Collated by Maireid Sullivan 2020 - updated 2022
Work in progress
“Before you heal someone, ask him if he is willing
to give up the things that made him sick.” anon
Introduction
- Looking back on lessons learned Part 1
- World Health Organization (WHO, CMS, FDA, CDC, etc.) Part 2
- 2022 - 2024 Science Reports Part 3
- 2021 - 2022 Alternative Science Research
- Women's issues Part 4
- 2020 Science Reports Part 5
- Government Reports Part 6
- Media Reports Part 7
- Timeline: 2020-2022 Reports on The Origins of Covid-19 Part 8
- Vaccination Research History Part 9
- Spanish Flu - in hindsight Part 10
-
Learning from History
- In Closing: Historian shares her personal opinion
“Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.” – Albert Einstein
Introduction
Vulnerability to immune system breakdown and infection: People everywhere have long suffered chronic insecurity, in varying degrees, caused by malnutrition, poverty, fear, homelessness, anxiety, lack of sleep,
and by armed conflict, displacement and violence.
It's a little easier now to calmly reflect on historical perspectives and efforts to contain the current pandemic, especially poignant when we learn, for example, that the Justinian Plague began mid-500s AD and lasted nearly 300 years - until late 700s AD:
Ongoing war, trauma and poverty leads to "system breakdown".
"Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many virological research projects examined how close naturally occurring CoVs are to causing a pandemic in humans."Bruttel et al. 2022
Note:
In mid-August 2019, Fort Detrick. the largest employer in Frederick County, Maryland, and America’s main biological warfare lab was ordered to stop all research into viruses and pathogens, and was shut down following safety violations, in particular relating to the disposal of dangerous materials.
The closure
was reported world wide long before the World Military Games held in Wuhan in Oct. 2019, which military personnel from over 100 countries attended.
Wuhan, China
18-27 October 2019
World Military Games Nearly 10K military representatives, from 100 countries, participated in the world military games held in Wuhan, between 18-27 October 2019.
Wikipedia:
The 2019 Military World Games, officially known as the 7th CISM Military World Games and commonly known as Wuhan 2019, was held from October 18–27, 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China.
The 7th Military World Games was the first international military multi-sport event to be held in China and also it was the largest military sports event ever to be held in China, with nearly 10,000 athletes from over 100 countriescompeting in 27 sports.
First virus report: Dec. 31, 2019, China
Wuhan reported 27 cases of viral pneumonia of unknown cause.
Wuhan 2019 World Military Games - the 'Bat hypothesis'
Note:
We now know that there are no horseshoe bats native to Wuhan. Yunnan province is where the bat caves are - bats that also perfectly match the genetics of those found in the covid strains genetics. The only horseshoe bats from Yunnan found in Wuhan were located at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they were researching/studying the latency of coronaviruses in horseshoe bats, funded by EcoHealth Alliance (EHA).
Singapore, Malaysia
9 to 10 December, 2019 Nipah Virus International Conference
Park Royal Hotel, Singapore
Filmed on December 9, 2019, following the first day of the two-day Nipah Virus International Conference, in Singapore. Posted to YouTube on May 19, 2020, by Professor Racaniello, Columbia University
YouTube 35:52 TWiV 615:
Columbia Professor V. R. Racaniello's Dec. 9, 2019 interview with
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a global nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergence of disease.
Interview closing lines:
VR: I love it. I think what you’re doing is fabulous.
PD: So appreciate that.
Professor Vincent R. Racaniello (b. 1953), is the Higgins Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and co-author of a textbook on virology:
- Virology Blog: About viruses and viral diseases
- Facebook: TViV (This Week in Virology) is a podcast about viruses
- YouTube MicrobeTV Channel host:
"I am Vincent Racaniello, Earth's virology Professor.
It's my goal to teach virology to the world. On this channel you will find videos from my virology lectures at Columbia University, from my science shows This Week in Virology, This Week in Parasitism, This Week in Microbiology, This Week in Evolution, and This Week in Neuroscience; interviews that I've done with microbiologists, and short videos about viruses. Subscribe and stay tuned for future awesome science content."
Excerpt:
Of the $41.91 million, $37.61 million was awarded to EcoHealth Alliance by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which describes its mission as “to protect the United States and its allies by enabling the DoD and international partners to detect, deter, and defeat WMD and threat networks.”
Beginning in fiscal year 2014, the DTRA began awarding funding to EcoHealth for a work program labeled “Scientific Research – Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction”. After three straight years in which awards were fewer than $1 million, the amounts sent to the program jumped considerably. In fiscal year 2017, $2.34 million of the $2.91 million EcoHealth received from DTRA went toward the weapons research. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, 100 percent of DTRA’s awards to EcoHealth went toward the program — $4.24 million, $2.99 million, and an eye-popping $21.33 million, respectively. The final total: $33.85 million — 90 percent of EcoHealth’s awards from DTRA and 81 percent of its total Pentagon awards — over seven years for a single program.... >>>more
Excerpt: The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals.
The news comes as the charity's chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories.
The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. >>>more
World Military Games
Selected reports on aftermath . . .
United States 30 June, 2020
The American Prospect, Washington D.C. Did the Military World Games Spread COVID-19? The October 2019 event, held in Wuhan, China, appears to have been a vector for spreading disease in the U.S. and around the world.
Excerpt
WASHINGTON – Less than a month before data shows the first Chinese citizen became ill with coronavirus, nearly 300 members of the U.S. military, Department of Defense, and support personnel attended the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan, China.
When the games ended, they returned to at least 219 home bases in 25 states, without ever being screened for possible COVID-19 infection.
According to the Pentagon, there was no reason to do so then, or subsequently. A spokesperson issued a terse email response to the question, saying there was no screening because the event—held from October 18 to 27, 2019—“was prior to the reported outbreak.”
…
Before March 31, when the Pentagon restricted the release of information about COVID-19 cases at installations for security reasons, infections occurred at a minimum of 63 military facilities where team members returned after the Wuhan games.
A strong correlation exists in COVID-19 cases reported at U.S. military facilities that are home bases of members of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan.
Additionally, the U.S. team used chartered flights to and from the games via Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Washington was one of the earliest states to show a spike in COVID-19.
…
The delegation to Wuhan included 188 athletes, 24 coaches, 18 team captains, 15 medical providers, 10 referees, nine public-affairs officers, seven “senior leaders,” nine CISM (International Military Sports Council), and two State Department personnel, according to DOD documents… >>>more
Abstract
The global COVID-19 pandemic was originally linked to a zoonotic spillover event in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market in November or December of 2019. However, recent evidence suggests that the virus may have already been circulating at the time of the outbreak. Here we use previously validated data streams - satellite imagery of hospital parking lots and Baidu search queries of disease related terms - to investigate this possibility. We observe an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume beginning in late Summer and early Fall 2019. While queries of the respiratory symptom “cough” show seasonal fluctuations coinciding with yearly influenza seasons, “diarrhea” is a more COVID-19 specific symptom and only shows an association with the current epidemic. The increase of both signals precede the documented start of the COVID-19 pandemic in December, highlighting the value of novel digital sources for surveillance of emerging pathogens. >>>more
United States
17 May 2020
Inside The Games More athletes claim they contracted COVID-19 at Military World Games in Wuhan
Excerpt:
More athletes have revealed that they fell ill during the Military World Games in October when the Chinese city of Wuhan hosted the event months before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Taking place in October, the allegations came two months before the first identification of COVID-19 by China. >>>more
United States
13 March, 2020
The Diplomat, Asia Pacific Region Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Implies US Military Brought Coronavirus to Wuhan
A firebrand Chinese spokesperson implies the U.S. “army” may have brought the virus to China. … On February 27, Zhong Nashan, a Chinese scientist involved in Beijing’s national response, suggested the following: “Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China.”
Back to top Part 1 WHO Reports: (WHO, CMS, FDA, CDC, etc.)
World Health Organization (WHO) Geneva, Switzerland
On 26 Feb. 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially named the coronavirus disease: SARS-CoV-2 or the COVID-19 virus.
On 11 March 2020 the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic.
The WHO’s emergency powers require 194 member states to follow the WHO’s directives. All countries which are Members of the United Nations may become members of WHO by accepting its Constitution. Members of WHO are grouped according to regional distribution (194 Member States).
Who are WHO’s 194 member countries? WHO: FluNet is a global web-based tool for influenza virological surveilance... The data at country level are publically available and updated weekly... >>> more
Updated 31 Dec. 2020 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19):
Herd immunity, lockdowns and COVID-19
What is ‘herd immunity’?
Excerpt
Herd immunity against COVID-19 should be achieved by protecting people through vaccination, not by exposing them to the pathogen that causes the disease. Read the Director-General’s 12 October media briefing speech for more detail.
Vaccines train our immune systems to create proteins that fight disease, known as ‘antibodies’, just as would happen when we are exposed to a disease but – crucially – vaccines work without making us sick. Vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question and passing on the pathogen, breaking any chains of transmission.Visit our webpage on COVID-19 and vaccines for more detail.
To safely achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, a substantial proportion of a population would need to be vaccinated, lowering the overall amount of virus able to spread in the whole population. One of the aims with working towards herd immunity is to keep vulnerable groups who cannot get vaccinated (e.g. due to health conditions like allergic reactions to the vaccine) safe and protected from the disease. Read our Q&A on vaccines and immunization for more information...
Key points:
12 October 2020 WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19
- Around the world, we’re now seeing an increase in the number of reported cases of COVID-19, especially in Europe and the Americas.
- There has been some discussion recently about the concept of reaching so-called “herd immunity” by letting the virus spread.
- Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.
- WHO is hopeful that countries will use targeted interventions where and when needed, based on the local situation. We well understand the frustration that many people, communities and governments are feeling as the pandemic drags on, and as cases rise again.
- There are no shortcuts, and no silver bullets. The answer is a comprehensive approach, using every tool in the toolbox.
Excerpt: Description of the Situation
Since mid-October 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been monitoring data from Chinese surveillance systems that have been showing an increase in respiratory illness in children in northern China.
At a press conference on 13 November 2023, China’s National Health Commission reported on a nationwide increase in the incidence of respiratory diseases, predominantly affecting children. Chinese authorities attributed this increase to lifting of COVID-19 restrictions and the arrival of the cold season, and due to circulating known pathogens such as influenza, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Mycoplasma pneumonia and RSV are known to affect children more than adults.
On 22 November 2023, WHO identified media and ProMED reports about clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia in children's hospitals in Beijing, Liaoning and other places in China. >>>more
Excerpt:
For centuries across countries, people have turned to traditional healers, home remedies and ancient medicinal knowledge to address their health and well-being needs. According to the WHO Global Report on Traditional and Complementary Medicine (2019), various systems of traditional medicine being used around the world include acupuncture, herbal medicines, indigenous traditional medicine, homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, naturopathy, chiropractic, osteopathy, ayurvedic and Unani medicine. And one hundred and seventy WHO Member States have reported on the use of traditional medicine by their populations.
Traditional medicine is sometimes seen as pre-scientific, its practices and treatments to be replaced by modern, better, more efficient science-based medicine. What is less known, however, is its contribution to modern science and medicine, and a long history of traditional products and practices being translated into effective treatments for health conditions.
Around 40% of pharmaceutical products today draw from nature and traditional knowledge, including landmark drugs: aspirin, artemisinin, and childhood cancer treatments. A closer look at these drugs reveals that the scientists behind them built off traditional knowledge to achieve their breakthrough discoveries.
Tapping nature and indigenous knowledge to advance modern medicine
After testing – unsuccessfully -- over 240 000 compounds for use in antimalarials, Chinese scientist Tu Youyou, head of the Project 523 to discover a cure for chloroquine-resistant malaria, turned to traditional Chinese medical literature for clues. There, she and her team found a reference to sweet wormwood to treat intermittent fevers. In 1971, Tu Youyou’s team isolated artemisinin, an active compound in sweet wormwood that was particularly effective in treating malaria. Artemisinin is now recommended by the World Health Organization as the first and second line of treatment for malaria. In 2015, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on malaria, which has saved millions of lives.
Willow bark as the basis of aspirin is another example of how nature and traditional knowledge have contributed to modern medicine. Over 3,500 years ago, bark from the willow tree was used as a pain reliever and an anti-inflammatory, by Sumerians and Egyptians. In later years, it was used to ease the pain of childbirth in ancient Greece and cure fevers. In the 1897, Bayer chemist Felix Hoffmann synthesized aspirin ... >>>more
Excerpt:
Pharmaceutical companies could be made to disclose prices and deals agreed for any products they make to fight future global health emergencies, under new rules that would govern a World Health Organization-backed pandemic accord reviewed by Reuters.
A draft version of the WHO accord, which is being negotiated by the U.N. health agency's 194 member countries, calls for it to be compulsory for companies to reveal the terms of any public procurement contracts.
It says that public funding for the development of vaccines and treatments should be more transparent, and include provisions to ensure that any resulting products are distributed evenly around the world.
The aim of the pact, commonly known as the pandemic treaty, is to prevent the next global health crisis from being as devastating as COVID-19 and improving the global response that left many of the world's poorest countries behind.
During the pandemic, many deals governments made with pharmaceutical companies have been kept confidential, giving them little scope to hold drugmakers accountable.
A spokesperson for the WHO said it was member states that were driving the current process toward a new agreement.
...
'FAR REACHING AND BOLD'
Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law in Washington D.C. who follows the WHO, said the accord could be a game changer and redress the "unconscionable" hoarding of vaccines seen during COVID-19. "The draft is actually far reaching and bold. The obstacles though are political opposition and industry blowback," he said.
The U.N. agency cannot force companies to follow its rules.
The proposal may face resistance from the drug industry after its meteoric race to develop vaccines and treatments that proved to be critical tools in controlling the virus which has killed more than 6.5 million people worldwide. Pfizer (PFE.N) and its partner BioNTech (22UAy.DE), Moderna (MRNA.O) and AstraZeneca (AZN.L) tested, developed and launched vaccines less than a year after the virus first emerged in China in late 2019. >>>more
Excerpt: This is our recommended approach to COVID-19 based on the best (and most recent) literature. This is a highly dynamic topic; therefore, we will be updating the guidelines as new information emerges. Please check on the FLCCC Alliance website (www.flccc.net) for updated versions of this protocol. Disclaimer: The information in this document is provided as guidance to physicians worldwide on the prevention and treatment of COVID19. Our guidance should only be used by medical professionals in formulating their approach to COVID-19. Patients should always consult with their physician before starting any medical treatment.
1. Introduction 1.1. The Vacuum of Truth “The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.” —John Abramson, M.D., Harvard Medical School We are living through a period of time characterized by a “Vacuum of Truth,” with misinformation, disinformation, blatant lies, censorship, and nefarious intentions being the order of the day. It is difficult to dissect out the actual truth and discern whom to trust. Furthermore, it is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) are utterly corrupted instruments of Big Pharma. The Lancet editor, Richard Horton has stated, [1] “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” Dr. Marcia Angell, who served as an NEJM editor for 20 years, says journals are “primarily a marketing machine.” [2] Pharma, she says, has co-opted “every institution that might stand in its way. Complex scientific and moral problems are not resolved through censorship of dissenting opinions, deleting content from the Internet, or defaming scientists and authors who present information challenging to those in power. Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of both government institutions and large corporations. [3]
21 Jan 2022
WHO Enhancing response to Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant
On 26 November 2021, WHO designated the variant B.1.1.529 a variant of concern (VOC), following advice from the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution. The variant was given the name Omicron. …
Based on the currently available evidence, the overall risk related to Omicron remains very high. Omicron has a significant growth advantage over Delta, leading to rapid spread in the community with higher levels of incidence than previously seen in this pandemic.
To view previous versions of this technical brief, please see the links below. The current version of all WHO information products and publications is authoritative.(pdfs)
4 August, 2021 WHO
Media briefing on COVID-19 by the head of the World Health Organization’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove (b. 1977-), an American infectious disease epidemiologist based in the Health Emergencies Program at the World Health Organization.
10 March 2021
WHO | Webinar
Update: Dr Martin Friede and Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove join forces in this COVID-19 vaccine update from WHO. The webinar covers the science behind the immune response to viral infections, such as SARS-COV-2; the different vaccine platforms being used for the development of the COVID-19 vaccine; and aspects related to access and allocation of vaccines.
Q. Is it safe for people with pre-existing conditions to receive a COVID-19 vaccine?
A.
1. Mexican Dr. Alejandro Cravioto, Chair of WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on immunization,
“It depends very much on the pre-existing condition. I think what we have been clear about with this vaccine is that anybody who has had a severe reaction, an allergic reaction to any vaccine, should not receive this one. That is one of the things. But if someone has an allergy to a food or to some other product then we don’t see a contraindication to use the vaccine but we do have the recommendation to do the vaccination in a place where a severe allergic reaction can be treated effectively and immediately.”
2. Canadian American Dr. Kate O’Brien
WHO Director of immunisation Vaccines and Biologicals “People who have underlying conditions, so people who have heart disease or underlying lung disease, people who have diabetes or obesity; we know that those are the people who are actually at higher risk of having a serious outcome from a COVID infection. So the underlying conditions, those are actually the very people we want to be immunised.”
This is what we learned about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Animal origins, but not necessarily at the Wuhan markets
…The market in Wuhan, in the end, was more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero. So we need to look elsewhere for the viral origins.
Frozen or refrigerated food not ruled out in the spread
Then there was the “cold chain” hypothesis. This is the idea the virus might have originated from elsewhere via the farming, catching, processing, transporting, refrigeration or freezing of food. Was that food ice cream, fish, wildlife meat? We don’t know. It’s unproven that this triggered the origin of the virus itself. But to what extent did it contribute to its spread? Again, we don’t know.
… Extremely unlikely the virus escaped from a lab
The most politically sensitive option we looked at was the virus escaping from a laboratory. We concluded this was extremely unlikely.
We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. …
…But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture. While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan. A team of investigators
When I say “we”, the mission was a joint exercise between the WHO and the Chinese health commission. In all, there were 17 Chinese and ten international experts, plus seven other experts and support staff from various agencies. We looked at the clinical epidemiology (how COVID-19 spread among people), the molecular epidemiology (the genetic makeup of the virus and its spread), and the role of animals and the environment. Where to now?
Our mission to China was only phase one. We are due to publish our official report in the coming weeks. Investigators will also look further afield for data, to investigate evidence the virus was circulating in Europe, for instance, earlier in 2019. Investigators will continue to test wildlife and other animals in the region for signs of the virus. And we’ll continue to learn from our experiences to improve how we investigate the next pandemic.
Irrespective of the origins of the virus, individual people with the disease are at the beginning of the epidemiology data points, sequences and numbers. The long-term physical and psychological effects — the tragedy and anxiety — will be felt in Wuhan, and elsewhere, for decades to come. ...
United States
6 Nov. 2020
CMS Centers for Medicare & Medical Services, Washington DC
Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) CMS Hikes Payment for COVID-19 Inpatients Treated With New Drugs, Links it to 20% Bonus
Excerpt: Report on Medicare Compliance 29, no. 39 (November 2, 2020)
CMS said Oct. 28 that Medicare will pay hospitals extra when they treat inpatients with drugs or biologicals approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for COVID-19. The additional payments are linked to the 20% bonus hospitals already receive for COVID-19 MS-DRGs, and both require proof of a positive COVID-19 test, according to the fourth interim final rule with comment period (IFC).[1] CMS also raised the specter of post-payment reviews.
Hospitals will receive an additional payment when treatment includes Veklury (remdesivir) or COVID-19 convalescent plasma to treat patients diagnosed with COVID-19. ...
United States
FDA : US Food & Drug Administration Vaccine reviews: Fact Sheet 26 April 2019 Report:
Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee The Committee reviews and evaluates data concerning the safety, effectiveness, and appropriate use of vaccines and related biological products which are intended for use in the prevention, treatment, or diagnosis of human diseases, and, as required, any other products for which the Food and Drug Administration has regulatory responsibility.
Melbourne
Vaccine Education Centre Q&A -
Myocarditis or pericarditis following COVID-19 vaccines
"Myocarditis is an inflammatory disease of the heart muscle, whilst pericarditis is an inflammatory disease of the lining of the heart muscle. They are rare conditions, most commonly associated with viral infections (including SARS-CoV-2) but can also be triggered by other factors such as medications and autoimmune conditions."
Tallahassee, Fla. — On December 6, 2023, State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo sent a letter to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Mandy Cohen regarding questions pertaining to the safety assessments and the discovery of billions of DNA fragments per dose of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
The Surgeon General outlined concerns regarding nucleic acid contaminants in the approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA. Lipid nanoparticles are an efficient vehicle for delivery of the mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines into human cells and may therefore be an equally efficient vehicle for delivering contaminant DNA into human cells. The presence of SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA may also pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into human cells.
DNA integration could theoretically impact a human’s oncogenes – the genes which can transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.
DNA integration may result in chromosomal instability.
The Guidance for Industry discusses biodistribution of DNA vaccines and how such integration could affect unintended parts of the body including blood, heart, brain, liver, kidney, bone marrow, ovaries/testes, lung, draining lymph nodes, spleen, the site of administration and subcutis at injection site.
On December 14, 2023, the FDA provided a written response providing no evidence that DNA integration assessments have been conducted to address risks outlined by the FDA themselves in 2007. >>>more
Reported on
FOX 35, YouTube
Orlando, Jan. 5 2024
Florida Surgeon General calls for halt to COVID-19 vaccine, citing possible cancer risks
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo has called for a halt to the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine citing possible health risks that he claims the FDA has not yet looked into.
Partial transcript:
00:14
Hannah Mackenzie reporting:
Florida Surgeon General Doctor Ladapo says he has safety concerns pertaining to the discovery of
billions of DNA fragments found per dose in the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines. And he says those concerns have not been addressed by the FDA or the CDC.
Doctor Ladipo says if the risks of DNA integration with Covid vaccines cannot be addressed, that then the vaccines aren't appropriate for use in humans. He says he sent letters to the heads of the FDA and the CDC, specifically questioning how this was impact humans in three main areas: Healthy human genes being transferred into cancerous cells, chromosome instability and how the integration could affect unintended parts of the body, such as the heart, brain, lungs, even the injection site itself.
We asked local doctor Michael Sparks to weigh in, doctor sparks telling us what the state surgeon general saying one thing, and the FDA another. Health providers are left stuck in the middle.
1:17
Dr. Michael Sparks:
You know, new things are scary. Um, we, if we look back historically, we've introduced new medications that we were told were very safe, were going to be very effective. And they turned out not to be safe or effective. And they caused a lot of birth defects. Things like that. So it's not unreasonable to be worried about things that are new and that's where the research comes into play. There have been so many millions of doses of this vaccine delivered, though, that if we were to expect to see some of these, you know, theoretical problems, we should start seeing them.
1:44
Hannah Mackenzie:
Doctor Sparks adds. It all comes down to the risk benefit for each patient. And that should be
discussed with your doctor. We did request an interview with Doctor Ladipo. We didn't hear back.
At the Alert Center tonight, Hannah Mackenzie, Fox 35 news.
Australia
9 October 2023 World Council for Health What everyone needs to know about DNA contamination
Urgent Expert Hearing on Reports of DNA Contamination in mRNA Vaccines Can vaccine DNA contamination reprogram out genes and promote cancer? Covid-19 mRNA Vaccines Are GMOs by Way of Definition Under the Gene Technology Act in Australia
The World Council for Health, in collaboration with expert advisers, is dedicated to providing the public with accurate and reliable information to promote health and well-being. In light of recent concerns regarding bacterial DNA and genetic sequences in mRNA vaccines, we have organized an emergency panel of nine international experts to examine these reports.
The hearing, moderated by World Council for Health Steering Committee members Dr Mark Trozzi and Christof Plothe, DO, took place virtually 9 October 2023 and addressed the implications of these findings for all people of the world.
Excerpts
Following Monday's emergency hearing on reports of DNA contamination in Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, Dr Tess Lawrie spoke with Australian attorney Katie Ashby-Koppens about a case she's taken on in which they've supported Dr Julian Fidge, a pharmacist and medical doctor. They're taking action against Pfizer and Moderna for dealing with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) without a license in Australia.
Katie Ashby-Koppens: "The allegations are that the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines are genetically modified organisms by way of definition under the Gene Technology Act in Australia, as they are capable of transferring genetic material. The fact that they are able to transfer genetic material means that those products should have been properly considered by the gene Technology regulator in Australia. And they were not."
. . .
Key Statements and Questions Addressed:
1. Bacterial DNA in mRNA vaccines: It has come to our attention that bacterial DNA has been found in some mRNA vaccine vials. We recognize the importance of understanding the potential implications of this discovery.
2. Foreign DNA instructing mRNA production: There are claims that this foreign DNA could instruct our bodies to produce mRNA and foreign proteins. We aim to explore the validity of these claims and assess their impact on vaccine safety and efficacy.
3. SV40 genetic sequence in COVID-19 vaccines: Reports suggest the presence of a cancer-promoting genetic sequence called SV40 in the Covid-19 vaccines. We seek to gather expert insights and evaluate the significance of these findings.
4. Global confirmation and regulatory response: It has been alleged that these discoveries have been confirmed in a dozen laboratories worldwide. We will examine the scientific evidence supporting these claims and discuss the actions taken by medical regulators in response.
Excerpts:
Paxlovid, the pill that has become the go-to treatment for COVID-19 treatment, was granted full approval in May by the Food And Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults at high risk for severe disease, . . .
Paxlovid is an oral antiviral pill that can be taken at home to help keep high-risk patients from getting so sick that they need to be hospitalized. . .
The drug, developed by Pfizer. . .
“It's really our first efficacious oral antiviral pill for this virus,” says Scott Roberts, MD, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist.
. . . It’s worth noting that because Paxlovid is still being monitored in the real world, it is possible that all of the risks are not yet known. The FDA has provided a fact sheet on Paxlovid with a full list of known side effects. (pdf)
Excerpt:
Ethical analysis should encompass upstream decisions and their downstream consequences
Equity is a central tenet of global health, a recognition of the profound health disparities between the world’s rich and poor. But the meaning assigned to equity is often figurative or metaphorical: a call to action, a framing for advocacy. The proliferation of equity rhetoric does not appear to be matched by corresponding rates of progress in reducing global disparities. If unaddressed, inequities can undermine public trust in and support for science. Failure to achieve anything close to equitable global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines provides a case in point. Simply measuring the ultimate outcomes of vaccine distribution is not sufficient. Upstream decisions that create downstream distributive outcomes, and the complex interests and policies that lie behind them, deserve greater ethical scrutiny. Empirically driven analysis of the entire “equity-deficit cascade” is essential for equity to gain the attention and currency it deserves—beyond its metaphorical value.
Collectively, we have yet to engage meaningfully with the full complexity and implications of the concept of equity (1). In essence, a claim of equity is an assessment that two or more individuals or groups have been treated fairly in some transaction or intervention and that their treatment should be considered fair, even if it is not equal, because morally relevant differences have been considered in the justification of any treatment differences. Conversely, claims of inequity require the observation of unequal treatment—for example, unequal access to COVID-19 vaccines between two different populations—and inadequate moral justification for the unequal treatment. Moral justification for different treatment is the cornerstone of equity. Without it, appeals to equity are uninterpretable.
COVID-19 vaccine discovery, development, and delivery involved many steps and decisions (1) within a complex policy environment. Many of these decisions have differentially affected access to vaccines for different populations, but without adequate moral justification. For example, the decision to pursue an mRNA vaccine platform, despite the enormous success of the strategy and the extraordinary benefits it has delivered for many, complicated the planning and distribution of the vaccines to a substantial proportion of the global population because of limited capacity for manufacturing, high costs, and demanding cold-chain requirements, among other factors. The tendency to invoke equity casually obscures the central importance of assessing the moral relevance, implications, and justification of each of these decisions. And despite their potentially profound implications, these strategic decisions are not adequately accounted for in prominent ethical frameworks, which tend to focus on the articulation of guiding values, principles, and models for how fairness should be achieved in the allocation of COVID-19 vaccines rather than on factors that limit their acquisition or justifications for different treatment (2). >>>more
Australia
14 Feb. 2023 The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP)
Updating COVID-19 vaccines ‘on the agenda’, but not sustainable
Many Australians were recently recommended a fifth dose – but vaccination fatigue has researchers looking for longer term solutions.
Excerpt ...Vaccine uptake has certainly been lagging since the widespread removal of vaccine mandates. Since booster shots were made available in November 2021 and the first bivalent vaccine by Moderna in October 2022, 72.4% of the eligible population had received a third dose by January 2023, and 44.6% had received a fourth.
So where to next?
One strategy anticipated by Associate Professor Griffin is combining more viral targets into the one vaccine, similar to the approach taken for influenza.
‘So going from bivalent to maybe combining a few different subvariants, particularly as we see the greater development of new subvariants potentially accelerate,’ he said.
‘Many have described that as a “variant soup”, where there’s just so many we’re watching, a bit like we did with the flu vaccine. We went from having three to having four, and four is probably the best strategy.
‘We might end up doing something similar with COVID vaccines.’
Following that, the infectious diseases expert says one of the things scientists are now trying hardest to address is people’s ability to still get infected after they have been vaccinated – so-called ‘transmission blocking’ vaccines.
‘The intra-nasal vaccines look really promising there,’ Associate Professor Griffin said.
‘Another strategy is what some are describing as a “pan-coronavirus” vaccine.
‘That’s potentially a little too ambitious, but at least one that covers far more circulating subvariants than we are at the moment, that might just be a bit longer lasting and less in need of an update quite as regularly.’ >>>more
Excerpt: A team of researchers from Brown University's School of Public Health, Brown's School of Engineering and Silent Spring Institute found that simple air filtration devices called Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are effective at reducing indoor air pollutants.
The study, which analyzed the effectiveness of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes installed at the School of Public Health to help #prevent the #spread of #COVID-19, is the first peer-reviewed study of the efficacy of the boxes on indoor pollutants, according to the authors.
Lowering indoor air concentrations of commonly-found chemicals known to pose a risk to human health is a way to improve occupant health, according to lead author Joseph Braun, an associate professor of epidemiology at Brown.
"The findings show that an inexpensive, easy-to-construct air filter can protect against illness caused not only by viruses but also by chemical pollutants," Braun said. "This type of highly-accessible public health intervention can empower community groups to take steps to improve their air quality and therefore, their health."
Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, or cubes, can be constructed from materials found at hardware stores: four #MERV-13 filters, #duct #tape, a 20-inch #box #fan and a cardboard #box. As part of a school-wide project, boxes were assembled by students and campus community members and installed in the School of Public Health as well as other buildings on the Brown University campus.>>>more
Here follows a letter from Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George’s University of London, to Dr. Kamran Abbasi, the Editor in Chief of the BMJ. It was written in support of a colleague’s plea to Dr. Abbasi that the BMJ make valid informed consent for Covid vaccination a priority topic.
Dear Kamran Abbasi,
Covid no longer needs a vaccine programme given the average age of death of Covid in the U.K. is 82 and from all other causes is 81 and falling.
The link with clots, myocarditis, heart attacks and strokes is now well accepted, as is the link with myelitis and neuropathy. (We predicted these side effects in our June 2020 QRBD article Sorensen et al. 2020, as the blast analysis revealed 79% homologies to human epitopes, especially PF4 and myelin.)
However, there is now another reason to halt all vaccine programmes. As a practising oncologist I am seeing people with stable disease rapidly progress after being forced to have a booster, usually so they can travel.
Even within my own personal contacts I am seeing B cell-based disease after the boosters. They describe being distinctly unwell a few days to weeks after the booster – one developing leukaemia, two work colleagues Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an old friend who has felt like he has had Long Covid since receiving his booster and who, after getting severe bone pain, has been diagnosed as having multiple metastases from a rare B cell disorder.
I am experienced enough to know that these are not the coincidental anecdotes that many suggest, especially as the same pattern is being seen in Germany, Australia and the USA.
The reports of innate immune suppression after mRNA for several weeks would fit, as all these patients to date have melanoma or B cell based cancers, which are very susceptible to immune control – and that is before the reports of suppressor gene suppression by mRNA in laboratory experiments.
This must be aired and debated immediately.
Excerpt:
A Hungarian MP is questioning whether the COVID vaccines are linked to the dramatic drop in birth rates.
Why did birth rates suddenly drop?
“In January this year, something happened that has not happened for decades,” said MP Dúró Dóra, speaking to Parliament.
“The birth rate fell by 20% compared to the same period last year. And what is even more worrying is that the fertility has also fallen — something not seen since 2011.”
“… a researcher at the KRTK Institute of Economics points out that this drastic decline came just nine months after the COVID mass vaccinations began in Hungary.” Indeed, many countries are experiencing unprecedented drops this year compared to previous years.
. . .
To pinpoint what’s causing these unusual drops in birth rates, it’s reasonable to question if mass inoculation of the global population with an experimental vaccine last year could be related. (Though some mainstream outlets are trying to suggest that global warming is to blame.)
Moreover, it’s worth recalling that this comes just weeks after a peer-reviewed study revealed that Pfizer’s vaccine “temporarily” impairs men’s sperm counts.
. . .
Additionally, as reported in Epoch Times, obstetrician-gynecologist specialist Dr. James Thorp said in April: “I’ve seen many, many, many complications in pregnant women, in moms and in fetuses, in children, offspring, fetal death, miscarriage, death of the fetus inside the mom… What I’ve seen in the last two years is unprecedented.”
But Thorpe says doctors are under a defacto gag order to remain quiet and risk losing their jobs for speaking out.
. . .
And all this comes while authorities are ramping up calls for more vaccines — because the first three weren’t good enough, apparently.
Overall, while none of this is conclusive, the fact that the massive drop off in births occurred the year after a global COVID vaccination campaign, rather than the year after the COVID pandemic began (2020-2021), justifies an in-depth investigation by qualified professionals into the root cause of the unusual decline in birthrates. >>>more
Excerpt
OMNS (June 29, 2022) Daily mouth rinse, gargle and nasal rinse with dilute hydrogen peroxide solution can prevent Covid-19.
In a recent study, over 4,000 patients and 89 healthcare staff of a hospital in Ghana used hydrogen peroxide on a daily basis during the peak season of Covid-19 season (April 2021 - Dec 2021). None of the 4,000+ patients got Covid-19. None of the 89 staff got Covid-19, except one who discontinued the use of hydrogen peroxide! [1] In another hospital during the same period, out of 424 staff who were fully vaccinated, 34 used hydrogen peroxide and did not develop Covid-19, but 53 didn't use hydrogen peroxide and developed Covid-19. This is statistically significant. Out of the 78 unvaccinated staff, 23 used hydrogen peroxide and none of them got Covid-19. Of the remaining 55 unvaccinated who did not use hydrogen peroxide, 35 got Covid-19. This is statistically significant. These results suggest that even vaccines are not as effective as hydrogen peroxide in the prevention of Covid-19.
The Covid-19 virus (SARS-Cov-2) and other respiratory viruses invade our body through the nose and the mouth. This study shows for the first time that we can stop and kill these viruses in the mouth and nose before they invade deeper into our lungs and the blood stream to cause severe clinical symptoms using hydrogen peroxide.
This study shows that 1% hydrogen peroxide mouth wash and gargle, and 0.5% hydrogen peroxide for nasal cavity rinse (2-3 large drops per nostril) once daily was enough to significantly reduce the risks of Covid-19. [1] The table below from the report summarizes part of the results. In the video below, we have discussed and explained the significance of this study, including safety issues of hydrogen peroxide: https://www.brighteon.com/76f0c65b-69e9-4023-a2a8-0c31e72af047
Hydrogen peroxide history
Hydrogen peroxide is a well-known antiseptic, used extensively in dentistry and to disinfect surfaces and instruments. But many are unaware that hydrogen peroxide is a natural molecule that exists everywhere in the body, including in the immune/defensive cells that have very important biological functions to protect the body from disease.
Hydrogen peroxide was discovered over 200 years ago in 1818, and in 1856 it was found to be present in the human body. In 1888, hydrogen peroxide was reported for the first time to be effective for treating numerous diseases, including scarlet fever, diphtheria, nasal catarrh, acute coryza (rhinitis), whooping cough, asthma, hay fever and tonsillitis. It was also used as an oral and nasal antiseptic in the1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
In the 1960s, hydrogen peroxide was found to have a protective effect on myocardial ischemia. Intravenous infusion of hydrogen peroxide has been studied and promoted for the treatment of various diseases including cancer, skin diseases, polio and bacteria-related mental illness, even in pain relief. [2]
Dr. Levy's book "Rapid Virus Recovery" is on the use of hydrogen peroxide to prevent and treat viral infections, and has over 600 citations. [3] It reviews and analyzes the safety, effectiveness, biological mechanisms and the potential practical uses of hydrogen peroxide.
Hydrogen peroxide (HP) is an inexpensive, safe, and effective over-the-counter topical agent when taken as a mouthwash or when nebulized. [4-7] Knowing the availability of this natural agent and its practical utility may protect us from the current and future unknown viral infections involving the respiratory tract. ... more
United States
28 June 2022
CELL Reports Superimmunity by pan-sarbecovirus nanobodies "By camelid immunization and proteomics, we recently identified thousands of high-affinity RBD Nbs that potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2 (Xiang et al., 2020)."
Abstract
Vaccine boosters and infection can facilitate the development of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies with improved potency and breadth. Here, we observe superimmunity in a camelid extensively immunized with the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD). We rapidly isolate a large repertoire of specific ultra-high-affinity nanobodies that bind strongly to all known sarbecovirus clades using integrative proteomics. These pan-sarbecovirus nanobodies (psNbs) are highly effective against SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron, with the best median neutralization potency at single-digit nanograms per milliliter. A highly potent, inhalable, and bispecific psNb (PiN-31) is also developed. Structural determinations of 13 psNbs with the SARS-CoV-2 spike or RBD reveal five epitope classes, providing insights into the mechanisms and evolution of their broad activities. The highly evolved psNbs target small, flat, and flexible epitopes that contain over 75% of conserved RBD surface residues. Their potencies are strongly and negatively correlated with the distance of the epitopes from the receptor binding sites.
Biological safety
All work with SARS-CoV-2 was conducted under biosafety level-3 (BSL-3) conditions in the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) and the Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL)...
Highlights
• mRNA vaccines promote sustained synthesis of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
• The spike protein is neurotoxic, and it impairs DNA repair mechanisms.
• Suppression of type I interferon responses results in impaired innate immunity.
• The mRNA vaccines potentially cause increased risk to infectious diseases and cancer.
• Codon optimization results in G-rich mRNA that has unpredictable complex effects.
Abstract
The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the public health crises of Covid-19. The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease has no precedent. The many alterations in the vaccine mRNA hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein. However, the immune response to the vaccine is very different from that to a SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this paper, we present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. Immune cells that have taken up the vaccine nanoparticles release into circulation large numbers of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs
that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites. We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease,myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell's palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response and tumorigenesis. We show evidence from the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis. We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines questions them as positive contributors to public health.
Mount Sinai-led researchers have shown that tiny, robust immune particles derived from the blood of a llama could provide strong protection against every COVID-19 variant, including Omicron, and 18 similar viruses including SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1, which was responsible for the 2003 SARS outbreak.
In a paper published in Cell Reports on June 28, the team suggests that these "super-immunity" molecules, known as nanobodies, could be precursors to a fast-acting, inhalable antiviral treatment or spray that could potentially be stockpiled and used globally against the evolving pandemic and future viruses.
Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, llamas, camels, and alpacas have unique immune systems: they produce antibodies with a single polypeptide chain instead of two. This construct results in antibodies that are roughly one-tenth the size of normal ones, are exceptionally stable, and can firmly bind to disease targets. Because of these unique properties, researchers can readily link multiple nanobodies like a daisy chain, so if a virus attempts to escape by mutating, another nanobody is ready to keep it in check.
"Because of their small size and broad neutralizing activities, these camelid nanobodies are likely to be effective against future variants and outbreaks of SARS-like viruses," says lead author Yi Shi, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Pharmacological Sciences and Director of the Center of Protein Engineering and Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "Their superior stability, low production costs, and the ability to protect both the upper and lower respiratory tracts against infection mean they could provide a critical therapeutic to complement vaccines and monoclonal antibody drugs if and when a new COVID-19 variant or SARS-CoV-3 emerges."
As a critical part of their study, Dr. Shi's team immunized the llama, named "Wally," with the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (RBD), the short fragment or spike of the virus that latches onto the protein on the surface of human cells to gain entry and spread infection. They found that repeated immunization with the RBD resulted in Wally producing nanobodies that recognized not just SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, but a vast array of other coronaviruses—conferring what researchers referred to as "super-immunity." From this discovery, the team isolated and validated a large repertoire of highly potent antiviral nanobodies effective against a broad spectrum of SARS-like viruses.
"We learned that the tiny size of these nanobodies gives them a crucial advantage against a rapidly mutating virus," explains co-author Ian Wilson, Ph.D., Hansen Professor of Structural Biology and Chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. "Specifically, it allows them to penetrate more of the recesses, nooks, and crannies of the virus surface, and thus bind to multiple regions to prevent the virus from escaping and mutating." ...
Excerpt:
. . . the record is that Fauci and all his compatriots either downplayed or denied natural immunity for two years. That has been the source of vast confusion.
In fact, this might have been the most egregious science error of the entire pandemic. It amounted to giving the silent treatment to the most well-established point of cell biology that we have. It was taught to every generation from the 1920s until sometime in the new century when people stopped paying attention in 9th-grade biology class.
After the pandemic broke, Fauci said nothing on this topic for a year and a half. The John Snow Memorandum, written to counter the Great Barrington Declaration, claimed “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” Mandates and passports have excluded it. Academic, medical, and corporate enforcers have generally refused to recognize it.
When CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked him specifically, September 13, 2021, Fauci quickly demurred.
“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response,” Fauci said. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”
In other words, no one knows!
The HHS head refused to say either way, even when grilled by Rand Paul.
Earlier, the WHO even backed up this denialism, going so far as to change their own definition of immunity in the middle of a pandemic.
They eliminated the old sentence on natural immunity and replaced it with a claim that immunity comes from “protecting people from the virus” and not “exposing them to it.” That’s some clever rhetoric right there!
There’s no question that this effort to deny natural immunity was systematic and pushed from the top.
How has this changed? In February 2022, the CDC finally published on the topic that they could not forever deny. And now, Fauci himself let the following slip in an interview on March 23, 2022:
“When you look at the cases they do not appear to be any more severe [than Omicron] and they do not appear to evade immune responses either from vaccine or prior infection.”
What’s critical here is not his debatable claim about vaccines but rather his offhand remark about prior infection. It was tossed off as if: “Everyone knows this.” If so, it is no thanks to him, the CDC, or WHO.
To be sure, everything we’ve known since two years ago – if not 2.5 thousand years – is that immunity from prior Covid infection is real. Vaccines have traditionally been a substitute version of exactly that. Brownstone has assembled fully 150 studies that demonstrate that immunity through infection is effective, broad, and lasting.
Had that messaging been around during lockdowns, the attitude toward the virus would have been very different. We would have clearly seen the present reality from the beginning, namely that endemicity generally arrives in the case of a new virus of this sort due to exposure-induced population immunity. This is how humankind evolved to live in the presence of pathogens. . . .
Highlights
- Vaccination confers broader IgG binding of variant RBDs than SARS-CoV-2 infection
- Imprinting from initial antigen exposures alters IgG responses to viral variants
- Histology of mRNA vaccinee lymph nodes shows abundant GCs
- Vaccine spike antigen and mRNA persist for weeks in lymph node GCs
Summary
During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, novel and traditional vaccine strategies have been deployed globally. We investigated whether antibodies stimulated by mRNA vaccination (BNT162b2), including third-dose boosting, differ from those generated by infection or adenoviral (ChAdOx1-S and Gam-COVID-Vac) or inactivated viral (BBIBP-CorV) vaccines. We analyzed human lymph nodes after infection or mRNA vaccination for correlates of serological differences. Antibody breadth against viral variants is lower after infection compared with all vaccines evaluated but improves over several months. Viral variant infection elicits variant-specific antibodies, but prior mRNA vaccination imprints serological responses toward Wuhan-Hu-1 rather than variant antigens. In contrast to disrupted germinal centers (GCs) in lymph nodes during infection, mRNA vaccination stimulates robust GCs containing vaccine mRNA and spike antigen up to 8 weeks postvaccination in some cases. SARS-CoV-2 antibody specificity, breadth, and maturation are affected by imprinting from exposure history and distinct histological and antigenic contexts in infection compared with vaccination.
Background
Mortality statistics are fundamental to public health decision making. Mortality varies by time and location, and its measurement is affected by well known biases that have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to estimate excess mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic in 191 countries and territories, and 252 subnational units for selected countries, from Jan 1, 2020, to Dec 31, 2021.
. . .
Findings
Although reported COVID-19 deaths between Jan 1, 2020, and Dec 31, 2021, totalled 5·94 million worldwide, we estimate that 18·2 million (95% uncertainty interval 17·1–19·6) people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic (as measured by excess mortality) over that period. The global all-age rate of excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic was 120·3 deaths (113·1–129·3) per 100 000 of the population, and excess mortality rate exceeded 300 deaths per 100 000 of the population in 21 countries. The number of excess deaths due to COVID-19 was largest in the regions of south Asia, north Africa and the Middle East, and eastern Europe. At the country level, the highest numbers of cumulative excess deaths due to COVID-19 were estimated in India (4·07 million [3·71–4·36]), the USA (1·13 million [1·08–1·18]), Russia (1·07 million [1·06–1·08]), Mexico (798 000 [741 000–867 000]), Brazil (792 000 [730 000–847 000]), Indonesia (736 000 [594 000–955 000]), and Pakistan (664 000 [498 000–847 000]). Among these countries, the excess mortality rate was highest in Russia (374·6 deaths [369·7–378·4] per 100 000) and Mexico (325·1 [301·6–353·3] per 100 000), and was similar in Brazil (186·9 [172·2–199·8] per 100 000) and the USA (179·3 [170·7–187·5] per 100 000).
Separate report: Science: PUBLIC HEALTH Pandemic deaths undercounted
COVID-19 took more than 18 million lives by the end of 2021, roughly three times as many as the officially reported toll, according to a controversial new estimate. Several earlier studies indicated that tallies by the World Health Organization (WHO) vastly underestimate deaths, but the new one, published in The Lancet last week, is the first peer-reviewed examination of the period through December 2021. Researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) analyzed figures from 74 countries and territories to estimate excess mortality—deaths exceeding those expected from other causes. India’s official numbers omit 3.5 million COVID-19 deaths, the largest gap between reported and estimated ones. But Egypt and several other countries in Africa with smaller populations have bigger ratios of estimated to reported deaths. The IHME analysis has been criticized for overestimating excess COVID-19 deaths, particularly in some higher-income countries. WHO plans to release its own revised estimates in the next few weeks.
Background
Mortality statistics are fundamental to public health decision making. Mortality varies by time and location, and its measurement is affected by well known biases that have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to estimate excess mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic in 191 countries and territories, and 252 subnational units for selected countries, from Jan 1, 2020, to Dec 31, 2021.
. . .
Interpretation
The full impact of the pandemic has been much greater than what is indicated by reported deaths due to COVID-19 alone. Strengthening death registration systems around the world, long understood to be crucial to global public health strategy, is necessary for improved monitoring of this pandemic and future pandemics. In addition, further research is warranted to help distinguish the proportion of excess mortality that was directly caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection and the changes in causes of death as an indirect consequence of the pandemic.
“Risk of severe COVID linked to genetic variants related to immune signalling and mucus production.”
Scientists have identified a host of genetic variants that are linked to an increased risk of developing severe COVID-191. These variants affect processes ranging from immune-system signalling to blood clotting, and understanding them could help researchers to target new therapies for people who are critically ill.
Together with other genetic studies, these results mean that “we have a more robust evidence base for understanding COVID than any other common disease in critical care”, says co-author Kenneth Baillie, an intensive-care physician and geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
International
8 March 2022
Nature Brain changes after COVID revealed by imaging
Imaging before and after infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus reveals substantial changes in the brain after infection. The work sets an example for the high standards required in large longitudinal neuroimaging studies.
Myriad neuropsychiatric symptoms have been attributed to infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus1,2, from lost sense of smell and taste to headaches, memory problems and more. Knowing precisely how the brain is changed by infection would help us to understand these debilitating symptoms. Large-scale brain-imaging studies can provide quantitative measures of subtle changes — but conducting these studies presents a formidable challenge. Writing in Nature, Douaud et al.3 describe 785 sets of brain scans that mark the first step in tackling this challenge head-on. …
Abstract
Critical Covid-19 is caused by immune-mediated inflammatory lung injury. Host genetic variation influences the development of illness requiring critical care1 or hospitalisation2–4 following SARS-CoV-2 infection. The GenOMICC (Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care) study enables the comparison of genomes from critically-ill cases with population controls in order to find underlying disease mechanisms. Here, we use whole genome sequencing in 7,491 critically-ill cases compared with 48,400 controls to discover and replicate 23 independent variants that significantly predispose to critical Covid-19. We identify 16 new independent associations, including variants within genes involved in interferon signalling (IL10RB, PLSCR1), leucocyte differentiation (BCL11A), and blood type antigen secretor status (FUT2). Using transcriptome-wide association and colocalisation to infer the effect of gene expression on disease severity, we find evidence implicating multiple genes, including reduced expression of a membrane flippase (ATP11A), and increased mucin expression (MUC1), in critical disease. Mendelian randomisation provides evidence in support of causal roles for myeloid cell adhesion molecules (SELE, ICAM5, CD209) and coagulation factor F8, all of which are potentially druggable targets. Our results are broadly consistent with a multi-component model of Covid-19 pathophysiology, in which at least two distinct mechanisms can predispose to life-threatening disease: failure to control viral replication, or an enhanced tendency towards pulmonary inflammation and intravascular coagulation. We show that comparison between critically-ill cases and population controls is highly efficient for detection of therapeutically-relevant mechanisms of disease.
Excerpt: A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus significantly advances the understanding of a key aspect of the immune system during COVID-19: the interferon response.
Interferons (IFNs) are signaling proteins produced by a host cell to activate the antiviral defenses within the body. If the immune response, including the production of IFNs, is unable to clear the virus, the immune system continues to fight. However, a prolonged and exacerbated immune response can cause organ damage and even death. >>>more
United States / India
28 Feb. 2022
University of Colorado (CU) Anschutz Medical Campus Bark of Neem Tree may Protect Against Coronavirus Variants Researchers at CU Anschutz have discovered a way to better understand the way the immune system works while fighting COVID-19, opening the door to more effective treatments.
New research reveals Neem-based drugs may help fight future coronavirus variants. CU Anschutz scientists partner with researchers in India on a new study looking at Neem bark extract's effectiveness in treating coronavirus variants. The promising results could change the future of combatting emerging strains.
Excerpt:
Extract from the bark of the Neem tree may help treat and reduce the spread of coronavirus, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.
The study, reported recently in the journal Virology, shows that components of Neem bark may target a wide range of viral proteins, suggesting its potential as an antiviral agent against emerging variants of coronaviruses (including SARS-CoV-2).
The Neem tree, indigenous to India, has been used for thousands of years for its anti-parasitic, anti-bacterial and antiviral properties. The bark extract has helped treat malaria, stomach and intestinal ulcers, skin diseases and many other diseases.
Neem-based medications for treating emerging variants
“The goal of this research is to develop a Neem-based medication that can reduce the risk of serious illness when someone is infected with coronaviruses,” said study co-author Maria Nagel, MD, research professor in the department of neurology and ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
“We hope that scientists won’t have to continuously develop new therapies every time a new SARS-CoV-2 variant emerges,” she said. “Just like how we take penicillin for strep throat, we envision taking the Neem-based drug for COVID, allowing us to resume our normal lives without fear of hospitalization and death.”
The scientists investigated the impact of the bark extract against coronaviruses in their laboratories. In India, researchers tested it in animal models and showed that it had antiviral properties against coronavirus. Using computer modeling, the researchers predicted that Neem bark extract will bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein at various locations, preventing virus entry to host cells.
At CU Anschutz, Nagel’s lab tested the Neem bark extract in SARS-CoV-2 human lung cells. It proved as effective as a preventive drug for infection and also decreased virus replication and spread after infection. Combatting the ongoing pandemic
“The next step in our research is to identify the specific components in Neem bark extract that are antiviral. Because these components bind to various regions of SARS-CoV-2, we believe that it will be effective on emerging variants with spike mutations,” said Nagel. “We will then determine the formulation of dosage for an antiviral drug to treat coronavirus infections.”
The scientists said this research could guide new antiviral therapeutic efforts to combat the ongoing pandemic, while holding out the promise for treating new coronavirus strains.
England
25 Feb. 2022
BBC News Vaccines: What we know about long-term safety now
"We don't know the long-term side effects of Covid vaccines."
That's a claim that's still common to see shared online.
“A much rarer side effect which has been linked to the mRNA vaccines Pfizer and Moderna - myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart - also occurs in this phase.”
But a year is actually considered relatively "long term" when it comes to vaccine safety.
This week marks the anniversary of the first delivery of Covid-19 vaccines under the Covax scheme - as well as being more than 14 months since the first dose was given.
And scientists explain that's enough time for all but the rarest side effects to have emerged. …
. . .
from our understanding of how the immune system works, that an individual who hasn't had a reaction to the vaccine in the first couple of months is vanishingly unlikely to have any new side effects after that.
But is it possible that side effects which have already happened are going unnoticed, and may come to light in the coming years?
. . .
Indeed, while the vaccines have all completed the expected three phases of trials that usually take place before being offered to the general public, they are still being carefully monitored until at least 2023, to make sure even the rarest of events are picked up.
And remember, safety in medicine is all about balancing risks and benefits.
All the evidence suggests the overall risks of catching Covid are many times higher than any risks from the vaccine.
Introduction:
… many challenges remain, including monitoring for long-term safety and efficacy of the vaccine. This warrants further evaluation and investigations. The safety profile of BNT162b2 is currently only available from short-term clinical studies. Less common adverse effects of BNT162b2 have been reported, including pericarditis, arrhythmia, deep-vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, myocardial infarction, intracranial hemorrhage, and thrombocytopenia [4,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. There are also studies that report adverse effects observed in other types of vaccines [21,22,23,24]. To better understand mechanisms underlying vaccine-related adverse effects, clinical investigations as well as cellular and molecular analyses are needed.
JAMA summary:
In a study of unvaccinated US adults up to 20 months, antibodies were detected in 99% of people who reported a positive COVID-19 test result, in 55% who believed they had COVID-19 but were never tested, and in 11% who believed they had never had #COVID19.
As of December 28, 2021, approximately 27% of the US population was unvaccinated against SARS-CoV-2,1 yet the prevalence of natural immunity remains unknown. Blood donor studies may have selection bias and lack clinical information.2 Previous COVID-19 infection is a possible surrogate for natural immunity, but 1 study suggested that 36% of COVID-recovered individuals are serologic nonresponders.3 Even among individuals who develop antibodies, durability of this response beyond 6 months remains unknown. We characterized natural immunity and long-term durability among unvaccinated individuals using anti–spike antibodies, the first line of defense against SARS-CoV-2.
. . .
Although evidence of natural immunity in unvaccinated healthy US adults up to 20 months after confirmed COVID-19 infection is encouraging, it is unclear how these antibody levels correlate with protection against future SARS-CoV-2 infections, particularly with emerging variants. The public health implications and long-term understanding of these findings merit further consideration.
Excerpt
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a statement Friday, said although BA.2 has increased in proportion to the original omicron strain in some countries, it is currently circulating at a low level in the U.S.
The subvariant is 1.5 times more transmissible than the original omicron strain, referred to by scientists as BA.1, according to Statens Serum Institut, which conducts infectious disease surveillance for Denmark.
The new sublineage doesn’t appear to further reduce the effectiveness of vaccines against symptomatic infection, according to the U.K. Health Security Agency.
“Currently there is no evidence that the BA.2 lineage is more severe than the BA.1 lineage,” CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund said.
BA.2 overtook the original omicron as the dominant variant in Denmark over the course of a few weeks, said Troels Lillebaek, the chairman of the Scandinavian nation’s committee that conducts surveillance of Covid variants.
BA.1 and BA.2 have many differences in their mutations in the most important areas. In fact, the difference between BA.1 and BA.2 is greater than the difference between the original “wild strain” and the Alpha variant, which was the first major mutation to take root across the world.
The BA.2 variant has five unique mutations on a key part of the spike protein the virus uses to attach to human cells and invade them. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, warned on Tuesday that the next Covid will variant be more transmissible.
“The next variant of concern will be more fit, and what we mean by that is it will be more transmissible because it will have to overtake what is currently circulating,” Van Kerkhove said.
Lillebaek said there is not enough data yet to determine whether BA.2 is able to reinfect people who caught the original omicron. However, prior infection would likely provide some crossover immunity to BA.2.
Pfizer and Moderna started clinical trials this week on omicron-specific shots amid growing concern that new variants will emerge as immunity induced by the original vaccines wanes. . .
SUMMARY
Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) represent an emerging global crisis. However, quantifiable risk-factors for PASC and their biological associations are poorly resolved. We executed a deep multi-omic, longitudinal investigation of 309 COVID-19 patients from initial diagnosis to convalescence (2-3 months later), integrated with clinical data, and patient-reported symptoms. We resolved four PASC-anticipating risk factors at the time of initial COVID-19 diagnosis: type 2 diabetes, SARS-CoV-2 RNAemia, Epstein-Barr virus viremia, and specific autoantibodies. In patients with gastrointestinal PASC, SARS-CoV-2-specific and CMV-specific CD8+ T cells exhibited unique dynamics during recovery from COVID-19. Analysis of symptom-associated immunological signatures revealed coordinated immunity polarization into four endotypes exhibiting divergent acute severity and PASC. We find that immunological associations between PASC factors diminish over time leading to distinct convalescent immune states. Detectability of most PASC factors at COVID-19 diagnosis emphasizes the importance of early disease measurements for understanding emergent chronic conditions and suggests PASC treatment strategies.
Purpose
How completely do hospital discharge diagnoses identify cases of myopericarditis after an mRNA vaccine?
Methods
We assembled a cohort 12 to 39 years old patients, insured by Kaiser Permanente Northwest, who received at least one dose of an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna) between December 2020 and October 2021. We followed them for up to 30 days after their second dose of an mRNA vaccine to identify encounters for myocarditis, pericarditis or myopericarditis. We compared two identification methods: A method that searched all encounter diagnoses using a brief text description (e.g., ICD-10-CM code I40.9 is defined as ‘acute myocarditis, unspecified’). We searched the text description of all inpatient or outpatient encounter diagnoses (in any position) for “myocarditis” or “pericarditis.” The other method was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which searched for emergency department visits or hospitalizations with a select set of discharge ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes. For both methods, two physicians independently reviewed the identified patient records and classified them as confirmed, probable or not cases using the CDC’s case definition.
Results
The encounter methodology identified 14 distinct patients who met the confirmed or probable CDC case definition for acute myocarditis or pericarditis with an onset within 21 days of receipt of COVID-19 vaccination. Three of these 14 patients had an ICD-10 code of I51.4 “Myocarditis, Unspecified” which was overlooked by the VSD algorithm. The VSD methodology identified 11 patients who met the CDC case definition for acute myocarditis or pericarditis. Seven (64%) of the eleven patients had initial care for myopericarditis outside of a KPNW facility and their diagnosis could not be ascertained by the VSD methodology until claims were submitted (median delay of 33 days; range of 12-195 days). Among those who received a second dose of vaccine (n=146,785), we estimated a risk as 95.4 cases of myopericarditis per million second doses administered (95% CI, 52.1 to 160.0).
Conclusion
We identified additional valid cases of myopericarditis following an mRNA vaccination that would be missed by the VSD’s search algorithm, which depends on select hospital discharge diagnosis codes. The true incidence of myopericarditis is markedly higher than the incidence reported to US advisory committees. The VSD should validate its search algorithm to improve its sensitivity for myopericarditis.
Key Points
• We identified a higher estimate of myopericarditis following COVID-19 mRNA vaccine by searching encounter text description compared with the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) methodology
• An incomplete list of ICD-10 codes and delays in hospital claims data were responsible for the difference
• We estimated a risk of 95.4 cases of myopericarditis per million second doses administered in patients age 12-39 which is higher than the incidence reported to US advisory committees
• We encourage other VSD sites to validate the case ascertainment of current VSD methodology ...
Abstract
Although myocarditis and pericarditis were not observed as adverse events in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine trials, there have been numerous reports of suspected cases following vaccination in the general population. We undertook a self-controlled case series study of people aged 16 or older vaccinated for COVID-19 in England between 1 December 2020 and 24 August 2021 to investigate hospital admission or death from myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmias in the 1–28 days following adenovirus (ChAdOx1, n = 20,615,911) or messenger RNA-based (BNT162b2, n = 16,993,389; mRNA-1273, n = 1,006,191) vaccines or a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) positive test (n = 3,028,867). We found increased risks of myocarditis associated with the first dose of ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 vaccines and the first and second doses of the mRNA-1273 vaccine over the 1–28 days postvaccination period, and after a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. We estimated an extra two (95% confidence interval (CI) 0, 3), one (95% CI 0, 2) and six (95% CI 2, 8) myocarditis events per 1 million people vaccinated with ChAdOx1, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively, in the 28 days following a first dose and an extra ten (95% CI 7, 11) myocarditis events per 1 million vaccinated in the 28 days after a second dose of mRNA-1273. This compares with an extra 40 (95% CI 38, 41) myocarditis events per 1 million patients in the 28 days following a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. We also observed increased risks of pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmias following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. Similar associations were not observed with any of the COVID-19 vaccines, apart from an increased risk of arrhythmia following a second dose of mRNA-1273. Subgroup analyses by age showed the increased risk of myocarditis associated with the two mRNA vaccines was present only in those younger than 40.
Background:
Understanding the clinical course and short-term outcomes of suspected myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination has important public health implications in the decision to vaccinate youth.
Methods:
We retrospectively collected data on patients - 21 years-old presenting before 7/4/2021 with suspected myocarditis within 30 days of COVID-19 vaccination. Lake Louise criteria were used for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cMRI) findings. Myocarditis cases were classified as confirmed or probable based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definitions.
Results: We report on 139 adolescents and young adults with 140 episodes of suspected myocarditis (49 confirmed, 91 probable) at 26 centers. Most patients were male (N=126, 90.6%) and White (N=92, 66.2%); 29 (20.9%) were Hispanic; and median age was 15.8 years (range 12.1-20.3, IQR 14.5-17.0). Suspected myocarditis occurred in 136 patients (97.8%) following mRNA vaccine, with 131 (94.2%) following the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine; 128 (91.4%) occurred after the 2nd dose. Symptoms started a median of 2 days (range 0-22, IQR 1-3) after vaccination. The most common symptom was chest pain (99.3%). Patients were treated with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (81.3%), intravenous immunoglobulin (21.6%), glucocorticoids (21.6%), colchicine (7.9%) or no anti-inflammatory therapies (8.6%). Twenty-six patients (18.7%) were in the ICU, two were treated with inotropic/vasoactive support, and none required ECMO or died. Median hospital stay was 2 days (range 0-10, IQR 2-3). All patients had elevated troponin I (N=111, 8.12 ng/mL, IQR 3.50-15.90) or T (N=28, 0.61 ng/mL, IQR 0.25-1.30); 69.8% had abnormal electrocardiograms and/or arrythmias (7 with non-sustained ventricular tachycardia); and 18.7% had left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) <55% on echocardiogram. Of 97 patients who underwent cMRI at median 5 days (range 0-88, IQR 3-17) from symptom onset, 75 (77.3%) had abnormal findings: 74 (76.3%) had late gadolinium enhancement, 54 (55.7%) had myocardial edema, and 49 (50.5%) met Lake Louise criteria. Among 26 patients with LVEF <55% on echocardiogram, all with follow-up had normalized function (N=25).
Conclusions:
Most cases of suspected COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis occurring in persons <21 years have a mild clinical course with rapid resolution of symptoms. Abnormal findings on cMRI were frequent. Future studies should evaluate risk factors, mechanisms, and long-term outcomes.
Full List of Ingredients - Appendix C
a list of ingredients for the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Janssen
COVID-19 vaccines reported in the prescribing information for each vaccine.*
. . .
Summary of recent changes (last updated November 29, 2021):
Updated recommendations for receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine booster dose Key points - COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for everyone aged 5 years and older in the United States for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
- COVID-19 vaccines currently approved or authorized by FDA are effective in preventing serious outcomes of COVID-19, including severe disease, hospitalization, and death.
- Efforts to maximize the proportion of people in the United States who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 remain critical to ending the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and CDC have issued interim recommendations for the use of three COVID-19 vaccines:
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine/COMIRNATY
Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine
Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) COVID-19 Vaccine
ACIP and CDC consider individual and public health benefits and risks along with factors such as the value placed on the intervention by the population, its acceptability to key stakeholders, feasibility of implementation, and impact on equity when making vaccine recommendations.
- These clinical considerations provide additional information to healthcare professionals and public health officials on use of COVID-19 vaccines.
Excerpt
Analysis and comparison of the review document submitted by Pfizer to the US Food and Drug Administration, on the basis of which the FDA gave the green light to expand the emergency permit for vaccination, as well, for children aged 12-15, as opposed to the study protocol in children, [PDF] reveal concerning findings, including violations of the protocol established by Pfizer itself, and no less serious, designing the trial protocol in a way that will allow the company to present as positive findings as possible in terms of vaccine safety in children, and to include as little as possible serious side effects in the review submitted to the FDA. ...
United States
1 Oct. 2021
Naturopathic Perspective Scanning & Transmission Electron Microscopy Reveals Graphene Oxide in CoV-19 Vaccines “Germs Are Born In Us and From Us as an Outfection and Not an Infection of the Body Cells. In other words germs are symptoms of cellular and genetic disorganisation and NOT the specific cause of the cellular and genetic disorganisation! The GERM is NOTHING and the TERRAIN is EVERYTHING. Germs can only contribute to a state of toxic imbalance but can NEVER cause ANY specific sickness or disease! – Dr. Robert O Young CPC, MSc, DSc, PhD, Naturopathic Practitioner
Excerpt:
Phase Contrast, Dark Field, Bright Field Microscopy, Transmission and Scanning Electron Microscopy and Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy Reveal the Ingredients in the CoV-19 Vaccines!
Abstract
Currently there are four major pharmaceutical companies who manufacture a SARS-CoV-2 now called SARS-CoV-19 vaccine. These manufactures and their vaccine are Pfizer--BioNTech mRNA Vaccine, the Moderna-Lonza mRNA-1273 Vaccine, the Serum Institute Oxford Astrazeneca Vaccine and the Janssen COVID -19 Vaccine, manufactured by Janssen Biotech Inc., a Janssen Pharmaceutical Company of Johnson & Johnson, a recombinant, replication-incompetent adenovirus type 26 expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The intended purpose of these vaccines are to provide immunity from the so-called infectious novel coronavirus
or SARS-CoV - 2 virus now called the SARS-CoV - 19.
These four pharmaceutical companies have not provided complete FDA disclosure on their vaccine box, insert fact sheet or label for many of the major and/or minor ingredients contained within these so-called vaccines. The purpose of this research article is to identify those specific major and minor ingredients contained in the Pfizer Vaccine, the Moderna Vaccine, the Astrazeneca Vaccine and the Janssen Vaccine using various scientific anatomical, physiological and functional testing for each SARS-COV-2-19 vaccine. As a human right, governed under World Law by the Nuremberg Code of 1947, the vaccine specific ingredient information is critical, required and necessary to know so that any human from any country in the World can make an informed decision whether or not to consent to the SAR-CoV-2-19 inoculation. We have conducted the scientific testing on each vaccine and have identified several ingredients or adjuvants that have not been disclosed which are contained in these four SARS-CoV - 2 -19 vaccines. Currently, these vaccines are being administered to millions of humans around the World under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) issued by each country without full disclosure of all ingredients and in some cases mandated by governments or employers in violation of individual human rights under the Nuremberg Code of 1947.
Methodology and Techniques
Four “vaccines” were analyzed which are the Pfizer-BioNtech, Moderna-Lonza mRNA-1273 Vaccine, Vaxzevria by Astrazeneca, Janssen by Johnson & Johnson, using different instrumentation and protocols of preparation according to new nano particulate technological approaches. The different instrumentation includes Optical Microscopy, Bright-Field Microscopy, pHase Contrast Microscopy, Dark-Field Microscopy, UV absorbance and Fluorescence Spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, Transmission Electron Microscopy, Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy, X-ray Diffractometer, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance instruments were used to verify the “vaccines” morphologies and contents. For the high-technology measurements and the care of the investigation, all the controls were activated and reference measurements adopted in order to obtain validated results. Live Blood Phase Contrast and Dark-Field Microscopy
Images of the aqueous fractions of the vaccines were subsequently obtained to visually assess the possible presence of carbon particulates or graphene... >>>more
Israel
24 August, 2021
SCRIBD Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections. Note:
"Overall, 673,676 MHS members 16 years and older were eligible for the study group of fully vaccinated SARS-CoV-2-naïve individuals; 62,883 were eligible for the study group of unvaccinated previously infected individuals and 42,099 individuals were eligible for the study group of previously infected and single-dose vaccinees." ... "This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the Delta variant.”
Excerpt: page 2 of 32.
Abstract
Background:
Reports of waning vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 have begun to surface. With that, the comparable long-term protection conferred by previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear.
Methods:
We conducted a retrospective observational study comparing three groups: (1)SARS-CoV-2-naïve individuals who received a two-dose regimen of the BioNTech/PfizermRNA BNT162b2 vaccine, (2)previously infected individuals who have not been vaccinated, and (3)previously infected and single dose vaccinated individuals. Three multivariate logistic regression models were applied. In all models we evaluated four outcomes: SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic disease, COVID-19-related hospitalization and death. The follow-up period of June 1 to August 14, 2021, when the Delta variant was dominant in Israel.
Results:
SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January andFebruary of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P<0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination(from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by theDelta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
Excerpt 1. Introduction
… However, the mechanism by which SARS–CoV–2 suppresses adaptive immunity remains unclear.
As two critical host surveillance systems, the immune and DNA repair systems are the primary systems that higher organisms rely on for defense against diverse threats and tissue homeostasis. Emerging evidence indicates that these two systems are interdependent, especially during lymphocyte development and maturation [7]. As one of the major double-strand DNA break (DSB) repair pathways, non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) repair plays a critical role in lymphocyte–specific recombination–activating gene endonuclease (RAG) –mediated V(D)J recombination, which results in a highly diverse repertoire of antibodies in B cell and T cell receptors (TCRs) in T cells [8]. For example, loss of function of key DNA repair proteins such as ATM, DNA–PKcs, 53BP1, et al., leads to defects in the NHEJ repair which inhibit the production of functional B and T cells, leading to immunodeficiency [7,9,10,11]. In contrast, viral infection usually induces DNA damage via different mechanisms, such as inducing reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and host cell replication stress [12,13,14]. If DNA damage cannot be properly repaired, it will contribute to the amplification of viral infection-induced pathology. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether SARS–CoV–2 proteins hijack the DNA damage repair system, thereby affecting adaptive immunity in vitro.
REVIEWED by DrBeen Medical Lecture streamed live on YouTube (38:57 Min.)
5 Nov. 2021
Spike Protein Goes to Nucleus and Impairs DNA Repair (In-Vitro Study - Not Possible In-Vivo)
“Spike Protein Impairs DNA Damage Repair” Researchers from Sweden found the spike protein to be going IN to the nucleus and not only going there but also impairing, reducing and stalling the DNA repair. This can have drastic side effects...."
Abstract
The effectiveness of BNT162b2, ChAdOx1, and mRNA-1273 vaccines against new SARS-CoV-2 infections requires continuous re-evaluation, given the increasingly dominant Delta variant. We investigated the effectiveness of the vaccines in a large community-based survey of randomly selected households across the UK. We found that the effectiveness of BNT162b2 and ChAd0x1 against any infections (new PCR positives) and infections with symptoms or high viral burden is reduced with the Delta variant. A single dose of the mRNA-1273 vaccine had similar or greater effectiveness compared to a single dose of BNT162b2 or ChAdOx1. Effectiveness of two doses remains at least as great as protection afforded by prior natural infection. The dynamics of immunity following second doses differed significantly between BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1, with greater initial effectiveness against new PCR-positives but faster declines in protection against high viral burden and symptomatic infection with BNT162b2. There was no evidence that effectiveness varied by dosing interval, but protection was higher among those vaccinated following a prior infection and younger adults. With Delta, infections occurring following two vaccinations had similar
peak viral burden to those in unvaccinated individuals. SARS-CoV-2 vaccination still reduces new infections, but effectiveness and attenuation of peak viral burden are reduced with Delta.
Key findings from the study:
-
Obtaining two vaccine doses remains the most effective way to ensure protection against the COVID-19 Delta variant of concern dominant in the UK today.
- With Delta, Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines still offer good protection against new infections, but effectiveness is reduced compared with Alpha.
- Two doses of either vaccine still provided at least the same level of protection as having had COVID-19 before through natural infection; people who had been vaccinated after already being infected with COVID-19 had even more protection than vaccinated individuals who had not had COVID-19 before.
- However, Delta infections after two vaccine doses had similar peak levels of virus to those in unvaccinated people; with the Alpha variant, peak virus levels in those infected post-vaccination were much lower.
Other findings:
- A single dose of the Moderna vaccine has similar or greater effectiveness against the Delta variant as single doses of the other vaccines.
- Two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech have greater initial effectiveness against new COVID-19 infections, but this declines faster compared with two doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca. Results suggest that after four to five months effectiveness of these two vaccines would be similar – however, long-term effects need to be studied.
- The time between doses does not affect effectiveness in preventing new infections, but younger people have even more protection from vaccination than older people.
Research by Lancaster University scientists to create a COVID-19 vaccine which can be administered through the nose has taken a significant step forward.
The pre-clinical animal trials of the intranasal vaccine showed a reduction in both the impact of the disease itself and transmission of the virus.
The findings – published today in the journal iScience – open the door to addressing global health and vaccine inequalities.
Researchers immunised hamsters with two doses of the vaccine, and found they showed complete protection from lung infection, inflammation and pathological lesions following exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Importantly, two doses of the intranasal vaccine were found to significantly reduce the virus “shedding” from the nose and lungs of the hamsters – suggesting the vaccine has the potential to control infection at the site of inoculation. This should prevent both clinical disease and virus transmission, to halt the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Excerpt:
The COVID-19 Delta variant has changed the vaccination game in Australia.
With outbreaks resulting in a prolonged lockdown for Sydney as well as shorter periods for other states, the proportion of Australians vaccinated has steadily increased while vaccine hesitancy has fallen.
The latest survey data collected by the Melbourne Institute show vaccine hesitancy had fallen to 21.5% of the adult population at the end of July 2021, compared with 33% at the end of May 2021.
But how much further can it fall?
Our data suggests there are qualitatively different types of vaccine hesitancy. The decline in vaccine hesitancy we have seen thus far is more about those who had just been “taking their time” rather than being steadfastly uncommitted.
Worryingly, our analyses suggest there remains a significant proportion of the population whose resistance to vaccination will be hard to shift, regardless of the incentive.
Our latest data>>>more
Melbourne University: Vaccine Hesitancy Tracker Tracking COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy across Australia using Taking the Pulse of the Nation (TTPN) Survey data. We add new data every two weeks
Excerpt:
• Hesitancy remains largely stable across age groups: highest at 30.2% for those aged 18 to 44 years old, is 17.2% for those aged between 45 and 64, and is 7.6% for those aged over 65 years old.
• Other data from the TTPN survey shows the same overall reasons for vaccine hesitancy now as there were in February. The main reasons for hesitance are concerns over the effectiveness and safety of vaccines (59%) and lack of trust in the vaccines (39%).
The risk of COVID-19 has been largely communicated only in terms of deaths and hospital capacity, with recovery and survival conflated with each other. Around one in three people with symptomatic COVID-19 still experience symptoms 12 weeks after onset (1). Long Covid can be experienced by all age groups and not only those with acute severe disease. The debilitating symptoms are wide-ranging, multisystemic, and predominantly fluctuating or relapsing. There is still much to understand about Long Covid, but what is not well understood should not be ignored.
Long Covid is likely the first illness in history that has been defined by patients through social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. People with Long Covid formed a movement that demanded recognition of what was happening to them. . . .
Closing paragraph:
The road to properly addressing Long Covid is long and must be traveled with humility, open mindedness, compassion, and scientific rigor. This is relevant not only to COVID-19, but also future pandemics and to other neglected chronic conditions. Science, policy, and society as a whole seem to acknowledge and address immediate impacts much better than the subsequent effects. Let this pandemic be the time to change that.
Excerpt:
. . .
The study of Tummino et al. highlights how the seduction of the concept of hypothesis-free drug repurposing can corrupt the scientific method. Drug discoverers know that no compound, whether an approved drug or not, is monospecific and that all have side effects or toxicities, especially at higher concentrations commonly used in cell-based screens. All hits in cell-based screens should be considered artifacts until conclusively proven otherwise (7). Unfortunately, when the hit is a known drug and the cellular effect is the one wished for, and especially amid the urgency of a pandemic, warning cries are easily dismissed, even if they come from experienced drug discoverers who have seen it all before.
International
23 July 2021
Nature | Collections Food systems in the wake of COVID-19
The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated weaknesses and tested resilience of food systems. This forward-looking Collection examines precarity of livelihoods and health in the wake of COVID-19 and considers some of the interventions needed to build food systems back better.
Abstract
Unaffordability of healthy diets affected 3 billion people before the COVID-19 pandemic, 2.5 billion of whom lived in 63 low- and middle-income countries. In these 63 countries, income losses due to the pandemic have markedly worsened the affordability gap. The proportion of people unable to afford half the cost of a healthy diet increased from 43% to 50%; this increased unaffordability will aggravate undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and diet-related non-communicable diseases.
Main
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy and people’s incomes is severe and has hit people in the informal and service sectors particularly hard, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Poverty has increased, and the number of people in acute hunger crisis or worse conditions across 79 countries with World Food Programme operational presence has increased from 130 million to 265 million (ref. 1). Evidence from targeted telephone surveys in Asia and Africa points to disturbingly large increases in poverty and food insecurity throughout 20202,3.
Here we assess the further impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the problem of not being able to afford healthy and nutrient-adequate diets and on expected changes of food consumption in 63 LMICs using the MIRAGRODEP Computable General Equilibrium model and its extended household-level models. MIRAGRODEP is a global simulation model capturing multiple regions, sectors and international economic linkages, and has recently been used to estimate the impact of pandemic-related economic disruptions at a sectoral, national, regional and global level4, and the poverty impacts. The healthy diet is based on food-based dietary guidelines, while the nutrient-adequate diet is based on linear optimization to just meet nutrient needs and, unlike the healthy diet, does not take dietary recommendations, behaviour or food preferences into account. …
A nasal spritz of a designer antibody offers strong protection against variants of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 — at least in mice.
Since the early days of the pandemic, scientists have been developing antibodies as treatments for COVID-19. Today, several such antibodies are in late-stage clinical trials, and a handful have been approved for emergency use by regulatory agencies in the United States and elsewhere.
Among doctors, however, antibody treatments have not been very popular, says Zhiqiang An, an antibody engineer at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. That’s partly because those available are delivered through intravenous infusions rather than directly to the respiratory tract, where the virus is mainly found — so it takes high doses for them to be effective. Another challenge is the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants that seem to be resistant to some existing antibodies.
An and his colleagues set out to engineer an antibody that could be delivered directly into the nose. They scanned a library of antibodies from healthy humans and zeroed in on those that were able to recognize a component of SARS-CoV-2 that the virus uses to latch on to and enter cells. Among the promising candidates were IgG antibodies, which are relatively slow to appear after an infection but are precisely tailored to the invading pathogen.
Excerpt:
2020 has witnessed unprecedented situations due to coronavirus pandemic that affected all aspects of life. The whole globe lived months of uncertainty before two companies have announced the incredible results of phase III clinical trials for two different mRNA-based vaccines.
...
Having said that, both mRNA-based vaccines represent a unique case that is considered one of the most advanced and promising achievements in the field of pharmaceutical biotechnology and biopharmaceutical formulations. More than three decades of research effort on developing gene therapy solutions for many diseases could not convey many healthcare policymakers, pharmaceutical companies, funding agencies, medicine agencies, and drug administrations to adopt gene therapy avenues as highly potential approaches to transfer the therapeutic strategies into a new era. However, these mRNA vaccines, which have been developed and approved within a few months, signify a breakthrough in the field of gene therapy, which has battled to achieve ordinary acknowledgement due to a large number of sceptical and conservative scientists and other claimed safety and translational concerns. Although these two vaccines are not the first approved drugs utilising genetic materials as active ingredients, they are believed to be a milestone in modern medical history that may forever change pharmaceutical approaches. >>>more
. . . As she already had some experience with treating colds and flu among friends and family with the HP nebulization, along with what had worked well in her own personal experience, she began all of her "COVID patients" on the following protocol of HP nebulization:
1. Several milliliters of undiluted 3% hydrogen peroxide was placed in the nebulization chamber that was connected to a tabletop air compressor/pump-style nebulization machine.
2. Nebulization was initiated with a mask covering the nose and mouth to deliver the nebulized HP into the nose, sinuses, throat, and airways.
3. Each nebulization was continued for a full 30 minutes. Three treatments a day were given for a full five days.
All of the patients reported significant improvement after the completion of the first 30 minutes of nebulization, including near-immediate improvement in the ease of breathing by those who had the most advanced infections.
Abstract
Operation Warp Speed brought to market in the United States two mRNA vaccines, produced by Pfizer and Moderna. Interim data suggested high efficacy for both of these vaccines, which helped legitimize Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the FDA. However, the exceptionally rapid movement of these vaccines through controlled trials and into mass deployment raises multiple safety concerns. In this review we first describe the technology underlying these vaccines in detail. We then review both components of and the intended biological response to these vaccines, including production of the spike protein itself, and their potential relationship to a wide range of both acute and long-term induced pathologies, such as blood disorders, neurodegenerative diseases and autoimmune diseases. Among these potential induced pathologies, we discuss the relevance of prion-protein-related amino acid sequences within the spike protein. We also present a brief review of studies supporting the potential for spike protein “shedding”, transmission of the protein from a vaccinated to an unvaccinated person, resulting in symptoms induced in the latter. We finish by addressing a common point of debate, namely, whether or not these vaccines could modify the DNA of those receiving the vaccination. While there are no studies demonstrating definitively that this is happening, we provide a plausible scenario, supported by previously established pathways for transformation and transport of genetic material, whereby injected mRNA could ultimately be incorporated into germ cell DNA for transgenerational transmission. We conclude with our recommendations regarding surveillance that will help to clarify the long-term effects of these experimental drugs and allow us to better assess the true risk/benefit ratio of these novel technologies.
Note:
December 9, 2021. This paper was reprinted in the Townsend Letter, the Examiner of Alternative Medicine. Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT who has been conducting research at MIT for over five decades, has spent a large portion of her career investigating the hazards and mechanisms of action of glyphosate.
Her attention was diverted to the science of mRNA gene transfer technologies in early 2020, when Operation Warp Speed was announced. As noted in her paper, many factors that lacked precedent, yet were being implemented at breakneck speed, included:
. The first-ever use of PEG in an injection
. The first-ever use of mRNA gene transfer technology against an infectious agent. The first-ever “vaccine” to make no clear claims about reducing infection, transmissibility or death
. The first-ever coronavirus vaccine ever tested on humans (and previous coronavirus vaccines all failed due to antibody-dependent enhancement, a condition in which the antibodies actually facilitate infection rather than defend against it)
. The first-ever use of genetically modified polynucleotides in the general population
Australian researchers have identified neutralizing nanobodies that block the SARS-CoV-2 virus from entering cells in preclinical models.
The discovery paves the way for further investigations into nanobody-based treatments for COVID-19.
Published in PNAS, the research is part of a consortium-led effort, bringing together the expertise of Australian academic leaders in infectious diseases and antibody therapeutics at WEHI, the Doherty Institute and the Kirby Institute.
Using alpaca 'nanobodies' to block COVID-19 infection
Antibodies are key infection-fighting proteins in our immune system. An important aspect of antibodies is that they bind tightly and specifically to another protein.
Antibody-based therapies, or biologics, harness this property of antibodies, enabling them to bind to a protein involved in disease.
Nanobodies are unique antibodies—tiny immune proteins—produced naturally by alpacas in response to infection.
As part of the research, a group of alpacas in regional Victoria were immunized with a synthetic, non-infectious part of the SARS-CoV-2 'spike' protein to enable them to generate nanobodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. ...
England 15 April 2021
Oxford / Cambridge Cerebral venous thrombosis: a retrospective cohort study of 513,284 confirmed COVID-19 cases and a comparison with 489,871 people receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine
Excerpt: p. 3
There are concerns about a possible association between vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT, also called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis; Silvis et al, 2017). The concern has focused primarily on ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (Astra Zeneca),and more recently the Ad26.COV2-S vaccine (Janssen). The current risk with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 is estimatedat approximately 5 per million vaccinated individuals. Emerging data suggest that the association reflects a ‘vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopaenia’ (VITT) (Greinacher et al, 2021; Schultz et al, 2021). Governments and medical regulators have reacted by restricting the use of thetwovaccinesin different subgroups of the population, based on a risk-benefit analysis. Yet one key component of the risk-benefit calculationthat is crucial to understand the context of the riskis currently unknown: the absolute risk of CVT following a diagnosis of COVID-19. To date there are only a few case reports of CVT post-COVID-19(Dakay et al 2021)
Excerpt:
EMA convened an ad hoc expert group meeting on Monday 29 March to provide further input into the ongoing assessment. Independent external experts with a range of medical specialities, including haematologists, neurologists and epidemiologists, discussed specific aspects such as possible mechanisms, whether underlying risk factors could be identified and what additional data are needed to further characterise the observed events and the potential risk. The outcome of this meeting will be discussed by the PRAC and feed into its ongoing evaluation.
At present the review has not identified any specific risk factors, such as age, gender or a previous medical history of clotting disorders, for these very rare events. A causal link with the vaccine is not proven, but is possible and further analysis is continuing.
As communicated on 18 March, EMA is of the view that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing COVID-19, with its associated risk of hospitalisation and death, outweigh the risks of side effects. ...
International
26 March 2021
JAMA Psychiatry. How COVID-19 Affects the Brain
doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.0500
This article discusses possible pathogenic mechanisms of brain dysfunction in patients with COVID-19.
Excerpt:
Some patients present with anosmia, cognitive and attention deficits (ie, brain fog), new-onset anxiety, depression, psychosis, seizures, and even suicidal behavior.1,2 These present before, during, and after respiratory symptoms and are unrelated to respiratory insufficiency,1 suggesting independent brain damage. Follow-ups conducted in Germany and the United Kingdom found post–COVID-19 NPs in 20% to 70% of patients, even in young adults, and lasting months after respiratory symptoms resolved,1 suggesting brain involvement persists.
Entering through angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptors,2 SARS-CoV-2 can damage endothelial cells leading to inflammation, thrombi, and brain damage. Moreover, systemic inflammation leads to decreased monoamines and trophic factors and activation of microglia, resulting in increased glutamate and N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA)3 and excitotoxicity (Figure). These insults induce new-onset or re-exacerbation of preexisting NPs.
Does the Virus Invade the Brain?
SARS-CoV-2 is known to penetrate the olfactory mucosa, causing loss of smell, and may enter the brain, migrating from the cribriform plate along the olfactory tract2 or through vagal or trigeminal pathways; however, definitive evidence for this is lacking. . .
...
While ageusia, nausea, and vomiting may be related to CVO and brain stem viral invasion, other short-term and long-lasting NPs are more likely due to neuroinflammation and hypoxic injury. Brain stem involvement may explain persistent autonomic abnormalities and anxiety. . .
International
17 February, 2021
JAMA Network Vitamin D3 to Treat COVID-19
Different Disease, Same Answer,
Excerpt:
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred renewed interest in vitamin D to address viral replication and hyperinflammation that have a major role in the pathogenesis of severe COVID-19. In addition to known antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory effects, vitamin D metabolites also have direct action on angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which serves as the cell surface entry receptor for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
In this issue of JAMA, Murai et al12 examine the therapeutic efficacy of vitamin D3 administration in patients with COVID-19. …
International
18 Jan. 2021
Nature Evolution of antibody immunity to SARS-CoV-2
Coronavirus components persist in one patient’s small intestine. 92 days after the start of their Covid symptoms. Christine Gaebler et al
Abstract
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected 78 million individuals and is responsible for over 1.7 million deaths to date. Infection is associated with the development of variable levels of antibodies with neutralizing activity, which can protect against infection in animal models1,2. Antibody levels decrease with time, but, to our knowledge, the nature and quality of the memory B cells that would be required to produce antibodies upon reinfection has not been examined. Here we report on the humoral memory response in a cohort of 87 individuals assessed at 1.3 and 6.2 months after infection with SARS-CoV-2. We find that titres of IgM and IgG antibodies against the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 decrease significantly over this time period, with IgA being less affected. Concurrently, neutralizing activity in plasma decreases by fivefold in pseudotype virus assays. By contrast, the number of RBD-specific memory B cells remains unchanged at 6.2 months after infection. Memory B cells display clonal turnover after 6.2 months, and the antibodies that they express have greater somatic hypermutation, resistance to RBD mutations and increased potency, indicative of continued evolution of the humoral response. Immunofluorescence and PCR analyses of intestinal biopsies obtained from asymptomatic individuals at 4 months after the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) revealed the persistence of SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids and immunoreactivity in the small bowel of 7 out of 14 individuals. We conclude that the memory B cell response to SARS-CoV-2 evolves between 1.3 and 6.2 months after infection in a manner that is consistent with antigen persistence. Main
Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 were initially characterized in a cohort of individuals convalescing from COVID-19 at approximately 40 days (1.3 months) after infection…
… However, whereas data on the function of vitamin D in bone growth and maintenance is clear-cut and has informed practical clinical guidelines and public health policies over the years, evidence supporting the role of vitamin D in other health and disease processes, in particular in acute respiratory tract infection, remains patchy. … Additionally, increased time spent indoors due to strict lockdowns and shielding triggered concerns that some people might not obtain the necessary physiological levels of vitamin D from sunlight.ARY 01, 2021
Related study:
3 Aug. 2020
The Lancet Vitamin D for COVID-19: a case to answer?
Adrian R Martineau and Nita G Forouhi
Excerpt:
… Recently, we have shown that airway diseases are associated with dysregulated vitamin D metabolism, raising the possibility that vitamin D deficiency might arise as a consequence of pulmonary inflammation. Prospective studies can provide insights into the potential for reverse causality, but results from those published to date are conflicting:
3177 charts across 297 topics
All free: open access and open source
Collaborative efforts with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
17 Goals to Transform Our World
The Sustainable Development Goals are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection. More important than ever, the goals provide a critical framework for COVID-19 recovery.
Read more here
~ Venkatakrishnan, A.J., Kayal, N., Anand, P. et al.
Benchmarking evolutionary tinkering underlying human–viral molecular mimicry shows multiple host pulmonary–arterial peptides mimicked by SARS-CoV-2. Cell Death Discov. 6, 96 (2020).
doi: 10.1038/s41420-020-00321-y "...the mechanistic rationale underlying immune evasion and multi-system inflammation (Kawasaki-like disease) remains poorly understood."
~ Kanduc, D., Shoenfeld, Y.
Molecular mimicry between SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein and mammalian proteomes: implications for the vaccine.
Immunol Res 68, 310–313 (2020).
doi: 10.1007/s12026-020-09152-6
"... particular attention has to be dedicated to the choice of the laboratory animals to be used in preclinical studies during the formulation/validation of anti-pathogen vaccines."
The clinical trial - named HEAL-COVID - also aims to cut the number patients being readmitted to hospital with complications as a result of having Covid.
Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that 29% of patients who are hospitalised due to Covid-19 are readmitted within six months, and more than 12% die within the same period.
HEAL-COVID stands for Helping to Alleviate the Longer-term consequences of Covid-19 and is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. It will test a number of safe, existing drugs on patients across the UK in order to find effective treatments.
“Study lead Dr Charlotte Summers, from the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke's Hospital (pictured), said: "Having survived the trauma of being hospitalised with Covid-19, far too many patients find themselves back in hospital with new or long term complications.
"Unfortunately, many go on to die in the months after being discharged. This trial is the first of its kind to look at what drugs we could use to reduce the devastating impact on patients."
The trial is being led by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) and University of Cambridge, in collaboration with Liverpool Clinical Trials Centre (University of Liverpool) and Aparito Limited.
HEAL-COVID will enrol patients when they are discharged from hospital, following their first admission for Covid-19. They will be randomised and given one of two drugs – apixaban and atorvastatin - and their progress tracked. It's hoped a third drug will be introduced to the trial on the recommendation of the UK COVID Therapeutic Advisory Panel (UK-CTAP) in the coming weeks.
… The treatments
- Apixaban is an oral anticoagulant drug that is used to reduce the risk of blood clots forming.
- Atorvastatin is a widely used lipid lowering drug (‘a statin’) that also acts on other mechanisms of disease that are thought to be important in Covid-19....
Vitamin B6 may help keep COVID-19's cytokine storms at bay...
Who would have thought that a small basic compound like vitamin B6 in bananas or fish could be key to a robust response against COVID-19?
Studies have so far explored the benefits of vitamins D and C and minerals like zinc and magnesium in fortifying immune response against COVID-19. But research on vitamin B6 has been mostly missing. ...
Excerpt:
Researchers in the United Kingdom have launched a study that will mix and match two COVID-19 vaccines in a bid to ease the daunting logistics of immunizing millions of people — and potentially boost immune responses in the process.
Most coronavirus vaccines are given as two injections: an initial ‘prime’ dose followed by a ‘boost’ to stimulate the immune system’s memory cells and amplify the immune response. The clinical trial will test participants’ immune responses to receiving one shot of a coronavirus vaccine produced by Oxford and drug firm AstraZeneca — which uses a harmless virus to carry a key coronavirus gene into cells — and one shot of the vaccine produced by drug company Pfizer, which uses RNA instructions to trigger an immune response. The trial, which is run by investigators at the University of Oxford, aims to begin enrolment on 4 February...
Follow-up report on the above Oxford combination research
Pfizer vaccine may be less effective in people with obesity, says study
by Linda Geddes, Science correspondent
1 March 2021, The Guardian Healthcare workers with obesity found to produce only about half the antibodies healthy people do
Excerpt
Italian researchers have discovered that healthcare workers with obesity produced only about half the amount of antibodies in response to a second dose of the jab compared with healthy people. Although it is too soon to know what this means for the efficacy of the vaccine, it might imply that people with obesity need an additional booster dose to ensure they are adequately protected against coronavirus.
Previous research has suggested that obesity – which is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) over 30 – increases the risk of dying of Covid-19 by nearly 50%, as well as increasing the risk of ending up in hospital by 113%. ...
Excerpt:
We’ve got two different studies that have evaluated the same vaccine. But they’ve evaluated them under very different conditions.
Firstly, conditions in South Africa and the UK are different in terms of the socio-economic environment, which could influence the force of infection by SARS-CoV-2.
Over and above that, the trials evaluated vaccine efficacy against two very different variants, which would differ in their susceptibility to antibodies induced by vaccination (as well as by natural infection from past infection by prototype SARS-CoV-2).
The South African efficacy readout is against the B.1.351 variant – 92% of all of the cases in the main analysis developed COVID-19 following infection by this variant.
The UK trial involved people infected with the B.1.1.7 and other variants. ...
- Why the major difference in risk between the UK’s 89% and South Africa’s 60%?...
- How is the Novavax vaccine different from others that have reported data on their efficacy?...
- What makes the Novavax vaccine stand out?...
Excerpt:
Long-awaited results about the effectiveness of a leading Chinese COVID-19 vaccine were tinged with disappointment and confusion this week. But researchers say the vaccine could help reduce deaths from the disease.
Researchers in Brazil reported that CoronaVac, developed by Beijing-based Sinovac, was 50.4% effective at preventing severe and mild COVID-19 in late-stage trials. That’s significantly lower than the 90% efficacies of several leading vaccines.
Summary Background
A safe and efficacious vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), if deployed with high coverage, could contribute to the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluated the safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine in a pooled interim analysis of four trials.
Part 3
2021 - 2022 Alternative Science Research Back to top
United States
23 Dec. 2021 CDC & Media Push a Cocktail of Poisons CDC and Media Push Cocktail-of-Toxins COVID Vaccines on Pregnant Women Despite High Signal of Harm from Miscarriages, Fetal Deaths, Newborn Deaths, Maternal Deaths, Stillbirths, Menstrual Problems, Birth Defects
Excerpt
A cursory look at the day’s news everyday reveals that the CDC is working hard to push the COVID vaccines on pregnant women, even though the numbers of miscarriages and fetal deaths continue to mount. Searching online yields all sorts of vague assurances the vaccines are safe and pregnant “people” (are they really preparing us for men to get pregnant?) should get them.
They’re not the only ones, the slant of the news across all mainstream media platforms echoes the same frenzied push to force pregnant women–who have been trained by now to refuse a glass of wine or beer when pregnant–to imbibe the cocktail of poisons which all the four Trademark vaccines–Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson and Johnson have now been shown irrefutably to be. >>>more
Abstract
SARS- CoV-2 or novel coronavirus enters in human body through nose and mouth, stays there for a while. Then binds with ACE2 receptor, enters inside cell, multiply there and manifests. Again, Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone or Povidone Iodine (PVP-I) is a strong microbicidal agent having 99.99% virucidal efficacy in its only 0.23% concentration, irrespective of all known viruses, even in SARS- CoV-2 (in vitro). An oro-nasal spray is designed to apply the PVP-I in nose and oral cavity to gain a protective layer or coating over nasal and oral mucosa, so that SARS-CoV-2 can’t bind with the ACE-2 receptor and prevent their entry inside. So, it will be effective for prevention of COVID-19. Moreover, as PVP-I has the ability for destruction of SARS-CoV-2, transmission of SARS- CoV-2 from patient will be reduced also. Thus PVP-I oro-nasal spray can act as an effective shield for COVID-19 protection for healthcare workers, for all.
Keywords: PVP-I, Oro-nasal spray, COVID-19
Background
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has already affected millions of people with more than a million deaths worldwide since the advent of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019 [1]. SARS- CoV-2 enters in human body through nose and mouth, stays there for a while. Then binds with ACE2 receptor, enters inside cell, multiply there and manifests. Again, it is already established that PVP-I is a strong microbicidal (chemical) agent, having 99.99% virucidal efficacy in its only 0.23% concentration, irrespective of all known viruses, even in SARS-CoV-2 (in vitro) [2, 3, 4].
The first step in the development of URTIs is the adherence and colonisation of the respiratory pathogen to the nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal mucosa. Assuming nasal and oral entry of such pathogens, intranasal and intra oral application of Povidone Iodine offers a practical measure for their prevention. ...
Excerpt:
OMNS (March 16, 2023) In the recent pandemic, a common reason many people died is the failure to use widely available, highly effective, safe, and inexpensive treatments that have proven to drastically reduce morbidity and mortality from this disease. Over the last several centuries and especially within the last decades, we have gained a huge amount of medical knowledge about biochemistry and nutrition -- and how important this is for maintaining a strong, resilient body and immune system. For example, cardiologist Dr. Thomas Levy wrote entire books that describe how extremely high dose vitamin C can treat or cure a wide spectrum of infectious diseases. [1] He cites more than 1,000 studies and reports from doctors and scientists who published lifesaving results from the use of nutrition supplements.
Too many people know nothing about these results. The problem is that those in the medical establishment who have the most power have interests other than health and welfare. They are interested in money and profits. Additional problems that may be responsible for the fact that millions of people have died unnecessarily from the pandemic include: ideologies, ignorance, a desire of control, unknowingness due to failure or unwillingness to consult other medical experts such as orthomolecular practitioners.
During the COVID-19-pandemic, those patients who got very sick from the viral illness and were thus hospitalized on average had a 13% (95% confidence interval: 9 to 17%) fatality rate. [2] However, a valuable successful early treatment protocol with synergistic combinations of cheap repurposed drugs and vitamins like the one from Dr. Fareed and Dr. Tyson (from California) proved to be safe in keeping almost all patients from being hospitalized. [3] Yet their protocol has been ignored, even though a study had confirmed that the thousands of patients who were treated early by those doctors had a 99.8% lower risk of death from COVID-19 than a control group comprising other patients from the same county. [3] They were ignored even after they informed the governments and health agencies about their excellent success rate. In addition to early treatment, they have also developed late treatment protocols. Those protocols have drastically reduced the risk of death of patients who were hospitalized (due to the failure to administer early treatment).
The following statements by Dr. Derick Knauss on the identity of the virus and on the failures of the PCR test are corroborated by numerous scientific studies including the WHO.
See the text by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky at the foot of Dr. Knauss’ article
~ ~
"I have a PhD in virology and immunology. I’m a clinical lab scientist and have tested 1500 “supposed” positive Covid 19 samples collected here in S. California. When my lab team and I did the testing through Koch’s postulates and observation under a SEM (scanning electron microscope), we found NO Covid in any of the 1500 samples.
What we found was that all of the 1500 samples were mostly Influenza A and some were influenza B, but not a single case of Covid, and we did not use the B.S. PCR test.
We then sent the remainder of the samples to Stanford, Cornell, and a few of the University of California labs and they found the same results as we did, NO COVID. They found influenza A and B. All of us then spoke to the CDC and asked for viable samples of COVID, which CDC said they could not provide as they did not have any samples. We have now come to the firm conclusion through all our research and lab work, that the COVID 19 was imaginary and fictitious.
The flu was called Covid and most of the 225,000 dead were dead through co-morbidities such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, emphysema etc. and they then got the flu which further weakened their immune system and they died.
I have yet to find a single viable sample of Covid 19 to work with. We at the 7 universities that did the lab tests on these 1500 samples are now suing the CDC for Covid 19 fraud. the CDC has yet to send us a single viable, isolated and purifed sample of Covid 19. If they can’t or won’t send us a viable sample, I say there is no Covid 19, it is fictitious. The four research papers that do describe the genomic extracts of the Covid 19 virus never were successful in isolating and purifying the samples. All the four papers written on Covid 19 only describe small bits of RNA which were only 37 to 40 base pairs long which is NOT A VIRUS. A viral genome is typically 30,000 to 40,000 base pairs.
With as bad as Covid is supposed to be all over the place, how come no one in any lab world wide has ever isolated and purified this virus in its entirety? That’s because they’ve never really found the virus, all they’ve ever found was small pieces of RNA which were never identified as the virus anyway.
So what we’re dealing with is just another flu strain like every year, COVID 19 does not exist and is fictitious. I believe China and the globalists orchestrated this COVID hoax (the flu disguised as a novel virus) to bring in global tyranny and a worldwide police totalitarian surveillance state, and this plot included massive election fraud to overthrow Trump.
Dr. Derek Knauss is a clinical lab specialist focussing on virology and immunology. He is based in Southern California. >>> more
WOMEN's issues
30 April 2021
HuffPost 5 New Things We Learned About COVID-19 In April 2021
What's the latest on pregnancy and COVID-19 risk?
Is facial paralysis a concern post-vaccination? Here's what we know now.
Excerpt:
What we know about COVID-19 seems to change by the minute.
It’s understandable, given the massive scale of the pandemic. Right now, more than 150 million cases have been confirmed around the world. And even a year into the pandemic, the virus and ways to address it are still relatively new to the medical world, so researchers are learning as they go.
1. That blood clots have been linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — but they’re extremely rare.
. . . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration … that “out of an abundance of caution” they were looking into a handful of incidents in which some recipients (all women, most under the age of 50) developed a rare disorder involving blood clots and low blood platelets within two weeks of receiving their shot. …
2. There *could* be a link between vaccination and menstrual cycle changes.
3. Pregnant women may be at higher risk for serious outcomes from COVID-19 than previously thought.
… an April study warned.
“Women with COVID-19 during pregnancy were over 50% more likely to experience pregnancy complications (such as premature birth, pre-eclampsia, admission to intensive care and death) compared to pregnant women unaffected by COVID-19,” said study researcher Dr. Aris Papageorghiou, a professor of fetal Medicine at the University of Oxford in England in a press statement.
… the risks in symptomless infected women and non-infected women were similar,” . . . experts stress that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for pregnant women.
4. Younger children really are less likely to spread the virus.
. . . New research published in April . . .finding that younger students (up to age 9) have very low rates of transmission. . . .
5. COVID-19 vaccines don’t pose an increased risk for facial paralysis
Note: What went wrong with the following I-TECH Ιvermectin study published in JAMA? In brief, the study design was such that any other antiviral, such as Paxlovid or Molnupiravir, would also have failed.
Key Points
Question
Does adding ivermectin, an inexpensive and widely available antiparasitic drug, to the standard of care reduce the risk of severe disease in patients with COVID-19 and comorbidities?
Findings
In this open-label randomized clinical trial of high-risk patients with COVID-19 in Malaysia, a 5-day course of oral ivermectin administered during the first week of illness did not reduce the risk of developing severe disease compared with standard of care alone.
Meaning
The study findings do not support the use of ivermectin for patients with COVID-19.
Abstract
Importance
Ivermectin, an inexpensive and widely available antiparasitic drug, is prescribed to treat COVID-19. Evidence-based data to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin are needed.
Objective
To determine the efficacy of ivermectin in preventing progression to severe disease among high-risk patients with COVID-19.
... Ivermectin, an inexpensive, easy-to-administer, and widely available antiparasitic drug, has been used as an oral therapy for COVID-19. An in vitro study demonstrated inhibitory effects of ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2. Although some early clinical studies suggested the potential efficacy of ivermectin in the treatment and prevention of COVID-19, these studies had methodologic weaknesses.
International
"Brazil: City-wide study (223,000 subjects) shows 70% reduction in mortality among Ivermectin using residents"
Abstract
Background: Ivermectin has demonstrated different mechanisms of action that potentially protect from both coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection and COVID-19-related comorbidities. Based on the studies suggesting efficacy in prophylaxis combined with the known safety profile of ivermectin, a citywide prevention program using ivermectin for COVID-19 was implemented in Itajaí, a southern city in Brazil in the state of Santa Catarina. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of regular ivermectin use on subsequent COVID-19 infection and mortality rates.
Materials and methods:
We analyzed data from a prospective, observational study of the citywide COVID-19 prevention with ivermectin program, which was conducted between July 2020 and December 2020 in Itajaí, Brazil. Study design, institutional review board approval, and analysis of registry data occurred after completion of the program. The program consisted of inviting the entire population of Itajaí to a medical visit to enroll in the program and to compile baseline, personal, demographic, and medical information. In the absence of contraindications, ivermectin was offered as an optional treatment to be taken for two consecutive days every 15 days at a dose of 0.2 mg/kg/day. In cases where a participating citizen of Itajaí became ill with COVID-19, they were recommended not to use ivermectin or any other medication in early outpatient treatment. Clinical outcomes of infection, hospitalization, and death were automatically reported and entered into the registry in real time. Study analysis consisted of comparing ivermectin users with non-users using cohorts of infected patients propensity score-matched by age, sex, and comorbidities. COVID-19 infection and mortality rates were analyzed with and without the use of propensity score matching (PSM).
Results:
Of the 223,128 citizens of Itajaí considered for the study, a total of 159,561 subjects were included in the analysis: 113,845 (71.3%) regular ivermectin users and 45,716 (23.3%) non-users. Of these, 4,311 ivermectin users were infected, among which 4,197 were from the city of Itajaí (3.7% infection rate), and 3,034 non-users (from Itajaí) were infected (6.6% infection rate), with a 44% reduction in COVID-19 infection rate (risk ratio [RR], 0.56; 95% confidence interval (95% CI), 0.53-0.58; p < 0.0001). Using PSM, two cohorts of 3,034 subjects suffering from COVID-19 infection were compared. The regular use of ivermectin led to a 68% reduction in COVID-19 mortality (25 [0.8%] versus 79 [2.6%] among ivermectin non-users; RR, 0.32; 95% CI, 0.20-0.49; p < 0.0001). When adjusted for residual variables, reduction in mortality rate was 70% (RR, 0.30; 95% CI, 0.19-0.46; p < 0.0001). There was a 56% reduction in hospitalization rate (44 versus 99 hospitalizations among ivermectin users and non-users, respectively; RR, 0.44; 95% CI, 0.31-0.63; p < 0.0001). After adjustment for residual variables, reduction in hospitalization rate was 67% (RR, 0.33; 95% CI, 023-0.66; p < 0.0001).
Conclusion:
In this large PSM study, regular use of ivermectin as a prophylactic agent was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates. ...
Malaysia
July 27, 2021
FLCCC - ZOOM Lecture
Summary: Dr. Pierre Kory outlines the History of FLCCC Recommendations
in this medical lecture that he delivered via Zoom on July 27, 2021, to the physicians and citizens of Malaysia upon his receiving the Benevolence Leadership Award from the Cheng Ho Multi Culture Education Trust and Tan Sri Lee Kim Yew of Malaysia.
In it, he tells the story of how and why the FLCCC Alliance was formed—and how, at the start of the pandemic, the team quickly began to develop protocols to successfully treat patients. Their first, the MATH+ Hospital Treatment Protocol, was used to save critically ill patients and to prevent them from having to rely on ventilators to breathe. As COVID-19 cases surged, they urgently researched ways to offload the hospitals and reduce case counts and deaths. Their I-MASK+ Prevention & Early Outpatient Treatment Protocol centered around the drug ivermectin—which is effective for prevention as well as treating early and late phases of COVID-19. Treatment for Long Haul COVID disease followed. (Runs 39 minutes).
Excerpt: …
Therapeutic Advances:
A large majority of randomized and observational controlled trials of ivermectin are reporting repeated, large magnitude improvements in clinical outcomes. Numerous prophylaxis trials demonstrate that regular ivermectin use leads to large reductions in transmission. Multiple, large “natural experiments” occurred in regions that initiated “ivermectin distribution” campaigns followed by tight, reproducible, temporally associated decreases in case counts and case fatality rates compared with nearby regions without such campaigns.
Excerpt:
Summary of the Evidence for Ivermectin in COVID-19 Ivermectin is an anti-parasite medicine whose discovery won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for its impacts in ridding large parts of the globe of parasitic diseases via the distribution of over 3.7 billion doses within public health campaigns since 1987. Since 2012, numerous in-vitro and in-vivo studies began to report highly potent anti-viral effects of ivermectin against a diverse array of viruses including SARS-CoV-2. Further, increasing antiinflammatory and immuno-modulating effects are being identified Our comprehensive narrative review of the “totality of the evidence” supporting ivermectin was published in The American Journal of Therapeutics in April, 2021 where we reviewed data on efficacy from a diverse array of scientific sources beyond just the randomized controlled trial evidence as illustrated in the diagram below...
Update: Currently, as of September 19, 2021, the totality of the evidence is as follows.
• IN-VITRO (BASIC SCIENCE): ivermectin has been shown to inhibit the replication of many viruses, including West-Nile, Zika, Dengue, Influenza, and most recently SARS-CoV-2 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
• IN-VIVO: ivermectin diminishes viral load and protects against organ damage in animal models of SARS-CoV-2 infection and has multiple, potent anti-inflammatory and immune-modulating properties [1, 2, 3]
. . .
CONCLUSION
Based on the totality of the existing evidence above, the FLCCC strongly recommends ivermectin be used in both the prevention and treatment of all phases of COVID-19 in both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
. . . One dose of Ivermectin was all it took to get 81-year-old John Swanson off the ventilator. John’s wife Sandra could not believe it. His story is remarkably similar to other cases of patients who were on their way out with advanced COVID-19 but saved when Ivermectin was added.
Ralph Lorigo is the lawyer who now has won three court orders forcing New York hospitals to administer Ivermectin to dying patients. Incredibly, these three hospitals and their lawyers fought against the patients, arguing they did not have the right to receive the drug despite a valid prescription written by their doctors. In essence, the argument was that they did not have the right to try a potentially life-saving medication.
In each of the three cases, the New York State Supreme Court Justices sided with the patient, and in each of the three cases, the patients made near-miraculous recoveries after the Ivermectin was given. In each case, these patients were in the Intensive Care Unit on ventilators, unable to breathe on their own, and universally, after the drug was given, they rapidly improved and were able to breathe on their own.
. . .
Ivermectin is widely used by physicians, as there are now 51 studies from around the world, with 50 showing clear benefit and one showing neutral. However, the lone study showing a neutral effect was roundly criticized as flawed in an open letter signed by a group of 120 physicians.
Experts worldwide have called for the global and systematic use of Ivermectin to prevent and treat COVID-19.
. . .
ivermectin costs about $2 per dose. It is safer than Tylenol or most vitamins, says Dr. Pierre Kory of the FLCCC Alliance, a group of expert physicians promoting access and information through a nonprofit organization. Dr. Kory and Mr. Lorigo have teamed up to help other hospitalized patients gain access to the life-saving drug.
Dr. Fred Wagshul, a Yale-educated physician, is a pulmonary specialist and directs the Lung Center of America. He is also a founding member of the FLCCC Alliance. Dr. Wagshul notes that the typical dose for hospitalized patients is 0.3 mg of Ivermectin per kg of body weight for four days which works out to nine 3 mg tablets daily for four days in a typical 200-pound patient.
. . .
The disinformation campaign is evident with the publication of articles attempting to cast Ivermectin in a false light, referring to it as an “animal dewormer” that might be a “bad idea” for humans to use. In reality, many drugs are common to both humans and animals for treatment, including antibiotics, antifungals, and antiparasitic agents.
Ampicillin, a form of penicillin, has been widely used to treat infections in children like whooping cough, salmonella, and meningitis. It has been routinely used to treat adults for bronchitis, pneumonia, and rheumatic heart disease. It is also consistently employed in veterinary applications to treat calves, cattle, dogs, and cats. . . .
… For the second time in recent weeks, a state judge has ordered a Western New York hospital to use the drug Ivermectin as an experimental treatment for a patient suffering from Covid-19.
…
State Supreme Court Justice Frank Caruso on Friday ordered a Rochester hospital to continue Ivermectin treatments to Glenna Dickinson, 65, of Albion.
…
“Within 12 hours, she had made a strong improvement, but the hospital was reluctant to continue giving her Ivermectin," Lorigo said late Friday. "We got an order from Judge Caruso, and he may have saved this woman's life."
… Although it has reportedly been used successfully in Australia and several other countries to treat Covid-19, Ivermectin is not approved by the United States government as a Covid-19 treatment. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration has said it is testing Ivermectin for that use. ...
Germany
7 March 2021 Mass Vaccination in a Pandemic - Benefits versus Risks:
YouTube: Interview with Geert Vanden Bossche PhD - internationally recognised vaccine developer having worked as the head of the Vaccine Development Office at the German Centre for Infection Research.
Excerpt from a personal message from Dr. Bossche:
"To all authorities, scientists and experts around the world, to whom this concerns: the entire world population.
I am all but an antivaxxer. As a scientist I do not usually appeal to any platform of this kind to make a stand on vaccine-related topics. As addicted virologist and vaccine expert I only make an exception when health authorities allow vaccines to be administered in ways that threaten public health, most certainly when scientific evidence is being ignored. The present extremely critical situation forces to spread this emergency call. As the unprecedented extent of human intervention in the Covid-19-pandemic is not at risk of resulting in a global catastrophe without equal, this call cannot sound loudly and strongly enough…"
Read his full comment here
Currently, no cure is available for COVID-19. Researchers are testing a variety of treatments. But misinformation continues to circulate about ways to prevent infection with the COVID-19 virus or treat COVID-19.
Here's what the science says: … “beware of quick fixes. A miracle cure that claims to contain a secret ingredient is likely a hoax.”
United States
6 Nov. 2020
Professor Vincent Racaniello, Professor of Virology at Colombia University in New York tests positive for Covid-19
(14:22)
”In this video I explain how the PCR test was done, what the Ct value that I received means, and why I was not worried about the result.”
To encourage people to receive COVID-19 vaccines for the benefit of the entire community, we need compensation schemes to be in place if there is a rare but serious side-effect, writes Associate Professor Nicholas Wood.
In last week’s federal budget the Australian government announced it had given the suppliers of two COVID-19 vaccines indemnity against liability for rare side-effects.
Although details are unclear, it appears the government would foot the bill for compensation if a member of the public wins legal action against the drug company.
This is in contrast to 25 other countries with no-fault compensation schemes for rare vaccine side-effects.
Here’s the little we know about Australia’s latest indemnity deal and what we could be doing better.
What do we know about Australia’s new deal?
The deal relates to two vaccines the government had previously announced it would supply, should clinical trials prove successful.
These are the University of Oxford vaccine, from AstraZeneca, and the University of Queensland vaccine, from Seqirus (part of CSL).
… How unusual is this?
This deal is not entirely new or unexpected. The government has provided some indemnity to pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines against smallpox and influenza.
The governments of many other countries have also agreed to indemnify COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, including governments in the UK, US and the European Union.
The manufacturers believe that as the use of their vaccine is for the benefit of society, they should not be held financially accountable for any consequences from a vaccine reaction.
So what does this mean for the public?
If a person in Australia believes they have been injured by a vaccine, including future COVID-19 vaccines, they will need to pursue compensation through the legal system.
Under the latest agreement, it would appear the government, rather than the drug company, would pay that compensation, should the person win their case.
However this is not ideal. The person still has to engage with the legal system, which is both costly and complex, and there’s no guarantee of success.
Compensation may not even be possible via our legal system. That’s because in most cases, it will be difficult to show in court a serious side-effect was due to a fault in the vaccine composition or negligence in the way it was administered.
So in Australia, people with a vaccine injury, either COVID-19 or other vaccine, will likely bear the costs of their injury by themselves, and seek treatment by our publicly-funded or private health systems.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme helps fund therapies for people with a permanent and significant disability but does not cover temporary vaccine-related injuries.
Participants in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials can be compensated for temporary and permanent vaccine injuries.
What’s happening overseas?
In the US, people with a rare but serious reaction to a COVID-19 vaccine will be able to access a special compensation scheme. This is designed to provide compensation for the use of COVID-19 pandemic medications and vaccines.
However, applicants only have one year from the date they had the vaccine or medicine to request benefits.
The US already has a vaccine compensation scheme for vaccines other than COVID-19. This is an example of a no-fault compensation scheme. These compensate for specific vaccine reactions, without having to go to court to prove the vaccine manufacturer is liable.
Australia, in contrast to 25 countries including the US, UK and New Zealand, does not have a no-fault vaccine compensation scheme, and does not have the equivalent of the US COVID-19 vaccine compensation scheme. >>>more
The SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) pandemic is the greatest threat to prosperity and well-being the US has encountered since the Great Depression. This Viewpoint aggregates mortality, morbidity, mental health conditions, and direct economic losses to estimate the total cost of the pandemic in the US on the optimistic assumption that it will be substantially contained by the fall of 2021. These costs far exceed those associated with conventional recessions and the Iraq War, and are similar to those associated with global climate change. However, increased investment in testing and contact tracing could have economic benefits that are at least 30 times greater than the estimated costs of the investment in these approaches.
Since the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in March, 60 million claims have been filed for unemployment insurance. Before COVID-19, the greatest number of weekly new unemployment insurance claims (based on data from 1967 on) was 695?000 in the week of October 2, 1982. For 20 weeks beginning in late March 2020, new unemployment claims exceeded 1 million per week; as of September 20, new claims have been just below that amount.
Recessions feed on themselves. Workers not at work have less to spend, and thus subsequent business revenue declines. The federal government offset much of the initial loss owing to the shutdown, which has averted what would likely have been a new Great Depression. But the virus is ongoing, and thus full recovery is not expected until well into the future. The Congressional Budget Office projects a total of $7.6 trillion in lost output during the next decade.1
. . .
Although putting a value on a given human life is impossible, economists have developed the technique of valuing “statistical lives”; that is, measuring how much it is worth to people to reduce their risk of mortality or morbidity. This approach has been used as a standard in US regulatory policy and in discussions of global health policy.2
There is a lengthy economic literature assessing the value of a statistical life; for example, in environmental and health regulation. Although no single number is universally accepted, ranges are often used. In environmental and health policy,3 for example, a statistical life is assumed to be worth $10 million. With a more conservative value of $7 million per life, the economic cost of premature deaths expected through the next year is estimated at $4.4 trillion...
Abstract
In contrast to other respiratory viruses, children have less severe symptoms when infected with the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In this review, we discuss proposed hypotheses for the age-related difference in severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Factors proposed to explain the difference in severity of COVID-19 in children and adults include those that put adults at higher risk and those that protect children.
The former include:
(1) age-related increase in endothelial damage and changes in clotting function;
(2) higher density, increased affinity and different distribution of angiotensin converting enzyme 2 receptors and transmembrane serine protease 2;
(3) pre-existing coronavirus antibodies (including antibody-dependent enhancement) and T cells;
(4) immunosenescence and inflammaging, including the effects of chronic cytomegalovirus infection;
(5) a higher prevalence of comorbidities associated with severe COVID-19 and
(6) lower levels of vitamin D. Factors that might protect children include: (1) differences in innate and adaptive immunity; (2) more frequent recurrent and concurrent infections; (3) pre-existing immunity to coronaviruses; (4) differences in microbiota; (5) higher levels of melatonin;
(6) protective off-target effects of live vaccines and
(7) lower intensity of exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
What is already known on this topic?
– Compared with older adults, severe or fatal COVID-19 disease is much less common in infants, children and young adults.
– This pattern is strikingly different to that for infection with most other respiratory viruses, for which both the prevalence and severity are higher in children.
What this study adds?
– A number of factors have been proposed to explain the difference between children and adults in the severity of COVID-19, which can be categorised into those that put adults at higher risk and those that protect children.
– Although, there are several hypotheses for the age-related difference in the severity of COVID-19, the observed age-gradient seems to most closely parallel changes in immune and endothelial/clotting function.
Australia
3 July 2020
ABC News Coronavirus Q&A
Interview:
Professor James McCaw and Dr. Norman Swan
"We're in the very, very early stages... " - Professor James McCaw, University of Melbourne said that this virus can be disabled by our immune system.
Stay strong!
What happens next?
To answer your questions about the coronavirus pandemic, Jeremy Fernandez is joined by Professor James McCaw from Melbourne University and Dr Norman Swan.
See audience Q&A in comments.
International 15 May 2020 Elsevier Imbalanced Host Response to SARS-CoV-2 Drives Development of COVID-19
“Low innate antiviral defenses and high pro-inflammatory cues contribute to COVID-19”
"an in-depth analysis of the transcriptional response to SARS-CoV-2 compared with other respiratory viruses."
New studies on pharmaceutical prevention solutions for covid-19 virus suggest that, in additon to nasal passages and lungs, prevention can include 'disinfecting' saliva and 'nebulising' lungs.
2. Nebulising lungs
Nov. 2020
Safety and efficacy of inhaled nebulised interferon beta-1a (SNG001) for treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 2 trial.
Interpretation
Patients who received SNG001 had greater odds of improvement and recovered more rapidly from SARS-CoV-2 infection than patients who received placebo, providing a strong rationale for further trials.
In 2019–2020 a new coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2 was identified as the causative agent of a several acute respiratory infection named COVID-19, which is causing a worldwide pandemic. There are still many unresolved questions regarding the pathogenesis of this disease and especially the reasons underlying the extremely different clinical course, ranging from asymptomatic forms to severe manifestations, including the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). SARS-CoV-2 showed phylogenetic similarities to both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV viruses, and some of the clinical features are shared between COVID-19 and previously identified beta-coronavirus infections. Available evidence indicate that the so called “cytokine storm” an uncontrolled over-production of soluble markers of inflammation which, in turn, sustain an aberrant systemic inflammatory response, is a major responsible for the occurrence of ARDS. Chemokines are low molecular weight proteins with powerful chemoattractant activity which play a role in the immune cell recruitment during inflammation. This review will be aimed at providing an overview of the current knowledge on the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system in the cytokine storm related to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Basic and clinical evidences obtained from previous SARS and MERS epidemics and available data from COVID-19 will be taken into account.
International
2 May 2020 IPAK
An alliance created to conduct independent research on the accuracy of qRT-PCR tests used in the process of the diagnosis of COVID19. This important project will research, among other issues, the false positive rates of PCR tests and provide an reliable and independent data upon which public health policies can be formed.
IPAK: Waning Immunogenicity and Vaccine Failure
Excerpt: How do we know when a vaccine is no longer effective? When the vaccine type is isolated from the wild-type, they are set on different evolutionary trajectories, in very different environments. We are studying the expected and realized patterns of molecular evolution in immunoepitopes of pathogens for which vaccines are available to calculate the molecular shelf-life of specific vaccines on the market...
“Gain-of-function” is the euphemism for biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. GoF research is government funded; its focus is on enhancing the pathogens’ ability to infect different species and to increase their deadly impact as airborne pathogens and viruses. Ostensibly, GoF research is conducted for biodefense purposes. These experiments, however, are extremely dangerous. Those deadly science-enhanced pathogens can, and do escape into the community where they infect and kill people.
…
Government officials and the recipients of government grants and contracts for “gain-of-function” research argue that these experiments are critical for understanding the subtle changes that can make a bird virus a pandemic threat.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, has played a major role in promoting and funding gain-of-function research, both in the US and China. Newsweek reported: “He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations [ ] that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.”
• Those claims are belied by the empirical evidence
GoF experiments have neither prevented a pandemic, nor provided useful information about safe and effective pandemic countermeasures. Numerous prominent scientists argue that these experiments deviate from morally justifiable research, and the experimentally altered pathogens have put the entire human species at risk.
However, GoF research is defended by a closed circle of scientists within government and those who are contracted by government to conduct this line of research.
…
The risks posed by influenza GoF experiments include frequent documented escapes of deadly pathogens into the community, which have a potential for triggering a pandemic. These risks far outweigh any speculative benefits. What’s more, as Dr. Marc Lipsitch of Harvard and Dr. Alison Galvani of Yale argue:“the creation and manipulation of potential pandemic pathogens are too risky to justify…there are safer more effective experimental approaches that are both more scientifically informative and more straightforward to translate into improved public health.” [PLoS Medicine, 2014][4]
Dr. Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard School of Public Health stated that recent disease-enhancing experiments “have given us modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet [these experiments] risked creating an accidental pandemic.”[5] >>> more
"Autopsies of Chinese citizens who have died from COVID-19 following SARS-CoV-19 infection show evidence of interstitial changes, suggesting the development of pulmonary fibrosis..."
Abstract:
Homology between human and viral proteins is an established factor in viral- or vaccine-induced autoimmunity. Failure of the SARS and MERS vaccines in animal trials involved pathogenesis consistent with an immunological priming that could involve autoimmunity in lung tissues due to previous exposure to the SARS and MERS spike protein. Exposure to SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis in COVID-19 likely will lead to similar outcomes. Immunogenic peptides in viruses or bacteria that match human proteins are good candidates for pathogenic priming peptides (similar to the more diffuse idea of “immune enhancement”). Here I provide an assessment of potential for human pathogenesis via autoimmunity by exposure, through infection or injection, SAR-CoV-2 spike proteins, and all other SARS-CoV-2 proteins. Immunogenic epitopes in each SARS-CoV-2 protein were compared to human proteins in search of high local homologous matching. Only one immunogenic epitope in a SARS-CoV-2 had no homology to human proteins. Mapping of the genes encoding human protein matches to pathways point to targets that could explain the observed presentation of symptoms in COVID-19 disease. It also strongly points especially to surprisingly large number of opportunities for expected disturbances in the immune system itself, targeting elements of MHC Class I and Class II antigen presentation, PD-1 signaling, cross-presentation of soluble exogenous antigens and the ER-Phagosome pathway. Translational consequences of these findings are explored.
On "pre-existing conditions"
Details on ACEIs and ARBS, see University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, Feb. 2015: Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitors vs. Angiotensin Receptor Blockers Clinical Question
In which clinical situations are angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) preferred over angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors? ...
NOTE: children’s bodies produce an endogenous ACE-2 blocker which wanes with age.
Excerpt: Patients who take ACEIs and ARBS may be at increased risk of severe disease outcomes due to SARS-CoV-2 infections.
ACEIs and ARBs are highly recommended medications for patients with cardiovascular diseases, such as refractory hypertension, coronary artery disease, heart failure and post-myocardial infarction status.1,2 ACEIs and ARBs are also recommended for the management of cardiovascular diseases in elderly patients, and in patients with diabetes and renal insufficiency. . .
... Research in experimental models has shown an increase in the number of ACE2 receptors in the cardiopulmonary circulation after intravenous infusions of ACE inhibitors.
"Since patients treated with ACEIs and ARBS will have increased numbers of ACE2 receptors in their lungs for coronavirus S proteins to bind to, they may be at increased risk of severe disease outcomes due to SARS-CoV-2infections," explains Diaz.
Diaz writes, this hypothesis is supported by a recent descriptive analysis of 1,099 patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infections treated in China during the reporting period, December 11, 2019, to January 29, 2020. This study reported more severe disease outcomes in patients with hypertension, coronary artery disease, diabetes and chronic renal disease. All patients with the diagnoses noted met the recommended indications for treatment with ACEIs or ARBs. Diaz says that two mechanisms may protect children from COVID-19 infections -- cross-protective antibodies from multiple upper respiratory tract infections caused by the common cold-causing alpha coronaviruses, and fewer ACE2 receptors in their lower respiratory tracts to attract the binding S proteins of the beta coronaviruses.
He recommends future case-control studies in patients with COVID-19 infections to further confirm chronic therapy with ACEIs or ARBs may raise the risk for severe outcomes.
In the meantime he cautions, "Patients treated with ACEIs and ARBs for cardiovascular diseases should not stop taking their medicine, but should avoid crowds, mass events, ocean cruises, prolonged air travel, and all persons with respiratory illnesses during the current COVID-19 outbreak in order to reduce their risks of infection." ...
1. Preston Estep III, Ph.D. is an American biologist and science and technology advocate. He is a graduate of Cornell University, where he did neuroscience research, and he earned a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University. He did his doctoral research in the laboratory of genomics pioneer Professor George M. Churchat Harvard Medical School ... Wikipedia
2. In March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Estep
founded the non-profit, open-source Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC), serving as Chief Science Officer. RaDVaC was founded as a self-experimentation-based, collaborative, distributed research initiative. The chitosan and peptide intranasal vaccine relies on decades of previous animal and human subject research. Estep first tested the initial vaccine on himself, and was joined by his colleagues at RaDVaC for subsequent generations of the vaccine, among which was his mentor at Harvard, George M. Church. RaDVaC makes the detailed rationale and instructions for its vaccine formulations available in a versioned white paper (Terms of use: The purpose of this RaDVaC vaccine project is to reduce risk of harm from SARS-CoV-2, minimally until there is at least one effective commercial vaccine widely available.)
Excerpt:
A different approach to fighting bacteria
Phage therapy (PT) is also called bacteriophage therapy. It uses viruses to treat bacterial infections. Bacterial viruses are called phages or bacteriophages. They only attack bacteria; phages are harmless to people, animals, and plants.
Bacteriophages are the natural enemies of bacteria. The word bacteriophage means “bacteria eater.” They’re found in soil, sewage, water, and other places bacteria live. These viruses help keep bacteria growth in check in nature.
Phage therapy might sound new, but it has been used for 100Trusted Source years. However, the treatment isn’t well known. More research is needed on bacteriophages. This therapy for disease-causing bacteria may be a useful alternative to antibiotics.
How phage therapy works
Bacteriophages kill bacteria by making them burst or lyse. This happens when the virus binds to the bacteria. A virus infects the bacteria by injecting its genes (DNA or RNA).
United States May 2018
San Diego School of Medicine What is Phage Therapy? Phages, formally known as bacteriophages, are viruses that solely kill and selectively target bacteria. They are the most common biological entities in nature, and have been shown to effectively fight and destroy multi-drug resistant bacteria. Namely, when all antibiotics fail, phages still succeed in killing the bacteria and may save a life from an infection.
The main concern for all of us now is the alarming rate of increasing 'superbugs' that are resistant to most – if not all – antibiotics, as well as the impact they will have on human health and the longevity of life. These issues, combined with a lack of regulation to approve the process of phage therapy for anything less than an absolute, no-alternative emergency, pose a serious concern for us. We hope that through our work here at IPATH, we can make this treatment more widely available to save lives where no other treatments could.
How Phages Work
The YouTube channel "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" explains how bacteriophages infect and destroy in this colorful animated video:
The Deadliest Being on Planet Earth – The Bacteriophage
A war has been raging for billions of years, killing trillions every single day, while we don’t even notice. This war involves the single deadliest being on our planet: The Bacteriophage. Part 5 Government Reports Back to top
Partial transcript
(2:00)
Section 22D (2) of the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 requires the Secretary of the Department of Health to ensure the quality, safety and efficacy of the vaccines were satisfactorily established for each cohort for which the provision of approval is being granted. Data recently revealed in court papers in the United States clearly shows that vaccine harm was apparent in the clinical trials that Pfizer, BioTech and others conducted. This information, it ATAGI had bothered to ask for it, should have resulted in a refusal of the application for provisional use. No data was provided to the Secretary regarding individual test subjects technically, anonymised patient clinical data. No independent analysis of the fundamental issues surrounding novel mRNA vaccines was conducted in Australia. None in Australia. Instead, the Secretary took pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna’s word for it. (3:13)
I will say that again. the Secretary took pharmaceutical companies word for the safety of their products. (3:20)
These are the same pharmaceutical companies that have been fined over and over for criminal behaviour.
AstraZeneca, US$355 million fine for fraud, and separately $550 million fine for making unfounded claims about efficacy. (3:37)
Pfizer $430 million fine for making unfounded claims about efficacy and $2.3 billion fine - billion dollar fine for making unfounded claims about efficacy and for paying kickbacks. (3:55)
Excerpt
President Joe Biden last week got his wish for a new agency to fund high-risk, cutting-edge biomedical research when Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and gave it a $1 billion startup investment. That’s a fraction of the $6.5 billion Biden had proposed, but advocates say it’s plenty to launch ARPA-H.
The 2022 spending bill does not resolve, however, a debate over whether to make ARPA-H a standalone agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Instead, it gives HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra 30 days to decide.
Biden proposed ARPA-H in 2021 as a biomedical version of the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), famed for its nimbleness and for backing innovations like the internet. Like DARPA, ARPA-H is expected to hire program managers on short-term contracts who would have enormous freedom to solicit research ideas and swiftly fund them with milestone-driven contracts.
Australia
1 February 2022 Health Direct.gov.au
STROMECTOL (ivermectin) is indicated for the treatment of:
a) Onchocerciasis and intestinal strongyloidiasis (anguillulosis).
b) Crusted scabies in conjunction with topical therapy
c) Human sarcoptic scabies when prior topical treatment has failed or is contraindicated. … verified as being available on the PBS (Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) on February 1, 2022. To learn more about this subsidy, visit the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) website.
Australia
1 Jan. 2022 Senator Gerard Rennick, Queensland
Final figures for 2021.
1,315 deaths from 318,129 cases equivalent to a case fatality rate of 4.1 in a thousand. This is significantly lower than the 2019 mortality rate from ALL causes of 6.8 per thousand. I.e. day to day living is more dangerous than Covid.
Average age of death is 80 and average age of cases is 32.
ABS haven’t released how many had comorbidities but the prior year was around 74%.
The infection rate was obviously very low due to lockdowns. If you wanted to guesstimate how many people would have contracted COVID if no lock downs had occurred, Sweden would be a good base case given they had very few lockdowns. (Ironically many other European countries infection rates are higher despite the fact they imposed more lockdowns.)
Sweden has had to date 1.3 million cases out of a population of 10.5 million people, over 21 months which works out at about 7% of the population infected on an annual basis. (Note its probably fair to say Australia’s infection rate would be lower given the weather and sparser population.)
Assuming the same infection rate in Australia, would mean 1.75 million people (25 million x 7%) infected.
Fatalities would number 7,000 (1.75 million x 4/1000) of which around 5,180 would be with comorbidities and 1,820 without assuming 74% comorbidities.
Interestingly enough, the ABS figures for the first 10 months show that deaths from influenza and pneumonia are 1,092 lower than than 2015 - 2019 average. Prorata this for another 2 months and population growth and there isn’t a lot of difference between COVID deaths with no comorbidities and Influenza/Pneumonia deaths. In other words it would be hard to argue COVID/delta would have caused a large number of excess deaths.
These figures are of course hypothetical as we will never know what the infection rate and case fatality rate would have been had restrictions not been imposed. Feel free to use your own assumptions.
The above numbers don’t take into account vaccine injuries which the TGA says is 94,000 (underreported) and counting. Reported deaths from the vaccines number in excess of 700.
Other side effects of the lockdowns such as suicides and neglected health ailments are not taken into account.
House Hearing on Global COVID-19 Vaccinations Efforts
Health and economics experts testified on the need to accelerate COVID-19 vaccination efforts globally before the Coronavirus Crisis Subcommittee. Witnesses talked about the negative effects continued outbreaks overseas have on the U.S. economy. Other topics discussed included vaccine mandates, therapeutics and other treatments, vaccine misinformation, and global supply chains.
Excerpts ….
50:50
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA),
Subcommittee on coronavirus - Ranking Member
“The mandates have been thrown out by courts over and over again. We’ve had three different court cases on mandates. All three have said that the president doesn’t have the legal authority to fire people - whether it’s Federal workers, sub-contractors or health care workers, yet it seems like that’s the administrations main focus.
(51:18)
I think if you go to Mr. Makary’s opening statement. I think you touched on things that a lot of us would like to see explore more. I’ve talked to a lot of medical professionals that have said it seems that the Biden administration is really underplaying the importance of things like natural immunity and some of the other therapeutics that are out there, and we’ve had - obviously we mourn the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died. We also know that we’ve had millions of Americans who have contracted COVID and then came through it and some had really really tough experiences; some had very mild symptoms. That, btw, was before and after the vaccine. Vaccinated and unvaccinated people have gotten COVID who have experienced different degrees of difficulty going through it and some that have had no problems but they’ve tested positive and now they have immunities. And it seems that there is a missing gap in the science on what these immunities do; how it protects people going forward. I think you touched on with children, but if you could, Dr. Makary, talk about what maybe should Congress be looking at more? What should the scientific community in Washington be doing that it’s not doing to study more about what natural immunity really means.
1:16:57
The Chair now recognises Mr. Jordon for 5 minutes.
US. Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH)
https://jordan.house.gov/
Q.
Dr. Makary, how many .. ah, Let me start with this: What’s the budget at CDC?
A. Dr. M. CDC
it’s about $9 billion dollars, sir.
Q. How about at NIAID. What’s the budget there?
A. 6 billion. 6 billion. 9 billion.
Q. 9 billion CDC. 6 billion in NIAID.
What’s that? What about NIH? What’s the budget there?
A. Between 42 and 43 billion.
Q. 43 and 43. If I do the quick math, that’s like 57. $58 billion dollars. That’s annual, right?
A. Annual.
Q. OK, and you know how many people work at CDC?
A. CDC and NIH together, about 30,000 people.
Q. 30,000. What about if you add in NIAID. You know how many that is …they’re part of NIH as well. Right? So. 30, what was that number?
A. That’s right. That’s right 50 - ah. 31,000 people between CDC and NIH.
Q. 31,000 people spending $58 billion a year. Why hasn’t our government done a study on natural immunity?
A. Ok. If I can be honest, Representative Jordan, I don’t think they want to know the answer. It would undermine the indiscriminate vaccine - vaccination policy for every single human being, including extremely low risk people.
Q. So, ha, how many, how many Americans have got COVID since we’ve had this virus? Do you know?
(1:30)
A. North of half of Americans. It’s based on a Columbia university study that showed one in three had COVID at the end of last year - a year ago.
Q. So there’s certainly a sufficient sample size to do a study. And there’s a 57 to 58 billion sum. I mean you can use some of that money to do a study. And then, of course, you know, you got 30 some thousand people who could conceivably do a study on a pretty fundamental question.
I think I saw in you opening statement that you’re actually doing a study on natural immunity. Is that right?
(2:04)
A. That’s right. With private funding, John Hopkins, my research team is doing a study.
Q. Ok. So there’s no grant money coming from CDC, NIH, something like that.
A. No, sir.
Q. And are any of these 30 some thousand employees helping you with your study?
A. No, sir.
Q. Now, other countries, if I understand, and I think this was in your opening statement as well, other countries have done this study. Is that correct?
A. Most of our learnings come from Israel and other countries. Yes, sir.
Q. And what have they found? let’s start with the Israel study, if you could just refresh my memory. What did Israel find?
A. The Israel study is the largest study done worldwide, and it found that natural immunity adjusted for age and comorbidity is 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity. And they just put out on December fifth, another study - a follow up study, again affirming similar results: the facts that natural immunity is stronger than vaccinated immunity.
Q. But are the scientists in our government, at the CDC and NIH - they don’t account for that? They don’t talk about that study? What do they say about that study?
A. They never talk it unless asked. But I would say that they are doing worse than being absent on the topic. They are undermining natural immunity through two studies that the CDC did that are so flawed, that are so poorly put together. Honestly, they would not qualify for a seventh grade science fair. The results cannot be derived from the data, and it’s a disgrace that those two studies were put out because it undermines the target body of science.
Q. So they won’t talk about international studies that conclude that natural immunity is 27 times better than the vaccines. But they will do some bogus - in your words - some seventh grade science experiment studies using some of the 33,000 employees and using some of the $58 billion of the American taxpayer money, they will do that. That’s right there.
A. That’s fair. I will say their intention is noble, but just very paternalistic. That is, they believe in - from private conversations - that if they acknowledge natural immunity, some people may avoid vaccination and think, ‘I’ll just get the infection’. We don’t want people to do that, but we can be honest with the data and encourage vaccination at the same time.
Q. I think the American people, particularly ones paying - this is there money. They expect honesty and transparency from our government. They don’t expect to be deceived. So, I mean, this is what gets me. We can spend money. Some of the 58 billion and some of the resources at NIH and CDC can be used to fund ‘gain of function’ research and give a grant to EcoHealth, who then sends some of that money to a lab in Wuhan, China. That’s just fine, but we can’t find any resources to deal with a fundamental question about natural immunity and so much so that you have to go out and get private funding to do it yourself.
A. That’s right. The NIH spent twice as much money on waging research last year, the year of COVID, more than they spent on COVID research.
Q. This would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. And the implications, when you think about these mandates, and everything else that’s happening, what it’s doing to our economy, not to mention just being honest with the American people who, after all, it’s their money. But yet we have the head guy, Mr. Fauci, Dr. Fauci, saying, I represent science, but he’s afraid to actually do the science and do the studies that need to be done to answer this question. And we have to rely on international studies and your private study to get the truth to the American people.
A. We’re subjected 72 million children to intense restrictions for two years. Yet we don’t have the most basic research. We’ve never had an NIH funded study on masks and kids. And we’ve never had any information revealed by the CDC on whether or not any healthy child has died of COVID. (5:53)
Q. But Doctor, it’s either they know the answer and don’t want the American people to know or they do know the answer and are trying to hide it. (6:04) I mean, it’s like they know the answer or they’re not sure they should say or they know the answer and are trying to hide it from the American people. it’s one of those two. . . >>>more
Europe 24 Nov. 2021 MEP: Members of the European Parliament
In this third press conference, which took place on 24 Nov. 2021 in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, we explained why the Green Certificate is violating peoples' fundamental rights as well as other related topics.
NOTE: The first speaker, (1:15 - 5:22), is Yaki Lunas, from Lithuania, who has degrees in psychology and mathematics, and has worked in business insurance, with actuaries and statistical data.
Who Should Get Vaccinated
- The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is recommended for people ages 5 years and older.
- Learn more about how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is making COVID-19 vaccine recommendations.
Who Should NOT Get Vaccinated
- If you have had a severe allergic reaction to any ingredient in the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (such as polyethylene glycol), you should not get this vaccine.
- If you had a severe allergic reaction after getting a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, you should not get another dose of an mRNA vaccine.
- A severe allergic reaction can cause a rapid heartbeat, difficulty breathing, swelling of the throat, or a generalized rash or hives. A person with a severe allergic reaction needs to be treated with epinephrine (often given as an EpiPen®) and should seek immediate medical attention.
If you aren’t able to get this vaccine, you may still be able to get a different type of COVID-19 vaccine. Get more information for people with allergies.
…
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Ingredients ...
Pfizer Inc. PFE, -0.71% and U.S. shares of BioNTech SE BNTX, -5.59% rose in the extended session Friday following reports that the drug makers will likely get full Food and Drug Administration approval for their COVID-19 vaccine sometime next week. Pfizer shares rose more than 2% after hours, following a 0.2% decline to close at $48.72, and BioNTech’s ADRs rallied more than 5%, following a 5.1% gain to close at $348.68. Late Friday, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that the FDA could approve the vaccine, which up until now has been distributed on an emergency basis, as early as Monday but could possibly go past that if regulators need more time to review data. The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that a third dose, or a booster, of the vaccine would be available in mid-September to those who already received their first two shots. Back in July, Pfizer and BioNTech reported encouraging data on a vaccine booster shot targeting the delta variant of the virus. ...
Australia
21 June 2021
The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia
House of Representatives No Domestic COVID Vaccine Passports Bill 2021
Circulated by authority of Mr. Craig Kelly MP, Member for Hughes
Excerpt: Explanatory Memorandum
Conclusion
This bill is compatible with human rights because it advances the protection of individual rights and freedoms and the freedom from unfair discrimination promoting equality before the law.
Craig Kelly MP
“There is substantial uncertainty about the benefit of providing AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines to adults under 55 given the potential risks,” said Dr Shelley Deeks, vice-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.
Deeks said the updated recommendations came amid new data from Europe that suggests the risk of blood clots is now potentially as high as one in 100,000, much higher than the one in one million risk believed before.
She said most of the patients in Europe who developed a rare blood clot after vaccination with AstraZeneca were women under age 55, and the fatality rate among those who develop clots is as high as 40%.
Dr Joss Reimer of Manitoba’s vaccine implementation taskforce said despite the finding that there was no increase risk of blood clots overall related to AstraZeneca in Europe, a rare but very serious side-effect has been seen primarily in young women in Europe.
Reimer said the rare type of blood clot typically happens between four and 20 days after getting the shot and the symptoms can mirror a stroke or a heart attack.
…
Several European countries that had suspended using the vaccine over concerns it could cause blood clots have resumed administering it after the EU’s drug regulator said the vaccine was safe. ...
Europe’s medicines regulator has moved to stifle spiralling concern about the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, saying the shot’s benefits outweigh the risks after four major EU countries announced they were suspending its use.
Germany, France, Italy and Spain temporarily halted inoculations with the vaccine on Monday after reported incidents of bleeding, blood clots and a low count of blood platelets in some people who had received it. ...
IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION
• Do not administer the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals with a known history of severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to any component of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine.
• Appropriate medical treatment to manage immediate allergic reactions must be immediately available in the event an acute anaphylactic reaction occurs following administration of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Monitor Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine recipients for the occurrence of immediate adverse reactions according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/).
• Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressive therapy, may have a diminished response to the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine.
• The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine may not protect all vaccine recipients.
• Adverse reactions reported in a clinical trial following administration of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine include pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, myalgia, arthralgia, chills, nausea/vomiting, axillary swelling/tenderness, fever, swelling at the injection site, and erythema at the injection site. Additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine.
• Available data on Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine administered to pregnant women are insufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy. Data are not available to assess the effects of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine on the breastfed infant or on milk production/excretion.
• There are no data available on the interchangeability of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine with other COVID-19 vaccines to complete the vaccination series. Individuals who have received one dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine should receive a second dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine to complete the vaccination series.
• Additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine.
• Vaccination providers must complete and submit reports to VAERS online at https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html. For further assistance with reporting to VAERS, call 1-800-822-7967. The reports should include the words "Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine EUA" in the description section of the report. . .
Thailand
12 March, 2021
AstraZeneca: Thailand delays vaccine rollout over blood clot fears
12 March 2021
Excerpt:
Thailand has delayed the rollout of the AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine over reports of blood clots, despite there being no evidence of this.
The country's prime minister was due to kick off the country's vaccination drive by getting the jab on Friday. This has now been cancelled.
The delay comes after a number of countries, including Denmark and Norway, suspended the use of the jab.
Around 5 million Europeans have already received the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Of this figure, about 30 cases had reported "thromboembolic events" - or developing blood clots.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Thursday that there was no indication the jab was causing the blood clots, adding that its "benefits continue to outweigh its risks".
AstraZeneca said the drug's safety has been studied extensively in clinical trials. 'No indication' Oxford jab linked to blood clots ...
China
8 March, 2021 Everything you need to know about China’s coronavirus vaccines
At least 25 countries and territories around the world — largely in Asia and the Middle East — are using Chinese vaccines.
BY Jillian Deutsch, Helen Collis and Stuart Lau
March 8, 2021
Politico.eu
Excerpt:
Move over, Sputnik. The next coronavirus vaccines really causing a stir in Europe are from China.
Polish President Andrzej Duda jumped on the phone to ask his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for doses; the Czech Republic just placed an order; and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave China’s vaccines the biggest EU endorsement by getting one himself.
European capitals, stuck in sluggish vaccination campaigns, are increasingly looking outside the EU for doses — and Beijing is happy to fill the void....
United States
8 March, 2021 What you need to know about the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine
ByZoë Read, Nina Feldman
WHYY PBS NPR
Excerpt:
What’s in the new vaccine, and how does it work?
The vaccine, produced by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos. unit, is created using similar, but slightly different technology than is used in making the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Those two use messenger RNA to direct the body to make the virus’ spike protein. Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccines enclose their mRNA in lipid nanoparticles, for which manufacturing facilities have had trouble ramping up production, contributing to bogged-down supply chain issues.
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine also delivers the body a recipe for creating the spike protein, but it uses DNA instead of RNA. That DNA is encapsulated in an inactivated adenovirus — the virus that causes the common cold — that cannot replicate in the body...
Australia
5 March 2021 AU-TGA coalition of regulatory authorities Australia, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Excerpt
TGA has adopted guidance developed by the Access Consortium
- a coalition of regulatory authorities from Australia, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.?The guidance lays out what information the medicines regulators would need in order to approve any modifications to authorised COVID-19 vaccines, should virus mutations make them less effective at preventing the disease. This guidance is in addition to the earlier Access Consortium statement on COVID-19 vaccines evidence ...
In Australia, we have contracts for AstraZeneca (a vectored vaccine), Pfizer (a mRNA vaccine) and Novavax (a protein vaccine). We are also fortunate to have domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity at CSL in Melbourne, which will manufacture the AstraZeneca vaccine under license, thereby avoiding supply-chain problems which may occur when procuring directly from overseas. In a pandemic, having domestic manufacturing capacity is a huge advantage. CSL is also technically able to manufacture Novavax, but is not set up to manufacture mRNA vaccines....
Asia-Pacific
3 March 2021
The Diplomat Chinese Vaccines Sweep Much of the World, Despite Concerns
China has pledged roughly half a billion doses of its vaccines to more than 45 countries.
By Huizhong Wu and Kristen Gelineau
Excerpt:
China’s vaccine diplomacy campaign has been a surprising success: It has pledged roughly half a billion doses of its vaccine to more than 45 countries, according to a country-by-country tally by The Associated Press. With just four of China’s many vaccine makers able to produce at least 2.6 billion doses this year, a large part of the world’s population will end up inoculated not with the fancy Western vaccines boasting headline-grabbing efficacy rates, but with China’s humble, traditionally made shots.
Amid a dearth of public data on China’s vaccines, hesitations over their efficacy and safety are still pervasive in the countries depending on them, along with concerns about what China might want in return for deliveries. Nonetheless, inoculations with Chinese vaccines already have begun in more than 25 countries, and the Chinese shots have been delivered to another 11, according to the AP tally, based on independent reporting in those countries along with government and company announcements. …
United States
27 Feb. 2021
US FDA approves Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. FDA Panel Recommends Johnson & Johnson Vaccine For COVID-19
By Sarah Ruiz-Grossman
If approved as expected by the Food and Drug Administration, this would be the third coronavirus vaccine available in the U.S. and the only one to require just one dose. ...
Vaccination against COVID-19 commenced in England on 8th December 2020, initially using the Pfizer BioNTech mRNA vaccine. The AstraZeneca vaccine was then added to the programme from 4th January 2021.
. . .
Surveillance objectives PHE will be monitoring the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against the following outcomes (2):
• virologically confirmed symptomatic disease using PCR
• hospitalisation
• mortality
• laboratory confirmed infection (symptomatic or asymptomatic) using PCR or by demonstrating seroconversion due to disease
• markers of infectiousness and transmissibility - viral load (CT value) and culturable virus
• onwards person to person transmission
Australia
21 Feb. 2021 Australian Government
Vaccination program was launched
Media Release
21 Feb. 2021
Excerpt:
Today the Australian Government launched Australia’s COVID-19 vaccination program, with the first vaccinations held in Sydney.
More details on the rollout of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines is here...
Australia
16 Feb 2021 AstraZeneca approval
TGA Australia The TGA has granted provisional approval to AstraZeneca Pty Ltd for its COVID-19 vaccine. This is the second COVID-19 vaccine to receive regulatory approval in Australia.
Excerpt:
Media Release "Australia has entered into 4 separate agreements for the supply of COVID-19 vaccines, if they are proved to be safe and effective...
...The Australian Government has invested more than $3.3 billion through these 4 agreements, which will strengthen Australia's position to access safe and effective vaccines when they become available."
- health.gov.au
Australia
15 Feb 2021 Pfizer/BioNTech delivery
Australian Government
Media Release
15 Feb. 2021
Excerpt:
More than 142,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine have arrived at Sydney airport.
The TGA will batch test the vaccines before Phase 1a of the vaccine rollout begins on 22 February.
Australia
12 Feb. 2021
AU vaccine production
CSL Media Release, 12 Feb 2021
The final stages of manufacturing of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine for Australia are planned to commence next week, with first doses on track for release towards the end of March, subject to approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).About: Australian vaccine manufacturers: CSL & Seqirus
The Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL), established in Australia in 1916, is one of the largest and fastest-growing protein-based biotechnology businesses and a leading vaccine provider. CSL's Seqirus facility will run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with expected release of two million doses at the end of March, and then one million doses per week thereafter.
Australia
3 Feb. 2021
Australia: COVID-19 vaccines – priority rollout (animation)
This video describes how vaccines will be rolled out, and who they will go to first. Read the transcript HERE
Australia
25 Jan 2021 AU Department of Health Media Release Pfizer/BioNTech approval
TGA / Australian Government The Therapeutic Goods Administration has provisionally approved the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use in Australia.
About the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has been provisionally approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for people 16 years and older. Find more about the vaccine and how it will be rolled out in Australia...
China's CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine produced by Sinovac has been proven safe and effective after phase III trials conducted in several countries, boosting public confidence over its global rollout as Indonesian President Joko Widodo received his first shot of the CoronaVac vaccine on Wednesday.
Sinovac's COVID-19 vaccine is 100 percent effective in preventing severe and moderate infections, 77.96 percent effective in preventing mild cases, and has an overall efficacy of 50.4 percent in Brazil's final-stage trials, according to researchers in Brazil on Tuesday.
Experts said the result is "good enough" considering almost all the trial participants in Brazil were high-risk medical workers, and the 77.96 efficacy for mild-case protection means the vaccine will reduce the amount of people needing hospitalization by 78 percent.
Given that medical facilities still face pressure amid a resurgence in cases, such a vaccine is fairly valuable to effectively avoid medical system collapse, experts noted.
From Beijing to villages in China's western autonomous region of Tibet, hundreds of COVID-19 vaccination sites have been established by local governments, . . .
The reports were published around the same time or after Chinese health officials announced in December that "conditional approval" had been given to one of the vaccine candidates from state-owned pharmaceutical company Sinopharm.
The country is planning to vaccinate 50 million residents before mid-February, according to a municipal government press release....
Beijing said the country has the capacity to produce 1 billion doses of Sinopharm's vaccine this year, with two newly-established workshops in Beijing and Wuhan being approved for production.
Safety
Local Reactogenicity
“In general, local reactions were mostly mild-to-moderate in severity and resolved within 1 to 2 days.”
Methods
In an ongoing multinational, placebo-controlled, observer-blinded, pivotal efficacy trial, we randomly assigned persons 16 years of age or older in a 1:1 ratio to receive two doses, 21 days apart, of either placebo or the BNT162b2 vaccine candidate (30 μg per dose). BNT162b2 is a lipid nanoparticle–formulated, nucleoside-modified RNA vaccine that encodes a prefusion stabilized, membrane-anchored SARS-CoV-2 full-length spike protein. The primary end points were efficacy of the vaccine against laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 and safety...
Dr. Anthony Fauci thinks that we’ll probably never get rid of the coronavirus entirely.
Still, he’s pretty confident that by 2022, Americans should be able to resume most aspects of life as we knew it before the pandemic – “if we deploy a vaccine and we implement public-health measures.”
Read our wide-ranging interview below, in which we discuss Fauci’s daily routine, his tips for holiday gatherings, his advice for how to keep your immune system “working optimally,” and more...
Excerpt
Three years into the coronavirus pandemic, many are behaving like life is “back to normal.” But for the millions of people throughout the world affected by long COVID, an ongoing set of often-debilitating health problems tied to an earlier COVID infection, “normal” feels like an elusive, uphill battle.
“For most patients, this is a stuttering process: Some days OK, some really bad,” said Christian Sandrock, a pulmonary, critical care and infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis.
. . .
Despite being a nationally recognized condition, because of the variance of the symptoms, those suffering from long COVID have often had their symptoms under-diagnosed or dismissed by family and friends, employers and by some in the medical community. ~ Post-Covid Conditions (Long COVID) National Institutes of Health (NIH) - National Library of Medicine >>>more
Excerpt: A string of about 30,000 genetic letters was all it took to start the nightmare of covid-19, the death toll from which is likely to be more than 20m. Exactly how the story began is hotly contested. Some think the infection was a zoonosis—a spillover from wild animals. Its cause, sars-cov-2, resembles a group of coronaviruses found in bats. Others, though, have pointed to the enthusiastic coronavirus engineering going on in laboratories around the world, especially in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus was first identified.
Recent work has bolstered the case for it being a zoonosis connected with a particular “wet market” in Wuhan selling wild animals. However, uncertainties around this conclusion allow other theories to flourish. On October 20th an un-peer-reviewed “preprint” was published on a server called bioRxiv, claiming to show that sars-cov-2 is the product of genetic engineering:
bioRxiv: Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 (pdf)
United States
31 March 2022
Vanity Fair Virus-Hunting Nonprofit at the Center of the Lab-Leak Controversy
Chasing scientific renown, grant dollars, and approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak transformed the environmental nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance into a government-funded sponsor of risky, cutting-edge virus research in both the U.S. and Wuhan, China. Drawing on more than 100,000 leaked documents, a V.F. investigation shows how an organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic found itself suspected of helping start one.
EXCERPT
On June 18, 2021, an evolutionary biologist named Jesse D. Bloom sent the draft of an unpublished scientific paper he’d written to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States. A bespectacled, boyish-looking 43-year-old often clad in short-sleeved checkered shirts, Bloom specializes in the study of how viruses evolve. “He is the most ethical scientist I know,” said Sergei Pond, a fellow evolutionary biologist. “He wants to dig deep and discover the truth.”
The paper Bloom had written—known as a preprint, because it had yet to be peer-reviewed or published—contained sensitive revelations about the National Institutes of Health, the federal agency that oversees biomedical research. In the interests of transparency, he wanted Fauci, who helms an NIH subagency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to see it ahead of time. Under ordinary circumstances, the preprint might have sparked a respectful exchange of views. But this was no ordinary preprint, and no ordinary moment.
More than a year into the pandemic, the genesis of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was still a mystery. Most scientists believed that it had made the leap from bats to humans naturally, via an intermediary species, most likely at a market in Wuhan, China, where live wild animals were slaughtered and sold. But a growing contingent were asking if it could have originated inside a nearby laboratory that is known to have conducted risky coronavirus research funded in part by the United States. As speculation, sober and otherwise, swirled, the NIH was being bombarded by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits. Fauci himself needed a security detail, owing to death threats from conspiracy theorists who believed he was covering up some dark secret.
Bloom’s paper was the product of detective work he’d undertaken after noticing that a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences mentioned in a published paper from China had somehow vanished without a trace. The sequences, which map the nucleotides that give a virus its unique genetic identity, are key to tracking when the virus emerged and how it might have evolved. In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan. Now, he was hoping Fauci and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins, could help him identify other deleted sequences that might shed light on the mystery.
Bloom had submitted the paper to a preprint server, a public repository of scientific papers awaiting peer review, on the same day that he’d sent a copy to Fauci and Collins. It now existed in a kind of twilight zone: not published, and not yet public, but almost certain to appear online soon. ...
United States
16 Feb, 2022
NYTimes Magazine Nurses Have Finally Learned What They’re Worth
As the coronavirus spread, demand for nurses came from every corner. Some jobs for travellers paid more than $10,000 per week. Will the boom last.
Excerpt:
In 2020 alone, Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo, Texas lost 185 nurses — nearly 20% of its nursing staff. In the ICU, that number was closer to 80%. Many of those nurses left to take jobs with travel-nursing agencies, which placed them, on a temporary and highly lucrative basis, in hospitals throughout the country.
Bedside nursing has always been, as one hospital chief executive put it, a ‘‘burnout profession.’’ The work is hard. It is physical and emotional. And hospitals have built shortages into their business model. But when the pandemic hit, shortages only increased, pushing hospitals to the breaking point. Nationwide, the tally of nurses with both the skills and the willingness to endure the punishing routines of Covid nursing — the isolation rooms, the angry families and the unceasing drumbeat of death — is dwindling. In a survey of critical-care nurses last year, 66 percent of respondents said they were considering retirement.
Memory B cells were discovered more than half a century ago. But scientists are just beginning to understand the crucial role they play in protecting people from serious illness.
People who have recovered from a Covid-19 infection in the past, and then been vaccinated, appear to be more resilient to the new variants, from Delta to Omicron.
…
"Once people who have had Covid-19 are vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine, you see that they produce an antibody response which is three times higher than those who received the vaccine without prior infection," says Nussenzweig.
But the reason these people display such potent responses is down to a long-overlooked facet of our immune system, a type of white blood cell known as memory B cells. These cells are generated in response to a virus, and remember it in case that pathogen ever returns.
For a long time, we knew relatively little about these cells, and how they behave. But through investigations into HIV, Ebola, autoimmune diseases and now Covid-19, we are beginning to understand just how vital they are in determining our responses to both infections and vaccines.
From chickens to HIV
In the 1890s, the German physiologist Emil von Behring – a man who became known as "the saviour of children" due to his Nobel Prize winning work on treatments for tetanus and diphtheria – proposed the existence of cells that could remember past encounters with a particular infection, and generate antibodies when they encounter it again.
It would take another 70 years for proof to be obtained for von Behring's ideas. In the 1960s, immunologists found that chickens which had their bursa – a major immune organ in birds – destroyed with radiation, lacked certain cells necessary to produce antibodies. These became known as Bursa-derived cells or B cells. By the mid 1970s, it was discovered that these cells form in humans in the bone marrow, before migrating to the lymph nodes or the spleen.
We now know that throughout our lifetimes, we are constantly producing new B cells. The body contains up to around 10 billion of them – equivalent to the length of 100 football pitches, if you lined them all up in a row – with each B cell containing receptors that can recognise different types of antigen shapes on the surface of a virus.
This matters because while B cells do not bind to viruses themselves, they can turn into plasma cells when they detect a threat. These plasma cells produce antibodies directed towards the same viral antigen as their native B cell. A less diverse pool of B cells means fewer antibodies that might be capable of neutralising the virus.
One of the things which Covid-19 has illustrated to immunologists is that people who have a greater diversity of B cells are much more equipped to fend off a new pathogen, and particularly the ever-evolving variants of Covid-19. This is impacted by age, underlying health conditions, and also simply genetics. "Everyone will have a different repertoire of B cells with which they respond to any infection," says Ali Ellebedy, associate professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine. "Even if you have siblings, they will have different B cell responses."
As we get older, two things happen to the B cell response. Firstly the body starts to produce a smaller array of B cells, meaning there is less chance they will have receptors that will recognise the antigens on a new virus. And crucially they take longer to mobilise against a threat, so particularly lethal pathogens can overwhelm the immune system before it has kicked into gear. It is these same factors that have made younger people with underlying health conditions more vulnerable to Covid-19.
But when your body fights off an infection or receives a vaccine, this triggers a clever immunological trick. Some of the B cells turn into so-called memory B cells which can circulate in the bloodstream for decades, ready to re-activate and launch an antibody response in case that virus ever returns. Such antibodies also play a role in suppressing chronic infections which lie dormant in the body for much of our lives, such as Epstein-Barr virus. It appears that these viruses are then capable of reactivating when the body is weakened, as seems to be the case in a proportion of Long Covid patients.
But there are many nuances to the memory B cell response. One of the things immunologists have learnt from studies of Ebola survivors is that severe infections appear to elicit much greater numbers of memory B cells than vaccines alone.
"When you have a bad infection, your body's cells are producing a huge amount of virus," says Nussenzweig. "It's all over your respiratory system, your nose, lungs, upper airways, mucosa. All of the immune system is involved in the response, and it's responding to all elements of that virus, so this is one possible reason for why natural infections might lead to better immune system memory."
Excerpt
Pfizer made nearly $37bn (£27bn) in sales from its Covid-19 vaccine last year – making it one of the most lucrative products in history – and has forecast another bumper year in 2022, with a big boost coming from its Covid-19 pill Paxlovid.
The US drugmaker’s overall revenues in 2021 doubled to $81.3bn, and it expects to make record revenues of $98bn to $102bn this year.
The bumper sales prompted accusations from campaigners of “pandemic profiteering”. The group Global Justice Now said the annual revenue of $81bn was more than the GDP of most countries and accused Pfizer of “ripping off public health systems”
Excerpt:
Covid has made it clear: the likes of Pfizer, in thrall to shareholders, only really care about their huge profits
Pfizer has had an exceptionally good pandemic. Today it announced that its Covid-19 vaccine brought in $37bn billion last year, making it easily the most lucrative medicine in any given year in history.
That isn’t all. For a company that was until recently the least trusted company in the least trusted industrial sector in the United States, Covid-19 has been a PR coup. Pfizer has become a household name over the last 12 months.
Excerpt: Are Israeli hospitals really overloaded with unvaccinated COVID patients? According to Prof. Yaakov Jerris, director of Ichilov Hospital’s coronavirus ward, the situation is completely opposite.
“Right now, most of our severe cases are vaccinated,” Jerris told Channel 13 News. “They had at least three injections. Between seventy and eighty percent of the serious cases are vaccinated. So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just twenty to twenty-five percent of our patients are unvaccinated.”
Jerris also revealed some of the confusion in reporting cases. Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Sunday, he told ministers, “Defining a serious patient is problematic. For example, a patient with a chronic lung disease always had a low level of oxygen, but now he has a positive coronavirus test result which technically makes him a ‘serious coronavirus patient,’ but that’s not accurate. The patient is only in a difficult condition because he has a serious underlying illness.”
Excerpt
he CEO of the OneAmerica insurance company recently
disclosed
https://insurance-forums.com/life-insurance/oneamerica-ceo-says-death-rates-among-working-age-people-up-40/
that mortality in the 18-64 age group was 40 percent higher during the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2021 than during pre-pandemic levels. For reference, the CEO indicated that a 10 percent increase would have been a 1-in-200-year event. Furthermore, most of the deaths were not attributed to Covid. …
Clearly there is a very significant above average number of deaths across the US that cannot be attributed to Covid. …
Excerpt: New York: It is one of many mysteries about long COVID: Who is more prone to developing it? Are some people more likely than others to experience physical, neurological or cognitive symptoms than can emerge, or linger for, months after their coronavirus infections have cleared?
Now, a team of researchers who followed more than 200 patients for two to three months after their COVID diagnoses report that they have identified biological factors that might help predict if a person will develop long COVID.
The study, published on Tuesday by the journal Cell, found four factors that could be identified early in a person’s coronavirus infection that appeared to correlate with increased risk of having lasting symptoms weeks later.
The researchers said they had found that there was an association between these factors and long COVID whether the initial infection was serious or mild. They said that the findings might suggest ways to prevent or treat some cases of long COVID, including the possibility of giving people antiviral medications soon after an infection has been diagnosed.
“It’s the first real solid attempt to come up with some biologic mechanisms for long COVID,” said Dr. Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.
He and other experts, along with the study authors, cautioned that the findings were exploratory and would need to be verified by considerably more research. …
Excerpt: A royal commission would enable better understanding of the debates that have gone on, and go on, within the health establishment, including at the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC), the group of federal and state advisers to the national cabinet. Mostly, differences within that group have been mired in secrecy…How the federation has operated during COVID and what adaptations are needed would be major issues for a royal commission.
And then there’s Australia’s international response. Much attention was on the government’s call for an inquiry into the pandemic’s origins, but
Excerpt:
Senator Ron Johnson listens to American Frontline Nurses
founder Nicole Sirotek, a nurse and biochemist.
Excerpt from her 8 minute speech:
... (2:00)…they said “We’re just following orders”
“Following orders” has led to the sheer number of deaths that has occurred in these hospitals. I didn’t see a single patient die of Covid. I’ve seen substantial number of patients die of negligence and medical malfeasance. (2:25)
2:37) The pharmaceutical companies have gone into those hospitals and decided to ‘practice’ I guess you can say, on the minorities, on the disadvantaged, on the marginalised populations that we know that we had no advocates for. Because the very agencies that should have been protecting them were closed because we were “sheltering in place” now when I was there and I saw that the pharmaceutical companies were rolling out Remdesivir— onto the patients, I tried to get a hold of the IRBs, I tried to get a hold of my appropriate team of command, I tried CMS, I tried Dept. of Health, and they rolled out Remdesivir onto a substantial number of patients for which we all saw it was killing the patients and now, the FDA approved drug is continuing to kill patients in the US. As nurses, we’ve collected statistical or descriptive amount of information that you may not get from the doctors because from where they do quantitive we do qualitative data with a humanistic phenomenological approach in nursing research. And, so, we’ve collected the data from all of these patients across the country, from which we have been helping patients because I formed the organisation American Frontline Nurses on the advocacy network, so nurses could advocate for these patients. And all of these data pools show that as these patients get Remdesivir they have a less than 25% chance of survival if they get more than two doses. Now they’re rolling it out on children as well. (4:08)
Excerpt
US researchers show negative version of placebo effect behind many symptoms such as headaches and fatigue
More than two-thirds of the common side-effects people experience after a Covid jab can be attributed to a negative version of the placebo effect rather than the vaccine itself, researchers claim.
Scientists in the US examined data from 12 clinical trials of Covid vaccines and found that the “nocebo effect” accounted for about 76% of all common adverse reactions after the first dose and nearly 52% after the second dose.
The findings suggest that a substantial proportion of milder side-effects, such as headaches, short-term fatigue, and arm pain are not produced by the constituents of the vaccine, but by other factors thought to generate the nocebo response, including anxiety, expectation and misattributing various ailments to having had the jab….
Nocebo effect explained:
New Zealand
March 2019
MEDSAFE The Nocebo effect
What is it?
Excerpt:
The nocebo effect is the opposite of the placebo effect.
It describes a situation where a negative outcome occurs due to a belief that the intervention will cause harm. It is a sometimes forgotten phenomenon in the world of medicine safety. The term nocebo comes from the Latin ‘to harm’.
For adverse reactions to medicines, nocebo implies that patients are more likely to experience an adverse effect if they expect or are worried about the adverse effect. The adverse effects may be physically experienced by the patient and are often clinically diagnosable1. An example of the nocebo effect is the severe adverse effects experienced by patients taking a placebo during a clinical trial.
Some experts state that the nocebo effect may have a larger effect on clinical outcomes than the placebo effect as negative perceptions are formed much faster than positive ones...
Excerpt:
European Union regulators warned that frequent Covid-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible.
Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency. Instead, countries should leave more time between booster programs and tie them to the onset of the cold season in each hemisphere, following the blueprint set out by influenza vaccination strategies, the agency said. ...
London-based Wellcome has announced its intention to invest £16 billion ($21.79 billion) over the next decade in scientific research focused on addressing global health challenges, the largest funding commitment to science and health in its eighty-five-year history.
With an investment portfolio now worth £38.2 billion ($52.02 billion) — as a result of the strongest annual investment returns the organization has seen in twenty-five years (33 percent, adjusted for inflation) — Wellcome will boost funding to advance its new strategy, announced in 2020 and focused on mental health, infectious disease, and the health impacts of climate change. Over the last decade, the organization spent more than £9 billion ($12.25 billion) on research grants and other charitable activities, including £1.2 billion ($1.63 billion) in the 2020-21 fiscal year. Wellcome also committed an additional £750 million ($1.02 billion) to fund large-scale, high-impact projects over the next five years, which it anticipates will grow to £1 billion ($1.36 billion) next year.
As part of its new strategy, Wellcome will support cross-sector collaborations such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a public-private partnership Wellcome co-founded in 2017 that has played a pivotal role in bolstering COVID-19 response efforts and pandemic preparedness.
“These returns mark a step-change in Wellcome’s ability to fund and support new discoveries in science and health, and help solve three of the great challenges of the twenty-first century — climate change, infectious diseases, and mental health,” said Wellcome director Jeremy Farrar. “With plans to spend £16 billion on our mission over the next decade, we will be increasing our spending from the previous decade by more than 50 percent. This gives us a huge opportunity to increase our support for scientific research that will make a real difference to people everywhere in the years to come.”
NOTE: What is the Wellcome Trust?
The Guardian, 16 Mar, 2015
Excerpt: In 1880, a young man from the American wild west arrived in London with £2,000 and a business plan. His name was Henry Wellcome. Today, the organisation that bears his name is the second largest charitable foundation in the world. … With Henry’s death came the capital in his will which would enable the creation of the Wellcome Trust. Today it stands as the second largest non-governmental funder of medical research, last year dispensing more than £727m in grants.
HISTORY:
May 2016
The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR),
Chaired by Jim O'Neill
was commissioned in July 2014 by the UK Prime Minister, who asked economist Jim O’Neill to analyse the global problem of rising drug resistance and propose concrete actions to tackle it internationally. The Review on AMR was jointly supported by the UK Government and Wellcome Trust, although operated with full independence from both. Established as a two-year, time-limited process, the Review engaged widely with international stakeholders to understand and propose solutions to the problem of drug-resistant infections from an economic and social perspective, and produced its final report and recommendations in the summer of 2016.
The BioInnovation Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, has announced a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of research to identify new technologies and solutions to improve the health of women and girls across the world, including in low-income countries.
The grant will support BII’s efforts to strengthen the European ecosystem for research and startups that address unmet medical needs in women’s health and family planning. As part of the joint initiative, BII will conduct a landscape analysis and identify leading research and start-up opportunities for women’s health, as well as undertake community-building and awareness raising activities with key partners within the ecosystem.
“BII is delighted to have secured this prestigious grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” said BioInnovation Institute CEO Jens Nielsen. “It enables us to put in place the resources needed to scout and support important initiatives to accelerate improvements in women’s health — a priority for society and an area of strategic interest for BII. We are excited to drive innovation in this important field, and we will strive to deliver novel solutions for a global unmet medical need.”
“The BII team’s capabilities and strong commitment to women’s health has impressed us,” said Katrine Thor Andersen, deputy director of global health at the Gates Foundation. “We are excited to have BII as a strategic partner to complement our efforts in catalyzing innovation, with the goal of improving the health of women and girls, especially in low-income countries — bringing us closer to a more gender-equal world.”
Excerpt:
Katrine Thor Andersen, Deputy Director, Global Health, Gates Foundation, said:
“The BII team’s capabilities and strong commitment to Women’s Health has impressed us. We are excited to have BII as a strategic partner to complement our efforts in catalyzing innovation, with the goal of improving the health of women and girls, especially in low-income countries —bringing us closer to a more gender-equal world.”
Read more on https://bii.dk/community/womenshealth/
and on https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants
“A reasonable proportion of cases being classified as Covid hospitalisations are actually people with other reasons for admission,” NSW health minister Brad Hazzard said. “Heart attacks, births, falls, none of that stops just because there is Covid. They come into hospital, they have a swab taken and it confirms Covid. “This shows us its out in the community, but we aren’t necessarily seeing that as the primary reason for all of the admissions.”
United States
31 Dec. 2021
NPR
Omicron is spreading at lightning speed. Scientists are trying to figure out why.
Every case of omicron is sparking at least three other new infections on average worldwide. Researchers think omicron's ability to evade the protection provided by existing vaccines is the biggest factor in its virulence.
Excerpt:
In late November, more than 110 people gathered at a crowded Christmas party at a restaurant in Oslo, Norway. Most of the guests were fully vaccinated. One had returned from South Africa just a few days earlier and was unknowingly carrying the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
Ultimately, about 70% of the partygoers were infected.
Scientists who traced this superspreader event concluded it was evidence that omicron was "highly transmissible" among fully vaccinated adults. >>>more
Scientists at Scripps Research, University of Chicago and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified a new Achilles' heel of influenza virus, making progress in the quest for a universal flu vaccine. Antibodies against a long-ignored section of the virus, which the team dubbed the anchor, have the potential to recognize a broad variety of flu strains, even as the virus mutates from year to year, they reported Dec. 23, 2021 in the journal Nature.
"It's always very exciting to discover a new site of vulnerability on a virus because it paves the way for rational vaccine design," says co-senior author Andrew Ward, Ph.D., professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research. "It also demonstrates that despite all the years and effort of influenza vaccine research there are still new things to discover."
"By identifying sites of vulnerability to antibodies that are shared by large numbers of variant influenza strains we can design vaccines that are less affected by viral mutations," says study co-senior author Patrick Wilson, MD, who was previously at the University of Chicago and recently recruited to Weill Cornell Medicine as a professor of pediatrics and a scientist in the institution's Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children's Health. "The anchor antibodies we describe bind to such a site. The antibodies themselves can also be developed as drugs with broad therapeutic applications."
In a typical year, influenza affects more than 20 million people in the United States and leads to more than 20,000 deaths. Vaccines against influenza typically coax the immune system to generate antibodies that recognize the head of hemagglutinin (HA), a protein that extends outward from the surface of the flu virus. The head is the most accessible regions of HA, making it a good target for the immune system; unfortunately, it is also one of the most variable. From year to year, the head of HA often mutates, necessitating new vaccines.
...
The researchers are planning future studies on how to design a vaccine that most directly targets the HA anchor of different influenza strains. >>>more
Abstract
COVID-19 is known to cause multi-organ dysfunction1-3 in acute infection, with prolonged symptoms experienced by some patients, termed Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC)4-5. However, the burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time to viral clearance is not well characterized, particularly in the brain3,6-14. We performed complete autopsies on 44 patients with COVID-19 to map and quantify SARS-CoV-2 distribution, replication, and cell-type specificity across the human body, including brain, from acute infection through over seven months following symptom onset. We show that SARS-CoV-2 is widely distributed, even among patients who died with asymptomatic to mild COVID-19, and that virus replication is present in multiple extrapulmonary tissues early in infection. Further, we detected SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple anatomic sites, including regions throughout the brain, for up to 230 days following symptom onset. Despite extensive distribution of SARS-CoV-2 in the body, we observed a paucity of inflammation or direct viral cytopathology outside of the lungs. Our data prove that SARS-CoV-2 causes systemic infection and can persist in the body for months.
Whichever wave or variant caused an individual’s coronavirus infection shapes their response to subsequent infections, according to a new study.
This is something called immune imprinting, and researchers found that people imprinted by the Alpha variant make different responses to the Delta variant.
The scientists also found that imprinting differences were associated with different levels of waning immunity.
In those vaccinated, but not previously infected, antibody protection against Delta waned to zero by week 21 after a second dose, according to the study published in the Science journal.
But memory B cells, which also make up part of the immune system, persist, and boosters can help rescue antibody levels.
Researchers say their findings may have implications for the development of future Covid-19 vaccines. …
“… partly caused by World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules for 20-year monopolies on patents and other intellectual property for COVID-19 vaccines. A handful of companies like Pfizer, which received public funding to fast-track development of vaccines, control the quantities and price. “
… The World Health Organisation has pleaded for Pfizer and other companies to share their knowledge so increased production can take place in countries which already produce generic medicines like India and South Africa. South Africa and India have proposed a temporary waiver of WTO patent rules on vaccines and other COVID-related products to enable regional vaccine production hubs to quickly expand global production. This is known as the WTO TRIPs waiver [PDF].
Over 100 of the 164 WTO member governments, including the US and Australia, are supporting the waiver….
Pfizer has played a leading role in lobbying against the WTO waiver. Pfizer partnered with German company Biontech to produce its MRNA vaccine. Pfizer has recently announced expected revenue of US$36 billion from vaccine sales for this year….
Excerpt
A research abstract cited by commentators as proof that COVID-19 vaccines increase a person’s risk of heart disease has raised multiple concerns from experts.
The 319-word abstract, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, claims its research has found mRNA vaccines “dramatically increase” inflammation in endothelium cells and T cell infiltration in the heart.
This inflammation, it says, “may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination” (here).
Excerpt: Factory farming and disease
The WHO suspects, but has no proof, that Covid-19 is linked to the intensive breeding of animals in south-east Asia’s many barely regulated wildlife farms. …
Governments and the £150bn-a-year poultry and livestock industries emphasise how intensive farming is generally extremely safe and now essential for providing fast-growing populations with protein, but scientific evidence shows that stressful, crowded conditions drive the emergence and spread of many infectious diseases, and act as an “epidemiological bridge” between wildlife and human infections.
…
Wild birds are routinely blamed by governments and industry for spreading avian flu along migratory routes, but evidence is mounting that intensive farms are potential “mixing pots” for new, deadly viruses…
With more than 20 billion chickens and nearly 700 million pigs being farmed at any one time, Wallace says the chances of new flu strains and variants emerging and spilling over to humans are high...
The next pandemic
Marius Gilbert, an epidemiologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, and others have shown how bird flu is linked to the rapid intensification of poultry farming, which is now making bird flu viruses more dangerous.
Public health experts have long warned about the dangers of industrial farming but since Covid the stakes have become higher as the full costs of a modern pandemic are seen, says medical doctor and historian Michael Greger, author of the book Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching.
Greger argues that there have been three eras of human disease: first, when we started to domesticate animals about 10,000 years ago and were infected with their diseases, such as measles and chickenpox; then in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Industrial Revolution led to epidemics of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer; and now, because of the agricultural intensification that is leading to zoonotic, or animal-borne, diseases such as bird flu, salmonella, Mers, Nipah and Covid-19.
“In evolutionary terms, rearing poultry, cattle and pigs in high-intensity, crowded, confined, entirely unnatural conditions may be the most profound alteration of the human-animal relationship in 10,000 years,” he says...
Gilbert says it is not just factory farming that leads to dangerous avian flu, but changes humans are making to the wider environment. “Most viruses which circulate in wild birds are of low danger and cause only mild effects. [But] from time to time they enter the poultry system, where they go through evolutionary change, mostly linked to the conditions in which the animals are farmed. We have seen low-pathogen viruses gain pathogenicity in farms.”... >>>more
In a blog post, YouTube said it would remove videos claiming that vaccines do not reduce rates of transmission or contraction of disease, and content that includes misinformation on the makeup of vaccines. Claims that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility or that the vaccines contain trackers will also be removed.
The platform, which is owned by Google, already had a similar ban on misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. But the new policy expands the rules to misleading claims about long-approved vaccines, such as those against measles and hepatitis B, as well as to falsehoods about vaccines in general, YouTube said.
Personal testimonies relating to vaccines, content about vaccine policies and new vaccine trials, and historical videos about vaccine successes or failures will be allowed to remain on the site.
India
3 Sept. 2021
Science/ The Wire What Studies From Israel Say About Delta COVID, Natural Immunity and Booster Shots
• A study in Israel compared 16,000 people who had had COVID-19 but didn’t get vaccinated with an equal number of people who were fully vaccinated but weren’t infected.
• The researchers found that natural immunity to COVID-19 was more potent than vaccine-induced immunity, with caveats.
• No deaths were reported among vaccinated persons, meaning vaccine-induced immunity remains the only feasible way to end the COVID-19 pandemic.
Excerpt: Australia’s national plan to end lockdowns once 80% of the adult population is vaccinated could result in 25,000 deaths in total and 270,000 cases of long Covid, new modelling warns.
The work by researchers at three leading Australian universities predicts more than 10 times as many deaths as the Doherty Institute modelling that underpins the national four-phase roadmap. That plan was adopted by national cabinet in July but is subject to different interpretations by state and territory leaders.
Dr Zoë Hyde, an epidemiologist and co-author from the University of Western Australia, warned the new modelling showed it was “simply too dangerous to treat Covid-19 like the flu” and that Australia should reach higher vaccination rates before opening up.
Hyde and co-authors Prof Quentin Grafton of the Australian National University and Prof Tom Kompas of the University of Melbourne, both economists, called for a 90% vaccination rate among all Australians, including children, and a 95% rate for vulnerable populations, including elderly people and Indigenous Australians. . . .
The Doherty modelling suggests that in the first 180 days after Australia reopens at an 80% of adults vaccination rate, there would be 761 deaths with partial testing, tracking, tracing and quarantine. >>>more
Excerpt: . . . We don’t know exactly how the four common-cold coronaviruses first came to infect humans, but some have speculated that at least one also began with a pandemic. If immunity to the new coronavirus wanes like it does with these others, then it will keep causing reinfections and breakthrough infections, more and more of them over time, but still mild enough. We’ll have to adjust our thinking about COVID-19 too. The coronavirus is not something we can avoid forever; we have to prepare for the possibility that we will all get exposed one way or another. “This is something we’re going to have to live with,” says Richard Webby, an infectious-disease researcher at St. Jude. “And so long as it’s not impacting health care as a whole, then I think we can.” The coronavirus will no longer be novel—to our immune systems or our society.
Michael Yeadon was a scientific researcher and vice president at drugs giant Pfizer Inc. He co-founded a successful biotech. Then his career took an unexpected turn.
Excerpt:
Late last year, a semi-retired British scientist co-authored a petition to Europe’s medicines regulator. The petitioners made a bold demand: Halt COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials.
Even bolder was their argument for doing so: They speculated, without providing evidence, that the vaccines could cause infertility in women.
The document appeared on a German website on Dec.1. Scientists denounced the theory. Regulators weren’t swayed, either: Weeks later, the European Medicines Agency approved the European Union’s first COVID-19 shot, co-developed by Pfizer Inc. But damage was already done.
...
What gave the debunked claim credibility was that one of the petition’s co-authors, Michael Yeadon, wasn’t just any scientist. The 60-year-old is a former vice president of Pfizer, where he spent 16 years as an allergy and respiratory researcher. He later co-founded a biotech firm that the Swiss drugmaker Novartis purchased for at least $325 million. >>>more
Reuters, owned by the $40 billion international multimedia company, Thomson Reuters Corporation, is also in the business of “fact checking” social media posts.
Reuters publishes its fact-checking commentary online in a format designed to resemble new stories, which turn up in online searches.
Last week, Reuters announced a new collaboration with Twitter to “more quickly provide credible information on the social networking site as part of an effort to fight the spread of misinformation.”
In February, Reuters announced a similar partnership with Facebook to “fact check” social media posts.
However, when announcing its fact-checking partnerships with Facebook and Twitter, Reuters made no mention of this fact: The news organization has ties to Pfizer, World Economic Forum (WEF) and Trusted News Initiative (TNI), an industry collaboration of major news and global tech organizations whose stated mission is to “combat spread of harmful vaccine disinformation.”
Reuters also failed to provide any criteria for how information would be defined as “misinformation” and did not disclose the qualifications of the people responsible for determining fact versus false or misleading “misinformation.” >>>more
United States 11 August, 2021
New York Times F.D.A. to Authorize Third Vaccine Dose for People With Weak Immune Systems The decision to expand the emergency use of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is meant to help transplant recipients and others whose immune systems are similarly compromised.
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — Federal regulators are expected to authorize a third shot of coronavirus vaccine as soon as Thursday for certain people with weakened immune systems, an effort to better protect them as the highly contagious Delta variant sweeps the nation.
The decision to expand the emergency use of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is meant to help those patients with immune deficiencies who are considered most likely to benefit from an additional shot. It covers people who have had solid organ transplants and others whose immune systems are similarly compromised, according to an official familiar with the plan.
The development will give physicians latitude to recommend additional shots for those patients. At least 3 percent of Americans have weakened immune systems for a variety of reasons, from a history of cancer to the use of certain medications such as steroids.
Sky News Australia is serving a one-week suspension from YouTube after the video platform giant's review of the channel's content.
In a statement, Sky News Australia, which is a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, said the suspension was related to videos discussing COVID-19.
The channel said it rejects that any of their broadcasters have "ever denied the existence of COVID-19 as was implied, and no such videos were ever published or removed".
"We support broad discussion and debate on a wide range of topics and perspectives, which is vital to any democracy," a Sky News Australia spokesperson said.
"We take our commitment to meeting editorial and community expectations seriously."
YouTube, which is owned by Google, does not allow videos to be uploaded which pose a risk or harm to people, or which contradicts health guidelines including advice about COVID-19 treatment, prevention, transmission, and social distancing.
A spokesperson for YouTube said it had removed videos from its site and given the channel its "first strike".
Three strikes in 90 days will result in any YouTube channel being permanently deleted.
"We have clear and established COVID-19 medical misinformation policies based on local and global health authority guidance, to prevent the spread of COVID-19 misinformation," a YouTube spokesperson said.
"We apply our policies equally for everyone regardless of uploader and, in accordance with these policies and our long-standing strikes system, removed videos from and issued a strike to Sky News Australia's channel."
Sky News Australia has around 1.85 million subscribers and said it has uploaded more than 20,000 videos in the previous 12 months. >>>more
Sky News Australia has been banned from posting to YouTube for one week after reviews of old videos were found to violate the platform’s COVID-19 policies.
The temporary suspension was imposed on Thursday and means the channel, which has 1.85 million subscribers, isn’t able to upload new videos or live streams.
YouTube hasn’t said which Sky News programs violated its guidelines, but told media outlets there were “numerous” offending videos which have been removed.
In a written statement, YouTube said: “We have clear and established COVID-19 medical misinformation policies based on local and global health authority guidance, to prevent the spread of COVID-19 misinformation.
"We apply our policies equally for everyone regardless of uploader, and in accordance with these policies and our long-standing strikes system, removed videos from and issued a strike to Sky News Australia’s channel.”
Any channel with three strikes in the same 90-day period will be permanently removed from YouTube. >>>more
Australia
5 August, 2021
AAAS Science This scientist says cleaning indoor air could make us healthier—and smarter
A New York City homicide detective who “always wanted to be a scientist” majored in environmental science and began to apply to graduate school even as he started the process to become an FBI agent. He failed the FBI polygraph test, "But his investigative instincts never left him".
Excerpt:
Joseph Allen runs a major public health research project at Harvard University, probing how indoor air quality affects human health and cognition. He consults with companies on ventilation and air filtration, and during the pandemic he became a prominent voice on public health, writing dozens of op-eds criticizing early guidance from health authorities and debunking misconceptions about how the virus spreads. But none of it would have happened if he hadn’t washed out as an FBI recruit.
. . .
A tall, athletic-looking man with a bald head and stylish stubble, Allen directs the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he studies the effects of toxic gases emitted from furniture, carpets, and paints; stale air; and high levels of carbon dioxide. Years of studies by Allen and others have shown poorly circulated air in buildings impairs our ability to think clearly and creatively. Considering that we spend more than 90% of our lifetimes indoors, those findings have implications for personal well-being—and for businesses concerned about their bottom line. >>>more
Richard Muller, Professor Emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, stated during his testimony, “We have a whistleblower, the virus itself.”
SARS-CoV-2 has a unique trigger on the surface called a furin cleavage site and a unique code in the genes for that site called a CGG-CGG dimer; these markers do not exist in natural coronaviruses, but are known to have been used in GOF research
*Note: GOF: “Gain of function” is a term applied to bio-warfare research. Gain-of-function research is medical research that alters an organism or disease in a way that increases pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range. This research is intended to reveal targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics…. In virology, gain-of-function research is employed with the intention of better understanding current and future pandemics.[4] Selgelid, Michael J. (2016-07-06). "Gain-of-Function Research: Ethical Analysis, Science and Engineering Ethics. 22(4): 923–964. doi:10.1007/s11948-016-9810-1 - Wikipedia
(OMNS June 21, 2021) Although the mainstream media outlets might have you believe otherwise, the vaccines that continue to be administered for the COVID pandemic are emerging as very substantial sources of morbidity and mortality themselves. While the degree to which these negative outcomes of the COVID vaccines can be debated, there is no question that enough disease and death have already occurred to warrant cessation of the administration of these vaccines until additional, completely scientifically-based research can examine the balance between its now clear-cut side effects versus its potential (and still not yet clearly proven) ability to prevent new COVID infections. >>>more
- The number of cases of a heart inflammation condition in 16- to 24-year-olds was higher than expected after they received their second dose of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines, the CDC said.
- There have been 275 reported cases of myocarditis or pericarditis, which are inflammation conditions involving the heart, in people ages 16 to 24 as of May 31, according to a CDC presentation.
As the US and Europe approve plans to immunise teenagers, scientists in Britain advise delay.
Launching a programme of Covid-19 immunisations for children should be considered only in special circumstances, leading health experts have warned.
…
Doctors would be giving vaccines for which there was limited information about possible side-effects to children who have nothing to gain from such a move, said Professor Adam Finn of Bristol University.
“Children transmit Covid to some extent, although they rarely suffer badly from the disease themselves. If you offer them vaccines, then you put them at risk of possible side-effects – so there really needs to be some significant, tangible benefit to them, not just the indirect protection of adults from Covid-19.”
The number of people who have died worldwide in the Covid-19 pandemic has surpassed three million, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The milestone comes the day after the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned the world was "approaching the highest rate of infection" so far.
India - experiencing a second wave - recorded more than 230,000 new cases on Saturday alone.
Almost 140 million cases have been recorded since the pandemic began.
The risk of developing a serious brain clot - known as a cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) - is 8 to 10 times higher in people with Covid than those who get a vaccine, a study suggests.
Based on US data, the Oxford research team says people being vaccinated should be reassured by the findings.
It follows investigations into links between the AstraZeneca vaccine and rare blood clots.
The study only looked at those who had had a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
The research, which involved electronic health records of 81 million people in the US, looked at the number of CVST cases seen in the two weeks following a diagnosis of coronavirus and the number of cases occurring in the two weeks after people had their first coronavirus vaccine.
It estimates that while these blood clots are uncommon after Covid - with 39 in every million people developing one within two weeks of being ill - they are much rarer still after a vaccine.
'Work in progress'
But researchers say their study - which has not been through a formal review and is separate from the Oxford vaccine group - is still a work in progress and must be interpreted cautiously because it is difficult to calculate with certainty how common CVSTs are in the general population, partly because of just how rare they are.
The study also found:
- Clots were more common in people who already had cardiovascular disease
- 80% of people who have the clots survive
- Some cases were seen in under-30s, showing they are not immune to serious complications from coronavirus
- In those who had an mRNA vaccine - such as the Pfizer or Moderna jab - they estimate CVSTs occurred in around four in a million people.
- Scientists say their study cannot identify whether vaccines are linked to these clots and much larger studies are needed to address this. They say a more complete database would be needed because as in cases it was unclear exactly which mRNA vaccine had been given
- There are no directly comparable figures for the AZ vaccine because this jab has not been used in the US . . .
Australia
15 April 2021
The Conversation 3 mRNA vaccines researchers are working on (that aren’t COVID):
mRNA vaccines could potentially be used to prevent a range of diseases, not just COVID-19.
Assoc. Professor Archa Fox and Prof Damian Purcell
Excerpt:
Remind me again, what’s mRNA?
Messenger ribonucleic acid (or mRNA for short) is a type of genetic material that tells your body how to make proteins. The two mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, deliver fragments of this mRNA into your cells.
Once inside, your body uses instructions in the mRNA to make SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. So when you encounter the virus’ spike proteins again, your body’s immune system will already have a head start in how to handle it.
So after COVID-19, which mRNA vaccines are researchers working on next? Here are three worth knowing about…
The first confirmed case of a rare but potentially fatal blood clot has been recorded in Canada in connection with the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine.
Quebec's Ministry of Health and Social Services confirmed a person in the province experienced an adverse event known as vaccine-induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia (VIPIT).
…
NACI Chair Dr. Caroline Quach said last month the risk of rare blood clots appears to only occur in younger populations, which is why the committee recommended suspending the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine in those under 55. … Quach also said the vaccine works well in preventing severe outcomes and death in people over 55, particularly in those over 70, and the risk of blood clots does not appear to be present in those age groups.
… But the people who appear to have an elevated risk of the rare blood clots are not the same age group most at risk from COVID-19.
"This is a very effective vaccine for preventing COVID-19 and we're in the middle of a third wave in much of the country and the risk of getting COVID-19 is high," said Bogoch.
"Based on what we know today, the benefits outweigh the risks — especially when we're dealing with the 55 year old and older crowd."
...
Symptoms to watch for ...
- Shortness of breath.
- Chest pain.
- Leg swelling.
- Persistent abdominal pain.
- Sudden onset of severe or persistent worsening headaches or blurred vision.
- Skin bruising (other than at the site of vaccination).
England
25 March 2021
The London Economic Greed is the cause of our crisis, not a solution Contrary to the Prime Minister's beliefs, greed and capitalism actually inhibited vaccine development. Excerpt:
Boris Johnson has sparked controversy by attributing the life-saving vaccine roll-out to the forces of “greed” and “capitalism.”
In a Zoom call to the 1922 Committee of Conservative Backbenchers, the PM remarked: “The reason we have vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends.”
“It was giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders.”
Suddenly realising the negative reaction these comments would ignite Johnson attempted to row back what he had said, repeatedly telling MPs to “forget I said that” and asking them to “remove that comment from your collective memory.”
Nick Dearden, director of the organisation Global Justice Now, said that despite Johnson’s attempts to expunge the record, “it remains an incredibly revealing remark which shows just how warped his understanding of this crisis is”.
'Public sector played a role in every stage'
It also overlooks the fact that market forces actually left us woefully unprepared for this emergency, with lethal consequences.
Awkwardly for Johnson no sooner had he closed his laptop on the Zoom call had his comments been flatly contradicted by a government report into the vaccine development program published on Wednesday.
Officials emphasised that the public sector ‘played a role in every stage of the Ox/AZ vaccine supply chain’, and that the absence of government intervention ‘at any stage of the process would have delayed the development of the vaccine.’
‘Development of the Ox/AZ vaccine inside a year was made possible by the combined efforts of scientists, venture capitalists, manufacturing experts, regulators, civil servants and volunteers.’
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have also been heavily dependent on government intervention. It was the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority that funded research into the unproven mRNA vaccine technology which has been the basis for both company’s vaccines.
Greed inhibited vaccine development Contrary to Johnson’s comments, vaccine development has been inhibited by greed and self-interested market actors. In 2014 Professor Hill, the scientist in charge of Britain’s response to the Ebola outbreak publicly criticised the ‘market failure’ behind a lack of vaccines for epidemic diseases:
“Well who makes vaccines? Today commercial vaccine supply is monopolised by four or five mega-companies,” Professor Hill continued “The problem with that is, even if you got a way of making a vaccine, unless there’s a big market it’s not worth the while of the mega company… It’s a market failure.”
These words proved prescient. Back in 2016 researchers in Houston were trying to develop a vaccine against lethal strains of coronavirus, but were forced to discontinue said research due to lack of funding from pharmaceutical firms that considered the venture unprofitable.
Drugs that work too well
Indeed, despite the terror inspired by SARs and MERs outbreaks, the entire research budget for treating coronaviruses for 2016-2018 was $113 million, which is less than 1 per cent of what a single pharmaceutical firm earned from Viagra sales in 2016 alone.
Part of the reason that pharmaceutical corporations are typically wary of investing in drugs that prevent transmissible disease is that they work too well. The firm which holds the patent for a vaccine can only make a profit by selling one or two vaccines per patient. Conversely, a firm that holds a patent on a treatment for chronic or incurable disease will have bumper profits secured by the patients’ need for continuous medication.
The reason we were so unprepared for COVID-19 was because of greed. Rather than lionising greed and capitalism, our political elites should take note of the repeatedly demonstrated fact that cooperation and planning is our only hope for preventing future pandemics.
In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the complete genome sequences of viruses from thousands of patients enable us to look for convergent patterns. While most mutations are one-offs that go extinct, some establish new lineages that become more frequent as the virus succeeds in replicating and infecting many people.
If the same part of the virus repeatedly mutates in different samples around the world and becomes more frequent, this mutation very likely encodes an adaptation that helps the virus reproduce and transmit.
With the benefit of increased genome surveillance of the coronavirus, several recent studies have identified signatures of convergent evolution. Here in the U.S. our laboratory found at least seven genetically independent lineages that acquired a mutation at one particular spot on the virus’s infamous spike protein, the one it uses to latch onto human cells. Spike has a sequence of linked amino acids, …
... Lineages outside the U.S. have also acquired 677H, including in Egypt, Denmark, India and a large cluster in Macedonia…
International
23 March 2021
Associated Press Tracking the Covid_19 pandemic Coronavirus vaccination efforts ramp up across the globe, leaving hope of an end in sight.
Excerpt:
Nationalism also complicated the largest vaccination campaign in world history. The British government trumpeted the speed at which it approved vaccines and ramped up its rollout as proof the U.K. had been right to withdraw from the European Union. Meanwhile, the AstraZeneca vaccine developed in Britain struggled to win full-throated endorsements elsewhere in Europe.
Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and vaccines made in China became instruments of geopolitics and tools in international diplomacy. Eager to secure shots for their citizens and to display industrial prowess, Turkey and India signed agreements to produce Sputnik V. The Balkan nation of Serbia jumped ahead in vaccinating its residents by securing both the Russian and Chinese vaccines.
As he prepared to take over the White House, Joe Biden made a commitment to administer 100 million shots during the first 100 days of his presidency. The Food and Drug Administration has authorized three vaccines for use in the U.S., all developed or co-developed by American companies: Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
United States 17 March 2021
Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) Moderna, mRNA-1283 Published from 1981 by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Excerpt:
According to Moderna, mRNA-1283 is intended to be evaluated in futures studies for use as a booster dose for previously vaccinated or seropositive as well as in a primary series for seronegative individuals.
COVID-19: 300 Candidates and Counting
To navigate through the >300 potential therapeutic and vaccine options for COVID-19, GEN has grouped the candidates into four broad categories based on their developmental and (where applicable) clinical progress: ...
The use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been suspended in the Republic of Ireland. The National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) recommended the move following reports of serious blood clotting events in adults in Norway.
In a tweet, the Irish Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said it was a "precautionary step". AstraZeneca said there is no evidence of a link between the vaccine and increased risk of clotting...
Twitter:
Irish Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly @DonnellyStephen
The decision to temporarily suspend use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine was based on new information from Norway that emerged late last night. This is a precautionary step. The National Immunisation Advisory Comm meets again this morning and we’ll provide an update after that...
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Russia and China are racing to plug the COVID-19 vaccine gap in Africa, hoping to cement their influence on a continent where many countries have yet to administer a single shot.
But, so far, vaccine donations from Beijing and Moscow have been small, the commercial deals they offer are costly, and some African governments are wary about a lack of data.
As rich countries ramp up their inoculation drives, Africa, without the resources to pre-order Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, is being left behind...
Concluding paragraph
The risk, for the transnational capitalist class, is that the governments of low and middle income countries are being forced to break with the neoliberal project of the West. China and Russia are clearly differentiating themselves from Western vaccine producers through prioritising the export of their vaccines and accepting slower vaccination at home.
Now that G7 countries are losing face to China and Russia, but still determined to refuse the waiver, the G7 countries are boosting their funding of the Covax facility to increase supply. Yet this facility will still only aim to vaccinate up to 20%.
Facing several more years of the pandemic and the prospect of higher prices when Covax concludes, the need to expand vaccine production appears self-evident in the global South. The demand for the TRIPS waiver is unlikely to go away....
United States
8 March, 2021
The Atlantic The Differences Between the Vaccines Matter
Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same.
by Hilda Bastian
Excerpt:
Public-health officials are enthusiastic about the new, single-shot COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, despite its having a somewhat lower efficacy at preventing symptomatic illness than other available options. Although clinical-trial data peg that rate at 72 percent in the United States, compared with 94 and 95 percent for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, many experts say we shouldn’t fixate on those numbers. Much more germane, they say, is the fact that the Johnson & Johnson shot, like the other two, is essentially perfect when it comes to preventing the gravest outcomes...
Today I want to talk about tiny, little antibodies, what we're calling nanobodies, and how they might actually help us in the fight against COVID-19. So to help explain what this is all about, I've gone straight to an expert, Dr. Aashish Manglik. He is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesia and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF.
. . .
So think for a minute, how does a virus actually get inside your body? There has to be some little hook or attaching-- something that allows it to attach onto your cell. And that's been mapped in beautiful resolution. We know that there's these proteins on the SARS virus called spike proteins. But this protein, this spike protein which has become so famous now, isn't just a simple little grappling hook. It's moving and changing its shape. And the way in which it changes its shape is what it uses in order to attach to our cells in the first place.
So one of the ways that we can prevent the virus from actually attaching to cells is to basically strait-jacket this movement. To prevent it from doing this business. And the way that we do this is making antibodies as mini antibodies-- nanobodies-- to fix the shape of the spike protein and prevent it from having this jello or wiggly motion that it normally needs to get inside cells. … So once one of these little nanobodies that we've engineered binds to the virus, it completely prevents the virus' ability to get inside cells. . .
I think it kind of fits a very unique niche, both for the current pandemic and likely for future respiratory pandemics, either a future influenza pandemic or a future coronavirus pandemic. On the one hand, we think that an approach like this could be great for treating people who just learned that they're infected. So let's say you just got a test done, you found out that you're positive for the virus. We tell most people, hey, go home and if you get really sick come back to the hospital. But a treatment like this that you could give yourself-- for example, squirt up your nose or inhale-- could perhaps decrease your odds of really getting quite sick. Especially if you're high risk. So that's one approach. . .
. . .
“So the premise that we had for our approach is that these little mini antibodies are so stable that one could directly just give themselves one of these reagents directly in their nose. Now whether it can be over the counter or not, that's a much more complicated issue. But the critical thing is that our approach could be self-administered by people and wouldn't require someone to come into an infusion center or a hospital in the first place.”
It is understood AstraZeneca had asked the Italian government to export 250,000 doses to Australia from its Anagni plant near Rome
… after it tightened its rules on vaccine exports in January in an effort to secure its own supply.
… In a statement a spokesperson for the Health Minister Greg Hunt said the shipment that has already arrived in Australia would "take us through" to when it is made locally from the end of the month.
"[The Italy shipment] is one shipment from one country," they said. "This shipment was not factored into our distribution plan for coming weeks.
"Domestic production starts with 1 million per week of deliveries from late March and is on track."...
Italy has blocked the shipping of 250,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, originally intended for Australia. Ofificials say the decision was made to keep doses in the EU. . .
The first 300,000 doses of the Europe-manufactured Oxford University-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine landed on Australian soil last Sunday morning. Some 50 million AstraZeneca doses will be manufactured at a factory in Melbourne but 3.8 million will have to arrive from overseas, primarily Europe.
Australia is thought to be collateral damage in an ongoing war of words between European officials and AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish company...
(CNN)Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought, and are urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city that China has not so far let them examine.
... If the data is handed over I doubt there will be a big story about it because it doesn’t fit with the narrative that people want to hear.
The WHO is now asking for about 200,000 blood samples from Wuhan and the area around it. The main issue is testing them for the right thing since the samples are very small. The test will destroy the samples so you need to make sure that you do the right test. Who should do the test, etc….
… Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago. But they did not vanish from the Earth entirely. In the past decade it has become clear that Neanderthals mated with the ancestors of modern humans, and that at least some of those unions produced viable offspring. The upshot is that almost half of the Neanderthal genome still survives, scattered in small quantities among almost all modern people’s dna. (The exception is those with mostly African ancestors, for Neanderthals seem never to have lived in Africa.)
Such genes have been associated with everything from hairiness to fat metabolism. Many seem to be related to the immune system, and to affect the risk of developing diseases including lupus, Crohn's and diabetes. A pair of recent papers suggest covid-19 belongs on that list as well. Two long sections of dna, both inherited from Neanderthals, appear to confer resistance or susceptibility to severe covid-19, depending on which is present.
The Oxford vaccine is subtly different as it uses a harmless virus to carry the same genetic material into the body. This has been approved in the UK and Europe.
It is the easiest of the three to use as it can be stored in a fridge, rather than needing very cold temperatures.
All three are supposed to be given as two doses, but the UK is prioritising giving as many people as possible the first dose and delaying the second...
The UK government has granted pharmaceutical giant Pfizer a legal indemnity protecting it from being sued, enabling its coronavirus vaccine to be rolled out across the country as early as next week.
The Department of Health and Social Care has confirmed the company has been given an indemnity protecting it from legal action as a result of any problems with the vaccine.
Ministers have also changed the law in recent weeks to give new protections to companies such as Pfizer, giving them immunity from being sued by patients in the event of any complications.
NHS staff providing the vaccine, as well as manufacturers of the drug, are also protected.
The vaccine will be made available to anyone over the age of 16 but will not be available to pregnant women because of the lack of data about how it could affect them and the baby. An ongoing trial is looking at this. ...
Ten years' vaccine work achieved in about 10 months. Yet no corners cut in designing, testing and manufacturing.They are two statements that sound like a contradiction, and have led some to ask how we can be sure the Oxford vaccine - which has published its first results showing it is highly effective at stopping Covid-19 - is safe when it has been made so fast.
So, this is the real story of how the Oxford vaccine happened so quickly.
It is one that relies on good fortune as well as scientific brilliance; has origins in both a deadly Ebola outbreak and a chimpanzee's runny nose; and sees the researchers go from having no money in the bank to chartering private planes. The work started years ago...
Australia 20 October 2020
University of Sydney News (Note: Drug companies are immune from being sued in America. Australia is one of the few countries in the world not to offer a no-fault vaccination side-effects compensation scheme - 25 others do, including US, UK and NZ. The University of Sydney has published an article on this topic.) Who pays compensation if a COVID-19 vaccine has rare side-effects?
What does Australia’s latest indemnity deal mean in practice?
Excerpt:
To encourage people to receive COVID-19 vaccines for the benefit of the entire community, we need compensation schemes to be in place if there is a rare but serious side-effect, writes Associate Professor Nicholas Wood.
In last week’s federal budget the Australian government announced it had given the suppliers of two COVID-19 vaccines indemnity against liability for rare side-effects.
Although details are unclear, it appears the government would foot the bill for compensation if a member of the public wins legal action against the drug company.
This is in contrast to 25 other countries with no-fault compensation schemes for rare vaccine side-effects.
Here’s the little we know about Australia’s latest indemnity deal and what we could be doing better.
What do we know about Australia’s new deal?
The deal relates to two vaccines the government had previously announced it would supply, should clinical trials prove successful.
These are the University of Oxford vaccine, from AstraZeneca, and the University of Queensland vaccine, from Seqirus (part of CSL).
However, it is not entirely clear what this indemnity deal means in practice. The budget papers say the government will cover: 'certain liabilities that could result from the use of the vaccine.'
The government considers further details “commercial in confidence”.
For instance, we don’t know how serious or disabling a side-effect would have to be to qualify or whether there is any cap on the amount of compensation.
We also don’t know what would happen if there were errors involved, or contaminants introduced, while manufacturing the vaccine. These would still be the company’s liability, but it may be hard to determine where boundaries lie.
How unusual is this?
This deal is not entirely new or unexpected. The government has provided some indemnity to pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines against smallpox and influenza.
The governments of many other countries have also agreed to indemnify COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, including governments in the UK, US and the European Union. >>>more
United States
30 Aug. 2020
C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) How do viruses leap from animals to people and spark pandemics?
Scientists want to understand how viruses like SARS-CoV-2 make these so-called zoonotic jumps to help spot the next big outbreak
Excerpt
In 2016, just as the worst Ebola epidemic in history was dying down in west Africa, researchers from a US government-funded pandemic-surveillance program called PREDICT sampled bats in the hardest hit region in search of Zaire ebolavirus, the virus responsible for the outbreak. They were looking for animal hosts from which the epidemic had sprung.
Although they didn’t manage to do that, they found something else: a new species of ebolavirus, the genus of viruses that cause Ebola diseases. The new virus—the sixth in the genus to be identified—infects two bat species that roost in people’s homes in the Bombali region of Sierra Leone. The following year, the new virus popped up in the same bat species in Guinea and Kenya.
Although researchers don’t yet know whether this new Bombali virus infects people, or whether it would cause disease if it did, lab experiments suggest that it could. ...
IN BRIEF
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has laid bare the urgent need for a better understanding of how viruses jump from animals to people, a process called zoonotic spillover. There are many hurdles a virus must get over to leap species to species, including finding a way to unlock receptors on the new host’s cell surfaces and learning how to replicate itself in those cells without alerting the host’s immune system. Scientists are working to better understand the molecular steps that viruses take to overcome these barriers. They hope to integrate that information with ecological surveillance of emerging zoonotic viruses to spot pathogens that could trigger a new outbreak.
Excerpt: Patients with the new coronavirus keep the pathogen in their respiratory tract for as long as 37 days, a new study found, suggesting they could remain infectious for many weeks.
In yet another sign of how difficult the pandemic may be to contain, doctors in China detected the virus’s RNA in respiratory samples from survivors for a median of 20 days after they became infected, they wrote in an article published in the Lancet medical journal.
The new coronavirus has spread to 118 countries and infected about 125,000 people since first emerging in Wuhan, China, at the end of last year, evading drastic efforts by local authorities and subsequent containment attempts in other nations.
The findings have “important implications for both patient isolation decision-making and guidance around the length of antiviral treatment,” Fei Zhou from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the other authors wrote.
Currently, the recommended isolation period after exposure is 14 days to avoid spreading the virus. But if people remain contagious long after their symptoms have vanished, they may unwittingly propagate the pathogen after they return from quarantine.
By comparison, only a third of patients with SARS still harbored the virus in their respiratory tract after as long as four weeks, the Chinese scientists said. They studied the medical records and laboratory data from 191 Covid-19 patients treated at Jinyintan Hospital and Wuhan Pulmonary Hospital, including 54 who died from the infection. >>>more
United States
25 Feb. 2020
The Atlantic You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus
Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.
Excerpt:
…Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch - “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”
Containment is the first step in responding to any outbreak. In the case of COVID-19, the possibility (however implausible) of preventing a pandemic seemed to play out in a matter of days. Starting in January, China began cordoning off progressively larger areas, radiating outward from the city of Wuhan and eventually encapsulating some 100 million people. People were barred from leaving home, and lectured by drones if they were caught outside. Nonetheless, the virus has now been found in 24 countries. … the Chinese government announced that officials in Hubei province would be going door-to-door, testing people for fevers and looking for signs of illness, then sending all potential cases to quarantine camps. … Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)
Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”
. . . With so little data, prognosis is difficult. But the concern that this virus is beyond containment—that it will be with us indefinitely—is nowhere more apparent than in the global race to find a vaccine, one of the clearest strategies for saving lives in the years to come.
Over the past month, stock prices of a small pharmaceutical company named Inovio have more than doubled…
Originally, doctors in the U.S. were advised not to test people unless they had been to China or had contact with someone who had been diagnosed with the disease. Within the past two weeks, the CDC said it would start screening people in five U.S. cities…
Excerpt
A mad dash is afoot to craft a vaccine for the new coronavirus that's ravaging China and starting to spread across the globe, with possibly dozens of labs working on permanent protection against the pathogen.
Researchers say an effective vaccine could be created in a matter of weeks, using advanced techniques.
"We know enough. We can do this. We can actually make a vaccine in the lab in two weeks," said Florian Krammer, a professor of vaccinology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City. "But -- here's the but -- that doesn't help us much."
Why not? Because any new vaccine will still face manufacturing and regulatory hurdles that would take months to surmount, experts say.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said, "Though we may be in clinical trials within a year, I do not expect a coronavirus vaccine to be commercially available within a year."
The World Health Organization on Thursday declared the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak a global public health emergency.
Countries around the world are reporting isolated cases of coronavirus, as travelers carry the bug out of China -- including the United States, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia,, Malaysia, Macau, France, South Korea, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Vietnam, India, the Philippines, Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Finland, the United Kingdom and Russia.
. . . The more high-profile efforts at developing a coronavirus vaccine include:
- A Massachusetts biotech company called Moderna is developing a vaccine genetically designed by researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to the Washington Post. The NIH hopes to have safety trials for this vaccine underway by April.
- A Philadelphia biotech firm, Inovio, is gearing up for lab and animal testing of a vaccine of its own design. The effort is backed by a $9 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, according to The New York Times.
- Pharmaceutical industry leader Johnson & Johnson is also working on a vaccine, but its top scientists say it could take up to a year to bring the vaccine to market, CNBC reports...
SOURCES: Florian Krammer, Ph.D., professor, vaccinology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City; Amesh Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Baltimore; NPR; Washington Post; CNBC; The New York Times
United States
23
Jan 2020
Wall Street Journal Drugmakers Rush to Develop Vaccines Against China Virus First tests of the research could occur within a few months, but approval would take longer
Spreading quickly from its epicenter in the city of Wuhan, a potentially lethal virus has sickened hundreds around China and reached the U.S., Japan and South Korea. While experts believe it is much less deadly than the related coronavirus that caused the 2003 SARS epidemic, countries are rushing to contain the outbreak, and Wuhan residents are taking their own protective measures.
Excerpt:
Several drugmakers are racing to develop vaccines that could protect against the new respiratory virus originating in China, as fears mount it could spread more widely.
Australia
CSIRO - Showcase Making a vaccine for COVID-19
We worked on the development, testing and manufacture of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus responsible for causing COVID-19.
Excerpt:
The vaccine pipeline
Vaccine development usually follows a series of linear steps because of the high costs and failure rate. Then, the potential vaccine has to be approved for use by relevant regulatory bodies and then manufactured in sufficient amounts and distributed around the world. If we were to follow this approach, a traditional vaccine could take more than 10 years to be developed - this is not fast enough for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Developing a vaccine quickly and safely needed a new model.
Hitting the vaccine accelerator
To accelerate vaccine production, researchers needed to:
- streamline the process and undertake various stages of development at the same time
- fund as many vaccine candidates as possible using a range of different approaches and technologies
- have trials running at a number of locations around the world
- build manufacturing capacity to be able to meet demand.
So, how is the global research community developing potential vaccines for COVID-19 and how are we part of this accelerated pipeline?
Understanding the virus
Our first challenge was understanding this new virus. We were given a sample of virus from the Peter Doherty Institute. We cultivated the virus, growing it to levels allowing us to understand its genomic sequence and its characteristics.
...
Approvals
If regulators have approved similar products before, approval can be accelerated – although this is not likely for a COVID-19 vaccine. Each country also has its own regulations and approval processes.
Along the way, if any of these vaccine candidates are shown to be unsafe or ineffective, researchers must return to the drawing board or in this case the lab to tweak their existing candidate or develop a new one. There are no guarantees of success and why vaccine development can be a long and uncertain process. >>>more
Part 7 Timeline: 2020-2022 reports on the origins of Covid-19 Back to top
Excerpt ... that Fauci and all his compatriots either downplayed or denied natural immunity for two years. That has been the source of vast confusion.
In fact, this might have been the most egregious science error of the entire pandemic. It amounted to giving the silent treatment to the most well-established point of cell biology that we have. It was taught to every generation from the 1920s until sometime in the new century when people stopped paying attention in 9th-grade biology class. After the pandemic broke, Fauci said nothing on this topic for a year and a half... >>> more
TIMELINE EXCERPT:
- Dec. 31, 2019
Wuhan in China reported 27 cases of viral pneumonia of unknown cause
- Jan 11, 2020
China reported its first death due to the new virus.
- Jan 20, 2020
The CDC confirmed the first US case of a new coronavirus
- Jan 31, 2020
The Trump administration restricted travel from China.
- Feb. 6, 2020
The first death in the US is reported in California, but the link is not confirmed until April 21, 2020.
- Feb. 11, 2020
The WHO officially names the coronavirus disease: COVID-19
- Feb 26, 2020
California patient with COVID-19 is first case of “community spread”
- Feb 26, 2020
Trump places VP Mike Pence in charge of the Coronavirus Task Force
- Feb. 29, 2020
A patient near Seattle dies and is deemed the first US COVID-19 death.
- March 3, 2020
The Federal reserve slashes interest rates by 0.5%, the first unscheduled, emergency rate cut since 2008.
- March 11, 2020
The WHO declares COVID-19 a global pandemic.
0:53 / 2:37
United States
5 Jan. 2021 Veterans Today
Connecting the dots: which is the real origin of the global deadly COVID-19 pandemic, China, Italy or USA? What has biotech brought us?
Preface
excerpt:
This dot-connecting article is fundamentally based on scientific studies, factual reports and long-time facts on which my dot-connecting analyses, hypotheses and conclusions are based. >>>more
Part 8 Vaccination Research History - Sellected reports Back to top
Excerpt:
Widespread vaccination has helped decrease or virtually eliminate many dangerous and deadly diseases in the United States. Yet because vaccines have been so effective at removing threats, it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate just how significant they have been to public health.
Here are four major diseases that you may have forgotten about
(or downplayed) thanks to how effective vaccines have been at mitigating or eliminating them. >>>more
Abstract
To prevent future pandemics, it is important that we understand whether SARS-CoV-2 spilled over directly from animals to people, or indirectly in a laboratory accident. The genome of SARSCOV-2 contains a peculiar pattern of unique restriction endonuclease recognition sites allowing efficient dis- and re-assembly of the viral genome characteristic of synthetic viruses. Here, we
report the likelihood of observing such a pattern in coronaviruses with no history of bioengineering. We find that SARS-CoV-2 is an anomaly, more likely a product of synthetic genome assembly than natural evolution. The restriction map of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with many previously reported synthetic coronavirus genomes, meets all the criteria required for an
efficient reverse genetic system, differs from closest relatives by a significantly higher rate of synonymous mutations in these synthetic-looking recognitions sites, and has a synthetic fingerprint unlikely to have evolved from its close relatives. We report a high likelihood that SARSCoV-2 may have originated as an infectious clone assembled in vitro.
Lay Summary
To construct synthetic variants of natural coronaviruses in the lab, researchers often use a method called in vitro genome assembly. This method utilizes special enzymes called restriction enzymes to generate DNA building blocks that then can be “stitched” together in the correct order of the viral genome. To make a virus in the lab, researchers usually engineer the viral genome to add and remove stitching sites, called restriction sites. The ways researchers modify these sites can serve as fingerprints of in vitro genome assembly.
We found that SARS-CoV has the restriction site fingerprint that is typical for synthetic viruses. The synthetic fingerprint of SARS-CoV-2 is anomalous in wild coronaviruses, and common in lab-assembled viruses. The type of mutations (synonymous or silent mutations) that differentiate the restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 are characteristic of engineering, and the concentration of these silent mutations in the restriction sites is extremely unlikely to have arisen
by random evolution. Both the restriction site fingerprint and the pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses. Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2. >>>more
Excerpt:
In 1979, Danish anthropologist Peter Aaby, in his mid-30s, was studying malnutrition in the small West African country of Guinea-Bissau when the outbreak hit—a measles epidemic of horrific proportions. At least 20 percent of children under 5 years old who got measles that year would die. He and his colleagues began vaccinating, hoping to save the remaining healthy children.
His team’s effort would lead to a remarkable discovery: The vaccinated children, about 1,500 of them, didn’t die—not from measles or any other condition. In a year, the kids’ mortality rate for all causes declined threefold compared to unvaccinated children. “This is strange,” he began to think. “Something incredible happened here.” >>>more
This report highlights 15 technologies or categories of technologies that, with further scientific attention and investment, as well as attention to accompanying legal, regulatory, ethical, policy, and operational issues, could help make the world better prepared and equipped to prevent future infectious disease outbreaks from becoming catastrophic events.
Infectious disease emergencies can arise with little notice and have serious detrimental and lasting effects on health and society. As a subset of infectious disease emergencies, global catastrophic biological risk (GCBR) is a special category of risk involving biological agents—whether naturally emerging or reemerging, deliberately created and released, or laboratory-engineered and escaped—that could lead to sudden, extraordinary, widespread disaster beyond the collective capability of national and international organizations and the private sector to control. While rare, the risks of severe pandemics and GCB events are increasing because of factors like climate change, population growth and urbanization, and rapid affordable global travel. In addition, advances in biotechnology that enable easier and more targeted manipulation of biology increase the chances that microbes may be misused or will become the accidental cause of a pandemic. Yet, while biotechnology does pose some societal risk, investment in the technologies described in this report, and other technologies, is also an important component in helping to safeguard the world from a devastating biological event. When applied thoughtfully, technology can improve our ability to recognize and address emerging biological problems.
“I hope I've inspired you to join me in the new era of vaccines as immune trainers. Because with you on board, we are one step closer to benefitting from the full powers of vaccines.” - Professor Christine Stabell Benn, (b. 1968-), a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee: EDCTP, an EU-funded partnership between institutions mandated by the governments of 14 European and 16 African countries.
Summary
Vaccines do much more than protect against the disease they are designed for. Watch this talk from TEDxAarhus 2018 by medical doctor and professor in global health Christine Stabell Benn, and learn how hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved every year just by using the existing vaccines smarter. Christine Stabell Benn is a medical doctor and professor in global health. By studying real-life effects of vaccines in Africa, she has found that vaccines do much more than protect against the target disease; they have so-called non-specific effects. In most cases, they come with an added bonus of increased resistance against other infections than the target disease. If we take that into account, we can save hundreds of thousands of lives every year just by using the existing vaccines smarter. Christine argues that we should not only study vaccines' effects on the target infection, but also ask the often ignored question: what is the impact of vaccines on overall health?
Transcript - 9 languages
Excerpt:
"the little girl gets a live polio vaccine, a few drops of weakened polio virus in the mouth. According to the current understanding of vaccines, this should do nothing to her risk of surviving or dying because there is no polio in Guinea-Bissau. But our research has shown that this vaccine will train her immune system and make her so strong that she can combat all kinds of different diseases. And this will significantly reduce her risk of dying. A super vaccine which can train your baby's immune system and make her so strong that she can combat all kinds of diseases. Who wouldn't want that? Why haven't you heard about this before? In my opinion one of the main reasons is that vaccines have become such a tense battlefield between vaccine supporters and vaccine sceptics. Arguments have become black and white. Vaccines are good, vaccines are bad. There is no room for new perspectives. There is no room for our research findings. But for the next fifteen minutes, I ask you to kindly set aside any opinion you may have about vaccines and allow me to tell you what we discovered. ..." >>> Transcript
Excerpt
Flu viruses are classified by two proteins on the outer surface of the virus: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). There are 18 different H subtypes and 11 different N subtypes, and viruses can be further broken down into different strains within those subtypes. For example, there are various strains of H1N1 influenza virus. The H protein (also called HA) enables the flu virus to enter a human cell. It is made up of a head and a stem. Seasonal flu vaccines fight infection by inducing antibodies that target the HA head. This region varies season to season, which is why flu vaccines must be updated each year. However, scientists discovered the stem typically remains unchanged, making it an ideal target for antibodies induced by a universal flu vaccine. NIAID Universal Influenza Vaccine Strategic Plan
In February 2018, NIAID released its Universal Influenza Vaccine Strategic Plan outlining the institute’s research priorities.
… Leading Vaccine Strategies and Candidates
….
NIAID Vaccine Research Center scientists have initiated Phase 1/2 studies of a universal flu vaccine strategy that includes an investigational DNA-based vaccine (called a DNA “prime”) followed by a licensed seasonal influenza vaccine (“boost”) to improve the potency and durability of seasonal influenza vaccines.
In May 2018, NIAID launched a Phase 2 clinical trial of a universal influenza vaccine called M-001. The vaccine, which was developed and produced by BiondVax Pharmaceuticals based in Ness Ziona, Israel, contains antigenic peptide sequences shared among many different influenza strains.
. . . Children’s Health Defense Note: CHD has internal documents in which the FDA acknowledges that technology that allows for the creation of these new vaccines has outpaced their ability to predict adverse events. Shouldn’t our federal agencies be calling for a moratorium until we have that knowledge—especially since it is heavily reported that the CDC/FDA post-marketing surveillance systems are inadequate to pick up problems after licensure?
Massachusetts Senator and big spender, Ed Markey, has introduced a bill that would shovel no less than a billion dollars toward the universal flu-vaccine project.
Here is a sentence from an NIAID press release that mentions one of several research approaches:
“NIAID Vaccine Research Center scientists have initiated Phase 1/2 studies of a universal flu vaccine strategy that includes an investigational DNA-based vaccine (called a DNA ‘prime’)…”
This is quite troubling, if you know what the phrase “DNA vaccine” means. It refers to what the experts are touting as the next generation of immunizations.
Instead of injecting a piece of a virus into a person, in order to stimulate the immune system, synthesized genes would be shot into the body. This isn’t traditional vaccination anymore. It’s gene therapy.
. . . Here is the inconvenient truth about DNA vaccines—
They will permanently alter your DNA.
The reference is the New York Times, March 9, 2015,
“Protection Without a Vaccine.”
It describes the frontier of research—the use of synthetic genes to “protect against disease,” while changing the genetic makeup of humans. This is not science fiction: “By delivering synthetic genes into the muscles of the [experimental] monkeys, the scientists are essentially re-engineering the animals to resist disease.” “’The sky’s the limit,’ said Michael Farzan, an immunologist at Scripps and lead author of the new study.” “The first human trial based on this strategy — called immunoprophylaxis by gene transfer, or I.G.T. — is underway, and several new ones are planned.”
Here is the punchline: “The viruses invade human cells with their DNA payloads, and the synthetic gene is incorporated into the recipient’s own DNA. If all goes well, the new genes instruct the cells to begin manufacturing powerful antibodies.” Read that again: “the synthetic gene is incorporated into the recipient’s own DNA.”
Alteration of the human genetic makeup.
Not just a “visit” - Permanent residence. And once a person’s DNA is changed, he will live with that change—and all the ripple effects in his genetic makeup—for the rest of his life.
The Times article taps Dr. David Baltimore for an opinion:
“Still, Dr. Baltimore says that he envisions that some people might be leery of a vaccination strategy that means altering their own DNA, even if it prevents a potentially fatal disease.”>>>more
Gain-of-function (GOF) research involves experimentation that aims or is expected to (and/or, perhaps, actually does) increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens. Such research, when conducted by responsible scientists, usually aims to improve understanding of disease causing agents, their interaction with human hosts, and/or their potential to cause pandemics. The ultimate objective of such research is to better inform public health and preparedness efforts and/or development of medical countermeasures. Despite these important potential benefits, GOF research (GOFR) can pose risks regarding biosecurity and biosafety. GOFR is a subset of “dual-use research”—i.e., research that can be used for both beneficial and malevolent purposes. Whereas the dual-use life science research debate has largely focused on biosecurity dangers associated with potential malevolent use of research, the GOFR debate has more explicitly focused on risks involving both biosecurity and biosafety—the point being that creation of especially dangerous pathogens might pose highly significant biosafety risks that are independent of, and perhaps more feasible to measure/assess than, risks associated with malevolent use.
Following controversy surrounding research, published in 2012, that led to the creation of highly pathogenic H5N1 (avian) influenza virus strains that were airborne transmissible between ferrets—and more recent reports of biosafety mishaps involving anthrax, smallpox, and H5N1 in government laboratories—in 2014 the administration of US President Barack Obama called for a “pause” on funding (and relevant research with existing US Government funding) of GOF experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in particular. This pause applies specifically to experiments that “may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes … such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route” (White House 2014). With announcement of this pause, the US Government launched a “deliberative process … to address key questions about the risks and benefits of gain-of-function studies” (White House 2014) to inform future funding decisions—and the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) was tasked with making recommendations to the US Government on this matter. As part of this deliberative process, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) commissioned this Ethical Analysis White Paper providing: ... >>>more
Excerpt:
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by the SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which uses angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor for cell entry. A group of SARS-like CoVs (SL-CoVs) has been identified in horseshoe bats.
. . .
The outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002-2003, which resulted in over 8,000 infections and close to 800 deaths, was caused by a novel coronavirus (CoV), now known as the SARS-associated CoV (SARS-CoV)…Such discoveries raised the possibility that bats are the natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV and triggered a surge in the search for CoVs in different bat species in different geographic locations.
. . .
In this study, a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-based pseudovirus system was employed to address these issues. Our results indicated that the SL-CoV S protein is unable to use ACE2 proteins of different species for cell entry and that SARS-CoV S protein also failed to bind the ACE2 molecule of the horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus pearsonii. However, when the RBD of SL-CoV S was replaced with that from the SARS-CoV S, the hybrid S protein was able to use the huACE2 for cell entry, implying that the SL-CoV S proteins are structurally and functionally very similar to the SARS-CoV S. These results suggest that although the SL-CoVs discovered in bats so far are unlikely to infect humans using ACE2 as a receptor, it remains to be seen whether they are able to use other surface molecules of certain human cell types to gain entry. It is also conceivable that these viruses may become infectious to humans if they undergo N-terminal sequence variation, for example, through recombination with other CoVs, which in turn might lead to a productive interaction with ACE2 or other surface proteins on human cells.
Reflecting on the History of Plagues World History Encyclopedia
Justinian's Plague (541-542 CE)
by John Horgan, 2014
Excerpt: During the reign of the emperor Justinian I (527-565 CE), one of the worst outbreaks of the plague took place, claiming the lives of millions of people. The plague arrived in Constantinople in 542 CE, almost a year after the disease first made its appearance in the outer provinces of the empire. The outbreak continued to sweep throughout the Mediterranean world for another 225 years, finally disappearing in 750 CE. ... 20-40% of the inhabitants of Constantinople would eventually perish from the disease. Throughout the rest of the empire, nearly 25% of the population died with estimates ranging from 25-50 million people in total” … The plague arrived in Constantinople in 542 CE, almost a year after the disease first made its appearance in the outer provinces of the empire. The outbreak continued to sweep throughout the Mediterranean world for another 225 years, finally disappearing in 750 CE….>>>more
1. Introduction:
Epidemics have played a significant role during the last one thousand years of human civilization. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed a quarter of the population of Europe. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, smallpox swept through the whole of Europe. Moreover, between 1840 and 1862, cholera devastated populations worldwide. Many epidemics have taken place since the beginning of the twentieth century, including Spanish flu, HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), bird flu, and the Ebola outbreak currently raging in West Africa. The Ebola virus is especially deadly, given its high fatality rate and transmissibility.
Occurring from October 1910 to April 1911, the pneumonic plague epidemic in Northeast China has been termed the worst epidemic of the twentieth century, as it was a disaster in terms of the lives of the people and the economy of Northern China. Even though it occurred nearly one hundred years ago, for many researchers, the disastrous pneumonic plague that took more than 60 000 lives remains worthy of study. It was this pneumonic plague epidemic that really instigated the earliest scientific epidemic prevention work in modern China. Analysis of the organization and management efforts, including medical care, epidemic prevention, and effects of quarantine, provide important information for later generations... Summarizing the successful experiences in fighting the pneumonic plague in Northeast China a hundred years ago is of relevance in the effort...
2. Wu Lien-teh's fight against pneumonic plague
Excerpt: ... At that time, Japan and Russia were on the ground, controlling the plague epidemic, and were attempting to infringe upon the territorial sovereignty of Northeast China.
In this complex situation, the Chinese government instructed Wu Lien-teh to head for the plague-affected areas. By strengthening railway quarantine, controlling traffic, isolating the epicenter of the plague, cremating victims’ bodies, and many other measures, and by facilitating collaboration between the Chinese and foreign governments and doctors, Wu Lien-teh finally quelled the pneumonic plague. It was the largest infectious disease to spread through China in the twentieth century, occurring over less than 4 months. This was the first ever recorded cooperation between scientific prevention experts and government bodies to effectively control a large plague in China.
Wu showed tremendous leadership during the time when he was in command of the Manchurian plague control efforts, gaining him international fame. His University of Cambridge, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and Pasteur Institute training enabled him to mediate the medical approaches of Chinese and Western scientists. As a Chinese official abroad, he identified with China's quest for modernity through Western medicine. Wu Lien-teh founded the Binjiang Medical School (the predecessor of Harbin Medical University) based on the Northeast Epidemic Affairs Department and the equipment and technology of Binjiang Hospital in September 1926.
3. Summary of the plague experience to help support the control...
Read full report here
The Spanish Flu (1918-1919) aka The Great Influenza Epidemic 'spread'during World War I (1914-1918), when an estimate of 60 million soldiers (Koman 1915), from all over the world, including close to 5 million US soldiers, converged across Europe. Those who survived the war brought the virus back to their homelands: At least 50 million people died (CDC).
Origin:
We now know that the "Spanish Flu" virus emerged in Camp Funston, now Ft. Riley, Kansas, USA (Barry 2004) in January 1918, and quickly spread with the arrival of US troups on the European war front, where military leaders suppressed the news in order to maintain morale, but news of outbreak in neutral Spain was freely reported, giving the impression that Spain was the epicenter - thus, the Spanish Flu misnomer.
Bayer Aspirin: a big mistake
Founded in Gemany, in 1883, Bayer Pharmaceutical company formulated Aspirin in 1899. Designed to reduce fever, Aspirin became the leading pharmaceutical treatment for the Spanish Flu, until, in hindsight, it was discovered that a fever was required to suppress the virus.
- Bayer is a pharmaceutical company.
- Monsanto is a pesticide company.
- Bayer bought Monsanto.
- Bayer makes drugs for NonHodgkin's lymphoma.
- Monsanto makes chemical called glyphosate to spray on FOOD crops.
- Glyphosate causes NonHodgkin's lymphoma.
The Founding of Bayer:
1. Best known for their path-breaking anti-inflammatory pain reliever, Aspirin, the Bayer pharmaceutical company was founded in 1863.
2. Bayer became part of IG Farben, a powerful German chemical conglomerate, in 1925. ...
As part of the IG Farben conglomerate, which strongly supported the Third Reich, the Bayer company was complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich. In its most criminal activities, the company took advantage of the absence of legal and ethical constraints on medical experimentation to test its drugs on unwilling human subjects. These included paying a retainer to SS physician Helmuth Vetter to test Rutenol and other sulfonamide drugs on deliberately infected patients at the Dachau, Auschwitz, and Gusen concentration camps. Vetter was later convicted by an American military tribunal at the Mauthausen Trial in 1947, and was executed at Landsberg Prison in February 1949. >>>more
Valuable references:
United States
20 Jan. 2004
NIH
The site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications Excerpts:
The lowest estimate of the death toll is 21 million, while recent scholarship estimates from 50 to 100 million dead. World population was then only 28% what is today, and most deaths occurred in a sixteen week period, from mid-September to mid-December of 1918.
It has never been clear, however, where this pandemic began. Since influenza is an endemic disease, not simply an epidemic one, it is impossible to answer this question with absolute certainty. Nonetheless, in seven years of work on a history of the pandemic, this author conducted an extensive survey of contemporary medical and lay literature searching for epidemiological evidence – the only evidence available. That review suggests that the most likely site of origin was Haskell County, Kansas, an isolated and sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of the state, in January 1918 [1]. If this hypothesis is correct, it has public policy implications.
. . .
So if the contemporary observers were correct, if American troops carried the virus to Europe, where in the United States did it begin?
Both contemporary epidemiological studies and lay histories of the pandemic have identified the first known outbreak of epidemic influenza as occurring at Camp Funston, now Ft. Riley, in Kansas. But there was one place where a previously unknown – and remarkable – epidemic of influenza occurred.
Haskell County, Kansas, lay three hundred miles to the west of Funston. There the smell of manure meant civilization. People raised grains, poultry, cattle, and hogs. Sod-houses were so common that even one of the county's few post offices was located in a dug-out sod home. In 1918 the population was just 1,720, spread over 578 square miles. But primitive and raw as life could be there, science had penetrated the county in the form of Dr. Loring Miner. Enamored of ancient Greece – he periodically reread the classics in Greek – he epitomized William Welch's comment that "the results [of medical education] were better than the system." His son was also a doctor, trained in fully scientific ways, serving in the Navy in Boston.
In late January and early February 1918 Miner was suddenly faced with an epidemic of influenza, but an influenza unlike any he had ever seen before. Soon dozens of his patients – the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in the county – were being struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot. Then one patient progressed to pneumonia. Then another. And they began to die. …
The epidemic got worse.
Then, as abruptly as it came, it disappeared.
Men and women returned to work. Children returned to school. And the war regained its hold on people's thoughts.
The disease did not, however, slip from Miner's thoughts. Influenza was neither a reportable disease, nor a disease that any state or federal public health agency tracked. Yet Miner considered this incarnation of the disease so dangerous that he warned national public health officials about it. Public Health Reports (now Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report), a weekly journal produced by the U.S. Public Health Service to alert health officials to outbreaks of communicable diseases throughout the world, published his warning. In the first six months of 1918, this would be the only reference in that journal to influenza anywhere in the world.
.
..
By then, influenza was erupting in France, first at Brest, the single largest port of disembarkation for American troops. By then, as MacFarlane Burnet later said, "It is convenient to follow the story of influenza at this period mainly in regard to the army experiences in America and Europe.
The fact that the 1918 pandemic likely began in the United States matters because it tells investigators where to look for a new virus. They must look everywhere.
In recent years the World Health Organization and local public health authorities have intervened several times when new influenza viruses have infected man. These interventions have prevented the viruses from adapting to man and igniting a new pandemic.
But only 83 countries in the world – less than half – participate in WHO's surveillance system (WHO's flunet website).
While some monitoring occurs even in those countries not formally affiliated with WHO's surveillance system, it is hardly adequate. If the virus did cross into man in a sparsely populated region of Kansas, and not in a densely populated region of Asia, then such an animal-to-man cross-over can happen anywhere. And unless WHO gets more resources and political leaders move aggressively on the diplomatic front, then a new pandemic really is all too inevitable... >>>more
Summary
Is it at all possible that the most devastating catastrophe in human history was forgotten for nearly a century only to be rediscovered following the outbreak of COVID-19? One might expect that the significance of historical events that impacted entire populations, and even more so calamities that caused the death of millions, would be instantly recognised and inevitably remembered. Yet, the puzzling case of the long neglected cultural legacy of the Great Flu calls into question many of the implicit assumptions that we may have about collective memory. Following the surge of new-found interest in the topic, it is now timely to begin to unravel the tangled histories of how the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was remembered, forgotten and repeatedly rediscovered across the globe in personal, communal, medical, historiographical and cultural spheres....
Introduction
MC: Why would we need to find a memory of the Spanish Flu?
I think we need to remember what a colossal event it actually was. I think I’m right in saying that during our pandemic, so far, two million people have died. There’s no precise calculation of how many people died in Spanish Flu … so-called Spanish Flu, but I’ve seen estimates that range from, at the bottom end, 20 million, possibly 50 million, and, indeed, possibly 100 million, and more than died in the Great War, about which we go on endlessly. So why did it get forgotten and are there any lessons we could learn from it...
Partial transcript:
Professor Beiner: I'm going to bring it all home now...
(1:03:58)
Covid-19: Have we entered the age of post-forgetting?
Is forgetting finally over? Well, this is interesting enough:
As everyone went into the first "Lockdown" in March 2020,
... (1:04:20) this is what happens if you look at Google searches.
Ever since Google began taking records in 2004, most of the time, very little interest in Spanish Flu. ... very few searches. ...
(1:04:43)
... and then! February to May 2020: BOOM!
Search engines around the world begin looking for Spanish Flu to understand what's happening: How do we give historical perspective on the pandemic that we're facing. And because of the revival of the previous two decades, then suddenly there's the literature there: These the websites: there's information; there's people out there to inform people: BOOM!
There's information out there so that people can inform themselves and it becomes a global memory very, very quickly. And if you want to look at what this does to social memory, to social forgetting, well, people begin looking for the centenarians, don't they! You can see this now every day in the newspapers, if you look. ... you begin looking for the last centenarians who have the last living memory - of the flu. Some of them die, of Covid. And these people, for most of their lives, were never talked about as "survivors of the flu", have suddenly become survivors of the flu. Till then, they were just 'elderly people' - even tho' most people who are around today hardly have recollections because they were babies at the time. The people whose stories should have been collected was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago - earlier. So, the centenarians are suddenly recognised as "flu survivors" and that's the redressal, if you wish - an attempt at the last minute to redress social forgetting. But 'social forgetting' is not just about the first generation. It's about 2nd generation stories and 3rd generation stories putting together the pieces of how this may have appeared in households in various forms: of photographs in various houses, of family members, with the person missing there - who died of the flu - but people remember them and sometimes cut out their picture from someone else and add it to the family photograph. And this - ritual and practices of remembrance and families, of how it is talked about and not talked about and has come out in various practices. (1:06:30) . . .
(1:07:42)
This is the very last point I want to make, ... we're talking about the memory of Covid. Right. So, now there's an obsession. If you look around the internet, everybody is documenting Covid-19. There are so many oral history projects, not only in Ireland. Every university in America ... they all have their oral history projects. And public libraries, and national libraries, and institutions and organisations - the main archives are archiving things...(listings) massive documentation, so we don't forget Covid-19.
(1:08:26)
Personally, I'm not worried about people forgetting Covid-19, to be honest. That's not the lesson of what I've told you here. That's the obvious lesson, but it's not, because, to tell you the truth, Covid-19 is being documented instantly without anybody lifting a finger. Why? Because of social media. Covid-19 is out there on YouTube. Covid-19 is out there on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, for the young ones, on TikTok. You can preserve that, but it being documented without anyone initiating an oral history project.
(1:08:60)
What do I understand from these two things? From this obsession with the memory of Covid and how it relates to what I've told you now. Two thinks I'd like to say. And with this I'll end the talk.
(1:09:10)
... Two terms which I've used in my research: I'm going to talk about "pre-memory" and "pre-forgetting" Let me explain these two complicated terms in two sentences, very briefly.
(1:09:34) The first one is pre-memory.
Pre-memory is my theory, which is quite obvious to me, if you think about it: That memory of an event begins BEFORE an event. As we experience an historical event, we're thinking of previous events and that's shaping our perception of it. And that shapes how we remember the event. I've dealt with this since 1798 in Ireland and now I'm looking at the pandemic. So, when you think about it, the pre-memory of Covid-19 is Spanish Influenza. The rediscovery of Spanish Influenza and all the literature that came before that prepared people to think how we think about Covid-19!
(1:10:07)
All these images of Spanish Influenza are there as a pre-memory of Covid-19. Memory of Covid-19 begins before there was Covid-19.
It begins with all these books coming out which are warning us, all the time. Every history book that came out in the 2000s talks about Spanish flu, and always includes a consideration or a chapter of "Can it happen again?" And it always puzzled me: why are historians always obsessed with "Can it happen again?" - it doesn't happen in any other area of history. Well, here you have the answer: This pandemic preparedness which enters historiography in a way prepares us. It's the pre-memory for Covid.
(1:10:42) Why do I say "pre-forgetting"?
This is an interesting one!
This is my theory that before an event happens, we might already have anxieties on, as it's happening, that we'll forget it. You don't only want to remember it, but we're afraid we might forget it. You start being obsessed with forgetting, and even as the event is happening, even before it actually finishes. And this is interesting: So people rediscover "The Great Flu" - what's the lesson of "The Great Flu"? It seems that the lesson is "a century of forgetting" and so we already have a fear that we'll forget Covid.
(1:11:15)
Now, if you ask me, all the documentation that is happening now, on Covid, will tell us nothing about the memory of Covid in 50 years time. Why? Because we don't know what questions people will ask in 50 years time. In 50 years time, people will ask their own questions and look for their own sources. It's good that we document things. But as Alfred Crosby reminded us - remember the quote that I showed you. There was no lack of documentation on the pandemic of 1918. People decided not to look at it. Right? So it doesn't tell us about what people will remember - in 20, 30, 50, 100, 200 years time. What it tells us about ourselves: we're afraid that people won't remember OUR pandemic. And that's part of our obsession of rediscovering the previous pandemic. And, lets end it on that.
(1:12:00)
International
28 Feb. 2022
Nature: Editorial Wanted: better systems for turning evidence into action
The pandemic created a colossal demand for scientific evidence to inform decision-making. Now researchers are mapping out what went wrong and what needs to change.
“seeing a growing appetite for evidence from public officials”
Misinformation — such as the idea that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine can prevent or treat COVID-19 — has flourished during the pandemic.
Excerpt:
There’s a saying in medicine that decisions were once made by GOBSAT:good old boys sat around a table, pontificating about their own (usually biased) opinions. The GOBSAT method is elitist and exclusionary, and it means that no one knows on what solid evidence, if any, a decision is based. Sadly, this way of making decisions has been on full display in many countries over the past two years.
…
During the pandemic, governments, businesses and people worldwide have needed rigorous evidence quickly to inform their decisions — on what treatments work for COVID-19, say, or how best to educate children safely. But that pressure has exposed weaknesses in the world’s systems for producing, synthesizing, communicating and using evidence for decision-making. …
…
But researchers are on the case. In the past couple of months, three reports have been published that show what can be done to improve evidence-informed decisions…
…
During the pandemic, too many decisions have been made by GOBSATs or by other questionable means. Lessons learnt from COVID-19 provide an opportunity for change, for injecting more-rigorous research and evidence into the way that decisions are reached. We can all start by asking the GOBSATs for the evidence on which their statements are based.
>>>more
1. Talent at the Top: China’s brightest, most idealistic people are admitted to politics – a policy unchanged in 2200 years. 2. Data in the Middle: every policy is implemented, tracked, and optimized based on terabytes of data. 3. Democracy at the Bottom:amateur volunteers check the stats and sign off on new legislation if they have 66% popular support.
"the results [of medical education] were better than the system."
– Barry D. Silverman (2011),
William Welch, (1850-1934): the road to Johns Hopkins "William Henry Welch's selection in 1884 as the first faculty member of the new medical school at Johns Hopkins created the invigorating atmosphere that generated the revolutionary changes in medical training and laboratory medicine that transformed medicine in America. Dr. Welch's family traditions, his New England upbringing, Yale education, and German university experience prepared a unique individual to lead American medicine into the 20th century.”
1945
United Nations
September 2020 "Nations United: Urgent Solutions for Urgent Times"
Celebrating 75 years since the founding of the United Nations,
on 24 October, 1945, San Francisco, California, USA.
On the 75th anniversary of the United Nations and the 5th anniversary of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)– in the midst of a pandemic radically transforming our economies and societies – this 30-minute film tells the story of the world as it is, as it was, and as it could be.
Director Richard Curtis; presenter Thandie Newton; producer, 72 Films...
A Personal Opinion:
Historian shares her point of view -
on the importance of social isolation
With thanks to Northern Ireland-born Wright State University Professor of History Noeleen McIlvenna, specialising in Early American history, for allowing me to share her personal insights, from 23 March 2020:
I don’t have a personal blog or whatever they are now called.
But if I did, this is what I’d post:
History Lesson for Today
As we all learn more than we ever wanted to about pandemics, historians of America and especially of the colonial era can help set COVID-19 in context. Stories from the tragedy of the Native holocaust upon the arrival of new viruses in the sixteenth century remind us of the terror and devastation that might befall us. But they also teach us that the end result need not be Mad Max or The Walking Dead scenarios. In fact, the past shows more signs of cooperation than conflict.
We learn that social isolation is really important. The rate of infection and death was much worse among the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan and Incas of Cusco, where people gathered closely in large cities, than among groups further to the north, where smaller communities with annual nomadic patterns suffered much less. Yes, some groups raided others; we have come to understand that a quest for beaver furs did not provoke the Iroquois to war on Algonquin peoples in the 1630s and 1640s. These were instead Mourning Wars. The Iroquois focused on stealing people, not killing them, to replace those they had loved and lost to disease. They took women and children, mostly, but not to enslave them as the British stole people in Africa. The Iroquois adopted their captives, to love them and thus to make more Iroquois. Resilience was key. The most common consequence of all was the creation of coalescent communities. Small groups bonded together for survival, fusing cultures and languages into something new. Anthropologists have paid more attention to this than historians, and it is imperative that we examine in detail how peoples managed to overcome differences and realize they needed one another for the long haul, not just in the midst of an epidemic. For one epidemic would be followed by another, perhaps twenty years later.
We must also counter the prevailing idea, however, that as soon as Europeans arrived, the indigenous people died and an empty continent gradually became a melting pot for immigrants, voluntary and involuntary, from around the globe. Indians did not evaporate. They were weakened by disease, but not extinguished. They fought for their territory, from Metacomet to the Pueblos in the seventeenth century, from Pontiac to Blue Jacket in the eighteenth, from Tecumseh to Crazy Horse in the nineteenth. All these warriors built pan-Indian alliances and all had initial success against Europeans. In other places, Indians developed cooperative business relationships with newcomers. From a European capitalist perspective, the Choctaw in Mississippi seemed wealthy compared to settlers, due to their lucrative trade in deerskins with the French. In the Great Plains the horse culture developed after Spanish contact and flourished for three hundred years. Despite high rates of fatality, Native Americans preserved their cultures and languages. American government warfare and policies, not viruses, led to horrific conditions at reservations like Pine Ridge.
If anything positive comes out of this 2020 pandemic, it should include a closer study of American Indian history. More historians and scientists can scour what records exist, documentary and material, to teach us of the many potential solutions American Indians tried – those strategies that served best and those that failed. (Conversion and prayer to a Christian God did nothing to protect anyone from viral infection.) And in doing so, modern American society, indeed the whole world, might finally learn to appreciate, respect and mourn what we lost.
