NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[CogDiss 1188X]

Agree on the garbage in, garbage out situation on the number of covid+ cases, as well as death counts.

It’s a hell of a way to run a pandemic if you’re trying to be guided by reality instead of panic. Since I assume they’re not ignorant of data issues, it looks like they want to generate fear. Early on, the touting of the Gates-WHO 3.4% case fatality rate, without properly putting it in context and pointing out that it was likely a gross overestimation, was a strong indication that they were pushing panic instead of a reasonable response.

The incentives to skew the numbers by hospitals coding as many covid patients as possible seem pretty strong. $13,000 per covid patient, $39,000 per ventilator patient, apparently. Impossible that the patient numbers aren’t significantly affected by that. Have respiratory symptoms bad enough to make you go to the hospital? Another $13,000 covid patient. Especially since you don’t have to forge a positive test result to collect cash.

Not that anyone would be so low as to commit fraud. It’s more an issue of incentives and following guidance.

Most hospital administrators are going to take advantage of all that cash lying around. Take a sociologist or an economist to lunch and ask her about it. Well, maybe in a couple of years.

Add in faulty tests that skew to false positives and one can really get a panic going, especially in the important early days of the outbreak:

Interpretation: The high false discovery rate that results, when prevalence is low, from false positive rates typical of RT-PCR assays of RNA viruses raises questions about the usefulness of mass testing; and indicates that across a broad range of likely prevalences, positive test results are more likely to be wrong than are negative results, contrary to public health advice about SARS-CoV-2 testing.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20080911v1

Imagine that — truth contrary to public health advice. How does something like that happen? A real head scratcher.

The inaccurate death certificate issue is definitely another way the numbers are skewed. The new covid-specific guidance on death certificates is completely suspect on its face (going against prior practice in general) and will lead to gross overcounting.

Not only that, but there are doctors complaining about being pressured to include covid on the death certificate, presumably for the money.

I guess this is what Dr. Birx meant when she said they were going to “take a liberal approach to mortality numbers.”

Btw, hope you are doing well. Your relative absence had me wondering if you had taken a vacation to Belmarsh and couldn’t find your way back.