You Do Know Most Everything In America Is Delivered By Diesel Trucks...,

In talks with my homie who just wrapped up a ten year stint with YRC, he tells me that most all the Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) Level Sensors are made in Malaysia, and the factory is shut down there, and this is a part which needs to be replaced about every year or so, and an ungodly amount of big rigs are down for lack of this part. The same sensor is used on buses and RV’s, which are also down for the count. 

Read some of the stories from RV’ers in the second link, to give you an idea of all of the sudden ‘you ain’t going nowhere’ sagas.  He also mentioned there are hardly any new big rigs for sale, similar to the new car shortage. Another friend went to a Honda dealer just across State Line and related that they had a mere 13 new cars for sale.

trucknews |  Fleet maintenance teams are struggling to source many of the truck parts they need as suppliers face shortages of commodities from microchips to rubber.

“It’s really starting to dribble down into common parts,” said Darry Stuart of DWS Fleet Management, during an online Fleet Talk presentation for the spring meeting of the American Trucking Association’s Technology and Maintenance Council (TMC).

The emerging rubber shortage alone could affect the availability and pricing of everything from tires to O-rings, added TMC executive director Robert Braswell.

Several reports have identified challenges including China’s recent stockpiling of natural rubber, as well as flooding and disease that are affecting rubber trees themselves.

But the shortages are not limited to parts alone. While South Shore Transportation maintenance director Kevin Tomlinson admits it’s difficult to source wood for trailer floors, he is facing lengthy waits for new trailers themselves.

“It’s a perfect storm of build and parts,” Tomlinson said, referring to the surging market demand that has aligned with the material shortages.

Industry analysts at FTR recently reported that U.S. trailer manufacturers are almost booked solid for the remainder of 2021 and have yet to open 2022 order boards because they’re uncertain about material and component costs.

rvtravel |  Most current USA-produced diesel engines are equipped with federal government-required devices that reduce nitrogen oxide tailpipe emissions.

So what does that have to do with anything?

A major way these emissions are controlled is by injecting DEF into exhaust gases. The DEF helps convert nitrogen oxide, an air pollutant, into nitrogen and oxygen. Both of these elements are found in the air we breathe and, in themselves, are harmless. A monitoring system ensures this process goes as planned.

How does the DEF monitor work? 

To ensure the DEF in a vehicle system is effective, a monitoring system checks, among other things, its quality, quantity, and temperature. The complete monitoring system is made up of various parts and is commonly called a “DEF head.” If this system determines the DEF isn’t up to standard (or has run out), the DEF head sends a signal to the engine computer warning of the trouble.

The engine control computer, on receiving this signal, turns on a dash warning light. At this point, a sort of “clock” begins a countdown. For many users, after 100 miles or so the engine is “de-rated,” or slowed down to as low as five miles per hour. It’s a sure inducement to get the rig to a repair shop.

So why is de-rating a problem?

If your motorhome or truck is de-rated, you get nowhere fast. If your de-rate happens while traveling down a high-speed roadway, the chances of a rear-end collision from a faster rig are increased. Enter the human toll, not just from a real traffic accident, but the mental stress of worrying about it.

Why not just get the problem fixed and keep on going?

Like so many modern products, DEF heads contain silicon chip microprocessors. These are the culprits that are causing the problem – they’re failing. The chips are very specific in design, and require the appropriate replacements. But just as the auto industry is shutting down production lines due to the worldwide shortage of microchips, DEF head manufacturers are likewise plagued. Many RVers are being told replacement DEF heads could be months away. Meanwhile, their RVs sit immobile and useless. The human toll here is real.

If there aren’t microchips to fix the problem, can’t something else be done?

A temporary “fix” exists. While the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) requires the DEF monitoring system, it recognizes some “essential” services can’t be stopped. For example, emergency vehicles simply can’t be de-rated, lest those rigs be put out of service. An allowance has been made to keep the DEF monitoring systems in place. They warn of bad DEF, but don’t de-rate the engines. If the EPA were to allow reprogramming of engine control computers in RVs in this same way, RVers could get on down the road.

Across The Board Mainstream Media Just Lied About Ivermectin In Oklahoma

Admitting some really safe, and inexpensive treatments like Invermectin have great value would diminish fear and slam the brakes on expensive treatments. I do not know this hypothesis to be true, but if there ever is a strong perception that the most influential members of the American medical community plus much of the media has decided that allowing Americans to suffer and die because otherwise it just opens a can of worms regarding activities in 2020, well, what will be found? Under such a hypothesis, “leaders” may be shocked that it is September 2021 and they still can’t move out of the trenches they dug even while all kinds of countries concern themselves with treating the sick effectively.

reason |  KFOR, an Oklahoma news channel, reported last week that rural hospitals throughout the state were in danger of becoming overwhelmed by victims of a very specific poisoning: overdoses of ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug promoted by vaccine skeptics as a possible treatment for COVID-19.

The story went viral, and was seized upon by the mainstream media. But its central claim is substantially untrue.

The meat of the story is a series of quotes from an Oklahoma doctor, Jason McElyea, who appears to attribute overcrowding at local hospitals to a deluge of ivermectin overdoses.

"The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated," McElyea told KFOR's Katelyn Ogle.

The story ran under the headline: "Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances." It was quickly picked up by national news outlets, such as Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and the New York Daily News. Numerous high-profile media figures, including MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, tweeted about ivermectin overdoses straining Oklahoma hospitals—the implication being that the right-wing embrace of a crank COVID-19 cure was dangerous not only for the people who consumed it but for the stability of the entire medical system.

It was a story that appeared to confirm many of the mainstream media's biases about the recklessness of the rubes. But it's extremely misleading. There is, in fact, little reason to believe a purported strain on Oklahoma hospitals is caused by ivermectin overdoses; one hospital served by the doctor quoted in the KFOR article released a statement saying it has not treated any ivermectin overdoses, nor has it been forced to turn away patients.

This is yet another example of the mainstream media lazily circulating a narrative that flatters the worldview of the liberal audience, without bothering to check on any of the details. Additional reporting was sorely needed here, and has now completely undermined the central point of the story.

 

The "Scientific Consensus" Is About To Rapidly Solidify Behind The "Political Mandates"

jonathan-cook  |  In some of these blogs I have been trying to gently highlight what should be a very obvious fact: that “the science” we are being constantly told to follow is not quite as scientific as is being claimed.

That is inevitable in the context of a new virus about which much is still not known. And it is all the more so given that our main response to the pandemic – vaccination – while being a relatively effective tool against the worst disease outcomes is nonetheless an exceedingly blunt one. Vaccines are the epitome of the one-size-fits-all approach of modern medicine.

Into the void between our scientific knowledge and our fear of mortality has rushed politics. It is a refusal to admit that “the science” is necessarily compromised by political and commercial considerations that has led to an increasingly polarised – and unreasonable – confrontation between what have become two sides of the Covid divide. Doubt and curiosity have been squeezed out by the bogus certainties of each faction.

All of this has been underscored by the latest decision of the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation, the British government’s official advisory body on vaccinations. Unexpectedly, it has defied political pressure and demurred, for the time being at least, on extending the vaccination programme to children aged between 12 and 15.

The British government appears to be furious. Ministers who have been constantly demanding that we “follow the science” are reportedly ready to ignore the advice – or more likely, bully the JCVI into hastily changing its mind over the coming days.

Over the weekend, the vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, even suggested, in a potentially radical overhaul of traditional ideas of medical consent, that doctors – and presumably schools – might soon be allowed to persuade children as young as 12 to get vaccinated against their parents’ wishes.

And liberal media outlets like the Guardian, which have been so careful until now to avoid giving a platform to “dissident” scientists, are suddenly subjecting the great and the good of the vaccination establishment to harsh criticism from doctors who want children vaccinated as quickly as possible.

Watching this confected “row” unfold, one thing is clear: “the science” is getting another political pummelling.

 

lil'Fauci And Francis Collins Both Lied About Funding Wuhan Gain Of Function Research

Now, thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health (which were unredacted enough to toss Fauci under the bus), we now know that Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit headed by Peter Daszak, was absolutely engaged in gain-of-function research to make chimeric SARS-based coronaviruses, which they confirmed could infect human cells.

Ebright summarized The Intercept's reporting in a Monday night Twitter thread:

theintercept |  "The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic." 

 

The materials show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present. 

 

(This had been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant. But this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and the full proposal of the 2017 grant.) 

 

The materials confirm the grants supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells. 

 

The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells ("humanized mice"). 

 

The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses--one not been previously disclosed publicly--was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed... 

 

...and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.

 

The materials further reveal that the the grants also supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric MERS-related coronaviruses that combined spike genes from one MERS-related coronavirus with genetic information from another MERS-related coronavirus. 

 

The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.

MSDNC Kwestioning The Sincerity Of The Neo-Vaccinoid Deliberate

nbcnews |  Backlash to the latest push for religious exemptions could backfire, however.

Doug Opel, a bioethics and pediatrics professor at the University of Washington who has written about the challenges of religious exemptions and vaccination mandates, pointed out that arguing against and not allowing religious exemptions might do more harm than good.

Though there are certainly people who will attempt to falsely secure an exemption, he said he believed that only a small minority of the American population would likely try to obtain one. It might be better to allow religious exemptions to reduce the perception of coercion and allow the vaccination mandates to stand with fewer challenges, he said.

“A policy reason to have exemptions is to allow the very few people who want to opt out to opt out and then allow the mandate itself to stand and be acceptable and sustainable over time,” he said. “Even if a minority opt out, the vast majority will get vaccinated, and the mandate will have served its purpose of reducing transmission and disease.”

70% Would Quit Rather Than Submit To The mRNA Neo-Vaccinoid

theweek  |  About 70 percent of unvaccinated Americans who are not self-employed said they would likely quit their job if their employer mandated COVID-19 vaccines and did not grant religious or medical exemptions, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll found.

Those numbers don't suggest vaccine mandates would lead to a massive exodus from the workplace since a healthy majority of employees who are working at places that have yet to implement a mandate have already received their shots. But among the 30 percent or so who haven't, there is significant opposition. Only 16 percent from that group would comply with a mandate, while 35 percent said they would seek an exemption and 42 percent would leave. If there's no exemption, then 72 percent of those surveyed said they would quit.

Wash Post/ABC poll shows 67% of workers who aren't self-employed would respond to a workplace vaccine requirement by quitting or asking for an exemption and quitting if it's denied. pic.twitter.com/Ad49dgFpP6

— Jon Steingart (@jonsteingart) September 5, 2021

The Post/ABC poll was conducted by telephone between Aug. 20-Sept. 1 among 1,066 adults in the U.S. The margin of error is 3.5 percentage points. Read more at The Washington Post.

Gingerly Blacksplaining Why Black And Brown Americans Are "Neo-Vaccinoid Deliberate"

abcnews  |  Much has been made about people of color being hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Numbers have shown that Black and Latino vaccination rates are lagging behind those of white people in America.

About 40% of Black people and 45% of Latinos have been at least partially vaccinated as of Aug. 16, compared to 50% of white people, according to the latest data by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And as of Aug. 16, 72% of people eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine were at least partially vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So far, researchers only have race or ethnicity data of 58% of the vaccinated population, of which 58% is white, 10% Black and 17% Hispanic.

There have been myriad efforts to explain the racial and ethnic vaccine rate disparity. Misinformation online has been blamed. Throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, many were exposed to a slew of misleading health information, including hoaxes about the COVID-19 vaccines, some specifically targeted at Blacks and Latinos. Other experts identify structural barriers to vaccines, including health literacy, vaccine safety concerns, and physical access as contributing factors. Distrust of the medical system and government was also cited as an underlying source of vaccine disparity.

Misinformation plays a small role in vaccine deliberation in people of color, study finds

Recent research by First Draft, a nonprofit focused on combating misinformation, found misinformation to only play a small role in vaccine deliberation among Black and Latino communities, but it also concluded that the role of misinformation should not be understated as it may be effective on people who exhibit higher levels of mistrust in institutions.

 

This Has Happened Previously Before Settling Down To Become A Common Cold...,

I have been doing a great deal of research about a past pandemic which I have never spent much time investigating – the Great Russian Flu of the 1890s. This has always been thought to be an actual influenza – but recent genetic and virologic studies are showing us that this was very likely the introduction of Coronavirus OC43 to the world.

Many physicians at the time were chronicling that the symptoms of this “flu” were different than any other influenza had ever been. Even Sir William Osler, in written statements in his textbooks of Internal Medicine, was of the notion that the symptoms exhibited by patients during that pandemic of the 1890s were really not like the normal flu. His books were written in the decades immediately leading up to the “real” influenza pandemic of 1918. And the one symptom that over and over described by numerous physicians that were writing at the time, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was depression. This just does not happen to any degree in true INFLUENZA and many remarked on the difference.

It must be noted that the word “depression” is a rather modern word and a modern construct. This construct is from our very reductionist, form-filling out, check the boxes modern medicine. “Depression” today is a drop bucket of multiple different diagnoses of the past. FYI, there are many things like this in medicine, not just depression.

Conan Doyle and Osler would have used more prominently the diagnosis “melancholia” to describe what we commonly use as “depression” today. But interestingly enough, contemporaneous medical writers of the 1890s often used a completely different word with a completely different diagnostic meaning to describe what they were seeing in patients of that pandemic. That word is ACEDIA. I have seen it used repeatedly in my research of the pandemic of the 1890s.

The difference is completely lost on us today – but it is actually a very important distinction. ACEDIA is an old medieval concept which is very difficult to describe. Basically it means a depression of the soul. A SPIRITUAL depression. While melancholia was more of a behavioral depression. Mainly having to do with living with consequences of behavior or reaction to events in a patient’s life.

Interestingly, when I am really talking to these POST COVID patients today – it is indeed more consistent with the spiritual and soul exhaustion of ACEDIA – and not behavioral or reactive like most depressions are. I have occasionally seen this ACEDIA type of depression before, but it is now just one patient after the other. I am also seeing ACEDIA like depression repeatedly in patients who have never had COVID. It is a sign of the times. In the days of Osler and Conan Doyle, they had no way to test patients for the presence of the virus and just assumed everyone had been infected by the miasma. I think today I am seeing this in POST COVID patients and non-infected as well.

The writers of that era in the 1890s were unequivocal in what they were seeing in their coronavirus pandemic – an epidemic of ACEDIA in those who had had the illness. I find it profoundly fascinating that the exact same type of thing is happening in our coronavirus patients and our COVID world today.

If indeed it was OC43 the infection rate is now 100%.

It sweeps over the earth and we all get it every other year or so.

That is what the concept of endemic status is.

Endemicity isn’t necessarily a good thing. Many endemic infections still kill millions yearly malaria and AIDS being the ones that come to my mind instantly. There are many others.

We should obviously try as hard as we can to limit casualities. But at some point, we as humans will need to come to grips with the fact that these pandemic introductions are one of the costs of the privilege of living here. It is part of life.

There is possibly nothing we can do about it. We have repeatedly tried in both human and animal outbreaks and have never been successful even once. I have my doubts we will succeed this time. It will however eventually calm down and behave like its cousins like OC43.

Unlike the mantra of modern neoliberalism, we as humans are not in charge.

When you read contemporaneous writing from politicians and medical people both in the 1890s and 1918 flu you instantly realize that they were doing their best to make citizens understand this simple concept. The hubris approach of modern times that we are in charge would have been unthinkable then. We will see how it all plays out. I have my opinion that they were much more wise during those earlier pandemics.

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.”