Speaking Of Science And The Necessity Of Large Randomized Sample Data

The CDC stopped tracking breakthrough infections that didn’t cause hospitalization or death after April 30, then pointed to low figures for earlier pre-Delta breakthrough cases to justify their position that these were so rare and mild they needn’t be tracked. 

They made that decision before they knew if those vaccinated could transmit the virus, suggesting this was unlikely. It wasn’t. Weeks later, they knew and announced the Delta variant was proliferating, yet did not change their guidance on breakthroughs.

In July strong evidence accumulated that breakthrough cases were easily spread, found in clusters, and growing in number, as in Provincetown. Unlike the US, Israel studied waning immunity early and began widely administering 3rd doses. 

The CDC said there wasn’t yet evidence to support 3rd jabs (evidence they’d declined to collect), then abruptly changed guidance for the immune-compromised—before submitting the evidence they’d said they were waiting for. 

Meanwhile, data from states tracking breakthroughs told a different story: cases were rising, occurred in clusters, most were symptomatic, and for the most vulnerable, could require hospitalization and cause death.

Looking at the following site I calculate about 4% of breakthrough infections go into the hospital compared to 5% of unvaccinated infections...lower but not by all that much.

Why don't we have this data for other states? Going further, why do we lack so much data on breakthrough cases?

What percentage of breakthrough infections are going into the hospital and how does that compare to infections among un vaccinated people?  

How do we know that the issue we are seeing with breakthrough infections is not waning immunity but the Delta variant getting by the vaccine?

Where is data on reinfection rates with Delta? Are those who had COVID already better protected? If breakthrough infections are milder (not convinced based on the Wisconsin data), do they convey better protection than a booster?

We will never know what percentage of breakthrough infections are going into the hospital, because the public health officials, including the CDC, are only tracking breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization or death.

While I'm not an epidemiologist, I would *really* prefer that the public health officials track *all* breakthrough infections. And, that they track *all* cases among unvaccinated individuals.

How else will they, or we, know which vaccines are most efficacious, and for how long? Are we just to wait for data from much smaller countries like Israel?

Israel did not have randomized studies of the third dose.  They did not wait for Pfizer studies. Pfizer just submitted its randomized study data, which should trump observational data from Israel.  It is important to know which groups actually obtain benefit from the neo-vaccinoid booster. 

Politics A Piss-Poor Substitute For Science-Driven Public Health Policy...,

NYTimes |   Top federal health officials have told the White House to scale back a plan to offer coronavirus booster shots to the general public this month, saying that regulators need more time to collect and review all the necessary data, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned the White House on Thursday that their agencies may be able to determine in the coming weeks whether to recommend boosters only for recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — and possibly just some of them to start.

The two health leaders made their argument in a meeting with Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator. Several people who heard about the session said it was unclear how Mr. Zients responded. But he has insisted for months that the White House will always follow the advice of government scientists, wherever it leads.

Asked about the meeting, a White House spokesman said on Friday, “We always said we would follow the science, and this is all part of a process that is now underway,” adding that the administration was awaiting a “full review and approval” of booster shots by the F.D.A. as well as a recommendation from the C.D.C.

“When that approval and recommendation are made,” the spokesman, Chris Meagher, said, “we will be ready to implement the plan our nation’s top doctors developed so that we are staying ahead of this virus.”

Less than three weeks ago, Mr. Biden said that contingent on F.D.A. approval, the government planned to start offering boosters the week of Sept. 20 to adults who had received their second shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine at least eight months ago. That would include many health care workers and nursing home residents, as well as some people older than 65, who were generally the first to be vaccinated. Administration officials have said that recipients of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine would probably be offered an additional shot soon as well.

Mr. Biden cast the strategy as another tool that the nation needed to battle the highly contagious Delta variant, which has driven up infection rates, swamped hospitals with Covid-19 patients and led to an average of more than 1,500 deaths a day for the past week, according to a New York Times database. “The plan is for every adult to get a booster shot eight months after you got your second shot,” he said on Aug. 18, adding: “It will make you safer, and for longer. And it will help us end the pandemic faster.”

But the announcement of a late September target date for starting the booster campaign set off alarm bells inside the F.D.A. — apparently playing a role in decisions by two of its top vaccine regulators, announced this week, to leave the agency this fall.

Exemplary Case Study In The Uselessness Of The mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids

news.com.au |   Israel, the poster child for vaccination, recorded more new Covid-19 infections on Wednesday than at the peak of its second wave when few in the country of nine million were even jabbed.

The nation – wholly dependent on Pfizer – has a rolling average of 9300 daily cases. Where it once broke vaccination records, Israel has now broken a grim new record – the country with the highest seven day average of new cases per million.

Infectious diseases experts have said Israel may prove that the effectiveness of vaccines do indeed wane over time.

“This is a very clear warning sign for the rest of the world,” Dr Ran Balicer of Clalit Health Services, one of Israel’s main healthcare providers, told Science magazine last month

“If it can happen here, it can probably happen everywhere.”

However, the country’s politicians are insistent no new lockdown will be introduced and have pointed out that despite the surge in cases, serious illness and death among vaccinated Israelis remains low. 

HIGHEST CASES PER MILLION GLOBALLY

On Wednesday, Israel recorded 11,250 new Covid-19 cases with a seven day average of 9308 cases, according to the country’s health ministry.

That’s higher than the seven day average of cases of 8624 cases on January 17, the second wave peak, only a month after the country’s vaccine program began.

Daily fatalities were at 31 on Wednesday with a rolling average of 21 deaths per day.

The country is now recording 1891 cases per million people, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project, the most anywhere globally and three times the level in the US, for instance.

 

Why Hasn't This Research Been Converted Into A Prophylactic Nasal Spray?

yale |  Exposure to the rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of the common cold, can protect against infection by the virus which causes COVID-19, Yale researchers have found.

In a new study, the researchers found that the common respiratory virus jump-starts the activity of interferon-stimulated genes, early-response molecules in the immune system which can halt replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus within airway tissues infected with the cold. 

Triggering these defenses early in the course of COVID-19 infection holds promise to prevent or treat the infection, said Ellen Foxman, assistant professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study. One way to do this is by treating patients with interferons, an immune system protein which is also available as a drug.

“But it all depends upon the timing,” Foxman said.

The results were published June 15 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

Previous work showed that at the later stages of COVID-19, high interferon levels correlate with worse disease and may fuel overactive immune responses. But recent genetic studies show that interferon-stimulated genes can also be protective in cases of COVID-19 infection.

Foxman’s lab wanted to study this defense system early in the course of COVID-19 infection.

Since earlier studies by Foxman’s lab showed that common cold viruses may protect against influenza, they decided to study whether rhinoviruses would have the same beneficial impact against the COVID-19 virus. For the study, her team infected lab-grown human airway tissue with SARS-CoV-2 and found that for the first three days, viral load in the tissue doubled about every six hours. However, replication of the COVID-19 virus was completely stopped in tissue which had been exposed to rhinovirus. If antiviral defenses were blocked, the SARS-CoV-2 could replicate in airway tissue previously exposed to rhinovirus.

The same defenses slowed down SARS-CoV-2 infection even without rhinovirus, but only if the infectious dose was low, suggesting that the viral load at the time of exposure makes a difference in whether the body can effectively fight the infection.

Bad Genes And Rogue Antibodies Make You Vulnerable To Covid

nature |  Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue antibodies, known as autoantibodies, are also present in a small proportion of healthy, uninfected individuals — and their prevalence increases with age, which may help to explain why elderly people are at higher risk of severe COVID-19.

The findings, published on 19 August in Science Immunology¹, provide robust evidence to support an observation made by the same research team last October. Led by immunologist Jean-Laurent Casanova at the Rockefeller University in New York City, the researchers found that around 10% of people with severe COVID-19 had autoantibodies that attack and block type 1 interferons, protein molecules in the blood that have a critical role in fighting off viral infections².

“The initial report from last year was probably one of the most important papers in the pandemic,” says Aaron Ring, an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in this work. “What they’ve done in this new study is really dig down to see just how common these antibodies are across the general population — and it turns out they’re astonishingly prevalent.”

The international research team focused on detecting autoantibodies that could neutralize lower, more physiologically relevant concentrations of interferons. They studied 3,595 patients from 38 countries with critical COVID-19, meaning that the individuals were ill enough to be admitted to an intensive-care unit. Overall, 13.6% of these patients possessed autoantibodies, with the proportion ranging from 9.6% of those below the age of 40, up to 21% of those over 80. Autoantibodies were also present in 18% of people who had died of the disease.

Casanova and his colleagues suspected that these devious antibodies were a cause, rather than a consequence, of critical COVID-19. There were hints that this might be the case — the group had previously found that autoantibodies were present in around 4 in 1,000 healthy people whose samples had been collected before the pandemic². The team also found that individuals with genetic mutations that disrupt the activity of type 1 interferons are at higher risk of life-threatening disease^3,4.

To examine this link further, the researchers hunted for autoantibodies in a massive collection of blood samples taken from almost 35,000 healthy people before the pandemic. They found that 0.18% of those between 18 and 69 had existing autoantibodies against type 1 interferon, and that this proportion increased with age: autoantibodies were present in around 1.1% of 70- to 79-year-olds, and 3.4% of those over the age of 80.

“There is a massive increase in prevalence” with age, Casanova says. “This largely explains the high risk of severe COVID in people in the elderly population.” He adds that these findings have clear clinical implications, and suggests that hospitals should be checking patients for these autoantibodies, as well as mutations implicated in blocking type 1 interferons. This could identify people who are more likely to become critically ill from COVID-19, helping physicians to tailor their treatment appropriately.

 

Why Is The Entire Western Media Lying About Ivermectin And Calling It "Horse Deworming Paste?"

Why is basically the entire media lying about what Ivermectin is and calling it a horse drug?

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) September 2, 2021

Because Ivermectin has been chosen as a group membership indicator, independent of its own nature. If you advocate for Ivermectin then you must be an ignorant and expendable spreadneck extremist according to most of my Democrat friends. The media is signaling adherence to that group. This same group doesn't really care whether it works, only what tribe you belong to based on your attitude about it.  Quoth the great IMDoc:

The NIH current status on ivermectin is there is not enough data to recommend OR to discourage its use. The NIH changed this recommendation in December of 2020 as previously the NIH status on ivermectin usage was to discourage its use. Usually the status in which ivermectin is now placed would be accompanied with all kinds of funds to study the true efficacy of the drug, to see if it is successful. That of course is not being done at this time.

Interestingly, 2 of our other COVID modalities have exactly the same recommend/discourage status. That would be remdesevir and outpatient monoclonal antibodies. EXACTLY the same status on both of these as ivermectin currently. The NIH states there is not enough evidence to recommend or to discourage the use of either of these.

And yet we continue right on with both the others without a blink of an eye.

A little math –

An Ivermectin course for COVID is less than twenty dollars.

A course of REMDESEVIR is currently right at $8800.00 dollars.

An outpatient treatment with monoclonal antibodies is right at $23,000.00 – 25,000.00 dollars with all the infusion costs added.

Remdesevir is loaded with all kinds of safety problems that I have seen with my own eyes. And it has the extra benefit of obviously not working – it literally does not do a god damned thing. Multiple studies have hinted at this.

The monoclonal antibodies are reasonably safe, unless you are one of the unlucky 1-3 out of 200 who have a very significant allergic reaction. Sometimes quite bad. They do seem to help to some degree.
But it is my immunologist and virologist friends who are having seizures about their use like this in massive 100-200 daily infusion centers, and the very high likelihood of producing all kinds of mutant variants with this therapy.

Your bankrupt government that is in hawk already for tens of trillions of dollars is currently “paying” for the last 2 choices – but not sure how long that will last.

Facebook feeds are now filled with all kinds of memes and stories with horse paste and horse pictures. But not a word about the other 2 or how expensive they are. I have seen all kinds of pics lately of my fully vaccinated friends and family in a monoclonal infusion center. They seem to have no clue they are bankrupting their kids future for a medication with the same NIH recommendation as ivermectin – which they are just laughing out of the room. They go right on blaming the unvaccinated for the pandemic in their feeds, all the while the antibodies they have just been given may be leading to the next mutation that will come up snake-eyes. And to boot, that one dose of meds they are getting is more than a lot of people in this country make in a year.

Yet, I continue to use ivermectin and budesonide with statistically obvious effects to keep patients out of the hospital compared to my peers who are not using it.

I have never dreamed in my life that I would live to see the American people bamboozled this easily. But here we are. I just keep working – very hard lately – it keeps my mind in much better places.

I spoke with one of my old students who is now a medical missionary in Africa this week. How this is being handled in the West has been an eye-opener for all to see where he lives. At least they have perspective in Africa. We have lost 600K people in the USA to COVID. The world loses upwards of 1 to million a year from diarrhea. The only difference between the two is that the diarrhea deaths are almost completely avoidable with appropriate care that is freely available in the West but not so much in Africa. And that is just diarrhea. They see the immense COVID freak out in the West and just shake their heads. My poor student just stated that he has to pray every day for strength not to despise what his culture has become.

My mind has been reliving the story of Lot and Sodom & Gomorrah a lot lately. But also to the Book of Daniel and Balthazzar’s feast. MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSHIM. Written by a hand on the wall to leader of the most powerful country on earth at the time. NUMBERED NUMBERED WEIGHED AND DIVIDED. “Alas O Babylon, the Lord God Jehovah has weighed you in the balance and has found you wanting. Thy last day is upon you.”

Lord have mercy.

How Dare These Spreadneck Peckerwoods Kwestin Medical Authoriteh!!!

medpagetoday |   As hospitals continue to admit COVID-19 patients, some are contending with demands from family members to attempt to treat their loved ones with ivermectin.

Just last week, the CDC warned healthcare professionals to steer patients away from the drug. But that hasn't stopped the pressure on hospitals, and the outcomes of new legal cases to force hospitals to provide the drug to struggling, ventilated patients have been mixed.

In the case of Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Illinois, a Sangamon County judge earlier this week ruled in favor of the hospital, the State Journal-Register reported.

Anita Clouse had sought to force Memorial Medical Center, part of Memorial Health System, to allow her husband, Randy Clouse, 61, to receive ivermectin, the State Journal-Register reported. Ralph Lorigo, a New York lawyer who represents Anita and has also taken on a bevy of other ivermectin cases, said in a court hearing that "she should have a right to try to save her husband."

However, Memorial Medical Center countered in court documents that Randy Clouse's condition was improving, and that he no longer had an active COVID infection, the State Journal-Register reported. The hospital further said that Clouse's physicians "believe administration of ivermectin will likely result in kidney and lung damage, which can lead to organ failure and death."

Randy and Anita Clouse were both unvaccinated and contracted COVID in July, the State Journal-Register reported. Anita had only mild symptoms, but Randy was admitted to the hospital shortly after he tested positive, and has since been placed on a ventilator and started on dialysis, the State Journal-Register reported, citing court documents.

Anita Clouse told the State Journal-Register that she and her husband knew about ivermectin before it was discussed by Fox News commentators because the couple bred German Shepherds and had given the drug to their dogs for parasites. She said that her husband previously told her he would want to receive the drug should he become sick with COVID.

Though the courts sided with the hospital in the Springfield case, a judge in Cincinnati, Ohio recently ruled in favor of a patient's family.

 

 

Is There Really Any Doubt That The Controlaspecies Panic-demic Was Just A Trial Run?

NYTimes |  The coronavirus was a shock, but a pandemic was long predicted. There is every reason to think that this one will not be a one-off. Whether the disease originated in zoonotic mutation or in a lab, there is more and worse where it came from. And it is not just viruses that we have to worry about, but also the mounting destabilization of the climate, collapsing biodiversity, large-scale desertification and pollution across the globe.

Looking back before 2020, it seemed that 2008 was the beginning of a new era of successive and interconnected disruptions, such as the global financial crisis, Mr. Trump’s election, and the trade and tech war with China. It all had a familiar ring to it. Great-power competition, nationalism and banking crises all harked back to the 19th and 20th centuries. Then came 2020. It has given us a glimpse of something radically new: the old tensions of politics, finance and geopolitics intersecting with a natural shock on a global scale.

The Biden administration declares that “America is back.” But to what is it returning? As recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, President Biden is determined to clear the decks, brutally if necessary. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, at the top of the agenda is great-power competition with China — a 19th century writ large. But what of the interconnected global crises of the 21st century that cannot be attributed to a national antagonist? For those, the one model that we have is central bank financial market intervention — a form of crisis-fighting based on technical networks, rooted in existing hierarchies of power and backed by powerful self-interest. It is conservative, ad hoc and lacking in explicit political legitimacy. It tends to reinforce existing hierarchy and privilege.

The challenge for a progressive globalism fit for the next decades is both to multiply those crisis-fighting networks — into the fields of medical research and vaccine development, renewable energy and so on — and to make them more democratic, transparent and egalitarian.

Back In The Day, There Was A Yahoo Group About Viral Parasols And Their Effect On The Weather..,

NYTimes |  Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has followed this pattern.

After Delta took hold last winter in India, caseloads there rose sharply for slightly more than two months before plummeting at a nearly identical rate. In Britain, caseloads rose for almost exactly two months before peaking in July. In Indonesia, Thailand, France, Spain and several other countries, the Delta surge also lasted somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 months.

And in the U.S. states where Delta first caused caseloads to rise, the cycle already appears to be on its downside. Case numbers in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri peaked in early or mid-August and have since been falling

We have asked experts about these two-month cycles, and they acknowledged that they could not explain it. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

But two broad categories of explanation seem plausible, the experts say.

One involves the virus itself. Rather than spreading until it has reached every last person, perhaps it spreads in waves that happen to follow a similar timeline. How so? Some people may be especially susceptible to a variant like Delta, and once many of them have been exposed to it, the virus starts to recede — until a new variant causes the cycle to begin again (or until a population approaches herd immunity).

The second plausible explanation involves human behavior. People don’t circulate randomly through the world. They live in social clusters, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, points out. Perhaps the virus needs about two months to circulate through a typically sized cluster, infecting the most susceptible — and a new wave starts when people break out of their clusters, such as during a holiday. Alternately, people may follow cycles of taking more and then fewer Covid precautions, depending on their level of concern.

Whatever the reasons, the two-month cycle predated Delta. It has repeated itself several times in the U.S., including both last year and early this year, with the Alpha variant, which was centered in the upper Midwest

 

Wait! Don't The mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids Cause Your Body To Manufacture Cytotoxic Spike Proteins?!?!?!

BHF  |  The spike protein found on the surface of Covid-19 virus cells causes changes to cells in the small blood vessels of the heart, according to research we funded presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress.

Researchers from the University of Bristol have found that the spike protein binds to cells called pericytes which line the small vessels of the heart. This binding triggers a cascade of changes which disrupt normal cell function, and lead to the release of chemicals that cause inflammation. This happened even when the protein was no-longer attached to the virus.

There is some previous evidence to suggest that the spike protein can remain in the blood stream after the virus has gone and travel far from the site of infection. In this study, researchers only studied pericytes from the small blood vessels within the heart. However, pericytes are found within small blood vessels all over the body, including in the brain and central nervous system. This latest finding may start to help explain the effect of the virus on organs away from the site of the Covid-19 infection. 

Researchers took small vessel cells from the heart and exposed them to the spike protein. They found that the spike protein alone was enough to disrupt normal cell function, and lead to the release of chemicals that cause inflammation. 

They then blocked the CD147 receptor and found that this prevented the spike protein from causing some of the changes to the cells. However, the inflammation continued. Now the researchers hope to find out if a drug blocking CD147 in humans can help to protect people from some of the complications arising from Covid-19.

Professor James Leiper, our Associate Medical Director, said:
“Covid-19 has presented an unprecedented challenge for the cardiovascular research community. There is still a lot that is unknown relating to how the virus can impact our health in the long term, but this research brings us one step closer to better understanding how Covid-19 affects the heart and circulatory system and may ultimately lead to new ways to protect the heart.

 

Joe Rogan Know He Not Posed To Publicly Rub Horse Deworming Paste In His Hiney For Covid

Success against #COVID19 will likely require both vaccines & treatments. We’re pleased to share we’ve started a Phase 2/3 study of our oral antiviral candidate—specifically designed to combat SARS-CoV-2—in non-hospitalized, low-risk adults: https://t.co/su5VtfbWPX

— AlbertBourla (@AlbertBourla) September 1, 2021

msdnc |   Podcast host Joe Rogan told his millions of followers Wednesday that he has Covid-19 and used ivermectin, a drug typically used on livestock that health experts have urged the public to avoid.

Rogan, host of the immensely popular Spotify podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience," posted a video to Instagram explaining he tested positive for the coronavirus following his return from a live show Saturday. He said he had “fevers and sweats” and that he “threw the kitchen sink” at the illness.

His treatments included monoclonal antibodies and ivermectin, Rogan said. Ivermectin, which is not an anti-viral drug, is generally used to treat or prevent parasites in animals such as horses.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month urged people to stop believing misinformation claiming the livestock treatment would help cure Covid, saying it saw multiple reports of patients who have been hospitalized after "self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses.”

The agency clarified that FDA-approved ivermectin tablets meant to treat people with certain conditions caused by parasitic worms as well as topical formulations used for head lice and skin conditions like rosacea are different from the drug used on animals. Ivermectin tablets and topical formulations for humans have "very specific doses" that are significantly smaller than the doses meant for animals.

Patients who overdose with ivermectin can experience nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, low blood pressure, allergic reactions, dizziness, problems with balance, seizures, coma and even death, according to the FDA.

Rogan has more than 13 million followers on Instagram, and his podcast is the most-streamed program on Spotify.

 

This Is Not The First Time The Government Was Hand-in-Glove With The Drug Industry

C-19 is a disease of the eldery and obese. And the extremely unlucky healthy people who sometimes fall prey to a novel vascular endothelial proliferation vector in the body.
 
Does anybody really believe vaccine immunity is better than natural immunity? As a society the young developing natural immunity would have been the preferred public health strategy. The experimental mRNA therapeutics target a single antigenic point on the virus. ONE. The spike protein.
 
Natural immunity targets 28 antigenic proteins on the virus. Robust immunological memory produces a vast array of Defense in Depth.
 
From a scientific perspective the masking/vaxxing strategy is farcical and deserving of contempt. Many Public Health authorities apparently no longer believe in evolution via immunological memory and have become Flat Earthers.
 
Another common sense point, most miss. Where does the virus enter the human body? Through the respiratory tract. The nose and mouth. Where is the vaccine given? In the shoulder. On the other side of the moat. Sure some IgG through the lymphatic system probably progresses to the lungs. And then wanes over time.
 
But the defense against infection from respiratory viruses begins in the mucosal immunity. IgAs are produced here. They are much more important in preventing infections from C-19 and other respiratory illnesses than IgG which is blood based for the most part.
 
Guess what? Natural immunity from infection equals robust IgA response the second time the virus tries to enter the individual.
 
This would not be the first time the “government” hand in glove with the drug industry used its offices to circumvent FDA oversight and safety requirements, in order to establish a national for profit health care agenda. Prior example: life time use of hormone drug replacement therapy for women.
 
Following is a well-researched and documented study of the long-standing government recommendations and health information campaign advocating for the multi-billion dollar hormone replacement drug industry. This government agenda fell to “science” only when its decades long recommendations were finally put to a double blind, randomized study.
 
Ironically, the study was intended to support official FDA approval for lifetime drug use instead of short-term symptomatic use; only to learn the very drugs were causing the very problems they had been previously telling women they would avoid if they used these drugs, and plenty more.
 
The template is familiar- establish a public health social agenda using an unproven hypothesis, partner with a for-profit pharmaceutical company, and actively discredit all opposition:
 
The Greatest Experiment Ever Conducted on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth (Barbara Seamans – solid health researcher with footnotes)

Only NIH Approved Treatments Get The HHS Prep Act Liability Waiver

“Enacted in December 2005, the PREP Act authorizes the Secretary of HHS (Secretary) to issue a declaration (called a PREP Act declaration) that provides immunity from tort liability (except for willful misconduct) for claims of loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of countermeasures to diseases, threats and conditions determined by the Secretary to constitute a present, or credible risk of a future public health emergency to entities and individuals involved in the development, manufacture, testing, distribution, administration, and use of such countermeasures.” (link)

 

A PREP Act declaration is specifically for the purpose of providing immunity from tort liability, and is different from, and not dependent on, other emergency declarations.

 

Under the HHS Notification, the PREP Act has been modified: “The amended Section VII adds that PREP Act liability protections also extend to Covered Persons for Recommended Activities that are related to any Covered Countermeasure that is:

 

1. licensed, approved, cleared, or authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (or that is permitted to be used under an Investigational New Drug Application or an Investigational Device Exemption) under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act or Public Health Service (PHS) Act to treat, diagnose, cure, prevent, mitigate or limit the harm from COVID–19, or the transmission of SARS–CoV–2 or a virus mutating therefrom; (link)

 

The attachment of a liability or tort waiver to only cover FDA approved therapeutics likely explains a shift amid the medical community to stop patients treatment due to coverage restrictions on their malpractice insurance.  Additionally, Big Pharma -the group who controls NIH- wouldn’t make as much money if their mandatory vaccines had a less costly alternative.  So there’s that.

 

The PREP Act offers hospitals blanket financial liability protection in treating C19 patients only if the hospitals follow the approved protocol; if hospitals treat only with CDC, FDA approved countermeasures, i.e. NIH approved measures, they keep the liability shield. Any hospital deviating from the protocol loses the PREP Act C19 liability shield, it seems. Again, follow the money.

 

I can’t see any other reason hospitals would fight so hard to block dying patients last-chance medical requests for an FDA approved drug used off-label but not EUA’d for C19. It might explain the hospital’s use of the term “human guinea pig”.

 

This is from a brief outline of the current PREP Act applied to C19 treatments. Ivermectin is not a "covered countermeasure” by this definition.

 

“Fourth, the medical product at issue must be a covered countermeasure. The PREP Act specifies four types of covered countermeasures: (i) a qualified “pandemic or epidemic product”; (ii) a “security countermeasure”; (iii) a drug, biological product,or device that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)has authorized for emergency use; and (iv) a “respiratory protective device” that is approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).”

mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids A "Solution" In Search Of A Problem For Some Time Now...,

cepi  |  As the COVID-19 pandemic shows, in a world characterised by increasing population density, human mobility, and ecological change, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) pose a real and growing threat to global health security.

Epidemic diseases affect us all. They do not respect borders.

The costs of EIDs are vast, in both human and economic terms. As well as the devastating death toll and disruption to societies, COVID-19 could cost the global economy $4.1 trillion, or almost 5% of global gross domestic product. Even small epidemics can cause tremendous economic disruption.

Vaccines are one of our most powerful tools in the fight to outsmart epidemics. The development of vaccines can help save lives, protect societies and restabilise economies.

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations’ (CEPI’s) mission is to stimulate and accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable access to these vaccines for people during outbreaks.

Historically, vaccine development has been a long, risky, and costly endeavour. Planning for emerging infectious diseases is especially challenging: the market potential for vaccines against these diseases is limited and testing such vaccines is difficult.

We need a better system to speed the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases.

Events like the devastating 2014/15 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa—which killed more than 11,000 people and had an economic and social burden of over $53 billion—showed us that very few vaccines are ready to be used against these threats.

The world’s response to this crisis fell tragically short.  A vaccine that had been under development for more than a decade was not deployed until over a year into the epidemic. That vaccine was shown to be 100% effective, suggesting that much of the epidemic could have been prevented.

The creation of CEPI

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched at Davos 2017 as the result of a consensus that a coordinated, international, and intergovernmental plan was needed to develop and deploy new vaccines to prevent future epidemics.

We are an innovative global partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations working to accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable equitable access to these vaccines for affected populations during outbreaks.

Close collaboration with global partners are crucial to ensure the success of our work. Therefore, we will support coordinating activities to improve our collective response to epidemics, strengthening capacity in countries at risk, and advancing the regulatory science that governs product development.

CEPI 2017 Presentation to the WHO

 

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.

The FDA Has No Credibility This Blogger Is Bound To Acknowledge...,

emilyposts |   A year ago, I would have tried to convince people that the FDA was the gold standard for COVID pharmaceuticals.

Now, I see that the agency needs to fail in order for it to be forced to make radical changes so that the public can trust that the label “approved by the FDA” means its safe.

Compounding the problem is that the FDA’s credibility gap has created a vacuum in which conspiracy theories and misinformation grow quickly. The result is many people don’t believe that the vaccine was actually approved. They don’t trust that it is safe to be vaccinated. They don’t even know who runs the FDA.

Had the FDA made the vaccines authorization and later approval process easy to understand by the public, this mess of vaccine distrust would not have happened. But the FDA refuses to work in public, deliver information in terms we all understand or even show their faces.

And all this could have been avoided if the FDA press office didn’t operate like the Cold War Kremlin. I tried to turn that ship around last year and was thrown overboard for the effort.

My FDA Assignment

I was hired at the FDA during the pandemic because the Commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, needed someone skilled at handling the press in a crisis at the highest levels of government.

I was a spokesman for Capitol Hill leadership during 9/11 and a press secretary at the State Department during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The strategic communications needed for COVID was no different than the wars. The FDA needed to get as much information as allowed out to the public as quickly as possible and be accessible to reporters 24/7.

 

Two Senior FDA Biologics Reviewers Resign Over Pfizer Final Approval Fiasco

endpts  |   Two of the FDA’s most senior vaccine leaders are exiting from their positions, raising fresh questions about the Biden administration and the way that it’s sidelined the FDA.

Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research & Review and 32-year veteran of the agency, will leave at the end of October, and OVRR deputy director Phil Krause, who’s been at FDA for more than a decade, will leave in November. The news, first reported by BioCentury, is a massive blow to confidence in the agency’s ability to regulate vaccines.

The bombshell announcement comes at a particularly crucial moment, as boosters and children’s shots are being weighed by the regulator. The departures also come as the administration has recently jumped ahead of the FDA’s reviews of booster shots, announcing that they might be available by the week of Sept. 20.

A former senior FDA leader told Endpoints that they’re departing because they’re frustrated that CDC and their ACIP committee are involved in decisions that they think should be up to the FDA. The former FDAer also said he’s heard they’re upset with CBER director Peter Marks for not insisting that those decisions should be kept inside FDA. What finally did it for them was the White House getting ahead of FDA on booster shots.

FDA’s former acting chief scientist Luciana Borio added on Twitter, “FDA is losing two giants who helped bring us many safe and effective vaccines over decades of public service.”

“These two are the leaders for Biologic (vaccine) review in the US. They have a great team, but these two are the true leaders of CBER. A huge global loss if they both leave,” Former BARDA director Rick Bright wrote, weighing in on the news. “Dr. Gruber is much more than the Director. She is a global leader. Visionary mastermind behind global clinical regulatory science for flu, Ebola, Mers, Zika, Sars-cov-2, many others.”

Grieving Military Parents Burn Old Cornpop...,

dailymail |  The mother of a Marine killed in the Kabul airport attack called President Joe Biden a 'dementia-riddent piece of crap' as the president meets with families of the 13 fallen service members on Sunday

'My son was one of the Marines that died yesterday,' Kathy McCollum said in a radio interview on Friday of her 20-year-old late son Rylee.

'[He was] getting ready to come home from freaking Jordan to be with his wife to watch the birth of his son,' McCollum said. 'And that feckless, dementia ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die.'

'I woke up at four'o'clock this morning to Marines at my door telling me my son was dead,' she said in the emotional account.

President Biden made an unannounced trip to Delaware on Sunday morning for a ceremony to honor the service members killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber.

He stood in silence, his right hand to his chest, as a succession of flag draped transfer cases were carried past him from a C-17 Globemaster plane.

The 13 killed on Thursday were Navy corpsman Max Soviak, Army Staff Sergeant Ryan Knauss, and Marines Hunter Lopez, Rylee McCollum, David Lee Espinoza, Kareem Nikoui, Jared Schmitz, Daegan Page, Taylor Hoover, Humberto Sanchez, Johanny Rosario, Dylan Merola and Nicole Gee.

Their remains arrived at Dover Air Force Base, at 8am for a 'dignified transfer,; when fallen troops' return to American soil is marked by a solemn movement.

theconservativetreehouse |  Mrs. Shana Chappell is furious at the Biden administration, and now that we know the military was aware of the pending attack before it took place – the horrific event is even worse.  Mrs. Chappell’s voice cries out in anger and grief.   The incompetence and failed leadership in the Afghan withdrawal led to the death of her son, Kareem Nikoui.  Her Facebook and Instagram accounts have now been suspended.  

 

A Voluntary Product Of The System Publicly Threatening To Tear The System Down On Social Media?

Fist Tap Dale...,

Worse Than Horse Deworming Paste - CDC And Media Again Caught Prevaricating And Propagandizing

nakedcapitalism  |  Last Friday, the CDC published “Outbreak Associated with SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant in an Elementary School — Marin County, California, May–June 2021” (“Outbreak”). This got a lot of play in the Northern California press, with a good deal of reporting done (or at least original stories written), because the study was led by Marin County Public Health, and they with other California epidemiologists and experts wrote the study up and then submitted it to the CDC, which accepted it. Good for them! However, there is a question “Outbreak” does not ask, and that the press did not ask. Carefully avoiding spoilers — though few NC readers will be surprised at the plot twist — I will first quote the “Outbreak” on the incident. Then I will switch into media critique mode, and present the headlines from Northern Califonia. After that, I will present the implications drawn from the outbreak by the press (which are more broad spectrum than the headlines). Finally, I will give the unasked question from “Outbreak” a thorough airing, and conclude.

Here is what “Outbreak” says in the “Investigation and Findings” section:

The outbreak location was an elementary school in Marin County, California… Each grade includes 20 to 25 students in single classrooms. Other than two teachers, one of whom was the index patient, all school staff members were vaccinated (verified in California’s Immunization Registry). The index patient became symptomatic on May 19 with nasal congestion and fatigue. This teacher reported attending social events during May 13–16 but did not report any known COVID-19 exposures and attributed symptoms to allergies. The teacher continued working during May 17–21, subsequently experiencing cough, subjective fever, and headache. The school required teachers and students to mask while indoors; interviews with parents of infected students suggested that students’ adherence to masking and distancing guidelines in line with CDC recommendations (3) was high in class. However, the teacher was reportedly unmasked on occasions when reading aloud in class. On May 23, the teacher notified the school that they received a positive result for a SARS-CoV-2 test performed on May 21 and self-isolated until May 30. The teacher did not receive a second COVID-19 test, but reported fully recovering during isolation.

The index patient’s students began experiencing symptoms on May 22. During May 23–26, among 24 students in this grade, 22 were tested…. Twelve (55%) of the 22 students received a positive test result, including eight who experienced symptom onset during May 22–26. Throughout this period, all desks were separated by 6 ft. Students were seated in five rows; the attack rate in the two rows seated closest to the teacher’s desk was 80% (eight of 10) and was 28% (four of 14) in the three back rows…

On May 22, students in a another classroom, who differed in age by 3 years from the students in the class with the index case and who were also ineligible for vaccination began to experience symptoms. The two classrooms were separated by a large outdoor courtyard with lunch tables that were blocked off from use with yellow tape. All classrooms had portable high-efficiency particulate air filters and doors and windows were left open. Fourteen of 18 students in this separate grade received testing; six tests had positive results. Investigation revealed that one student in this grade hosted a sleepover on May 21 with two classmates from the same grade. All three of these students experienced symptoms after the sleepover and received positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. Among infected students in this class, test dates ranged from May 24 to June 1; symptom onset occurred during May 22–31.

So that’s the outbreak. Here are the headlines:

• CDC: Unvaccinated Marin County teacher caused big COVID-19 outbreak in school San Francisco Chronicle
• CDC study finds unvaccinated Marin Co. teacher infected 22 elementary school students with COVID ABC7
• CDC report confirms unvaccinated Marin County teacher was source of Delta variant outbreak KTVU
• CDC study shows unvaccinated teacher started Delta COVID outbreak at Marin school KSBW
• One Unvaccinated Teacher In Marin School Seeded COVID Outbreak That Infected Over a Dozen Students, Their Siblings, and Parents SFist
• How 1 unvaccinated Marin County teacher started a delta variant outbreak: CDC study KRON4

There is a unanimity of opinion by the headline-writing editors that the source of the problem was the index case: the unvaccinated teacher. Indeed, that’s without justification — that is, is not only a matter of aghastitude — given the “Implications for Public Health Practice” in the Summary section of “Outbreak”:

Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant, but transmission risk remains elevated among unvaccinated persons in schools. In addition to vaccination, strict adherence to multiple nonpharmaceutical prevention strategies, including masking, are important to ensure safe school instruction.

(I presume the Summary is tacked on to the submitted study by CDC.) Now let’s turn to the bodies of the stories, where there is a broader spectrum of opinion than in the headlines.

The Commission on Information Disorder?

Harpers |  In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country.

Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all. But our man lived in an Eden, not because it was unspoiled, but because he hadn’t considered any other state of affairs. For him, information was in its right—that is to say, unquestioned—place. And that was good, too.

Today, we are lapsed. We understand the media through a metaphor—“the information ecosystem”—which suggests to the American subject that she occupies a hopelessly denatured habitat. Every time she logs on to Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, she encounters the toxic byproducts of modernity as fast as her fingers can scroll. Here is hate speech, foreign interference, and trolling; there are lies about the sizes of inauguration crowds, the origins of pandemics, and the outcomes of elections.

She looks out at her fellow citizens and sees them as contaminated, like tufted coastal animals after an oil spill, with “disinformation” and “misinformation.” She can’t quite define these terms, but she feels that they define the world, online and, increasingly, off.

Everyone scrounges this wasteland for tainted morsels of content, and it’s impossible to know exactly what anyone else has found, in what condition, and in what order. Nevertheless, our American is sure that what her fellow citizens are reading and watching is bad. According to a 2019 Pew survey, half of Americans think that “made-up news/info” is “a very big problem in the country today,” about on par with the “U.S. political system,” the “gap between rich and poor,” and “violent crime.” But she is most worried about disinformation, because it seems so new, and because so new, so isolable, and because so isolable, so fixable. It has something to do, she knows, with the algorithm.

What is to be done with all the bad content? In March, the Aspen Institute announced that it would convene an exquisitely nonpartisan Commission on Information Disorder, co-chaired by Katie Couric, which would “deliver recommendations for how the country can respond to this modern-day crisis of faith in key institutions.” The fifteen commissioners include Yasmin Green, the director of research and development for Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google that “explores threats to open societies”; Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and Kremlin critic; Alex Stamos, formerly Facebook’s chief security officer and now the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Kathryn Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s estranged daughter-in-law; and Prince Harry, Prince Charles’s estranged son. Among the commission’s goals is to determine “how government, private industry, and civil society can work together . . . to engage disaffected populations who have lost faith in evidence-based reality,” faith being a well-known prerequisite for evidence-based reality.

The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of “toxicity” on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it. As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?

Big Disinfo has found energetic support from the highest echelons of the American political center, which has been warning of an existential content crisis more or less constantly since the 2016 election. To take only the most recent example: in May, Hillary Clinton told the former Tory leader Lord Hague that “there must be a reckoning by the tech companies for the role that they play in undermining the information ecosystem that is absolutely essential for the functioning of any democracy.”

NIH Being Effectively Sued For Deception With Regard To Ivermectin Efficacy...,

Trialsite  |  On August 25, NIH appeared in conference in federal court in the District of New Jersey. The purpose of the appearance was for resolution of Jin-Pyong Peter Yim v National Institutes of Health and for scheduling of “motion practice”, if necessary. I am the plaintiff in the case. Beneath the legal formalities, the case could reveal that NIH deceived the nation on a treatment for COVID-19.

NIH is alleged to have violated the Freedom of Information Act. NIH failed to respond to a document request made on January 28, 2021:

“All updates to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Treatment Guidelines that were endorsed by a vote of the Panel. (Date Range for Record Search: From 01/01/2021 To 01/28/2021)”

The purpose of the FOIA request was not to obtain the document. Rather, it was to know if a vote was held to endorse the NIH recommendation on ivermectin. NIH violated FOIA because it did not respond within the time defined by statute. A complaint was filed against the NIH on March 26, 2021 to appeal the non-response. NIH answered the complaint on June 30. The answer included an exhibit and testimony.

NIH was represented by Margaret Ann Mahoney. She stated that NIH had responded to the FOIA request. She was referring to the NIH FOIA response from April 23:

“You requested all updates to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Treatment Guidelines that were endorsed by a vote of the Panel (Date range for record search from 01/01/2021 to 01/28/2021). All approved updates to the guidelines are posted online and can be found here. The documents posted on this website respond to your request in full.”

I requested a change to the NIH response. The NIH response is ambiguous as to whether the requested document exists. I provided a URL that refers to a single document. I requested that that URL be given in the NIH FOIA response if that recommendation was endorsed by a vote.

The conference was presided over by Judge Lois H. Goodman. She gave her opinion following discussion between the plaintiff and defendant. She expressed skepticism of the legal basis for the complaint. However, she urged further negotiation and allowed for “motion practice” if no agreement was reached. Her concluding remarks are here.

Following the conference, Judge Goodman also issued the following order:

“TEXT ORDER directing parties to confer to attempt resolution to this dispute. Parties to report to the Court as to the results of those efforts to resolve by 9/8/2021. If, matter cannot be resolved, dispositive motions to be filed by 9/24/2021 and to be returnable on 10/18/2021. Ms. Mahoney is directed to provide pro se plaintiff with a copy of this text order. So Ordered by Magistrate Judge Lois H. Goodman on 8/26/2021 .”

To Deny Natural Immunity Is To Deny Science...,

alexberenson |  The question I get more than any other:

I had Covid. I had an antibody test to prove it. Am I protected (and do I need to get the vaccine)?

Let me start with the usual disclaimer: THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A PHYSICIAN.

But the answer is now increasingly clear: natural immunity from Covid following infection and recovery is HIGHLY protective against future Covid infections. Rates of reinfection are very low.

Perhaps natural immunity eventually wanes, but we don’t know when. In fact, a little-noticed paper from June suggests it may actually strengthen for at least a year - and provide plenty of protection from Delta and other variants.

I am not going into the problems with vaccine-generated protection today or with our political unwillingness to recognize natural immunity. (Remember, GOOD NEWS - we could all use it).

Let’s just look instead at why natural immunity works so well.

You immune response comes in two forms: “humoral” and “cellular.”

When you are infected with Sars-Cov-2, your body’s “B-cells” - part of the immune system - quickly pour out “antibodies.” These antibodies attack the viral particles circulating in your blood and other fluids, hoping to keep the virus from entering your cells and replicating itself.

This is humoral immunity. Your B-cells make antibodies in many different shapes. Some are better at sticking to the virus. Scientists call these “neutralizing” antibodies because they neutralize the “antigen,” the foreign body attacking you, keeping it from entering your cells.

Amazingly, your B-cells quickly figure out which antibodies neutralize most effectively and make more of them, while cutting back on those that don’t work.

At the same time, another part of the immune system - killer or CD8 T-cells - attacks cells that the virus has already infected. You destroy your own cells to prevent the virus from using them to make more copies of itself. This is cellular immunity.

For a few days after you are infected, your immune system is in a race with the virus. If you win the race, defeat the virus, and recover - as the vast majority of people infected with Sars-Cov-2 do - within a week or two you should have no measurable levels of virus in your body.

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.

Fugg Around With Sheeple Quantum Biology, But You Not Gonna Phug With Mine...,

medical-net  |  Quantum biology is an emerging field of science, established in the 1920s, which looks at whether the subatomic world of quantum mechanics plays a role in living cells. Quantum mechanics is an interdisciplinary field by nature, bringing together nuclear physicists, biochemists and molecular biologists.

In a research paper published by the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, a team from Surrey's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunneling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.

Proton tunneling involves the spontaneous disappearance of a proton from one location and the same proton's re-appearance nearby.

The research team found that atoms of hydrogen, which are very light, provide the bonds that hold the two strands of the DNA's double helix together and can, under certain conditions, behave like spread-out waves that can exist in multiple locations at once, thanks to proton tunneling. This leads to these atoms occasionally being found on the wrong strand of DNA, leading to mutations.

Although these mutations' lifetime is short, the team from Surrey has revealed that they can still survive the DNA replication mechanism inside cells and could potentially have health consequences.

Dr Marco Sacchi, the project lead and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, said: "Many have long suspected that the quantum world - which is weird, counter-intuitive and wonderful - plays a role in life as we know it. While the idea that something can be present in two places at the same time might be absurd to many of us, this happens all the time in the quantum world, and our study confirms that quantum tunneling also happens in DNA at room temperature."

There is still a long and exciting road ahead of us to understand how biological processes work on the subatomic level, but our study - and countless others over the recent years - have confirmed quantum mechanics are at play. In the future, we are hoping to investigate how tautomers produced by quantum tunneling can propagate and generate genetic mutations."

Louie Slocombe, PhD Student, Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre and Study Co-Author

Jim Al-Khalili, a co-author of the study and Co-Director of the Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Surrey, said: "It has been thrilling to work with this group of young, diverse and talented thinkers - made up of a broad coalition of the scientific world. This work cements quantum biology as the most exciting field of scientific research in the 21st century."