Thanks for sharing the wisdom and perspective of someone actually working in the field. I've got friends working at the Cleveland Clinic who are describing awful conditions and staff at a breaking point. It's unseemly to see posters here crying about a couple hours of inconvenience during an optional entertainment activity while hospital staffs are drowning in sick and dying patients.

Its amazing how conditions vary region to region, state to state and even hospital to hospital.

My wife and niece are both nurses in north Jersey.

My wife is a visiting nurse, my niece works on a floor.

Both have seen increases in the number of covid cases, but in their
cases, the increases are manageable.

Other places like Newark and Trenton are having a lot more problems.

Based on NJ's Health Commissioner ,there's roughly a 45% /65% spilt between
vaccinated and unvaccinated in hospitalizations.

But a much higher percentage of the unvaxed, who are hospitalized, end up in the ICU or on a vent then someone who is vaccinated.

Even if an unvaccinated person does end up in the ICU, they have a much faster recovery then in the past.
There is also, a lot less mortality thanks to the severity on Omicron and therapeutics.

N.J. has started separating covid hospitalizations based on whether a
person went to the hospital with covid symptoms or for something like a heart attack and tested positive.

Pretty much a 50/50 split.

What's also an issue is that only about 17% of young kids are getting vaccinated, even if their parents are.

At least in NJ we were seeing hospitalizations starting to drop.

Sorry, should have been clearer "What's also an issue that was raised by NJ's Health Commissioner is that only . . . ".

That percentage is staying pretty consistent.

I didn't see that interview with Bannon, but what I have read from Dr. Malone is that he feels that in some age cohorts the vaccine is more likely to do damage from side effects (e.g., serious myocarditis in young men) than to protect against serious illness. I suspect that the Atlantic is either misquoting him or quoting him totally out of context. One of his major points recently has been trying to get his readers to understand the difference between relative risk and absolute risk. This makes a big different in how you assess the risk of individuals for serious cases of Covid19. My major point is that all voices need to be heard on this subject and let the individual make his or her own decision. For me, I've been vaxxed and boosted with Moderna's vaccine. I'm in an age group for which the evidence is pretty clear that that's the prudent decision.

Which quotes do you think are misquoted and out of context?

At the bottom of this article it says that The Atlantic's covid coverage is sponsored by a foundation associated with Johnson & Johnson. I am genuinely curious as to whether or not this leads to biased reporting. I think it's fair to say that it is in J&J's best interest to call someone like Dr. Malone misinformation.

I don't understand what this means. "His voice needs to be heard" -- why? And through what mediums? Clearly his voice is being heard, as you're telling us about it. He's also appeared on tons of podcasts; the problem is that in the process he keeps saying demonstrably false things.

Some examples:

-- He tweeted an article claiming the vaccine causes 2 deaths for every 3 it saves. That study has been debunked and ultimately retracted due to flawed methodology.
-- He claimed spike proteins generated by the vaccine are "toxic to cells"
-- He claimed those spike proteins cause irreparable harm to vital organs in children
-- He's repeated an easily debunked conspiracy theory that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have not been approved in the US
-- He claimed in July that the vaccine causes the virus to become more transmissible and vaccinated people create a risk to the unvaccinated.
-- He repeatedly mentions a misinterpretation of data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System cited by Tucker Carlson indicating "an explosion of deaths from the vaccine" that there's no evidence of.
-- He claimed a state in India "crushed Covid" using ivermectin, and then reached an agreement with the United States not to share that information.
-- He claimed vaccinated people are 4.5x more likely to catch Omicron. Here's he's just failing basic math and looking at cases, without comparing the size of the unvaccinated population to the size of the vaccinated population.

It's very unclear to me what you mean when you say that he "needs to be heard by the general public" when he's a dissenting voice, in a context where there's much greater medical consensus supporting a different viewpoint, and he has such a long history of dubious claims. How does one decide what it means to be heard by the general public, how the message is disseminated, and which dissenting opinions get that treatment?

I also noticed that your edited out the only specific example (myocarditis) from your post. I assume that's because you realized that mRNA vaccines increase the risk by 4x, where as Covid infections increase the risk by 40x.

So very specifically, are the risks Malone cites and what data supports them? I get you're much more interested in your meta critique of the media, but it's not clear to me that media outlets largely ignoring him at this point isn't the right choice. What's the case they shouldn't? I think he's just out there saying what a whole bunch of people want to hear, and so people like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, et al who immediately benefit from telling their audience what they want to hear amplify a credentialed Doctor who is willing to say those things. Even if he's wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/health/mrna-vaccine.html

Good article on the origins of mRNVA research in today's NYT. FWIW no mention of Malone, however Kariko is referenced about a dozen times.

Dovetailing off my previous comments is this Muncie Star article on the state of our state's healthcare leader, IU Health. Good summary reflecting what we see at work.

https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/health/2022/01/13...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/01/24/robert-m... /

Definitely feels like we are past the peak. Good news.

I've listened to maybe 2 or 3 episodes of Joe Rogan and they were all about aliens, but I keep seeing clips of what he says on social media and I gotta say his suggestion that people eat healthy and exercise is ridiculous. I ate like garbage in the OU dining halls for years and I feel fine.

Kennedy Jr joined Malone in DC this past weekend. He's been an anti-vaxxer pre-dating COVID. Didn't know until today that's he's married to Cheryl Hines. Have to wonder if her political/social viewpoints align with her real-life husband or more with her Curb Your Enthusiasm husband (or is it ex?). Can't be both, I wouldn't think.