Article: Moon of Alabama - It's time to say goodbye--- in which we debunk a "debunking"

"3. An immense majority (95%) of fatal evolutions happen in old and frail individuals with premorbidities, with an average age of death at or above 80 years old."

Bernhard responded with:

MoA: "That claim is again an outright lie"

I'm going to be charitable and assume that Bernhard's mistake here is to misread some admittedly ambiguous wording.

He calls the claim "an outright lie", and proceeds to try and debunk the idea that 95% of Covid19 deaths are over 80 years old, but that is not what Dr Jeanmonod said. The "95%" here refers to having serious comorbidities, not the age. But, as I said, I will cede that this conclusion is ambiguously worded.

Of course, if Bernhard had bothered to tackle the entire article - and not just 6 of the 8 bullet-pointed conclusions - he would know that. Here is the full quote from the body of the text (with sources included):

"For example in Italy, 95% of the fatalities happened for patients suffering from one up to three or more pre-existing morbidities, and the mean age of the deceased patients was 82. Such a mean fatality age is very close to the average life expectancy of developed, e.g. European countries (83.6 years for Switzerland)."

As you can see, there is no ambiguity here. The "95%" here refers to pre-existing medical conditions, not the ages.

That the vast majority of alleged Covid19 deaths have serious comorbidities is not just limited to the figures from Italy - it has been shown to be the case in UK and the US as well. In fact basically everywhere.

Bernhard does make a claim that these co-morbidities don't cause death and the virus does. This is unsourced conjecture, and is not in any way verifiable.

What IS verifiable is that government officials all around the world have gone out of their way to point out how loose their definition of "covid death" is, that it has already lead to huge over-counts.

It is also true that the average age of those who allegedly die from/with covid19 is over 80 (you can see a list of average age by country here). Bernhard does not refute this, because he can't.

Summary: His claim this statement is "a lie" is based on either an accidental misreading of an ambiguously worded sentence, or deliberate quote-mining to take the author's words out of context. Either way, the original claim is demonstrably true, and sourced to official reports.

4. ON T CELLS, HERD IMMUNITY AND THE "SECOND WAVE"

In the original article for OffG, Dr Jeanmonod wrote:

"4. Antibody studies, cross immunization with other corona strains and the completion of the death toll curve in many countries are strong evidence that the human population is developing herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2. In this context, a severe "second wave" for SARS-CoV-2 is improbable. We may rather expect a new cold episode from it just like every year, but of regular or even weak intensity thanks to the gained herd immunity."

Bernhard's response to this is flawed in a few ways. Firstly:

MoA: "Antibody prevalence even in hard hit place [sic] like New York City is way below the 80% or so that would be needed for some kind of "herd immunity". In the U.S. and Europe antibody prevalence is in total way less than 10%. The bay area for example has only some 2%. Is the U.S. ready to give 10 times more lives than the 266,000 who have already died of Covid-19 to achieve a only potentially temporary herd immunity?"

His figure of 80% exposure for herd immunity is old, and based on flawed modelling which assumed there was no pre-existing mucosal and cellular immunity, this has been shown to be incorrect.

The Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) for any disease is always, at best, a rough estimate and Sars-Cov-2 is no exception. It was stated as 80% back in April, but back then they said the UK would get 500,000 deaths and the IFR was 3.4%. Sweden worked on the model of 60% HIT. An article in Nature suggested it was closer 50%. Another model put it at 43%.

More recent preprints have suggested the herd immunity threshold is closer to 20% or even as low as 10%.

The point is the HIT is not nailed down, and Jeanmonod's statement is backed up by scientific studies which Bernhard ignores.

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