinated.  Again it is Sweden blacklisted from media attention, despite their success fighting Covid by trusting the citizenry rather than regarding them as enemies to be controlled.  An update comes from unmasked at substack Why Does No One Ever Talk About Sweden Anymore? Excerpts with my bolds.

“Experts” and the media declared Sweden was the world’s cautionary tale, a dangerous outlier who shunned The New Science™ of masks and lockdowns and stuck to established public health principles and pre-pandemic planning.

Over much of 2020 and into 2021, Sweden was persistently criticized by the media and on Twitter arguments due to comparisons to their neighbors, a standard curiously not applicable to most other countries around the world. Yet as we’ve progressed further into 2021, those same media outlets have suddenly gone quiet as their chosen victors have flailed unsuccessfully against ever increasing outbreaks.

So let’s see what’s transpired recently which resulted in the deafening silence, and examine what that means for The Science™, shall we?

[Note that Sweden began vaccinations when they became available this year, and has achieved 50% with two jabs, but over 75% of the vulnerable age and co-morbidies cohorts.  Consistent with previous policies, this was without coercion, so there will be many Swedes trusting in their immune systems without being induced by vaccines. The discussion below compares Sweden with Israel who vaccinated everyone.]

Concerning pandemic death rates, Sweden now ranks 40th. Eleven months later, they went from 12th to 40th. Peru, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, Belgium, Italy, Mexico, Croatia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Poland, Chile, Spain, Romania, Uruguay, Portugal, France, South Africa all rank ahead of Sweden. Nearly every one of them has tried masks and lockdowns and to this point it’s resulted in a “net failure” in terms of “death and suffering” compared to Sweden.

Oh and by the way, here’s excess mortality in Sweden since 2017 according to EUROMOMO:

That’s right, there’s only been a few weeks since the initial wave last spring where Sweden’s seen a “substantial increase” above normal ranges, and they’ve been at or near baseline for almost all of 2021. I wonder how many people around the world are aware of that.

It’s the same story seen in Los Angeles County, where hilariously timed and completely useless vaccine passport policies were just announced. The overwhelming majority of people are so hopelessly gaslit by media propaganda that they still actually believe that masks and closures matter, despite reality directly contradicting their assumptions.

Israel & Sweden

Standing in stark contrast to Sweden, Israel has been a media darling for doing exactly what they’re told by the groupthink mafia. They’ve vaccinated as aggressively and repeatedly as anywhere on earth, and they’ve had a seemingly endless series of mask mandates and fines for non-compliance.

As a result, The Wall Street Journal credited Israel’s commitment to mask wearing last fall with bringing cases down to low levels…only to see cases skyrocket higher immediately afterwards.

Sweden’s currently averaging about 90 cases per million. Israel’s averaging 1,218. That’s a lot worse! In fact, it’s 1,253% worse than Sweden.

Now, it’s very likely Sweden will see another increase over the fall and winter, just as they did last year, but uh…that’s kinda the point isn’t it? The increases happen in waves, regardless of supposed “mitigation” efforts. And again, Israel has been repeatedly and endlessly praised for their success. Sweden is a “disaster” and a “renegade.” Yet Israel’s recorded 13,279 cases per 100,000 since they started counting, the 11th highest rate in the world, while Sweden’s recorded 11,111 cases per 100,000.

But that doesn’t matter, because Israel’s done what they’re told, and Sweden hasn’t. There are no masks, no vaccine passports, no draconian business closures. They have a “consistent and sustainable” approach that’s led to…fewer confirmed infections than countries like Israel.

Connor Harris explains in his City Journal article Try a Dose of Skepticism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Ivermectin may or may not work against Covid-19, but media coverage of the drug has been sneering, inaccurate—and revealing.

“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” read a recent viral tweet warning readers away from using a certain medication to treat Covid-19. The tone of affectedly folksy condescension would be expected from any of thousands of Twitter-addicted progressive journalists, but less so from the official account of the United States Food and Drug Administration. Perhaps even more surprising, the tweet linked to a warning advising readers not to take a drug, ivermectin, that has been used in humans for decades and is a standard Covid-19 treatment in much of the world.

The media’s recent reporting on ivermectin is a fitting sequel to their reporting on hydroxychloroquine near the beginning of the pandemic—but not, as received opinion would have it, because both are tales of red-state yokels duped into taking poisonous phony remedies. As in the earlier case, media coverage of ivermectin exemplifies how the liberal political class’s bias, and its confusion of respect for science with blind trust in a scientific establishment, impairs their skepticism and their capacity to appraise complex scientific questions.

Ivermectin is one of several derivatives of a family of compounds first isolated in the 1970s from soil bacteria in Japan. The compounds are highly toxic to invertebrates but have few effects on mammals, making them excellent treatments for many diseases caused by parasitic worms. Though ivermectin is more commonly used in livestock in First World nations where human parasites are rare, it is widely given to humans for internal use elsewhere. Distribution of ivermectin in tropical Africa has virtually eliminated diseases such as river blindness, a success that won the drug’s discoverers a share of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015.

Ivermectin, then, has long been used in humans—and it is entirely reasonable to think that it could be effective against Covid-19.

It may be surprising that an antiparasitic medication might work against viruses, but such surprises are common in medicine: as another example, the psychotropic drug fluvoxamine, used to treat OCD and depression, has shown positive results against Covid-19 in multiple trials, including one large international collaboration. Ivermectin was shown to have antiviral effects in laboratory settings in 2012, when one study found that it protected cell cultures from infection by flaviviruses, which include the viruses that cause yellow fever and dengue. Interest in ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment was sparked by a study at Monash University in Australia, which found that the drug could virtually eliminate SARS-CoV-2 from cell cultures within two days, albeit at very high concentrations.

Studies in cell cultures, though, can establish only that a drug might work; to decide that it does work requires human studies. The evidence base in this regard is ultimately inconclusive but suggests that ivermectin could provide a meaningful benefit.

Media attention to ivermectin is largely thanks to a group of doctors who call themselves the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance. Pierre Kory, one of FLCCC’s founders, has advocated ivermectin treatment in several high-profile public appearances, including testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last December and a more recent interview in June on the popular podcast DarkHorse, hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. FLCCC puts out continually revised protocols that include ivermectin as a main component, as well as other drugs with varying degrees of empirical support.

FLCCC’s exact protocols have never been tested in randomized trials, but there are some weaker forms of evidence in their favor; many other doctors who use FLCCC or similar protocols have claimed vast improvement over typical rates of death and hospitalization. Overseas, influential doctors such as the chairman of the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association have called for widespread ivermectin use, and the drug is a standard treatment in much of Latin America, among other areas.

Still, given the drug’s relatively low risk profile, it may be reasonable to try ivermectin against Covid-19 despite the ambiguous evidence of benefits. And in any case, the sneering descriptions of the drug as an assuredly useless livestock de-wormer and the wild exaggerations of its dangers—both close parallels with the news coverage of hydroxychloroquine in spring 2020—cannot be justified.

Liberals have no monopoly on gullibility or lazy journalism, but the biased coverage of ivermectin springs from one of the worst pathologies of liberal discourse in particular: conflation of respect for science with fealty to established scientific institutions. A “pro-science” disposition has long been integral to American liberals’ self-conception (a ubiquitous yard sign reads, in part, “In this house, we believe science is real”); it grew especially strong during the George W. Bush years as a reaction to the administration’s stance on global warming and alliance with the religious Right.

But most Americans are scientists neither by training nor by temperament, and “pro-science” politics usually calcifies into blind trust in a few politically congenial authorities—such as universities and government health agencies, which have enjoyed high levels of liberal confidence throughout the pandemic despite such actions as reversing longstanding advice on face masks based on a dubious judgment call.

Conflating science with the scientific establishment not only corrodes the capacity for skepticism but also helps questionable or corrupt actions by authorities escape scrutiny. The hullabaloo over ivermectin poisoning, for example, far exceeds the attention given to another questionable treatment pushed not by right-wing hucksters but by the FDA itself: remdesivir, an antiviral produced by the pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences that is still the only Covid-19 treatment with full FDA approval.

The FDA’s approval of remdesivir in October 2020 was based on only three trials, one neutral and two showing only moderate shortenings of hospital stays. A week before the approval, a far larger trial sponsored by the WHO had found that remdesivir did not reduce mortality, leading the WHO to advise against the drug in November. (The New York Times report on the WHO trial, incidentally, gave ample space to a fair presentation of criticism of the trial from defenders of remdesivir, a marked difference from the tone of most recent ivermectin coverage.) Furthermore, remdesivir seems to cause significant harms to the kidneys in many cases: a “disproportionality analysis” of VigiBase, for instance, found that reports for remdesivir were 20 times as likely to mention kidney failure as reports for other Covid-19 drugs.

The FDA’s full approval of remdesivir contrasted with its summary dismissal of ivermectin suggests, at the least, a double standard.

The oddity of the FDA’s remdesivir approval received some mainstream coverage, but it came nowhere near the level of media saturation reached by the reports of Mississippians taking horse de-wormer. It’s not hard to understand why: the horse de-wormer stories gave some readers a delicious opportunity to feel smugly superior to their political enemies—a temptation that few of us find easy to resist. But the tale of remdesivir presents a more threatening specter, which journalists and politics junkies would do well to confront: the possibility that a scientific authority might be wrong.

Treatment protocols with HCQ or Ivermectin + nutritional supplements fill the the need for early home treatment.

David Zweig wrote in the Atlantic Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

From the start, COVID hospitalizations have served as a vital metric for tracking the risks posed by the disease. Last winter, this magazine described it as “the most reliable pandemic number,” while Vox quoted the cardiologist Eric Topol as saying that it’s “the best indicator of where we are.” On the one hand, death counts offer finality, but they’re a lagging signal and don’t account for people who suffered from significant illness but survived. Case counts, on the other hand, depend on which and how many people happen to get tested. Presumably, hospitalization numbers provide a more stable and reliable gauge of the pandemic’s true toll, in terms of severe disease. But a new, nationwide study of hospitalization records, released as a preprint today (and not yet formally peer reviewed), suggests that the meaning of this gauge can easily be misinterpreted—and that it has been shifting over time.

If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. How many patients fall into each category has been a topic of much speculation. In August, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System decided to find out.

The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent.

In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

One of the important implications of the study, these experts say, is that the introduction of vaccines strongly correlates with a greater share of COVID hospital patients having mild or asymptomatic disease. “It’s underreported how well the vaccine makes your life better, how much less sick you are likely to be, and less sick even if hospitalized,” Snyder said. “That’s the gem in this study.”

But the study also demonstrates that hospitalization rates for COVID, as cited by journalists and policy makers, can be misleading, if not considered carefully. Clearly many patients right now are seriously ill. We also know that overcrowding of hospitals by COVID patients with even mild illness can have negative implications for patients in need of other care. At the same time, this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two. “As we look to shift from cases to hospitalizations as a metric to drive policy and assess level of risk to a community or state or country,” Doron told me, referring to decisions about school closures, business restrictions, mask requirements, and so on, “we should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.”

Another Problem: Can Hospitals Covid Numbers Be Trusted?

Gateway Pundit published a pertinent article Missouri COVID Whistleblower: Hospitals are Lying to the public about COVID… and I can prove it.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Josh Snider worked in facilities management at Missouri Baptist Medical Center or “MBMC”, “I watched our hospital administrators say in the media that our intensive care units were overflowing with COVID patients, at 98% capacity, knowing that it was a complete and utter lie.”

Snider relates that the MBMC hospital, part of a larger $5.5 billion annual network within the Barnes Jewish hospital system in St. Louis, Missouri, actually shut down three out of four floors of intensive care during COVID because they were UNUSED.

“And even after shutting down three-fourths of our ICU capacity, they were still never more than 50% full with that drastically reduced overall capacity. These medical systems that are saying they are overrun with COVID patients are likely LYING TO THE PUBLIC,” Snider said.

Snider provided documentary proof of the COVID case load of the MBMC system, whose COVID patients do not track national trends, and where the number of COVID patients in ICU were, at many points, a single, solitary person.

“I would have to adjust the airflow in some of the rooms of people in the ICU with COVID, they were fine. I believe in COVID, I know it’s serious, but I also personally saw people who were fine, they had a terminal case of boredom. I spoke with these people and they weren’t sick at all, they felt fine but were told they had to stay there. Many brought their PlayStations with them to waste away the days with video games instead.”

This chart was INTERNAL and distributed to employees of MBMC. In it, you can see that the number of COVID patients in critical care was always under 20. The hospital shut down 3 of 4 ICU wings, and in the remaining one had the capacity for 60 beds/patients. They never came close to being at capacity for COVID ICU patients.

These charts, provided by Snider, show that there was a relatively normal track for COVID infections at the MBMC Center, an acute care facility in St. Louis. Even during periods of infection spikes in the national population, those spikes are not found in the hospital data. As well, the bottom line showing serious cases of COVID requiring intensive care remain significantly small and reduced throughout the months of the pandemic.

Here is the chart generated from information submitted to the US Department of Health and Human Services, as published by the Gannett News Service:

INTERNAL: on August 18, 2021, MBMC said they had 19 COVID patients in ICU.

EXTERNAL: on August 20, 2021, MBMC told the public they had 35.3 COVID patients in ICU.

THE PUBLIC NUMBERS ARE OFF FROM THE INTERNAL REPORTS OF COVID PATIENTS IN THE ICU BY ALMOST 100%

Snider has provided his personal statement, documentary evidence, and clear data discrepancies that all suggest that hospitals are not telling the public the truth about the COVID pandemic.

“The real flu season in the hospital was always more serious than COVID has been,” Snider said. “Flu season in a hospital is very challenging, and even the tamest flu season in years past was still worse than COVID has been so far. The people who have been suffering and sadly dying are clearly people who are hundreds of pounds overweight, and people with multiple other comorbidities like stage 4 cancer. I’m not a Doctor, but the response and panic to this virus is clearly wildly disproportionate to reality.”