Dr Matt’s Newsletter February 18th 2023 – “Better Late than Never” and “Better with Age”
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
This week’s newsletter has two news flashes hot off the Presses: Two days ago a major medical journal “finally” published that natural immunity is superior to covid vaccine-immunity, and three days ago a health alert from the Florida Department of Public Health warned about a 4400% increase in serious vaccine adverse events that were reported during the covid vaccine rollout in 2021 in Florida. These two research reports are the reason for the “Better Late than Never” title above.
The journal article on natural immunity is described by Democrat RFK Jr, and the Florida Department of health is headed by Republican Ron Desantis and his surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. Even though they make an odd couple, one a Democrat and the other Republican, if they joined forces I am sure they could win the next presidential election 😊.
Today’s newsletter sections include:
Community building and Music of the Week: A Waltz Ball March 11th, with waltz teaching workshops on February 28th, hosted by my patients Todd and Migle. For the music and humor I provide a reprise of the “Little Tramp” waltz from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush”.
Inspiration of the Week – The story of my hospice patient “Mrs S”. Her spirit moved on after 2 years in hospice, but at 101 years old she was a gracious “survivor” who lived through covid-19, long-term social isolation, and did it with grace and style, hence the “Better With Age” title to this newsletter.
Research of the week – Two news flashes: Democrat RFK Jr describes a major medical journal that “Finally” publishes a study on natural immunity, and Joseph Ladapo and Republican Ron Desantis issue an alert on covid-19 vaccines from the Florida Department of Health - the graph of this increase they provide is worth 1000 words.
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Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
Community Building and Music of the Week: Waltz Ball on March 11th, workshops starting February 28th
Two parents in my practice, Todd Borzych and Migle Gineityte, are the main hosts and instructors for the first ever Strauss Waltz Ball. Email me if interested and I can put you in touch with them, or you can just buy tickets and sign up for classes on their website, below.
Here is their promo: “On Saturday, March 11 2023, come experience a real Viennese Ball at an elegant metro accessible venue in McLean, VA! Dress up and come to the prestigious Capital One Hall for an elegant evening of dancing on a 2500 square foot floating wood dance floor in the first ever Tyson’s Strauss Ball!”
They are also teaching a set of lessons starting February 28th to prepare people who are new to waltzing. Todd and Migle have been teaching, performing and attending Viennese Waltz Balls for twenty years.
Here is the link to the ball:
http://dancesportendurance.com/tysons-strauss-ball/
And here is the link to the preparatory camp:
http://dancesportendurance.com/prepare-for-the-ball/
Here is some inspiration for you - and a dash of humor. Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp waltz from the movie, “The Gold Rush”, previously in my newsletter from October 12th along with various examples of waltzes in the “Music of the Week” section. I know Charlie Chaplin makes it look extremely easy, even with no belt to hold up his pants and a dog at his heels, but some dance lessons would be wise for the rest of us...
And special surprise of the week - Dr Matt Playing Trumpet with the Capital Quicksteps Quadrille Orchestra in the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park.
This clip is short, but we usually played for at least 2 hours of dances:
Inspiration of the Week – “Mrs S” a gracious survivor of the first order - Better with age.
Let me tell you a story about Mrs. S who is one of my favorite people - along with my many private practice patients :-).
Her story exemplifies things that my patients and I have talked about over the past three years: how elderly people and people with fragile health are more impacted by social isolation as a “public health” approach, how the vaccine can stimulate your immune system to give a false positive covid test result, how you learn that most people have mild or no symptoms when you do mass screening tests, and also how wise and resilient elderly people can be.
When I met her she was 99 years old and she was somewhat traumatized by having been isolated from friends and even other residents of her facility for an extended period, and they had just been allowed out of their rooms for the first time in seven months, which was a great relief to her. Unfortunately, this was short-lived because they were testing all the residents every week, and as soon as they got a positive result everyone would go back to their rooms again. One of her regular sayings was “I just sit here all day with the TV”, said with a sad but also slightly humorous expression. Eventually they dropped this rule because otherwise no one would have ever been out of their room, even to this day, because when you test over 100 people at once, someone is always testing positive.
Although she was intelligent, wise, and mature for her age (Ha ha just a little joke: she was 99 years old!), she also was anxious and sad at times. She had a beautiful smile and brightened up quickly when visitors arrived. For that reason, I started visiting her regularly and saw her at least 50 times over nearly two years that she was in hospice care. Her hospice nurse, the facility staff, and I did our best to give her social support. After six months in hospice our hospice chaplain and hospice social worker were allowed to restart in-person visits, and this also helped her considerably. Ironically, the main reason she was referred to hospice in the first place was officially stated as being a decline caused by the very social isolation that was supposed to protect her. She had been saying she did not want to live any more in a variety of ways, developed abdominal pain and inability to eat which was diagnosed as a “gall bladder infection” and was losing weight.
I was the first one on our hospice team to see her, which is unusual. I was asked to see her to see if we could come up with a diagnosis. I said “At age 99 none of the major organs are working very well, so we can just pick one that we think is the main weak link and go with that”. Not surprisingly, once we started making regular visits her health stabilized, and once activities restarted in summer 2021, she actually improved some and chronic skin breakdowns on her legs healed completely after being open and draining for over a year.
Mrs S. had been married for decades but her husband and her seven siblings had all died years before I met her. She and her husband never had any children, and she had no family in the area. However, she was very close with two special neighbors who served as her medical powers of attorney. She had also been very close with her seven siblings and husband, and when I left her room, I would always say “I’ll be back in a month or so”. She would often smile somewhat sadly and reply: “I shouldn’t say this but I hope I’ll be with my family again before you come back and visit next time”. I heard different versions of this farewell many times, and when I saw her the next time I would say something like “Well, I guess the lord wasn’t quite ready for you yet and you still have to keep us company a bit longer”.
She was one of the first people in the country to get the Covid vaccine, along with the rest of the residents of her facility. However, they were continuing weekly testing of all the residents after they gave them vaccines, and I believe the plan was to continue until two weeks after their second dose, which could take up to two months. When I learned they were still being tested, I had somewhat of a PTSD reaction. I knew that the facility staff were caught up in the “new abnormal” with very little choice due to intense societal pressures to “protect“ their fragile residents. I knew they were working overtime due to many staff leaving at the outset of the “pandemic”, and that the staff who were there showed courage just by coming to work while everyone else stayed at home. So I did not like to make their jobs even more difficult by being an “angry doctor”. However, when I saw that the residents were still being tested en-masse even after the vaccine rollout I got a bit flustered and told multiple people in the facility that the residents and staff were going to keep testing positive and would likely be more likely to test positive after getting the vaccine.
As you might’ve guessed by now, Mrs. S did test positive, two days after her first vaccine dose. Because she was officially “unvaccinated” her positive test would count as a tally against being unvaccinated, statistically speaking. RFK Jr has made this point about adverse effects: if something happens before you are considered “fully vaccinated”, which usually means two weeks after the final dose, you’re counted as unvaccinated. This means that any adverse event or positive test triggered by the vaccine would be skewed statistically to look like the “unvaccinated “ were having these issues more than people who were vaccinated.
Just after she tested positive, I went to see her. One of the facility staff members told me that when the results came back and multiple residents had tested positive, she and the other nurses immediately started talking about what I had said a few days before. I visited Mrs. S several times during her 14 day solitary confinement. She was always gracious and thanked me profusely for coming, with her usual line “I just sit here in front of the TV all day”. I would apologize for wearing my “astronaut suit”. On my first visit in quarantine she had very puzzled look on her face and said, simply “how could I have the virus, I don’t have any symptoms?” I told her, “that’s just the way it is. Anybody can test positive anytime and most people have mild to no symptoms even if they are 99 years old.” We had seen mild and asymptomatic cases repeatedly even before the vaccine rollout.
A month after her quarantine her hundredth birthday was approaching, and our hospice team planned a special visit. She was the baker of her family and would make cakes for all her sibling’s birthdays, with each sibling preferring a different cake: red velvet for one, white chocolate for another, dark chocolate with butter cream frosting, angel food cake, carrot cake, etc. So shortly before her hundredth birthday, in early March 2021, my daughter and I made her favorite cake with fancy decorations, and “99.9” on top of it. Our hospice chaplain, hospice social worker, hospice nurse and myself came to visit. Hospice social workers and chaplains had not been allowed to visit patients for almost a year, so there were smiles all around.
When the facility had a larger birthday celebration on the actual day of her birthday, facility staff stood in as family because her close friends and neighbors were still not allowed to visit - this was almost exactly one year after the beginning of the social isolation policies which started in March 2020. The staff set up a large screen so they could join by “zoom“, but that is not quite the same.
She stayed in hospice another year and a half after her 100th birthday. When she died in the summer of 2022 I was pretty sad, but I knew it was a selfish sadness. A stronger part of me understood that she was extremely happy to join her siblings and other loved ones. They all grew up in a “railroad station town“. I had never heard of this before and she explained that small towns evolved around Railroad stations because of all the people coming and going. These towns faded away as Railroads got supplanted by cars, buses and planes, and her home town no longer existed. However, just like with people who have passed on, the spirit of the town is still with us.
Research of the week – Two News flashes on vaccine adverse effects and the superiority of natural immunity: one from Democrat RFK Jr and one from Republican Ron Desantis and his Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo.
1: ‘Finally’ a major medical journal, “The Lancet” published a large meta-analysis showing that ‘Natural Immunity” is superior to covid vaccine immunity on Thursday Feb 16th, two days ago.
This finding fits well with the research showing increased chance of testing positive on the “covid tests” in people who are vaccinated, which I reviewed in two newsletters - most recently on January 18th. I will include a key graph from that research below.
The new study has more significant findings than just reducing the chance of testing positive, and focuses on natural immunity reducing “severe disease, hospitalization, and death”. Below are some quotes from an article on Children’s Health Defense website about the new study on natural immunity, as well as some direct quotes from RFK Jr:
“The Lancet is finally acknowledging what doctors and scientists have been gaslit for saying for years — that natural immunity provides superior protection to experimental vaccines,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense.
“Only the tsunami of propaganda and censorship from the pharma/government biosecurity cartel and the controlled media persuaded the public that Pfizer and Moderna were better at protecting the human immune system than God and evolution,” he added.
The study found that immunity acquired from infection was often far more robust and consistently waned more slowly than the immunity from two doses of an mRNA vaccine. The researchers found that natural immunity was at least 88.9% effective against severe disease, hospitalization and death for all covid-19 variants 10 months after infection.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-infection-natural-immunity-superior/
2: Florida Department of Health releases health alert about a huge spike in vaccine adverse events on Wednesday February 15th, three days ago.
The graph below is taken from their website, and it tells the story better than words can. However, I also included a few quotes and a picture of the letter Joseph Ladapo wrote to the heads of the CDC and FDA. the second graph is from a study I reviewed in my January 18th newsletter on the increased chance of vaccinated people testing positive - an increase that rises with each dose of vaccine as indicated in the graph.
Some quotes from the Florida Department of Health Website:
“The State Surgeon General is notifying the health care sector and public of a substantial increase in Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports from Florida after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout […] The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign. There is a need for additional unbiased research to better understand the COVID-19 vaccines' short- and long-term effects. The findings in Florida are consistent with various studies that continue to uncover such risks.
https://www.floridahealth.gov/newsroom/2023/02/20230215-updated-health-alert.pr.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
And Finally, pictures of the letter Dr. Ladapo sent to the heads of the CDC and FDA. I featured Dr Ladapo in two prior newsletters, with an extended interview on October 12th,. By an odd coincidence, that newsletter was the same one that featured a variety of waltzes.
