If Not Death Then Cognitive Degradation: Both Virus And NeoVaccinoid Cause Integrated Stress Response

Spartacus True Fact: The vaccine and the virus were made by the same people.

Spartacus True Fact: The pandemic and its response served multiple purposes for the Elite.

Spartacus Question: What is the purpose of all of this?

My Answers: Based on a protracted survey of Two Piece And A Biscuit and No Lives Matter devaluation of formerly exceptional (now completely expendable) populations.

• Profit via extractive medical, financial, and criminal parasitization of expendable demographics. 
• Demonization of expendables in multiple wars of all against all with accompanying profit and attrition.
  
• Avoidance of direct or centralized causal attribution.
  

For Spartacus: The more probable outcome (more probable than nanotech-based BCI) of non-fatal exposure to the virus or the mRNA neovaccinoid - is cognitive degradation. Such degradation is consistent with the long-term and large scale project to bring on the same gross degradation of mass populations via toxic drugs of addiction and digital social media.

Deemed "lives devoid of value" no one has to gin up enmity toward the drug-addicted and the mentally ill. These poor unfortunates already grovel at the fringes of society and are ripe for popularly sanctioned mass extermination. 

Therefore - as we move into the necessary stage of Phase III clinical trials of ISRIB mediated suppression of the ISR, and begin large scale testing of gain of cognitive function (with side-effects) that will necessarily accrue to this - there will be a large, ready, and available population of willing human subjects - or willing subject guardians - eager to obtain relief for their afflicted family members. 

Which brings us squarely back to the UR-Profitable, legitimate, medical and financial parasitization of yet another vulnerable and afflicted demographic.

Integrated Stress Response: page 37 Current Technology Review Memories Article

In the 1980s and 1990s, Walter demonstrated that when too many unfolded or misfolded proteins—which are characteristic of neurodegenerative diseases—were detected inside a cell, it triggered the equivalent of an emergency shutoff switch that halted all protein construction until the problem was solved. The action, which Walter dubbed the “unfolded protein response,” was akin to a blaring red alert at a busy worksite, stopping work; cellular repair crews would then converge on the site, attempt to fix the problem, and if all else failed, eventually order the cell to commit suicide.

Misfolded proteins, other researchers discovered soon after, were just one of many problems that could cause the cells of the body to temporarily shut down protein production. Starvation, viral infections, physical force that damaged the cellular architecture, the oxidative stress common in aging cells, and many other stressors could also trip cellular circuit breakers that would stop the protein assembly line. In fact, researchers now know that almost any metabolic disruption can halt production and potentially trigger cell death. Eventually others gave a name to a broader pathway that overlapped with

Walter’s unfolded protein response. They called it the integrated stress response (ISR).

Small molecule ISRIB suppresses the integrated stress response within a defined window of activation

On page 9 of the letter, I find the more important consequence of the virus.

Messenger RNA is normally consumed right after it is produced in the body, being translated into a protein by a ribosome.364 COVID-19 vaccine mRNA is produced outside the body, long before a ribosome translates it. In the meantime, it could accumulate damage if inadequately preserved. When a ribosome attempts to translate a damaged strand of mRNA, it can become stalled. When this happens, the ribosome becomes useless for translating proteins because it now has a piece of mRNA stuck in it, like a lace card in an old punch card reader. The whole thing has to be cleaned up and new ribosomes synthesized to replace it.365,366 In cells with low ribosome turnover, like nerve cells, this can lead to reduced protein synthesis, cytopathic effects, and neuropathies.367–369

and then again on page 10:

SARS-CoV-2 Spike has a prion-like domain that enhances its infectiousness.394–396 The Spike S1 RBD may bind to heparin-binding proteins and promote amyloid aggregation. In humans, this could lead to Parkinson’s, Lewy Body Dementia, premature Alzheimer’s, or various other neurodegenerative diseases.397 This is very concerning because SARS-CoV-2 S1 is capable of injuring and penetrating the blood-brain barrier and entering the brain. It is also capable of increasing the permeability of the blood-brain barrier to other molecules.398–400

The vaccine and the virus were made by the same people.

The virus was made for the neovaccinoid, not the other way around. People versed in multi-level asymmetrical warfare are responsible for the policy of forced injection with the mRNA goo in violation of personal bodily sovereignty and common sense given its poor efficacy and documented side effects. The mandate is both biological and psychological warfare. Using corporations to enforce the mandate is evil genius.

One of the indispensable tenets of this mandatory vaccination scheme is the avoidance of attribution. This avoidance can't be accomplished by propaganda and misdirection alone.

Think about the Sackler family and what it has managed to get away with.

Think about demonization of the "unvaccinated" - "so you managed to defeat the virus, well, we have a cytotoxic vaccine that you'll be forced to take - OR ELSE!!"

You can't exactly coerce non-addicted segments of the population to destroy themselves with fentanyl, methamphetamine, super-potent cannabis, or even the preoposterous bombe - can you? But a very large segment can be ridden all the way down to oblivion, destroying its minds and its lives, and causing massive disruption, alienation, indebtedness, violence, crime, and criminality across the ranks of associated friends and family - by compliant acceptance of an mRNA gob of goo that causes ISR and cognitive degeneration.

What a miraculous system for culling the herd - while profiting all the way at multiple levels - absent any mechanism of direct or consolidated attribution. Friends and family of those effected by gross cognitive degradation will eagerly embrace enrolling their afflicted loved ones into a program of mass medical experimentation in hopes of achieving a cure. 

Oh, and the digital biosecurity system is just a cherry on top. Look at the totality of the situation once again friend Spartacus. The infrastructure for all of what I've described above is already in place. For BCI and transhumanism, not so much. 

As for the tested and vetted ISRIB, well, that will only be for the carefully selected lives that truly matter. Much like mRNA and CRISPR neovaccinoids that cure cancer and congenital defects and disease. Any remaining barriers to widespread human testing free of consequences have been ripped to shreds by the precedents of emergency use and trust the science. 

High upon their Empyrean perches, the elite gamesmen look down on us and mockingly ask: What are you? Some kind of anti-vaxx political extremists?

"I Told You So" Doesn't Even Begin To Cover It - NIH Caught Red-Handed

summit  |   Earlier Paul had tweeted “I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here,” after NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak admitted in a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-KY) that a “limited experiment” was conducted to determine whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”

Senator Rand Paul, who was again proven right after the National Institutes of Health admitted it did fund gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, has blasted Anthony Fauci for lying for a year and a half about research that “could destroy civilization.”

Appearing on Fox News Thursday, Paul urged that Fauci has intentionally “been parsing words” as a way of never admitting that gain of function took place in NIH funded Chinese labs.

“They still to this day are trying to get around the truth,” Paul said, adding “They say ‘well it was unexpected that it gained function’.”

The Senator continued, noting that Fauci’s “declination is this: it’s inadvertent, we didn’t know they were going to gain function. That is what a gain of function experiment is,'” Paul explained.

“You don’t know when you combine two viruses that they will be more deadly, but it might be if you have half a brain you know if you combine two viruses it might be more deadly,” Paul proclaimed.

The Senator also noted that while he has referred Fauci to the Justice Department for investigation, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is more concerned with targeting “moms complaining about what they are teaching in school.”

Human Sacrifice Is Back With A Vengeance - Just Not The Archaic Pagan Variety

Human sacrifice is back with a vengeance, and this time we’re not throwing virgins into a volcano to stop an eruption or cutting the hearts out of prisoners-of-war to feed the gods and maintain cosmic balance. Instead, we’re calculating how many humans, along with other living creatures, must be sacrificed to keep economic growth going.

From the systemic degradation of the public health system link:

Somewhere in the last year public health lost its soul. The goal of fostering individual and collective health and well-being became secondary to disputable economic growth indicators and radical utilitarianism regarding the value of human lives. The focus on equity that was central in all public health discourses fell as one of the first victims of the discipline turn toward political symbiosis and realpolitik. The ambition to be a science-driven evidence-based practice continues to be daily trampled in evidence-free statements (Daflos, 2021; Goldman, 2020).

The neoliberal nations of the world are as much in thrall to religion as medieval Europe, but YHWH and the rest of the Trinity have been replaced by the Invisible Hand and monotheistic theology by the myths of growth and money. Where human sacrifice was practiced on victims numbered in the dozens or less in times past, now millions, and before long perhaps billions, will be sacrificed - justified by ungrounded speculation and willful blindness to alternatives.

slatestarcodex |   4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure theoretical limits. Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH

You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.

A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.

In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.

If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.

For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.

5. Capitalism. Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.

(I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)

From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where every company pays its workers a living wage. From within the system, there’s no way to enact it.

(Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose blood is running money!)

 

Representatives Of Pollution And The Hurricane Of Sacrificial Violence

charleseisenstein |  Aside from criminals, who today serves as the representative of Smith’s “disorder,” “social chaos,” and “breakdown of values” that seem to be overtaking the world? For most of my life external enemies and a story-of-the-nation served to unify society: communism and the Soviet Union, Islamic terrorism, the mission to the moon, and the mythology of progress. Today the Soviet Union is long dead, terrorism has ceased to terrify, the moon is boring, and the mythology of progress is in terminal decline. Civil strife burns ever hotter, without the broad consensus necessary to transform it into unifying violence. For the right, it is Antifa, Black Lives Matter protesters, critical race theory academics, and undocumented immigrants that represent social chaos and the breakdown of values. For the left it is the Proud Boys, right wing militias, white supremacists, QAnon, the Capitol rioters, and the burgeoning new category of “domestic extremists.” And finally, defying left-right categorization is a promising new scapegoat class, the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers. As a readily identifiable subpopulation, they are ideal candidates for scapegoating.

It matters little whether any of these pose a real threat to society. As with the subjects of criminal justice, their guilt is irrelevant to the project of restoring order through blood sacrifice (or expulsion from the community by incarceration or, in more tepid but possibly prefigurative form, through “canceling”). All that is necessary is that the dehumanized class arouse the blind indignation and rage necessary to incite a paroxysm of unifying violence. More relevant to current times, this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends. Totalitarians right and left invoke it directly when they speak of purges, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and traitors in our midst.

Sacrificial subjects carry an association of pollution or contagion; their removal thus cleanses society. I know people in the alternative health field who are considered so unclean that if I so much as mention their names in a Tweet or Facebook post, the post may be deleted. Deletion is a certainty if I link to an article or interview with them. The public’s ready acceptance of such blatant censorship cannot be explained solely in terms of its believing the pretext of “controlling misinformation.” Unconsciously, the public recognizes and conforms to the age-old program of investing a pariah subclass with the symbology of pollution.

This program is well underway toward the Covid-unvaxxed, who are being portrayed as walking cesspools of germs who might contaminate the Sanctified Brethren (the vaccinated). My wife perused an acupuncture Facebook page today (which one would expect to be skeptical of mainstream medicine) where someone asked, “What is the word that comes to mind to describe unvaccinated people?” The responses were things like “filth,” “assholes,” and “death-eaters.” This is precisely the dehumanization necessary to prepare a class of people for cleansing.

The science behind this portrayal is dubious. Contrary to the association of the unvaccinated with public danger, some experts contend that it is the vaccinated that are more likely to drive mutant variants through selection pressure. Just as antibiotics result in higher mutation rates and adaptive evolution in bacteria, leading to antibiotic resistance, so may vaccines push viruses to mutate. (Hence the prospect of endless “boosters” against endless new variants.) This phenomenon has been studied for decades, as this article in my favorite math & science website, Quanta, describes. The mutated variants evade the vaccine-induced antibodies, in contrast to the robust immunity that, according to some scientists, those who have already been sick with Covid have to all variants (See this and this, more analysis here, compare to Dr. Fauci’s viewpoint.)

It is not my purpose here, however, to present a scientific case. My point is that those in the scientific and medical community who dissent from the demonization of the unvaxxed contend not only with opposing scientific views, but with ancient, powerful psycho-social forces. They can debate the science all they want, but they are up against something much bigger. Rwandan scientists could just as well have debated the precepts of Hutu Power for all the good that would have done. Perhaps the Nazi example is more apposite here, since the Nazis did invoke science in their extermination campaigns. Then as now, science was a cloak for something more primal. The hurricane of sacrificial violence easily swept aside the minority of German scientists who contested the science of eugenics, and it wasn’t because the dissidents were wrong.

Why Don't Public Health Officials "Remember" What Happened With Polio Vaccine?

americanthinker |  Prior to the 1950s, paralytic polio was a scourge.  FDR was crippled from it while in his 30s, the March of Dimes was started to combat it, and photos of rows and rows of children in iron lungs were common in the media.  From this situation, vaccines were developed to combat the disease.

Polio is caused by one of three types of poliovirus that can cause paralysis and death.  In the 1950s, two vaccines were independently developed to combat it, one by Jonas Salk and the other by Albert Sabin.  Polio was eradicated, and today those vaccines are thought of as miracle drugs.  But were they?

In the early 1950s, Salk was the first to come out with a vaccine.  His was designed to treat all three polio viruses at once.  His approach seemed basic enough.  It was to grow polioviruses in the lab, kill them, and then inject healthy children with the dead viruses.  The idea was that the dead viruses could not reproduce, so they could not harm the children.  The children's immune system, however, would detect the injected viruses and produce effective antibodies against them, thus creating immunity against polio.

Just prior to beginning mass inoculations, samples of the Salk vaccine were sent to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for safety testing. 

There, when bacteriologist Dr. Bernice Eddy injected the vaccine into her monkeys, some of them fell down paralyzed.  She concluded that the virus was not entirely dead as promised.  Instead, the virus was active and could reproduce in its host.  Eddy sounded the alarm and presented her findings.  A debate ensued in the corridors of power.  Advocates for caution were overruled, and the mass inoculation proceeded on schedule. 

The inoculation of children began in 1955.  Within days, some injected children were coming down with polio.  Some were even spreading the disease to family members.  Subsequent investigations determined that the vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and ten dead.  Alton Ochsner, a professor of surgery at Tulane Medical School, was such a strong proponent of proceeding with the inoculation program that he gave vaccine injections to his grandchildren to prove that it was safe.  Ochsner's grandson died from polio a few months later, and his granddaughter contracted polio but survived. 

This fiasco has become known as the Cutter incident.  It's named after the manufacturer of the vaccine.  The vaccine was recalled and retested for safety, but the damage had already been done in the mind of the public.

The Archdruid Believes The mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids Are Hanlon's Razor Gone Wild

ecosophia |  Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This

 

There was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t clear at first.  Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that; the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a far from minor problem slipped past.  In the spring of 2021 word thus began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t. Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a self-inflicted disaster on their hands. 
 

Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites
 

The first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just careers that were at risk:  it was potentially the viability of the entire political-economic establishment.
 

Stage Nine: Things Get Serious
 

All of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t getting it.  All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that it was because too many people were sick you could count on being shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of what the fatality rate will be. 
 

This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect. 
 

Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle
 

As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time. 
 

Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame
 

When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke. 

If The Agenda Was "Public Health" Would Fauci And Walensky Still Have Jobs?

technofog  |  While they say this is about health, it is clear that it is also political.

The press revels in condemning conservatives for not getting the vaccine. Self-loathing conservatives like David French say Evangelical vaccine hesitancy is a “spiritual problem.” Conservative governors – those with low COVID death rates in their states – are attacked for not doing enough to encourage vaccination.

Paul Krugman takes these arguments to the next level, arguing that conservatives seeking personal autonomy are really trying to preserve their white male Christian “privilege” while making minorities pay the price.

The government – including officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins – must be happy with the blame-shifting. Just imagine their delight, after having potentially contributed to the creation of COVID-19, that the unvaccinated are now the accused.

Never one to miss a media appearance, Dr. Fauci is out there saying the unvaccinated are “propagating” the latest outbreak, that we need to “do something to get them to be vaccinated.” This duty that Dr. Fauci advances is the purported obligation to do something to protect others. (One has to ask whether millions of lives would have been saved had they followed this same duty with taxpayer dollars at Wuhan.)

We believe this is just the start. If persuasion has reached its limit (and there is evidence it has), then please, trust them at their word when they advocate restricting your rights and inflicting punishment if you remain unvaccinated.

And in considering the institutions of power setting their sights on the unvaccinated - those whose purported crime is of inaction - I leave you with the words of René Girard:

“The crowd tends toward persecution since the natural causes of what troubles it and transforms it into a turba cannot interest it. The crowd by definition seeks action but cannot affect natural causes. It therefore looks for an accessible cause that will appease its appetite for violence. Those who make up the crowd are always potential persecutors, for they dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it, the traitors who undermine it.”

Experimental NeoVaccinoids? Billions Of People? At The Same Time? Jawdropping Hubris...,

larrysanger  |  It is an objective, indisputable fact: never in the history of the world has there been a global push to administer an experimental medicine to all of humanity, billions of us, at the same time.

I want you to stop and reflect on that. Imagine the hubris it required both to carry out this plan and to propagandize the world to carry it out.

“Hubris?” you ask. “What do you mean?”

The Covid vaccines are experimental. The FDA has not approved them. Most vaccines require years to test and approve, in no small part because we want to make sure they don’t have dangerous long-term side effects, which they can have; the CDC has published a list of problems with selected approved vaccines. Many experimental vaccines never make it out of the experimental phase. CNN made similar points back when Trump was, wrongheadedly (I thought so at the time) pushing for rapid approval of the Covid vaccines. Of course, the mercurial news organization hastened to forget all that when the Biden administration decided rapid vaccine deployment was a good idea. They shouldn’t have: for all the good they certainly have done, physicians warn us that vaccines can be dangerous for some, and experimental vaccines are, naturally, even more so.

Again, my point is simple and absolutely factual. Again:

• experimental vaccine
• billions of people (over two billion)
• at the same time

You have to be willing to trust the welfare of billions of people not just to the honesty of our leaders and scientists—because things can go wrong for decent people. You must also trust their competence—and not just that, because competent people can make surprising, unforeseeable mistakes. You must also trust that we avoided the worst, that we dodged a bullet, and that they actually succeeded in making a more or less safe vaccine.

 

Vaccination Breakthrough Cases Resolving Into Long-Covid And Deadlier Variants

npr  |  There's more potentially worrisome news for vaccinated people: In very rare cases, people experiencing breakthrough infections may be at risk for long-COVID symptoms.

That's according to a small new study of fully vaccinated health care workers in Israel, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Data from Israel pic.twitter.com/Qmu4ZDtN7a

— Irene Tosetti (@itosettiMD_MBA) July 10, 2021

The study confirmed what's already known: That it's very rare for fully vaccinated people to get infected or sick with COVID-19. But it also found lingering COVID symptoms did develop in a handful of breakthrough cases.

Researchers studied 1,497 vaccinated health care workers at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel. Among them, only 39 got infected despite their inoculations. Of those, seven — or about 19% — developed symptoms that lasted at least six weeks, including headaches, muscle pain, loss of taste and smell and fatigue.

"It's really disturbing," says Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the infection, prevention and control unit with the Sheba Medical Center and an author of the study.

"If this is what we're going to see with all of the even mildly symptomatic infections that we're seeing now, it's definitely worrisome," she says.

New data suggests that fully vaccinated individuals are not just contracting COVID, but could be carrying higher levels of virus than previously understood, facilitating spread, my NBC News colleagues are reporting. New indoor masking guidance expected today.

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) July 27, 2021

Regev-Yochay and others stress that the results need to be confirmed by additional research involving many more patients who are followed for much longer. It could be a false alarm, the symptoms could be much rarer, or they could resolve far more quickly than the months of symptoms that typically plague those suffering from long COVID.

Experts stress that vaccination remains highly effective at preventing the most severe consequences of infection: hospitalization and death.

Nevertheless, other researchers agree the findings are cause for additional investigation.

"We had hoped that when you get vaccinated and even if you did have a breakthrough infection you would have enough of an immune response that would block this protracted symptom complex now known as long COVID," says Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research.

I Could Believe This Was About Saving Lives If Iodine and Ivermectin Were On The Treatment Protocol

WaPo  |  U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory Thursday calling misinformation a threat to vaccination efforts and attempts to control the pandemic. “We live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health,” he said at a news briefing.

Fed up, CoxHealth chief executive Steve Edwards, a frequent social media presence, tweeted July 1: “If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for someone’s death. Shut up.”

32% symptomatic pos. rate, very concerning! (From 4%) 4 pediatric Covid inpatients yesterday. Age…a few weeks old to 18 y/o

If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for someone’s death. Shut up. pic.twitter.com/TqkNbZKsYE

— Steve Edwards (@SDECoxHealth) July 1, 2021

That tweet won praise from people seeking catharsis when anti-vaccine voices have been loud and belligerent, but it also unleashed a backlash.

Nick Reed, a local conservative radio talk show host, devoted a show the next day to Edwards’s tweet. He said the message would erode community trust further and make patients with legitimate concerns about side effects more wary of getting honest answers from doctors at CoxHealth.

In an interview, Reed expressed sympathy for health-care workers frustrated from seeing the daily toll of the virus.

“It makes it difficult to understand there are people going about living their life and recognize what’s going on and recognize it can be very deadly and many have lost loved ones, but they have the luxury of standing back and evaluating the situation as a whole and wondering about the long-term effects of vaccines,” Reed said. “It’s two different worlds that people are in, and sometimes we don’t give grace and understanding to the other person’s world, and that can lead to this separation.”

Edwards stood by his tweet, which he said was clearly targeting people spreading false information and not those concerned about side effects.

“This is my hometown. I don’t treat it as a job. … When I’ve been in our covid ICU, I’ve seen people I know and it breaks my heart,” Edwards said in an interview. “I really don’t care about any kind of backlash I get by speaking the words that I do that I think will save lives.”

 

If The Double-Wide's A Rockin Don't Come A'Knockin With Your Fauci Ouchie!!!!

WaPo | On July Fourth, President Biden celebrated dramatic progress in the war on the coronavirus, with more than 150 million adults fully vaccinated and infections plunging 93 percent since Inauguration Day. “Together, we’re beating the virus,” Biden said at a party on the White House lawn.

But at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, attendees celebrated a different — essentially opposite — milestone: that Biden had missed his goal of vaccinating 70 percent of adults.

“Clearly they were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90 percent of the population into getting vaccinated,” activist Alex Berenson told the crowd Saturday, seeming to inflate Biden’s target. “And it isn’t happening.”

The crowd clapped and cheered at that failure.

What began as “vaccine hesitancy” has morphed into outright vaccine hostility, as conservatives increasingly attack the White House’s coronavirus message, mischaracterize its vaccination campaign and, more and more, vow to skip the shots altogether.

The notion that the vaccine drive is pointless or harmful — or perhaps even a government plot — is increasingly an article of faith among supporters of former president Donald Trump, on a par with assertions that the last election was stolen and the assault on the U.S. Capitol was overblown.

Appearing at CPAC, lawmakers like Reps. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took aim at Biden’s push for “door-to-door” vaccine outreach, framing efforts to boost inoculations as a creeping menace from big government.

“We’re here to tell government, we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare, don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchie,” Boebert said, referring to Biden’s top medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, her voice rising as she paced the stage and shook her finger. “You leave us the hell alone!”

The Delta Variant Narrative Eloquently Makes The Case For A Malfeasant Elite Agenda

Data show that:
Experimental mRNA Therapeutic Jabs REDUCE: symptoms, hospital admissions, and fatalities.

Data also show that:
The mRNA jabbed STILL become: infected; symptomatic; infectious; even super spreaders.

So what exactly does the planned vaccination passport aim to achieve other than a backdoor around lockdown protections and to create a two tiered political economy with no genuine biosecurity utility - only seething interpersonal resentment?

Polio vaccine gives a rough approximation of “sterilizing immunity.” You can fight off any infections by the polio virus for pretty much the rest of your life.

The state of the art Coronavirus ‘mRNA Therapeutics’ are showing a steep drop off in effectiveness after six to eight months. Even with that, vaccinated individuals can and do catch Covid and spread Covid.

Have you ever heard or read of someone who has had a polio vaccination giving it to anyone else afterward?

Even when people are willing to get the coronavirus ‘mRNA jab,’ most of the working class in this country cannot afford the opportunity costs of getting the ‘jab.’ No health ‘care,’ no paid, or even unpaid time off to recover from the after effects many experience from having had the shots, etc.

For some as yet unspecified reasons, the American Health Establishment has massively bungled its handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Even now, the ‘vaccinated’ are told that they do not need to mask in public, even when the evidence says otherwise; even when they can be the disease vectors that ignite new ‘hot spots’ of infection - simply by not staying masked in public.

I am highly suspicious of the nature of the “bungling” in evidence in Britain and America.

I suspect now that a decision was made to let the disease run wild so as to “cull the herd.” Having survived an infection last year, I've become emotionally detached from the demographic sub-populations targetted for Covid 'culling,’

Some years ago, I would more openly profess my Malthusian predilections. However, now that I can plainly see a cull being effected by Elites via nullification of the Social Contract - I'm much less sanguine about the prospects for population control and much clearer about the utility of plague for human livestock management. 

NYTimes |  Those who have been inoculated against the coronavirus have little to worry about. Reports of infections with the Delta variant among fully immunized people in Israel may have alarmed people, but virtually all of the available data indicate that the vaccines are powerfully protective against severe illness, hospitalization and death from all existing variants of the coronavirus.

Even a single dose of vaccines that require two shots seems to prevent the most severe symptoms, although it is a flimsier barrier against symptomatic illness — making it an urgent priority to give people second doses in places like Britain that opted to prioritize first doses.

“When you have populations of unvaccinated individuals, then the vaccines really can’t do their jobs,” said Stacia Wyman, an expert in computational genomics at the University of California, Berkeley. “And that’s where Delta is really a concern.”

Britain’s experience with the Delta variant has highlighted the importance not just of vaccination, but the strategy underlying it. The country ordered inoculations strictly by age, starting with the oldest and carving out few exceptions for younger essential workers, outside of the medical profession.

 

 

Guess Who's Blocking Ivermectin In Captive "Clinical Trials"?

nakedcapitalism |  The evidence backing ivermectin’s efficacy against Covid-19 continues to stack up, even as most health authorities refuse to approve its use. The last two months have seen the publication of three peer-reviewed meta-analyses demonstrating clear benefits. A review by Pierre Kory et al summarised findings from 18 randomized controlled treatment trials, concluding that ivermectin produced “large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.” Another study, led by Doctor Andrew Hill, a well-respected international medical researcher reported a 56% reduction in mortality together with favourable clinical recovery and reduced hospitalisation.

A third study, by Andrew Bryant et al, analysed the existing data from clinical trials according to conservative Cochrane meta-analysis standards — a gold-standard in science. Published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, the study found that “ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86%”. The study concluded that “large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin”, adding that “the apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”

Still in Limbo

But national and supranational health authorities continue to drag their feet. The US Food and Drug Administration, together with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization, insist that there is still not enough good quality data to approve ivermectin as an off-label treatment against Covid. Its use, they say, should therefore be restricted to well-designed, randomised control trials.

Over 20 countries around the world, including India, Bolivia, Mexico and Slovakia, have ignored that advice and are using the medicine, to some degree or another, largely with significant success. The latest country to do so is Indonesia, which is in the grip of its biggest wave of infections to date. In most countries, however, the drug is still in limbo as their respective health authorities await the outcome of large randomised controlled trials.

The problem is that large randomised trials are prohibitively expensive, costing millions of dollars to conduct. As a result, they tend to be funded by large pharmaceutical companies seeking FDA or EMA approval for the drugs they themselves have developed. It also makes it difficult to secure new indications for generic medications that are already approved for other purposes. After all, who is willing to invest millions of dollars testing a drug that is likely to generate little, if any, financial return?

But with the world fighting a losing battle against a fast-spreading, rapidly evolving coronavirus that has sent the global economy spinning, desperate times call for desperate measures. Money has been found and mobilised. According to Hill et al, there are at least five large, placebo-controlled clinical trials on the use of ivermectin for COVID-19 currently underway.

One of them, dubbed the TOGETHER trial, is being conducted at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. The trial has been running since last summer. The goal, according to the trial’s official website, is to “identify which repurposed therapies are most effective, in order to slow the pandemic while many countries await the delivery of vaccines.”

The trial has already tested and “dropped” hydroxychloriquine, lopinavir/ritonavir (an antiretroviral medication used in the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS) and metformin (an anti-diabetes medication). It is currently testing fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant), interferon-lambda (a regulator of intenstinal viruses), doxazosin (used to treat prostatic hyperplasia and hypertension) and ivermectin and will report its findings in the coming months.

The Emergence Of Murcomycosis Represents Catastrophic Immune Failure Induced By Covid Reinfection

 

Since the first reports about murcomycosis black fungus infection started coming out of the vast south asian gain of function human petri dish, it has been conspicuously clear - to even the most casual observer - that something very strange is going on.

 

The organism causing Mucormycosis is actually everywhere. 

 

We humans are exposed to black fungus daily, the level of exposure depending on where you are in the world and your location’s climate. Normal immune hosts dispatch black fungus infection immediately upon contact.

 

The only times you clinically observe black fungus infection in humans is with catastrophically immunosuppressed individuals. Most notably AIDS and diabetics with chronic A1C levels above 12.

 

Murcomycosis black fungus infection is horrible. It cannot be remedied by antifungals, and to the extent that it can be remedied, it requires drastic exculpatory extraction. That means it has to be cut out. It has a predilection for the sinuses. That means that the patient gets half their face cut out often with eyes included. 

 

As you might imagine, when you become nutrient media for black fungus, that's that ass. You're over, done, kaput, DEAD-ASS...,

The immunsuppression required for this to get started normally requires years to develop. Even in the chemo related scenarios - months are required.

 

The humans conducting this vast in vitro gain of function experiment are still in the early stages of their experiment with the sars-cov2 bioweapon. 

 

This black fungus fork is screaming something about how sars-cov2 goes mob deep on the human immune system. It is obviously very important. 

 

What living memory history involves a retrovirus that directly attacked the immune system?  These types of observations are instrumental in understanding the motivations of those behind this very curious epidemic.

Post mRNA Therapeutic Heart Issues Explained By A Physician...,

The data they went over today showed that the overwhelming majority of myocarditis cases in young males occur shortly after the second dose.

 

For example, in a group of 18-24 year olds they tracked for 7 days after dose 1 of an mRNA vaccine, they expected* to see 1-11 myocarditis cases; they observed 41 cases.

 

Tracking the same group for 7 days after the second dose of mRNA vaccine, they expected to see 1-8 cases; instead they observed 219 cases. What is that, a 27 times higher rate of myocarditis than you would expect to see?

 

See slides 26 and 28 of this presentation by Tom Shimabukuro, MD, MPH, MBA,

Vaccine Safety Team, CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force for more details.

 

* Based on Gubernot et al. U.S. Population-Based background incidence rates of medical conditions for use in safety assessment of COVID-19 vaccines.

 

Myocardial cells are one of the types of cells in our bodies that are not readily reproducible. Other examples of this are brain and nerve cells. They just simply do not turn over.

There are organs that are made up of cells that are able to turn over but just do it when they absolutely need to – examples here would be the liver and all the endocrine glands.

 

Then there are parts of the body that turn over for a living daily and do so intensely – examples would be the skin and the lining of the GI system.

 

Because the myocardium does not reproduce itself, the amount of the initial damage from myocarditis is critical. FYI, the same thing happens in an acute MI – the dead part is just dead – and will forever be dead. The remaining undamaged tissue has the ability to “remodel” and take up some of the slack but the person will never have the same heart.

 

To sum it up – with these cases of myocarditis – it is unlike an MI in that the damage is not confined to one area. 

 

The damage tends to be global throughout the heart all at once. Recovery is absolutely dependent on how bad that damage is. If recognized and treated early – it is possible to mitigate the damage somewhat depending on what all is involved. Some patients recover reasonably well because the damage was just not that severe. However, many times in my life, I have seen these patients struggle with heart failure symptoms from the moment it happens. We can help this with meds to some degree – and the rhythm problems can be helped with meds and defibrillators – but the patients will never be the same.

 

I have been staggered by the reports I am reading from all over about these COVID vaccine young people – and the startling number of them that are having to be transplanted.

 

The very concerning thing – there are now hospitals all over America where there are more admissions to the hospital from this COVID vaccine related myocarditis than ever were with the whole 18 months of COVID. I am referring only to the 12-17 age group. NOT THE WHOLE POPULATION. Unfortunately, this now includes my hospital – with zero 12-17 aged COVID admissions this whole time – and we have now had our very first teen admitted critically ill with myocarditis 3 days after the 2nd shot.

 

I was on a Zoom conference yesterday about this issue – a very “elder statesman” ethics professor ended the discussion of this myocarditis issue and I almost started tearing up – our standards have fallen so far – he simply stated – the medical ethical principles of beneficience and non-harm are overwhelming in this case. If the CDC/FDA fails to act to protect these young people – let the word go forth – this profession has lost its way, it is corrupt to the core – and is now being run only in the interests of the corporations and not the patients.

 

I am not “in the know” – I do not have any access to any deliberations or information that the public itself does not know.

 

But I have to say – I could not agree with this gentleman more. We are hearing a lot today that this age group is going to be the new reservoir of the variants and unless vaccinated will be the downfall of us all – all I can say is EVIDENCE PLEASE –

 

When I read reports in the media the past few days about this issue – and on comments on social media – there is quite a bit of conflating of data. We compare the vaccine side effects in this age group vs the incidence of COVID and COVID deaths NOT JUST in that age group but the entire population. That is just one example.

 

The further confounding issue is in this age group – basically teenagers – the case numbers are likely very very high – indeed – I would not be surprised if upwards of 2/3 of them are “case numbers” and not deaths or hospitalizations – because they so vanishingly rarely ever get sick with COVID and certainly not ending up dying. But yet have been positive and therefore a case number. Making vaccination even more questionable. I would say your 141 thousand case number is too small by orders of magnitude.

 

I know this because all year – I have had family clusters and school clusters pre and post vaccine – and almost invariably the teenagers and kids were postiive and completely asymptomatic. It is very likely that the vast majority of them were positive and never came to attention. They just simply do not get sick or just minimally so.

 

With regard to the death counts. My state has less than 10 teens dying of COVID for the entire past year. When the state medical examiner actually did a deep dive on these cases – only 2 were ever determined to actually have died FROM COVID – all the others were suicides, traumas, etc that died WITH COVID. The 2 who actually did die were both kids with severe issues – across the country cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, and other immunocompetence disorders have been the mainstay of this group. In general, under age 20 just do not die or get hospitalized with this problem – it is very very very unusual – and they almost universally have some kind of severe co-morbidity.

 

The incidence of admission and morbidity with these vaccines with relation to this myocarditis is actually higher than the COVID issues. Anyone who tries to “statistics” their way out of that fact is LYING to you. The CDC readily admits that their myocarditis numbers are very likely way undercounted. And still their numbers are indicating a rise in myocarditis from baseline between 25-200 times higher in this age group. In many people with any kind of myocarditis – they may never know about it because their cardiac reserve is so excellent at their younger age. As these people age and lose that reserve, we may be looking at this problem to be with us for some time.

 

In general – the rules and tenets of medical ethics are universal and not dependent on the times. There are very specific tenets that do take into account community and population issues vs individual issues like we deal with in pandemics. I could not even begin to go into it here – but the numbers are simply not there for these kids to be taking the risk for the benefit of society – they just simply are not. The risk/benefit to them and the benefit to society just do not match up. If this was a much more deadly disease – or other issues that were different – that may change the calculus.

 

One thing that would change the calculus that is being trumpeted to the heavens today as I have pointed out – is if there was evidence that leaving them unvaccinated would cause them to be a reservoir. The fact that these vaccines appear to be NON STERILIZING ( not stopping transmission) in the real world makes that point completely mute. But it is getting real mileage out there today.

 

That is why I asked for EVIDENCE PLEASE of that assertion.

 

I hate to say this – but say it I must. I have sat and watched the Pharma industry lie, manipulate, pretty up and just make up statistical numbers for 30 years of my life. In every conceivable way. I have sat through hours of journal clubs and gatherings to discuss this with colleagues. Medical statistics and epidemiology – are very very difficult to learn and apply (lots of confounding) – but because of the presence of certain statistical methods are very easy for marketing firms to really manipulate. THEY ARE DOING THIS NOW IN SPADES. This time, it is not just for an audience of doctors – it is for the whole country. Certainly, people in the media know this – and know exactly what Pharma is doing – but the marketing and manipulation just keeps flowing out to the public.

 

I have just about given up.

The Heart Inflammation Damage Is Likely Grossly Undercounted...,

cidrap.umn  |  Today during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel of expert advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discussed rare instances of heart inflammation among mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients. The committee agreed the vaccines are likely linked to cases of myocarditis and pericarditis but said the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.

The first reports of myocarditis and pericarditis occurred in Israel in January, the experts said, and have followed in all countries using mRNAs. The myocarditis (inflammation of heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissues surrounding the heart) associated with vaccines are usually mild and respond well to a course of treatment with non-steroidal anti-inflammatories.

"Clinical presentation of myocarditis cases following vaccination has been distinct, occurring most often within 1 week after dose two, with chest pain as the most common presentation, " said Grace Lee, MD, chair of ACIP's safety subcommittee.

"mRNA vaccines may be a new trigger for myocarditis, yet it does have some different characteristics," said Matthew Oster, MD, MPH, from the CDC's COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force.

The most common symptoms reported by patients were chest pain, shortness of breath, and difficulty sleeping.

Cases mostly in males under 30

Tom Shimabukuro, MD, MPH, MBA, the deputy director of the Immunization Safety Office at the CDC, said the agency has received reports of 1,226 cases of myocarditis, with 827 (67.5%) reported after dose two of either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

Of those cases identified after second doses, 563 followed the Pfizer vaccine series. In total, that's approximately 12.6 heart inflammation cases per million doses administered in the United States.

Among the 1,226 patients, 484 are younger than 29, and roughly two-thirds are men.

Dr. Robert Malone mRNA Jab Inventor Says Jab Mandates Are Deeply Unethical

foxnews  |  As colleges issue controversial mandates that students be vaccinated or not attend classes, and reports surfaced of numerous deaths potentially caused by the various coronavirus vaccines, the inventor of the mRNA technology that went into some of the vaccines told Fox News on Wednesday that Google-owned YouTube deleted a posting of a podcast during which he discussed his concerns and findings.

As "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host Tucker Carlson noted, Dr. Robert Malone is "the single most qualified" expert on mRNA vaccines, but that the Big Tech companies are asserting themselves as more informed than him on the topic.

"A Norwegian study conducted of 100 nursing home residents who died after receiving Pfizer's Corona shots. They found that at least ten of those deaths were likely caused by the vaccine. 10%," said Carlson.

Meanwhile, the New York Post reported that researchers found a link between rare cases of juvenile heart inflammation and vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which utilize the mRNA route.

"Young adults in the prime of their lives are being forced to take the vaccine because Tony Fauci said that," Carlson said, adding that Malone "has a right to speak," given his expertise.

"[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines," Dr. Malone said, pointing to the fact the vaccines are not formally approved but instead being administered under Emergency Use Authorization.

"This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics," he said. "And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don't have access to the data and the data haven't been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks – And therefore … we don't really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision."

Malone said that in the case of younger Americans, he "has a bias that the benefits probably don't outweigh the risks in that cohort."

But, he noted there is no substantive risk-benefit analysis being applied to the vaccines.

 

 

The Fungus Among Us...,

scientificamerican |  We are likely to think of fungi, if we think of them at all, as minor nuisances: mold on cheese, mildew on shoes shoved to the back of the closet, mushrooms springing up in the garden after hard rains. We notice them, and then we scrape them off or dust them away, never perceiving that we are engaging with the fragile fringes of a web that knits the planet together. Fungi constitute their own biological kingdom of about six million diverse species, ranging from common companions such as baking yeast to wild exotics. They differ from the other kingdoms in complex ways. Unlike animals, they have cell walls, not membranes; unlike plants, they cannot make their own food; unlike bacteria, they hold their DNA within a nucleus and pack cells with organelles—features that make them, at the cellular level, weirdly similar to us. Fungi break rocks, nourish plants, seed clouds, cloak our skin and pack our guts, a mostly hidden and unrecorded world living alongside us and within us.

That mutual coexistence is now tipping out of balance. Fungi are surging beyond the climate zones they long lived in, adapting to environments that would once have been inimical, learning new behaviors that let them leap between species in novel ways. While executing those maneuvers, they are becoming more successful pathogens, threatening human health in ways—and numbers—they could not achieve before.

Surveillance that identifies serious fungal infections is patchy, and so any number is probably an undercount. But one widely shared estimate proposes that there are possibly 300 million people infected with fungal diseases worldwide and 1.6 million deaths every year—more than malaria, as many as tuberculosis. Just in the U.S., the CDC estimates that more than 75,000 people are hospitalized annually for a fungal infection, and another 8.9 million people seek an outpatient visit, costing about $7.2 billion a year.

For physicians and epidemiologists, this is surprising and unnerving. Long-standing medical doctrine holds that we are protected from fungi not just by layered immune defenses but because we are mammals, with core temperatures higher than fungi prefer. The cooler outer surfaces of our bodies are at risk of minor assaults—think of athlete's foot, yeast infections, ringworm—but in people with healthy immune systems, invasive infections have been rare.

That may have left us overconfident. “We have an enormous blind spot,” says Arturo Casadevall, a physician and molecular microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Walk into the street and ask people what are they afraid of, and they'll tell you they're afraid of bacteria, they're afraid of viruses, but they don't fear dying of fungi.”

Ironically, it is our successes that made us vulnerable. Fungi exploit damaged immune systems, but before the mid-20th century people with impaired immunity didn't live very long. Since then, medicine has gotten very good at keeping such people alive, even though their immune systems are compromised by illness or cancer treatment or age. It has also developed an array of therapies that deliberately suppress immunity, to keep transplant recipients healthy and treat autoimmune disorders such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. So vast numbers of people are living now who are especially vulnerable to fungi. (It was a fungal infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, that alerted doctors to the first known cases of HIV 40 years ago this June.)

Not all of our vulnerability is the fault of medicine preserving life so successfully. Other human actions have opened more doors between the fungal world and our own. We clear land for crops and settlement and perturb what were stable balances between fungi and their hosts. We carry goods and animals across the world, and fungi hitchhike on them. We drench crops in fungicides and enhance the resistance of organisms residing nearby. We take actions that warm the climate, and fungi adapt, narrowing the gap between their preferred temperature and ours that protected us for so long.

But fungi did not rampage onto our turf from some foreign place. They were always with us, woven through our lives and our environments and even our bodies: every day, every person on the planet inhales at least 1,000 fungal spores. It is not possible to close ourselves off from the fungal kingdom. But scientists are urgently trying to understand the myriad ways in which we dismantled our defenses against the microbes, to figure out better approaches to rebuild them.

 

 

 

From The Very Outset LET HER RIP!!! Has Been The U.S. Covid Mitigation Strategy...,

nakedcapitalism | The question that I have no answer to is when exactly was it decided to not contain it. If you remember, some information came out about early and mid-February 2020 closed Senate meetings, after which senators were selling their shares in hotels and airlines, i.e. what was going to happen in late March was known at that time. But it was not in fact too late to contain it in early February, it could have been done with test-trace-isolate. So maybe it was perceived at the time that it could not be, assuming the decision was made as late as possible within that timeline. But the earlier that decision happened, the more nefarious motivations one would have to suspect were involved, because why would you not at least try to contain it when it was eminently doable? After all SARS-1 was contained even though it reached hundreds of cases in Canada and the US. And then what followed was the outright sabotage of testing and detection by the CDC,¹ the CDC allowing strongly suspected to be infected people to just get off their flight and walk right back into the community, and a rather long list of other such absurd actions. Maybe one day internal information will leak and we will learn the truth, who knows…

Also, this all becomes even more gruesome when one realizes that the decision of the US to allow it to become endemic meant the same decision was imposed on most of the rest of the world, as the US controls it. As I said above, Eastern Europe (except for Belarus and Russia) took it very seriously early on and locked down before it had gotten out of hand, and was in fact very close to elimination. Montenegro, which eventually ended up being one of the worst affected countries, actually did eliminate it in May 2020.

But once it became clear the US will not eliminate and the EU will not eliminate, those countries had no choice, although they could have at least held out for vaccines instead of letting it rip. There was never going to be a world in which the EU and Latin America have indefinitely banned travel out of the US, not with US military bases stationed all over Europe. And there was never going to be a world in which Bulgaria and Romania ban travel from Germany.

The really sad part is that a country like Russia supposedly does have that independence, and could have gone for elimination and closed borders and a bubble with China. But modern Russia is not the USSR, it’s just as, if not more neoliberal than the US, so they let it rip too, for the same reasons as in the US…

And now some the countries that did the right thing — Taiwan, Vietnam, and Laos — are encircled and battling their worst outbreaks since the start, which is heartbreaking to watch. 

The combination of infection level and vaccine effectiveness lead toward viral evolutionary selection:

 Unfortunately, with many respected scientists jumping on board of the optimism hype train (it was quite noticeable how the mood shifted on purely scientific matters that had absolutely nothing to do with politics a few months ago), the wrong message has already been once again sent to the public, and we can expect disaster in the future.

Non-sterilizing vaccines mean the virus will not only get the chance to evolve complete escape but will be channeled in that direction. But it also may be channeled in the direction of being much more virulent as a side effect of its fight with the vaccines (this can get quite detailed on a molecular level so I will not go into it right now).

The math does not look good — the unmitigated-spread R_0 in February 2020 was much closer to 6.0 than to the usually cited 2.0. But the current variants have undergone adaptation and are much more contagious. Let’s say we have R_0 = 6. And let’s say we reach 70% vaccination (it’s hard to see how we will get higher), and that transmission is cut by 80% (this, however, is simplistic — it is quite likely that transmission is cut by 80% in the first couple months after vaccination, but then the first thing that will wear off is protection from infection, with protection from severe disease going away last). That’s 56% effective vaccination. But the herd immunity threshold for R_0=6 is 85%, a lot higher, i.e. it will continue to spread. It might in fact continue to spread even with 100% vaccination with a full return to 2019 in terms of lack of social distancing.

So we should absolutely never have gone down the path of “solving” this crisis with vaccines and not doing anything to stop transmission. The vaccines should have been used as one of the tools to eliminate the virus, but in combination with NPIs.

If evolution featured in the thinking of our overlords, they would not have settled on this as the “solution” to the problem. But either it does not, or they just don’t care.

P.S. Some more sobering simple math. Let’s say the vaccine is 90% protective against severe disease over a period of two years. Then one can expect to have on average three serious COVID episodes by the time he is 60 even if he is always up-to-date with his biannual vaccinations (and there is no knowing how much more virulent to young people it will have become in the future with all the serial passaging). We now see what round #1 of mass reinfections looks like in India. So that is the “solution” being offered right now. However, it will probably not happen as one giant apocalyptic wave so it can be pushed to the background as a non-problem.

Gain Of Function Program For Covid-21: Build Back Better!

Over the weekend I watched a very interesting discussion between Dutch virologist, Geest Vanden Bossche and Bret Weinstein. Vanden Bossche made exactly this point about using vaccinations in the middle of an epidemic – he points out that - this is the first time a major vaccination program has taken place while a pandemic is at its peak.

He particularly emphasized that ‘two shot’ vaccinations have a longer immunological ramp up time, giving the virus more time to evolve. The mRNA therapeutic program is nothing other than an active gain of function experiment on the virus at a global scale.

The real worries here are the following:

First, the breakthrough (mRNA therapeutic breach) cases are asymptomatic/mild now, but they will not be mild later in the year, as antibodies for the synthetic spike protein decline in those who received these shots.

Second, and most important, from the evolutionary perspective of the virus, its evolutionary “goal” is not just to survive, but to make as many copies of itself as possible. Milder cases tend to have less of the virus (yes, there are completely asymptomatic superspreaders that generate a huge amount of virus in their upper respiratory tracts, but in general, if Covid-21 can get past the upper respiratory tract and cause real damage, that means a lot more copies of the virus.) Clearly the evolutionary pressure is there for Covid-21 to evolve in that direction.

Whatever can escape the antibodies generated by the mRNA synthetic spike protein and lead to more replication will be selected for. That will mean a much more contagious and virulent virus (Covid-21_ just from that.) So far, immune escape has evolved hand in hand with stronger affinity for the ACE2 receptor, which directly translates into higher contagiousness and also elevated virulence as well. The likely mutations to come next have been identified in vitro (to be noted, in vitro evolution had already correctly identified the ones that characterize the current variants, so it has a good track record so far).

In vitro has also identified ways for it to get deadlier through a different mechanism – that is - shutting down innate immunity by inhibiting the interferon response. This second mutation is a key strategy that these viruses have evolved in their battle with bats’ immune systems.  There is some evidence that Covid-19 is actually not all that good at this compared to, for example, the first SARS virus from 2003. I suspect that this was a major reason why SARS-1 was much more lethal.

Can the mRNA therapeutic regimen select for a reversion back to that state, i.e. it goes in the direction of countering the immune system as a whole by becoming better at overcoming the innate arm of the immune system. When the adaptive arm of Covid-19 has been strengthened by mRNA therapeutics, the evolutionary potential for a much more contagious and lethal Covid-21 may become evident?

I don’t have an answer, but I sure hope that it does not.

The mRNA therapeutic approach runs the risk of breeding something much more contagious and deadly Covid-21. And because it may well happen in stages, there is also the risk of it becoming gradually normalized, just as the current level of death has become normalized.  I remember learning about gain of function research reading Annie Jacobson's Operation Paperclip. So it's not as if potential outcomes aren't well understood.

So not only do we have lying officials that did everything possible to help the spread of an aerosol pathogen, now those same officials are running a playbook for creating more virulent strains taking us from Covid-19 to Covid-21. Meanwhile, we're drowned in and overwhelmed by dueling narratives Outside of what you read here, there's scant information to be gotten about gain of function mutations and the rate of infection of those whose mRNA therapeutic injections have been breached.

"Trust the science" pretenders like the frightening Dr. Kavita (force the injections) Patel are pretending that shots will get the virus under control - and they won’t. mRNA therapeutic jabs won't even get degenerating public health care systems under control. So, not only does this grand Covid-21 gain of function experiment have the potential to be even more deadly, nary any of the deep seated issues with any of the impacted health care systems have been fixed.