A LOT Of Obesity Is An Inflammatory Autoimmune Disorder

khn  |  There’s a reason soldiers go through basic training before heading into combat: Without careful instruction, green recruits armed with powerful weapons could be as dangerous to one another as to the enemy.

The immune system works much the same way. Immune cells, which protect the body from infections, need to be “educated” to recognize bad guys — and to hold their fire around civilians.

In some covid patients, this education may be cut short. Scientists say unprepared immune cells appear to be responding to the coronavirus with a devastating release of chemicals, inflicting damage that may endure long after the threat has been eliminated.

“If you have a brand-new virus and the virus is winning, the immune system may go into an ‘all hands on deck’ response,” said Dr. Nina Luning Prak, co-author of a January study on covid and the immune system. “Things that are normally kept in close check are relaxed. The body may say, ‘Who cares? Give me all you’ve got.’”

While all viruses find ways to evade the body’s defenses, a growing field of research suggests that the coronavirus unhinges the immune system more profoundly than previously realized.

Some covid survivors have developed serious autoimmune diseases, which occur when an overactive immune system attacks the patient, rather than the virus. Doctors in Italy first noticed a pattern in March 2020, when several covid patients developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the immune systems attacks nerves throughout the body, causing muscle weakness or paralysis. As the pandemic has surged around the world, doctors have diagnosed patients with rare, immune-related bleeding disorders. Other patients have developed the opposite problem, suffering blood clots that can lead to stroke.

All these conditions can be triggered by “autoantibodies” — rogue antibodies that target the patient’s own proteins and cells.

In a report published in October, researchers even labeled the coronavirus “the autoimmune virus.”

“Covid is deranging the immune system,” said John Wherry, director of the Penn Medicine Immune Health Institute and another co-author of the January study. “Some patients, from their very first visit, seem to have an immune system in hyperdrive.”

Promoting ‘Fat Acceptance’ Is As Ludicrous As Promoting ‘Smoker Positivity’

summit.news |  The London Telegraph reports that a study of 100 countries by the World Obesity Federation found that 2.2 million of 2.5 million deaths occurred in countries with high levels of obesity.

The study noted that death rates were discovered to be 10 times higher in nations where more than 50% the population was overweight. 

According to the study, in countries without obesity problems, the death rate from the virus was no higher than 10 per 100,000 population.

“We now know that an overweight population is the next pandemic waiting to happen,” noted Dr Tim Lobstein, the author of the report, senior policy adviser to the World Obesity Federation and visiting professor at the University of Sydney.

Britain, which has the third highest COVID death rate in the world, also has fourth highest obesity rate. On the flip side, Vietnam has one of the lowest levels of obesity in the world, and also has the lowest COVID death rate.

The new study backs up findings from Lancet published research last year which noted that obesity increases the risk of death from Covid-19 by around 50 per cent.

The findings have prompted stark warnings from the World Health Organisation, with Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general noting “This report must act as a wake-up call to governments globally. The correlation between obesity and mortality rates from Covid-19 is clear and compelling.”

The CDC has also warned that obesity is a clear factor in coronavirus death rates.

Are mRNA Vaccines Riskier For Obese People?

verywellhealth  |  “Adipose fat is considered like an endocrine organ now, and the immune response in central obesity is that the fat that sits around the organ and abdomen has a much higher prevalence of low immunity in fighting infection and generating antibodies to vaccines,” Desai says.

A 2012 review in the Proceedings Of The Nutrition Society reported that a potential mechanism could be that excess fat hinders access to the nutrients that immune cells need to carry out their daily activities.6

More Years of Obesity Leads to Higher Risk for Disease, Research Shows

How Vaccination Is Affected

Research has shown that obesity’s role in an impaired immune system often shows itself as lowered vaccine effectiveness. A 2017 study in the journal Annals of the American Thoracic Society found that adults with obesity who were vaccinated with the flu shot were two times more likely to get sick than vaccinated adults who were not obese—despite having the same level of vaccine-induced antibodies.7 The researchers theorized that the effect might be related to impaired T cell function.8

“The data we have so far is from influenza, hepatitis B, and tetanus that shows people who are obese have a decreased immune response to those vaccines,” Desai says.

What Does COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy Mean?

The Bottom Line

In terms of the new COVID-19 vaccines, Glatt says that there’s no evidence that the mRNA vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer would not work in a person who is obese. Rather, Glatt thinks that there are not enough studies to show how well the vaccine works in people who are overweight or obese.

The data that has been released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Pfizer show that the clinical trial was representative of people at different body weights—34.8% of vaccinated participants and 35.3% of participants in the placebo group were obese.9

“I think the evidence strongly supports that it is effective in obese patients, but I can’t guarantee that it’s as effective until we get a lot more data,” Glatt says.

Obesity May Alter Immune System Response to COVID-19

Unlike the annual flu shot that uses a weakened or inactive version of the influenza virus, Pfizer and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines use mRNA technology. Desai says that this changes how the immune response is generated.

However, Desai personally thinks that people who are obese will still respond poorly to the COVID-19 virus because of the body’s inability to handle the infection.

“It’s not how the immune challenge is administered whether through a vaccine or natural disease. The body’s response is weak irrespective of how the challenge is dealt,” Desai says. “People with obesity are most likely going to respond poorly whether it’s the vaccine or the virus. The coronavirus has already proven that it’s not good for obese individuals. In my opinion, no scientific evidence on this yet, [but] the vaccine will work more poorly in obese individuals.”

Obesity Prevention

By that logic, boosting your chances for vaccine effectiveness means controlling for obesity—but Glatt admits that's easier said than done. “It’s a hard thing to accomplish, but it’s an important thing to accomplish.”

Pfizer And Moderna mRNA Jabs Presenting As Breast Cancer

forbes |  Minor reactions following Covid-19 vaccination are common, and can include fever, chills, fatigue, body aches, a bump or redness at the injection site, or lymph node swelling. All of these are signs that the immune system is appropriately responding by developing antibodies. This is a good thing (although do not fear if you have no reaction at all— this is also fine). These reactions are more commonly seen in younger individuals, and because lymph node swelling tends to develop as a reaction to a nearby area of the body, the nodes in the armpit region can become inflamed after the Covid-19 vaccine. As these lymph nodes are near the outer breast tissue, women have raised valid concerns that these lymph nodes are breast masses or breast cancer metastases.

As one in eight women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, this is an important distinction to address. Because as common as breast cancer is, inflamed lymph nodes due to breast cancer are very rare, and cause for more concern. Less than 0.5% of patients with breast cancer present with axillary (armpit) lymph nodes, but when they are present in the setting of cancer, there is a 50% chance that they are either cancerous or representing another type of cancer such as leukemia or lymphoma. This finding has led many women to seek early evaluation, including surgical consultations and mammography or ultrasonography to assess these lymph nodes following their Covid-19 vaccine. 

Axillary lymph node swelling was seen in both men and women during both the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccine trials. The Moderna trial reported approximately 6% of patients after the first dose and about 8% after the second dose with temporary axillary lymph node swelling. The overwhelming majority of these swellings did not require pain medications or medical assessment, and most lasted no more than three days. Trial participants under age 64 developed axillary lymph nodes twice as often as those ages 65 years and older. The Covid-19 vaccine is not the first vaccination to present with axillary lymph node swelling. This has also been reported after the flu vaccine, hepatitis vaccines, polio vaccine, and the tetanus vaccine, to name a few. These similarly lead to local, temporary reactions to the body’s immune response.

In the January 2021 issue of Clinical Imaging, the authors discuss four cases of women presenting with axillary lymph nodes following Covid-19 vaccination, under the same arm as the injection site. The recommendation in their article is to repeat imaging several weeks after this finding, instead of heading to more aggressive interventions such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or biopsy. Dr. Sunny Mitchell, Medical Director of Breast and Women’s Services and Director of Breast Surgery at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in New York commented, “We are seeing unilateral axillary adenopathy on breast imaging, [such as] Mammogram, Ultrasound, and Breast MRI after Covid-19 vaccinations are administered. This is presenting in individuals with a history of breast cancer as well as no history of breast cancer. Breast Radiologists are considering short term follow-up/repeat imaging prior to recommending a biopsy in these situations.”

Floridians Thank God Every Day Mayor Q Andrew Gillum Didn't Get Selected Governor...,

turcopolier  |  Republican governors need to go on the offensive. They should require every hospital to collect and publish data along the lines of what Sarasota Memorial Hospital puts out every day. Those numbers should be posted on a website that all citizens can read. But additional data is needed. What are the ages of the people dying? Florida is called God's waiting room by some wags because of the swarm of elderly that have put down roots here to avoid shoveling feet of global warming in such charming iceboxes as Massachusetts, Minnesota and Iowa. Guess what? Old people die. Not just from COVID.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that COVID is not a real, serious disease. But it is not the only disease that threatens life and we should not be bullied into sacrificing our Constitutional rights just because some out of touch bureaucrats buried in the bowels of Washington try to tell you where you can worship and who you can hang out with.

I believe information is power and we need to put more of the correct information into the hands of each and every American. You are more trusted to run your life than letting slow Joe do it.

Sarasota Memorial Hospital	17-Nov	15-Dec	10-Feb
Today’s patient census:	678	757	718
COVID-positive patients total	57	78	45
% of Covid Patients in Hospital	8.41%	10.30%	6.27%
ICU census:	51	57	55
CoVID-positive patients in ICU	12	9	10
% of Covid Patients in ICU	23.53%	15.79%	18.18%
Total Hospital Beds	839	839	839
Total ICU Beds	62	62	72
7-Day SMH positivity rate	5.40%	4.63%	3.20%
Patients who tested positive	1348	1701	2811
Patients who tested negative	32011	38265	52510
% of Patient who tested positive	4.21%	4.45%	5.35%
Patients hospitalized since outbreak began (Mar 2, 2020)	1134	1410	1999
Patients treated/discharged	1233	1548	2304
Patient Deaths	112	140	203

OBiden Greenlights A Fat Bailout For Mismanaged Insolvent Karenized Cities And States

bloomberg |  House Democrats are backing Biden’s proposal for $350 billion in funding for state and local governments, according to draft stimulus legislation released Tuesday night.

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney’s bill, slated for committee action on Friday, sets up a new dedicated state and local fund in order to bypass the traditional appropriations process which is not eligible for budget reconciliation.

States would receive $195 billion and that money would partly be distributed based on a the share of unemployed workers. The District of Columbia would get the same share as states, unlike in last year’s relief bill. Local governments would receive $130 billion, partly based on population, with a carve-out for smaller communities. Territories would receive $4.5 billion and tribes $20 billion.

The bill also would spend $570 million to pay for 600 hours of paid leave for federal and postal workers to use for Covid quarantine or to care for infected loved ones.

“Democrats’ plan to bail out locked-down, poorly managed liberal states is unfair to American taxpayers and is ripe for waste, fraud, and abuse,” said the committee’s top Republican James Comer of Kentucky. -- Erik Wasson

Vaccines Stimulate Production Of Antigens - This mRNA Jab Stimulates Production Of Pathogen

Nature |  mRNA vaccines represent a promising alternative to conventional vaccine approaches because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration. However, their application has until recently been restricted by the instability and inefficient in vivo delivery of mRNA. Recent technological advances have now largely overcome these issues, and multiple mRNA vaccine platforms against infectious diseases and several types of cancer have demonstrated encouraging results in both animal models and humans. This Review provides a detailed overview of mRNA vaccines and considers future directions and challenges in advancing this promising vaccine platform to widespread therapeutic use.

Vaccines prevent many millions of illnesses and save numerous lives every year¹. As a result of widespread vaccine use, the smallpox virus has been completely eradicated and the incidence of polio, measles and other childhood diseases has been drastically reduced around the world². Conventional vaccine approaches, such as live attenuated and inactivated pathogens and subunit vaccines, provide durable protection against a variety of dangerous diseases³. Despite this success, there remain major hurdles to vaccine development against a variety of infectious pathogens, especially those better able to evade the adaptive immune response⁴. Moreover, for most emerging virus vaccines, the main obstacle is not the effectiveness of conventional approaches but the need for more rapid development and large-scale deployment. Finally, conventional vaccine approaches may not be applicable to non-infectious diseases, such as cancer. The development of more potent and versatile vaccine platforms is therefore urgently needed.

Nucleic acid therapeutics have emerged as promising alternatives to conventional vaccine approaches. The first report of the successful use of in vitro transcribed (IVT) mRNA in animals was published in 1990, when reporter gene mRNAs were injected into mice and protein production was detected⁵. A subsequent study in 1992 demonstrated that administration of vasopressin-encoding mRNA in the hypothalamus could elicit a physiological response in rats⁶. However, these early promising results did not lead to substantial investment in developing mRNA therapeutics, largely owing to concerns associated with mRNA instability, high innate immunogenicity and inefficient in vivo delivery. Instead, the field pursued DNA-based and protein-based therapeutic approaches^7,8.

Over the past decade, major technological innovation and research investment have enabled mRNA to become a promising therapeutic tool in the fields of vaccine development and protein replacement therapy. The use of mRNA has several beneficial features over subunit, killed and live attenuated virus, as well as DNA-based vaccines. First, safety: as mRNA is a non-infectious, non-integrating platform, there is no potential risk of infection or insertional mutagenesis. Additionally, mRNA is degraded by normal cellular processes, and its in vivo half-life can be regulated through the use of various modifications and delivery methods^9,10,11,12. The inherent immunogenicity of the mRNA can be down-modulated to further increase the safety profile^9,12,13. Second, efficacy: various modifications make mRNA more stable and highly translatable^9,12,13. Efficient in vivo delivery can be achieved by formulating mRNA into carrier molecules, allowing rapid uptake and expression in the cytoplasm (reviewed in Refs 10,11). mRNA is the minimal genetic vector; therefore, anti-vector immunity is avoided, and mRNA vaccines can be administered repeatedly. Third, production: mRNA vaccines have the potential for rapid, inexpensive and scalable manufacturing, mainly owing to the high yields of in vitro transcription reactions.

The mRNA vaccine field is developing extremely rapidly; a large body of preclinical data has accumulated over the past several years, and multiple human clinical trials have been initiated. In this Review, we discuss current mRNA vaccine approaches, summarize the latest findings, highlight challenges and recent successes, and offer perspectives on the future of mRNA vaccines. The data suggest that mRNA vaccines have the potential to solve many of the challenges in vaccine development for both infectious diseases and cancer.

Americans Flocking To Mexico For Their Corona...,

WaPo  |  The beachside dance floor was packed. The pulse of electronic music throbbed. In the middle of the pandemic, in the crowd of maskless dancers, some tourists commented to each other: "Tulum is back."

“It felt like covid was over. The borders are open. The world is back to normal. Let’s just have fun,” said Alexandra Karpova, 31, a public relations executive who flew from New York to attend the November festival, called Art With Me, on Mexico’s Riviera Maya on the Caribbean coast.

 But in the days after the festival, dozens of attendees tested positive for the coronavirus. Some brought it back to the United States.

The incident prompted a question at the heart of Mexico’s economic recovery: Is the country — with among the highest coronavirus caseloads in the world — taking too many risks to re-energize its lucrative tourism sector?

 Remarkably, the number of American tourists visiting the state of Quintana Roo, where Tulum and Cancun are located, has increased by 23 percent compared with 2019. With Europe closed to most Americans, Mexico has successfully marketed itself as a desirable alternative. Roughly 100 flights from the United States are now landing in Quintana Roo every day.

Many tourists are coming to stay at coastal resorts, where masks are mandatory in public places. Others are going on scuba diving tours or taking kite surfing lessons. But Tulum’s global reputation as a party destination has not changed during the pandemic.

“There are parties almost every night,” said Maria Prusakova, 30, the founder of a public relations firm, who traveled to Tulum in July from San Francisco.

When the restaurants closed at 11 p.m., she said, the parties started at private villas. No one wore masks. Prusakova got sick at the same time as 12 of her friends. They all tested positive — in her case, only after she returned to San Francisco.

“I’m still so happy I went,” she said. “I was so glad to see people. The food was amazing.”

Prusakova is returning to Tulum for New Year’s Eve, when the city is typically packed with parties. This year, authorities say they won’t permit them. State officials say they are scanning social media to find any mention of large gatherings. Event organizers are quietly telling tourists that they will find a way to host parties.

“We need to find a way to create jobs. Otherwise, the situation will continue getting worse,” said Marisol Vanegas, the state secretary of tourism. “But we always prioritize public health.”

 

California Has Become The Epicenter In America For Covid19

California’s surge stems from two sources, first the number of Mexicans living in poverty and/or severely packed households. La familia is the most important part of Mexican culture and it is not at all uncommon for one packed household to spread it to other households in the same extended family.

Second, well-to-do, working from home, don’t-know-anyone-who’s been sick white Californians spent the summer traveling both in state and flying to other places like Hawaii and Mexico. Always important to keep in mind that largely wealthy travelers were the initial vector in the US.

The well-to-do, working from home crowd would absolutely crumble if their mostly Latino nannies, housekeepers, and maids weren’t able to go to work every day. The servants and their employers are interacting in close quarters and are almost certainly exposing each other to the virus. Always important to keep in mind that largely wealthy business travelers were the initial vector in the US.

I also thought it really interesting that in the under-18 year olds, Mexicans have nearly 2X as many cases as all other ethnies combined! (110,000 vs 57,000.. Among known race cases.) Always important to keep in mind that largely wealthy business travelers were the initial vector in the US.

I’d guess it’s because the Mexican cases are primarily younger (almost half Mexican infections are 34 years old or younger). I’d also say that it makes me question a lot of these statistics…For example, are Mexican children more susceptible to inflection or, are they more likely to have been tested? Always important to keep in mind that largely wealthy business travelers were the initial vector in the US.

Finally, Mexicans skew younger than whites and blacks at the top demographic level. Always important to keep in mind that largely wealthy business travelers were the initial vector in the US.

Powerfully Unionized Fallen Professional Class Doesn't Trust The Science Or Believe The Experts

Slate |  “Teachers do not need to be sitting on a panel with a scientist, getting convinced to shut up and go with their position,” longtime union president and former Brookline High teacher Jessica Wender-Shubow told me recently. (She drew a distinction between individual teachers being asked to participate, which she didn’t support, and the union as a union getting an invitation—which didn’t happen.) She believed that parents didn’t understand the logistical realities of teaching, and the impossibility of getting perfect adherence from even the most perfect children. Brookline parents, she said, “are in in the business of ventilation and spacing. They decide what transmissibility looks like. They say the children are safe. But there are debates about that.”

The rest of the students, from third grade on up, returned in phases to Brookline’s school buildings for hybrid learning starting at the end of October. And then on Nov. 3—Election Day, and the day after the last group of students returned to in-person learning—the teachers went on strike. It was only for a day, and the kids weren’t scheduled to be there anyway; it was a professional development day for teachers. But the message was clear: The union wasn’t happy with the way reopening was going.

This fall, school reopening became a flashpoint, especially in blue America. The same public health experts who warned of the pandemic and had advocated closing everything in March made it increasingly clear that reopening schools was—if case counts were low, if testing were available, if buildings could be ventilated—a manageable risk, at least before it got cold and another wave of the virus hit. Reporting in places like the New Yorker showed how remote learning was likely to be a disaster for low-income students. Meanwhile, many teachers and labor allies were skeptical about the safety of reopening. States were facing budget crunches, Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos were advocating for blanket reopenings while refusing to provide funding or help, and states like Iowa and Georgia had refused to mandate masks in high schools.

But if there was any place that could do in-person learning safely, surely it was Brookline. The town was well resourced and civic-minded, and the state of Massachusetts had kept counts relatively low and hired a giant corps of contact tracers. The parents—at least a significant chunk of them—wanted it. (In Brookline, as everywhere, there were parents who were publicly leery about in-person schooling, but the ones clamoring for in-person learning seemed to be the loudest parental demographic.) And then there were those expert panels, which rivaled the state’s advisory board, especially Panel 4—“Public Health, Safety and Logistics.”

And yet for all that credentialing, when the 1,000 or so Brookline educators went on strike in November, it appeared to be an implicit response to Panel 4’s expert advice. Panel 4 had recently advised that 6 feet of distancing might be revisited in certain specific circumstances, especially given new science that showed the disease was less transmissible in younger children. Soon thereafter, the school district had refused to put language permanently guaranteeing 6 feet of distance into the union contract that was under (protracted) negotiation. “Six feet is just a proxy for how many people are in the classroom,” said Eric Colburn, a ninth grade English teacher who has worked in the district for 18 years. “I could easily be convinced it should be less in some cases, but I certainly think my union should be involved in making that decision.”

On the Brookline schools’ Facebook group, the comments read like a church going through a schism. “I trust teachers to teach, and scientists to guide us on science,” wrote one person, capturing a common view among parents. “[T]he point is that teachers aren’t being heard, all I hear is how amazing panel 4 is, I get it, a collection of brilliant minds working diligently on the matter,” shot back another Brookline resident. “If you all trust your teachers so much open up your ears and listen to what they are telling everyone,” that commenter added. Wender-Shubow, in our conversation this past September, took pains to say that Panel 4 had the best intentions. But, she said, “what they don’t know is how you teach children.” Their expertise stopped at the schoolhouse door. These kinds of fights, she said, “were happening everywhere, with a group of privileged white parents who are extremely skilled at promoting their position. They are squeaky wheels who know how to operate within civil society.”

Economic And Cultural (Power) Discontents Of The Fallen Professional Classes

 

About These mRNA Vaccines: You See, What Happened Wuz.....,

nakedcapitalism |  Earlier this week, we posted An Internal Medicine Doctor and His Peers Read the Pfizer Vaccine Study and See Red Flags [Updated]. Most readers responded very positively to the write-up by IM Doc, which included the reactions of the eight other members of his Journal Club who reviewed the article and its editorial, as they have done regularly with important medical journal articles. We have embedded the Pfizer article from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) below; the link to the editorial is here.

However, some took issue with IM Doc noting that two nurses in the UK had suffered anaphylaxis, a severe, potentially life threatening allergic reaction, after getting the Pfizer shot. IM Doc criticized the paper and editorial for not including or adding a discussion of any exclusion criteria, particularly since Pfizer’s proxies admitted that severe allergies were an exclusion criterion. From MedicalXpress:

Moncef Slaoui, who is the chief advisor to the US program for COVID vaccine and treatment development, told reporters, “Looking into the data, patients or subjects with severe allergic reaction history have been excluded from the clinical trial.

“I assume—because the FDA will make those decisions—that tomorrow this will be part of the consideration, and as in the UK, the expectation would be that subjects with known severe reactions, (will be asked) to not take the vaccine, until we understand exactly what happened here.”

Slaoui is the co-head of Operation Warp Speed and previously head of GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine department. Other media outlets and professional medical writers (see here and here for examples) picked up his statement that subjects with severe allergic reactions were excluded.

If you look at the article below, you will see that it is not searchable. That indicates an expectation that it would be read as a print out only. You will find it make no mention of “exclusion criteria”. Neither does the the separate editorial by NEJM editors. The article does does mention “protocols” in the text, twice, but does not have a link to where to find them, does not have a written URL, nor does it provide a name or location to assist in finding them.

Some critics argued that the protocol (which you need to search through to find the selection process for candidates, including the exclusion criteria, for the Phase III trials) could “easily” be found in the Supplemental Materials and further asserted that any regular reader of medical papers would be able to find then. The fact that IM Doc, who has been reading medical papers for 30 years, and his eight colleagues did not locate them is already significant counter-evidence, particularly since the NEJM’s media kit lists the publication’s audience solely as physicians. No doubt scientists read it too, but the eyeballs advertisers really want to reach are doctors, academics or scientists in the employ of competitors.

Melinda Gates: Uh, We Were So Focused On Vaccinations We Really Didn't Think Through The Lockdowns...,

aier  |  In a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times, Melinda Gates made the following remarkable statement: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” A cynic might observe that one is disinclined to think much about matters than do not affect one personally. 

It’s a maddening statement, to be sure, as if “economics” is somehow a peripheral concern to the rest of human life and public health. The larger context of the interview reveals the statement to be even more confused. She is somehow under the impression that it is the pandemic and not the lockdowns that are the cause of the economic devastation that includes perhaps 30% of restaurants going under, among many other terrible effects. 

She doesn’t say that outright but, like many articles in the mainstream press over this year, she very carefully crafts her words to avoid the crucial subject of lockdowns as the primary cause of economic disaster. It’s possible that she actually believes this virus is what tanked the world economy on its own but that is a completely unsustainable proposition. 

Further, her comments provide a perfect illustration of the core problem all along: most of the people who have been advocating lockdowns in fact have no actual experience in managing pandemics. To many of these, Covid-19 became their new playground to try out an unprecedented experiment in social and economic management: shutting down travel, businesses, schools, churches, and issuing stay-at-home orders that smack of totalitarian impositions. 

Here is what she says: 

You can project out and think about what a pandemic might be like or look like, but until you live through it, it’s pretty hard to know what the reality will be like. So I think we predicted quite well that, depending on what the disease was, it could spread very, very, very quickly. The spread did not surprise us.

What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts. What happens when you have a pandemic that’s running rampant in populations all over the world? The fact that we would all be home, and working from home if we were lucky enough to do that. That was a piece that I think we hadn’t really prepared for.

There are plenty of specialists who have lived through pandemics in the past and managed them by maintaining essential social and economic functioning. A major case in point is Donald A. Henderson, who as head of the World Health Organization is given primary credit for the eradication of smallpox. He wrote as follows in 2006:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Melinda together with her husband Bill have been the major funding source for pro-lockdown efforts around the world, giving $500M since the pandemic began, but also funding a huge range of academic departments, labs, and media venues for many years, during which time they have both sounded the alarm in every possible interview about the coming pathogen. Their favored policy has been lockdown, as if to confuse a biological virus with a computer virus that merely needs to be blocked from hitting the hard drive.

The Covid Data Is Now As Tainted As The 2020 Presidential Election Results

Dr. Roger Hodkinson The doctor said that nothing could be done to stop the spread of the virus besides protecting older more vulnerable people and that the whole situation represented “politics playing medicine, and that’s a very dangerous game.”

 

Hodkinson remarked that “social distancing is useless because COVID is spread by aerosols which travel 30 meters or so before landing,” as he called for society to be re-opened immediately to prevent the debilitating damage being caused by lockdowns.

 

Hodkinson also slammed mandatory mask mandates as completely pointless.

“Masks are utterly useless. There is no evidence base for their effectiveness whatsoever,” he said.

 

“Paper masks and fabric masks are simply virtue signalling. They’re not even worn effectively most of the time. It’s utterly ridiculous. Seeing these unfortunate, uneducated people – I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense – seeing these people walking around like lemmings obeying without any knowledge base to put the mask on their face.”

 

Hodkinson’s credentials are beyond question, with the MedMalDoctors website affirming his credibility.

“He received his general medical degrees from Cambridge University in the UK (M.A., M.B., B. Chir.) where he was a scholar at Corpus Christi College. Following a residency at the University of British Columbia he became a Royal College certified general pathologist (FRCPC) and also a Fellow of the College of American Pathologists (FCAP).”

“He is in good Standing with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, and has been recognized by the Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta as an expert in pathology.”

 

Biggest Source Of Coronavirus Infections In Illinois Are Federal, State And County Prisons And Jails

investigatemidwest  | Newly obtained confidential statewide data shows that coronavirus outbreaks in workplaces, schools and prisons are driving Illinois’ rising cases — and many of these outbreaks have never been made public. 

Illinois surpassed 300,000 confirmed cases this past weekend and recorded its highest daily death count since late June on Friday. 

The internal data — prepared by the state health department and covering four different days between July and September — was obtained by the Documenting COVID-19 project at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting as part of an open-records request. It gives detailed information and case counts for nearly 2,600 separate outbreaks across Illinois. 

The Illinois Department of Public Health, citing a state communicable diseases law, does not release details about where many outbreaks have occurred, limiting its disclosures to long-term care and assisted living facilities. Separately, the Illinois Department of Corrections and some counties regularly release numbers of infected inmates and prison staff. 

Public health officials issued a “warning list” last week for 28 Illinois counties at risk for coronavirus surges and blamed, in part, businesses who were "blatantly disregarding mitigation measures, people not social distancing, gathering in large groups and not using face coverings."

“Even though they are close to it, sometimes the infected don’t know that there’s a serious outbreak where they work. It’s a problem,” said Dr. Michael D. Cailas, an associate professor of occupational and environmental health sciences at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, who reviewed the confidential state data for this story. Cailas, who has mapped Chicagoland mortality data, added that many of the workplace outbreaks in Illinois are simply “not publicly known.”

In refusing to release the locations of outbreaks, the Illinois Department of Public Health said that it is bound by state and federal laws that are designed to protect the identity of those infected.

“Another consideration is the fact that people may not have become infected at the business location,” said department spokeswoman Melaney Arnold.

As part of its contract tracing efforts, the health department is compiling data on the types of facilities and locations where outbreaks are occurring and is “working to make this information available.” (The Documenting COVID-19 project and the Midwest Center have made the data available in a searchable format below.)

The data shows:

• The single biggest source of coronavirus infections in Illinois are federal, state and county prisons and jails. The Cook County Jail, once considered the worst outbreak in the U.S., listed 1,074 positive cases as of Sept. 30, the largest count of any single outbreak. (The Cook County figure is now up to 1,118, according to the jail’s website, including the deaths of seven inmates and four staffers.)
  
  But significant outbreaks at other Illinois prisons, including Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, near Chicago; East Moline Correctional Center in Rock Island; and Robinson Correctional in Crawford, brings the prison total as of Sept. 30 to at least 3,500 cases across 36 different facilities. That’s nearly double the almost 1,800 prison figure for Illinois reported by the Marshall Project and The Associated Press.
  
  In response to questions, the Illinois Department of Corrections said its response to the coronavirus “continues to be deliberate and aggressive,” noting that, in mid-March, it suspended visitation and placed all of its facilities in quarantine to stem the virus’s spread. 
  
  Aside from personal protective equipment and cleaning, all state prison staff are screened and temperature checked; inmates are regularly reviewed for early release; and the department appointed a statewide infection coordinator to handle the response.

NBC/MSDNC Amp Up Anti-Constitutional Pandemic Lockdown Lies And Disinformation

jonathanturley |  For four years, I have written about the alarming loss of neutrality and objectivity in journalism — a trend that is reflected by many polls showing that the majority of the public no longer trusts the media for fair and honest reporting. While I have regularly criticized President Donald Trump, I have also objected to unrelentingly biased reporting as well as embarrassingly soft coverage of former Vice President Joe Biden. Now, Stanford Communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser has publicly called for an end of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters in seeking “social justice.”

In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that the journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.”  Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Dressing up bias as “advocating social justice,” does not remove the taint of yellow journalism.  It is the same rationalization for shaping the news to fit your agenda and treating readers as subjects to be educated rather than informed.

While other professors in The Stanford Daily disagreed, Wesley Lowery, who has served as a national correspondent for the Washington Post, also rejects objectivity.  In a tweet, Lowery declared “American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment…The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”

These are major voices in media.  Glasser is a Stanford Department of Communication professor emeritus and served as the director for Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism. He is also the former president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

 

Forced Lockdowns Setting The Stage For Forced Vaccinations Setting the Stage For __________?

jonathanturley  |  In a recent column in the New York Times, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer criticized President Donald Trump for not issuing a national order making the wearing of masks mandatory – a pledge made by Vice President Joe Biden raising serious constitutional questions. Now, Whitmer is having her broad interpretation of state executive authority checked by the Michigan Supreme Court, which found that she violated the Constitution with her extension of the state of emergency.

The Supreme Court found that Whitmer lacked authority under two laws — the Emergency Management Act from 1976 and the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act from 1945.  Notably,  before the court’s opinion, advocacy groups submitted more than 539,000 signatures in a bid to repeal the 1945 law.

Yet the Michigan Supreme Court has now ruled that neither law gave Whitmer the authority to continue the state of emergency or issuing unilateral orders past April 30th.

NEJM  |   Six Trigger Criteria for State Covid-19 Vaccination Mandates.

• Covid-19 is not adequately contained in the state.

• The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has recommended vaccination for the groups for which a mandate is being considered.

• The supply of vaccine is sufficient to cover the population groups for which a mandate is being considered.

• Available evidence about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine has been transparently communicated.

• The state has created infrastructure to provide access to vaccination without financial or logistic barriers, compensation to workers who have adverse effects from a required vaccine, and real-time surveillance of vaccine side effects.

• In a time-limited evaluation, voluntary uptake of the vaccine among high-priority groups has fallen short of the level required to prevent epidemic spread.
  

Kansas City's Zipperhead Mayor Won't Be Held To Account For The Catastrophe He Caused...,

fox4kc  |   Kansas City department heads are being told to trim 11% from their budgets. That directive includes Kansas City police.

Mayor Quinton Lucas said Wednesday the cuts are because of a projected $60 million budget shortfall next year.

Because of the pandemic, it’s really no surprise Kansas City and probably most cities are worried about decreased revenue and tax dollars.

If it’s a way Kansas City makes money, it’s probably been affected in 2020. Earnings taxes, sales taxes, convention and tourism taxes are all down in the first four months of the fiscal year — a trend that’s expected to continue. 

“It’s now September, and we continue to be very down in a lot of commercial spending economic activity, and that’s probably going to be the case for the remainder of this calendar year and maybe into 2021,” Lucas said.

The budget cuts could mean layoffs or vacant jobs not filled. But the city will also look at other ways to cut costs without cutting too many services. 

It comes at a time when the Kansas City Health Department is trying to fight a global pandemic and the Kansas City Police Department is fighting what’s been called a pandemic of violence. Public safety accounts for 72.8% of the General Fund operating budget, and Lucas said he knows cuts there could have consequences.

“It’s why we organize a government to make sure that if you need a paramedic, if you have a big car accident, if you need to call police in the middle of the night, that somebody responds quickly,” Lucas said.

Bruh..., Tased And Arrested For No Mask, Outdoors? Or, For Failure To "RESPECKT MAH AUTHORITEH!!!!"

thehill |  An Ohio police officer tased and arrested a woman on Wednesday after she refused to leave an eighth grade football game for not wearing a mask, officials said.

Police in Logan, Ohio, who identified the woman as Alecia Kitts, said the officer told Kitts she would be asked to leave because she was not wearing a mask, in violation of school policy. After Kitts refused to leave the stadium, the officer warned she would be cited for trespassing. She was tased after she resisted arrest.

A video circulated online appears to show the officer, identified as School Resource Officer Chris Smith, handcuffing the woman and saying, “Put your hands behind your back.”

“I will not put my hands behind my back,” she responds. “I’m not currently doing nothing wrong.”

Approximately two minutes later, the officer tases the woman, arrests her and takes her away from the stands. 

Police said in a statement that when Smith informed Kitts she needed to wear a mask, she responded she had asthma and would not put it on.

"Officer Smith advised the female several times that she needed to put her mask on, and that if she did not, she would be asked to leave and would have to wait outside the stadium," the statement reads. "The female continually refused his request and Officer Smith advised her that if she refused to leave, she would be cited for trespassing and escorted off the property."

Have You Been Assigned A Biosecurity Risk Rating By The Elite Parasite Class?

off-guardian  |  COVID 19 is being used to create a global fascist dictatorship. From New Zealand to the the U.S, so called western democracies have adopted and developed the Chinese model of technocracy to create a single biosecurity State.

This globalist corporate State is to be centrally controlled and administered by a distant global governance cartel of appointed bureaucrats. Tasked only to serve the interests of a tiny, disproportionately wealthy group we can call the parasite class.

Every aspect of your life will be monitored and controlled, as we move towards the ultimate surveillance State. Your ability to work, to socialise, to travel, conduct business, access public services and to purchase essential goods and services will be dictated to you, and restricted, by the State, based upon your biosecurity or immunity status.

This transformation process is well underway. You are no longer a human being, you are a biosecurity risk. As such you may be removed to a military controlled quarantine camp as and when the State sees fit. Detention without trial will be the norm. All protest will be outlawed unless the protest suits the agenda of the parasite class.

We have a diminishing window of opportunity to stop this global fascist dictatorship. Violent protest will not work. Not only are they morally indefensible, they are tactically naive.

Violence is the language of the oppressor. The global State holds total dominion over instigation of the use of force. To crack down, in response to a violent uprising, is the fervent hope of the oppressor. It allows the State to exercise more, not less, authoritarian control.

In reality, to stop it, all we need to do is refuse, en masse, to comply. We must do this with our eyes open. It won’t be easy and many of us will face harsh punishment from a desperate tyrant. However, if we don’t stand up now, we are condemning future generations to unimaginable levels of slavery and misery.

In order to foist this upon us, the apparatus behind it has invested billions in propaganda. The fascist technocracy, presently being constructed at an alarming pace, requires our cooperation. Without it, the biosecurity dictatorship cannot gain its desired authority.