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
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.
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:
“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:
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”.
“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).”
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 costlyendeavour. 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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 .”
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.
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.
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."
discovermagazine |With photosynthesis, scientists show
for the first time that there are quantum effects in living systems.
This could lead to better solar panels, energy storage or even quantum
computers. (Credit: Shutterstock) We all probably learned about photosynthesis,
how plants turn sunlight into energy, in school. It might seem,
therefore, that we figured out this bit of the world. But scientists are
still learning new things about even the most basic stuff (see also
the sun and moon), and photosynthesis is no different. In particular, according to a study released Monday in Nature Chemistry,
an international team of scientists showed that molecules involved in
photosynthesis display quantum mechanical behavior. Even though we’d suspected
as much before, this is the first time we’ve seen quantum effects in
living systems. Not only will it help us better understand plants,
sunlight and everything in between, but it could also mean cool new tech
in the future.
The Quantum Conundrum
First, let’s back up. While photosynthesis may be taught in classrooms
the world over, quantum mechanics is a bit less popular, in part because
it’s so weird. Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman
once said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum
mechanics." It’s so impenetrable to non-experts that the same metaphors
come up whenever someone tries to explain it. You might have heard of Schrödinger's Cat,
which is both alive and dead at the same time thanks to quantum
weirdness — in particular, because electrons can be in two states at the
same time. It’s only when we observe the system that the weirdness
collapses and reality “picks” one state: the cat’s actually alive (or
dead), the electron’s actually at this end of the room (or that end).
But quantum effects are typically limited to the very small, and only
really observable in perfect, laboratory conditions. A living being,
with its wet, messy systems, would be a tough place to find some quantum
weirdness lurking — and yet we have.
Molecular Madness
Scientists zoomed in on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex, a key component of green sulfur bacteria's machinery
for photosynthesis. It’s been a historical favorite for such research
because we’ve long known its structure and it's fairly easy to work
with. Previous experiments had seemed to show light-sensitive molecules
in this area in two different states at the same time — that’s quantum
weirdness — but the effect lasted more than 1 picosecond, which is much
longer than expected. This new study shows that it was really just
regular vibrations in the molecules, nothing quantum about it. But
researchers have been excited about the possibilities of quantum biology
for years, so having disproved the earlier experiments, the authors
wanted to find some new evidence of their own. “We wondered if we might
be able to observe that Schrödinger cat situation,” says co-author
Thomas la Cour Jansen in a press release. And observe it they did! With a
technique called two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, researchers
saw molecules in simultaneous excited states — quantum weirdness akin to
a cat being alive and dead at the same time. What’s more, the effect
lasted exactly as long as theories predicted it, suggesting this
evidence of quantum biology will last. As the authors succinctly put it,
“Thus, our measurements provide an unambiguous experimental observation
of excited-state vibronic coherence in the FMO complex.” What could be
simpler? The results shed light (haha) on how to harvest energy from
light, and the team thinks they’re “generally applicable” to a variety
of systems, living and non-living alike. This means it could result in
engineering benefits such as better solar panels, energy storage or even
quantum computers. And, of course, updated textbooks for tomorrow’s
lessons on photosynthesis.
quantamagazine | It’s not surprising that quantum physics has a reputation for being
weird and counterintuitive. The world we’re living in sure doesn’t feel
quantum mechanical. And until the 20th century, everyone assumed that
the classical laws of physics devised by Isaac Newton and others —
according to which objects have well-defined positions and properties at
all times — would work at every scale. But Max Planck, Albert Einstein,
Niels Bohr and their contemporaries discovered that down among atoms
and subatomic particles, this concreteness dissolves into a soup of
possibilities. An atom typically can’t be assigned a definite position,
for example — we can merely calculate the probability of finding it in
various places. The vexing question then becomes: How do quantum
probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world?
Physicists sometimes talk about this changeover as the
“quantum-classical transition.” But in fact there’s no reason to think
that the large and the small have fundamentally different rules, or that
there’s a sudden switch between them. Over the past several decades,
researchers have achieved a greater understanding of how quantum
mechanics inevitably becomes classical mechanics through an interaction
between a particle or other microscopic system and its surrounding
environment.
One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is
that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical
physics — position and speed, say — are selected from a menu of quantum
possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in
evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.”
As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most
copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can
make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a
hallmark of classical behavior.
This idea, called quantum Darwinism (QD), explains a lot about why we
experience the world the way we do rather than in the peculiar way it
manifests at the scale of atoms and fundamental particles. Although
aspects of the puzzle remain unresolved, QD helps heal the apparent rift
between quantum and classical physics.
Only recently, however, has quantum Darwinism been put to the
experimental test. Three research groups, working independently in
Italy, China and Germany, have looked for the telltale signature of the
natural selection process by which information about a quantum system
gets repeatedly imprinted on various controlled environments. These
tests are rudimentary, and experts say there’s still much more to be
done before we can feel sure that QD provides the right picture of how
our concrete reality condenses from the multiple options that quantum
mechanics offers. Yet so far, the theory checks out.
virginiastoner | Vaccine dangers hiding in plain sight
FACT: There has been a massive increase in deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) this year. That’s not a ‘conspiracy theory’, that’s an indisputable fact. You can try to explain it or justify it, or even argue it doesn’t matter, but you can’t deny it.
We’re not talking about a modest increase in death reports, something we might chat about in concerned voices over Chai tea and bagels at a company mixer. We’re talking about a huge and unprecedented increase—so massive that in the last 4 months alone, VAERS has received over 40% of all death reports it has ever received in its entire 30+year history. So massive it’s literally “off the chart.” The first chart in the pair below shows VAERS death reports from 2014 thru 2020. If you tried to add the 2021 data to it, it would be way, way off the chart. The second chart shows how much detail was lost when the 2021 data was squeezed in.
The pair of charts below are another illustration. Notice all age groups had an increase in death reports from the COVID-19 vaccines—with both the 18-64 and 65+ age groups experiencing a dramatic “off the chart” increase.
The increase in VAERS death reports is not due to more vaccination
Even with the COVID-19 shots, the estimated total vaccines administered so far this year is less than the yearly average–because we are only a quarter of the way through this year. No doubt the vaccine count will climb much higher by the end of this year, but it’s not the reason for the massive increase in VAERS death reports over the last 4 months.
The following chart compares estimates of vaccines administered with deaths reported to VAERS, separating COVID-19 vaccines from other vaccines. The rate of reported deaths for other vaccines looks fairly normal; the massive increase is mainly from the COVID-19 vaccines.
There are many notes at the end of this paper about how the vaccine data was estimated, and where the data for these charts was obtained, along with the data table.
abcnews | Washington County's sheriff confirmed Tuesday night that jail inmates
had been prescribed ivermectin, but did not say how many. It wasn't
clear if all the inmates who were prescribed the medication had tested
positive for COVID-19.
“There is an open investigation and we can’t comment on it right now," Embry told The Associated Press.
Dr. Rob Karas, the jail's physician, has said no inmates were forced to take the drug.
The
U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved ivermectin for
use by people and animals for some parasitic worms, head lice and skin
conditions. The FDA has not approved its use in treating or preventing
COVID-19 in humans. According to the FDA, side effects for the drug
include skin rash, nausea and vomiting.
“Using any treatment for
COVID-19 that’s not approved or authorized by the FDA, unless part of a
clinical trial, can cause serious harm,” the FDA said in a
warning about the drug.
Embry declined to say who was the target
of the board's investigation. The board has authority over physicians,
but not jail facilities.
Sheriff
Tim Helder did not return a message Thursday, and a spokesperson for
the sheriff's office did not immediately respond to questions about the
drug's use.
In a lengthy statement released to the AP Thursday,
Karas defended the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19. Karas said he
has prescribed it to inmates and patients at his clinics who are
significantly sick with COVID-19 since late 2020. He did not respond to
questions about the investigation and the number of inmates who have
have been prescribed the drug.
“I do not have the luxury of
conducting my own clinical trial or study and am not attempting to do
so," Karas wrote. “I am on the front line of trying to prevent death and
serious illness."
The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
reported that the sheriff's office said Helder had learned of the drug's
use at the jail on Tuesday. In a July 20 email to Helder, Karas
recommended the sheriff's staff take it as a preventive measure against
COVID-19 but did not mention its use on inmates. Karas has said he's
taken the drug, as have members of his family.
dailymail | A jail doctor in Washington County, Arkansas, has been using an animal deworming drug to treat inmates with Covid-19 even though the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has specifically warned against it.
Ivermectin
is often used as a dewormer in animals including cows and horses, and
is not recommended for treating the virus. The FDA said it 'can cause
serious harm'.
During a finance and
budget committee meeting for Washington County on Tuesday night the
jail's physician Dr Rob Karas asked for a 10 per cent increase in the
medical services contract, even after the county sheriff confirmed that
the jail health provider had been prescribing the drug.
Dr Karas has faced calls to resign over the revelation.
County-elected Justice of the Peace Eva Madison brought the issue back
up towards the end of the meeting after jail officials presented their
2022 budget. 'I learned today that Dr Karas is giving ivermectin - cow
dewormer - to the inmates at the jail,' she said.
Madison told members of the Washington
County quorum court - the county's governing body - that a jail official
and county employee, who asked to stay anonymous, told her they had
been sent to the jail's clinic to get tested for Covid-19.
When
the unidentified person tested negative they told Madison they were
given a $76 prescription for ivermectin, as reported by CBS News.
'They
were concerned about the prescription, asked their primary care
physician about it and the doctor told him to 'throw that in the trash,'
she said.
'(The person) tested
negative, was given a prescription for ivermectin, was told to go to Dr
Karas's pharmacy just off campus to have it filled,' Madison told the
committee.
She added: 'He's out $76
because of Dr Karas prescribing dewormer to a county employee for
treatment of a condition that he didn't have.
'The
employee had the good fortune to have a physician that he could go to
and ask for a second opinion. Our inmates do not have that choice.'
Washington
County Sheriff Tim Helder did not say how many inmates at the 710-bed
facility had been given ivermectin and defended Dr Karas, who has been
prescribing the medication.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...