Please follow my twitter account @jsm2334 for more recent commentaries and threads on COVID-19 topics

Covid-19 Data Science
Finding the signal in the noise of Covid-19
Reporting and balanced evaluation of research results, data sets, applications and models, and commentaries related to Covid-19 and its underlying virus, SARS-Cov-2
How can excess deaths be higher in 2021 than 2020 if vaccines had any benefit?
This is a good question I see many ask. Some conclude from this question that vaccines must have been completely ineffective, or perhaps...
Explanation of "Healthy Vaccinee Effect" and Confounding
Healthy vaccinee effect (HVE) has become frequent topic of discussion these days. I am glad to see this, as I have been talking about...
Tracking Vaccine Effectiveness in an Evolving Pandemic, Countering Misleading Hot Takes and Epidemiological Fallacies
I have a paper soon to appear in American Journal of Epidemiology on this topic, but today I gave a talk on this topic for a group of...
What does USA Group Term Life Insurance Report say about Young Adult Excess Deaths in Fall 2021?
Many people are interesting in looking at excess deaths these days, and for the past 10 months I've seen numerous people in social media...
Evaluating Claims of Excess Cancer Deaths in the USA During the Pandemic.
An anonymous, apparently very experienced and prolific analytical systems modeler who is heavily followed on twitter, @EthicalSkeptic,...
Evaluating USA state-level excess death levels vs. total vaccination rates during the pandemic
There is a great deal of interest in assessing the individual and population-level effects of vaccination on various outcomes during the...
How durable is immune protection vs. severe Omicron-based infections after 3rd shot mRNA boosters?
Introduction In winter and spring 2021, hope was high that mRNA vaccines were going to be able to bring herd immunity and end the...
Do the recent 80k pages of Pfizer documents released really show vaccine efficacy was only 12%?
This week Pfizer released a new stack of documents related to the Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, with >80,000 pages of material released. ...
Does McCullough's paper really "establish a mechanistic framework" for mRNA vaccine harm?
Peter McCullough & colleagues have just published a paper in Food and Chemical Toxicology that posits biological mechanisms underlying...
New CDC report on myocarditis after infection or vaccination from health systems covering 20% of USA
Myocarditis has been validated as a minority harm risk of mRNA vaccination. This risk was discovered early in 2021, and was added to the...
Masks: Paper shows 2020 mandates reduced spread, but that doesn't mean they are the right policy now
I have collaborated with a research team at PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) along with University of Pennsylvania...
Why it was infeasible for the phase 3 vaccine trials to use "all cause deaths" as the endpoint
I have seen numerous people claim that the placebo-controlled, phase 3 vaccine trials that used symptomatic infections as the primary...
UK death data artifacts: "Stragglers" who delay vaccine doses a select group with higher death risk
The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) has released all-cause death data for England split out by age and vaccination groups. Its...
Paper demonstrating Omicron's immune escape vs. vaccination and previous infection
Biological researchers in Switzerland released a preprint in late December providing very useful information about the immune escape...
Vaccine insights from English population-wide COVID/non-COVID deaths split by vaccination status/age
Summary of Key points: The UK ONS posted data on all COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 deaths in England from Jan1 through Oct31, 2021, split out...
Correcting Berenson's optimally wrong take on vaccination and hospitalization risk from JAMA study
Alex Berenson is again misinterpreting/misrepresenting scientific data, this time saying this JAMA study shows vaccines “don’t stop Covid...
Response to Steve Kirsch's ad hominem attack, and clarifying the key sleight of hand in his argument
Here I am pulling out an Appendix to a recent blog post that responds to Steve Kirsch's substack post he wrote in response to that blog...
Renz "Whisteblower" data from CMS falsely claims death rate higher for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine than flu
Back in October, I write a blog post responding to the lawyer Renz's "whistleblower report" claiming that The USA government's Center for...
Texas A&M talk: Quantitative issues causing confusion for both skeptics and leaders in the pandemic
Last Friday gave a covid webinar at Texas A&M discussing various issues in the pandemic in which quantitative nuances have confused...







