CORONA Main Coronavirus thread

[mzkitty]

Sigh...........

 

[Jubilee on Earth]

U.S. Will Restrict Travel From India Starting Tuesday

The Biden administration will restrict travel from India beginning Tuesday, the White House said Friday, as concerns mount over a record surge in coronavirus cases there.

“On the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the administration will restrict travel from India,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. “The policy will be implemented in light of extraordinarily high Covid-19 caseloads and multiple variants circulating in India.”

The White House said the ban on travel from India wouldn’t apply to U.S. citizens, permanent residents or their spouses. Other individuals that might qualify for exemptions include humanitarian workers, certain journalists and academics and students commencing studies in the fall, according to a determination by the State Department for travelers deemed to be in U.S. national interests. The exceptions mirror those for other countries affected by pandemic-related travel restrictions.
A spokesman for the Indian Embassy had no immediate comment.

The announcement comes as India set a global record for new infections, prompting several countries to impose similar travel restrictions. The U.K., Canada, Germany, France and Australia were among the growing list of countries to ban most travelers from India in recent weeks.

India reported another world record of 401,993 new daily infections on Saturday, an increase from Friday’s 386,452 cases. The death toll stood at 211,853 as of Saturday, but public health experts believe total fatalities to be undercounted.

The U.S. and other governments have ramped up humanitarian assistance to India amid the crisis, which has overwhelmed the country’s hospitals and led to many people dying on the pavement waiting to be seen. India has also experienced a massive shortage in oxygen and related supplies, and the government is struggling to vaccinate people amid the surge.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the first person of Indian descent to serve in the role, told reporters Friday the wave in India was “a great tragedy.”

“We as a country have made a commitment to the people of India to support them,” Ms. Harris said. “But it is tragic.”

The State Department said Friday it would send one of its most senior diplomats to India. Daniel Smith, who served as acting secretary of state in January before Antony Blinken was confirmed, will serve as interim chargé d’affaires in India. The move “underscores U.S. commitment to working with India to advance our shared priorities, including the well-being of the Indian and American people during the pandemic crisis,” department spokesman Ned Price said.

The Biden administration initially drew criticism for being slow to respond to the situation, but has since announced more than $100 million in emergency relief.

Ms. Psaki said two U.S. military assistance flights carrying supplies had landed in India on Friday. The initial shipments included hundreds of oxygen cylinders, regulators and pulse oximeters, roughly 184,000 rapid diagnostic tests and approximately 84,000 N95 masks, she said.

The overall U.S. aid package announced by the White House this week includes 15 million N95 masks, 1 million rapid diagnostic tests, thousands of oxygen-related supplies, therapeutics and materials to manufacture more vaccines.

United Airlines Holdings Inc. and Air India are the only two airlines currently offering nonstop flights between the U.S. and India.

United’s four daily round-trip flights have been fairly full recently, according to people familiar with the matter. A United airline spokesman said in a statement that it will comply with the new restrictions.

“The safety of our customers and employees is our top priority and we will comply with all government regulations and travel orders,” United said. “United is proud of the essential air service we provide to connect our two countries and we’ll continue to support India during this time of need.”

Since the start of the pandemic, the U.S. has also banned most travelers from the U.K., the European Union, Ireland, Brazil, South Africa, China and Iran.

 

[iboya]

Fair use cited
Run time is 1:00
My opinion: I found this video sickening

Video synopsis from statements made by John Legend from the video:
This is a Walgreens video of John Legend called "This is Our Shot"
This video strongly pushes the covid jab and all the wonderful societal benefits of getting the covid jab.
This video states that you will be healed, made whole, our communities will be made one, by the trusted people who will give you the covid jab for free. This video states that you will feel safe, when you're ready they will be ready to give you the safe trusted covid jab.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=295r46gmVl0

youtube description
This is our shot at returning to the faces and places we love and miss. The COVID-19 vaccines are ready and so are we. Walgreens pharmacy experts are here to give it to you safely, for free. To schedule your COVID-19 vaccine, visit: Walgreens.com/OurShot

 

[glennb6]

I have to vent a little bit. I recall, before the election steal, DJT was giving a speech or press conference and he referred to the CV as a 'spell, a spell that had been cast upon the nation'. That's at least pretty close to what he said. I figured it was just speech making hyperbole but more and more I think it's a reality.

In my neck of the world the '3rd wave' has been declared to have hit, or so says the govt and their ministry of truth. They have an already scared public willingly staying home more, wearing their diapers at all times, and looking for someone to blame.
The reality is that it's just a redo of the previous two waves, which were not even ripples. The 15 month cumulative fatality rate is barely over 200 and most of those had severe pre-existing conditions, the kind you don't recover from. Never mind, the govt calls them CV deaths.
The reality is 99.9% of the population has never and is not sick with CV, but the news coverage makes people believe the death wave is enormous and getting worse.
It's all fake. One funny point is that the national health minister is being called on to resign for bungling this latest outbreak. In reality he's handled it so well in scaring the public, they now think he's failed in keeping the pubic safe. Irony at it's best.

To me, it seems as if a spell has been cast on everyone. I've talked to a couple locals and asked if they know that 99.9% of everyone is perfectly healthy, and I get the blank scared stare. I watch people shopping at the big box store - they wear little plastic gloves to hold the shopping cart with, all wear their diapers, and all look slightly scared. WTF is going on?

WTF indeed! Don't people read the new with some discernment and wonder why they don't see sick and dying people everywhere? Why in the big box shopping store are not people coughing and dragging their sick asses around instead of appearing physically healthy? For a nation that has a population greater than the UK, or France, or Canada, and lives on FB and LINE social media, why isn't the social media lit up like a Christmas tree with reports of sick friends, dying relatives, etc?

I'm sure it's the same back home in many states, albeit more people that actually do get sick - but not sick with a deadly killer virus, just sick with flu-like symptoms.

This really gets me wondering about the psychology of it all. HOW can the majority of the world be convinced there is a pandemic, for what, 15 months and running, and still believe it? I don't believe in magic or spells or any of that, but this sure seems to be as close to one if there ever was.

Sorry for the rant.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msFvK_b4dcE
40:05 min
TWiV 749: COVID-19 clinical update #60 with Dr. Daniel Griffin

•May 1, 2021


Vincent Racaniello

In COVID-19 clinical update #60, Daniel Griffin summarizes CDC guidance for summer camps, how to protect yourself when fully vaccinated, updated recommendation for J&J vaccine, declining global case fatality rate, and characterization of post-acute sequelae. Show notes at https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-749/

 

[Mprepared]

I have to vent a little bit. I recall, before the election steal, DJT was giving a speech or press conference and he referred to the CV as a 'spell, a spell that had been cast upon the nation'. That's at least pretty close to what he said. I figured it was just speech making hyperbole but more and more I think it's a reality.

In my neck of the world the '3rd wave' has been declared to have hit, or so says the govt and their ministry of truth. They have an already scared public willingly staying home more, wearing their diapers at all times, and looking for someone to blame.
The reality is that it's just a redo of the previous two waves, which were not even ripples. The 15 month cumulative fatality rate is barely over 200 and most of those had severe pre-existing conditions, the kind you don't recover from. Never mind, the govt calls them CV deaths.
The reality is 99.9% of the population has never and is not sick with CV, but the news coverage makes people believe the death wave is enormous and getting worse.
It's all fake. One funny point is that the national health minister is being called on to resign for bungling this latest outbreak. In reality he's handled it so well in scaring the public, they now think he's failed in keeping the pubic safe. Irony at it's best.

To me, it seems as if a spell has been cast on everyone. I've talked to a couple locals and asked if they know that 99.9% of everyone is perfectly healthy, and I get the blank scared stare. I watch people shopping at the big box store - they wear little plastic gloves to hold the shopping cart with, all wear their diapers, and all look slightly scared. WTF is going on?

WTF indeed! Don't people read the new with some discernment and wonder why they don't see sick and dying people everywhere? Why in the big box shopping store are not people coughing and dragging their sick asses around instead of appearing physically healthy? For a nation that has a population greater than the UK, or France, or Canada, and lives on FB and LINE social media, why isn't the social media lit up like a Christmas tree with reports of sick friends, dying relatives, etc?

I'm sure it's the same back home in many states, albeit more people that actually do get sick - but not sick with a deadly killer virus, just sick with flu-like symptoms.

This really gets me wondering about the psychology of it all. HOW can the majority of the world be convinced there is a pandemic, for what, 15 months and running, and still believe it? I don't believe in magic or spells or any of that, but this sure seems to be as close to one if there ever was.

Sorry for the rant.

I agree. They are obsessed with worry. My friend who had a MILD case of COVID and got both Moderna shots, emails me and said the next wave or something is coming. I say nothing. She will not listen to anybody. I belong to several sewing groups and today a young girl asked for a pattern for a mask for an INFANT. A bunch tell her No too young and others saying it not so nice, and then others yelling at the ones saying no, and most saying if around 18 months then would be find, and one woman said her 2-year-old has been wearing a THREE LAYER mask when playing and all is fine. Calling the ones against masks Debbie Downers LOL. One said she did find a pattern for an infant and good idea to get them used to MASKING. I guess masking is going to be common, brushing teeth, bathing, MASKING, don't forget to mask. So sick of watching people in their car alone or walking on a sidewalk or JOGGING and nobody near them.

 

[inskanoot]

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020)

Brighteon.com is a leading online free platform that empowers free speech, allowing individuals to freely share videos and express their thoughts without any form of censorship. Join us today and be part of our community.

www.brighteon.com

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020), 32:07

 

[TammyinWI]

I have to vent a little bit. I recall, before the election steal, DJT was giving a speech or press conference and he referred to the CV as a 'spell, a spell that had been cast upon the nation'. That's at least pretty close to what he said. I figured it was just speech making hyperbole but more and more I think it's a reality.

In my neck of the world the '3rd wave' has been declared to have hit, or so says the govt and their ministry of truth. They have an already scared public willingly staying home more, wearing their diapers at all times, and looking for someone to blame.
The reality is that it's just a redo of the previous two waves, which were not even ripples. The 15 month cumulative fatality rate is barely over 200 and most of those had severe pre-existing conditions, the kind you don't recover from. Never mind, the govt calls them CV deaths.
The reality is 99.9% of the population has never and is not sick with CV, but the news coverage makes people believe the death wave is enormous and getting worse.
It's all fake. One funny point is that the national health minister is being called on to resign for bungling this latest outbreak. In reality he's handled it so well in scaring the public, they now think he's failed in keeping the pubic safe. Irony at it's best.

To me, it seems as if a spell has been cast on everyone. I've talked to a couple locals and asked if they know that 99.9% of everyone is perfectly healthy, and I get the blank scared stare. I watch people shopping at the big box store - they wear little plastic gloves to hold the shopping cart with, all wear their diapers, and all look slightly scared. WTF is going on?

WTF indeed! Don't people read the new with some discernment and wonder why they don't see sick and dying people everywhere? Why in the big box shopping store are not people coughing and dragging their sick asses around instead of appearing physically healthy? For a nation that has a population greater than the UK, or France, or Canada, and lives on FB and LINE social media, why isn't the social media lit up like a Christmas tree with reports of sick friends, dying relatives, etc?

I'm sure it's the same back home in many states, albeit more people that actually do get sick - but not sick with a deadly killer virus, just sick with flu-like symptoms.

This really gets me wondering about the psychology of it all. HOW can the majority of the world be convinced there is a pandemic, for what, 15 months and running, and still believe it? I don't believe in magic or spells or any of that, but this sure seems to be as close to one if there ever was.

Sorry for the rant.

You betcha there are spells and hocus pocus involved with this. It is occultic/satanism.

It is called the time of great sorrows that we have entered, the great deception. It is called strong delusion.

 

[TammyinWI]

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020)

Brighteon.com is a leading online free platform that empowers free speech, allowing individuals to freely share videos and express their thoughts without any form of censorship. Join us today and be part of our community.

www.brighteon.com

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020), 32:07

I usually do not say this, but I am able to now...because this is the Honest to God Truth: "I told ya so."

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

When Politicians Panicked

SATURDAY, MAY 01, 2021 - 07:15 PM
Authored by John Tamny via TheMarket.ch,

Let’s travel back in time to March of 2020. It was then that predictions of mass death related to the new coronavirus started to gain currency. One study, conducted by Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, indicated that U.S. deaths alone would exceed 2 million.

The above number is often used as justification for the initial lockdowns. «We knew so little» is the excuse, and with so many deaths expected, can anyone blame local, state and national politicians for panicking? The answer is a resounding yes.

To see why, imagine if Ferguson had predicted 30 million American deaths, and hundreds of millions more around the world. Imagine the global fear, which is precisely the point. The more threatening a virus is presumed to be, the more superfluous government force is. Really, who needs to be told to be careful if a failure to be could reasonably result in death?

Death predictions aside, the other justification bruited in March of 2020 was that brief lockdowns would flatten the hospitalization curve. In this case, the taking of freedom allegedly made sense as a way of protecting hospitals from a massive inflow of sick patients that they wouldn’t have been able to handle, and that would have resulted in a public health catastrophe. Such a view similarly vandalizes reason. Think about it.

Really, who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization? Better yet, who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization at a time when doctors and hospitals would be so short staffed as to not be able to take care of admitted patients?

Translated for those who need it, the dire predictions made over a year ago about the corona-horrors that awaited us don’t justify the lockdowns; rather they should remind the mildly sentient among us of how cruel and pointless they were. The common sense that we’re to varying degrees born with, along with our genetic predisposition to survive, dictates that a fear of hospitalization or death would have caused us to take virus-avoidance precautions that would have well exceeded any rules foisted on us by politicians. Goodness, masks and hand sanitizers were selling out in Germany at a time when politicians were still downplaying the virus.

Vital Signals Get Lost
To which some will reply with something along the lines of «Not everyone has common sense. In truth, there are lots of dumb, low-information types out there who would have disregarded all the warnings. Lockdowns weren’t necessary for the wise among us; rather they were essential precisely because there are so many who aren’t wise.» Actually, such a response is the best argument of all against lockdowns.

Indeed, it cannot be stressed enough that «low information» types are the most crucial people of all during periods of uncertainty. Precisely because they’ll be unaware of, misunderstand, or reject the warnings of the experts, their actions will produce essential information that the rule-followers never could. In not doing what the allegedly wise among us will, low information citizens will, by their contrarian actions, teach us what behavior is most associated with avoidance of sickness and death, and more important, what behavior is associated with it.

One-size-fits-all decrees from politicians don’t enhance health outcomes as much as they blind us to the actions (or lack thereof) that would protect us the most, or not. Freedom on its own is a virtue, plus it produces crucial information.


But wait, some will say, «how elitist to let some people act as Guinea Pigs for the rest of us.» Such a statement is naïve. Heroin and cocaine are illegal, but people still use both. Thank goodness they do. How could we know what threatens us, and what doesn’t, without the rebellious?

Economic Growth Is the Best Medicine
Still, there’s the question of «elitism,» or comment about it. The view here is that the lockdowns were the cruelest form of elitism, by far. The implied statement about the lockdowns was that those who had the temerity to have jobs that were destinations would have to lose them. The lockdowns destroyed tens of millions of destination jobs, destroyed or severely impaired millions of businesses, not to mention the hundreds of millions around the world who were rushed into starvation, poverty or both as a consequence of nail-biting politicians in rich countries that chose to take a break from reality. Talk about elitist actions, plus the very idea of wrecking the economy as a virus-mitigation strategy will go down in history as one of the most abjectly stupid policy responses the world has ever endured.

That’s the case because economic growth is easily the biggest enemy death and disease have ever known, while poverty is easily the biggest killer. Economic growth produces the resources necessary so that doctors and scientists can come up with answers to what needlessly sickens us or shortens our lives altogether.

If anyone doubts the above truth, it’s useful to travel back in time to the 19th century. A broken femur then brought with it a 1 out of 3 chance of death, while those lucky enough to survive the break had only one option: amputation. A child born in the 19th century had as good a chance of dying as living. A broken hip was a death sentence, cancer most certainly was, but most didn’t die of cancer because tuberculosis and pneumonia got them first.

So what happened? Why don’t we get sick or die as easily as we used to? The answer is economic growth. Business titans like Johns Hopkins and John D. Rockefeller created enormous wealth, only to direct a lot of it toward medical science. What used to kill us became yesterday’s news.

Even though freedom is its own wondrous virtue, even though freedom produces essential information that protects us, and even though free people produce the resources without which diseases kill with sickening rapidity, panicky politicians erased it in 2020 on the supposition that personal and economic desperation were the best solution for a spreading coronavirus. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the political class in 2020.

 

[marsh]

Hundreds of millions in PPP loans went to CCP-backed firms, as U.S. small businesses went under

An estimated $200-$420 million in emergency U.S. taxpayer-funded loans went to at least 125 companies with significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party

justthenews.com

Hundreds of millions in PPP loans went to CCP-backed firms, as U.S. small businesses went under
An estimated $200-$420 million in emergency U.S. taxpayer-funded loans went to at least 125 companies with significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party
Image

Golden Horseshoe
(Just the News)

By Sophie Mann
Updated: May 1, 2021 - 10:18pm

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s.

This week, our award is going to the United States Small Business Administration and Treasury Department for awarding at least $200 million, but as much as $420 million, to Chinese Communist Party-linked businesses by way of the Paycheck Protection Program, intended to assist U.S. small businesses that were devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, widely believed to have originated in China.

A report from the Horizon Advisory strategic consulting group illustrates how negligible congressional oversight allowed at least 125 Chinese firms to "take advantage of the international disaster” by benefitting “directly from U.S. investment and relief measures."

The authors of the report, Emily de la Bruyere and Nathan Picarsic, point out that Beijing positioning itself to take advantage of an international disaster is not a novel strategic move for the CCP. They point to the 2008 financial crisis as another moment when China purchased depreciated assets, captured market share in strategic domains, and worked to project Chinese standards from emerging systems.

The report, entitled "China's Protection Racket," reveals that publicly available data on the recipients of PPP loans show that "U.S. federal funds intended for Covid-19 recovery and emergency support of U.S. small businesses are benefitting a host of companies owned or invested in by entities based in the People's Republic of China."

The 125 companies that de la Bruyere and Picarsic uncovered have received somewhere between $192 million and $419 million in emergency U.S. taxpayer funding. The significant range is due to the relatively broad way that PPP loans are publicly disclosed. Instead of citing a specific amount that a given business received, it will be listed as having received, for instance, $5-$10 million. Each of these companies was authorized for a loan by the SBA during the initial round of PPP funding.

The types of entities that received U.S. taxpayer dollars include state-owned Chinese defense conglomerates, U.S.-based semiconductor companies owned by Chinese state-controlled capital vehicles, and Chinese-owned media outlets.

Close to two dozen companies that received PPP loans were biopharmaceutical and medical technology companies with significant financial ties to China. Several automotive companies were beneficiaries of the taxpayer funds, including one — Chang'an Automobile — that had been implicated in intellectual property theft from Western car brands.

Noting the irony that while U.S. taxpayer dollars flowed toward propping up Chinese-backed companies "the PPP program did not reach every small business that has been harmed by the Covid-19 crisis," the report observes: "Many U.S. small businesses that did not receive funding have closed up shop or permanently shrunk their work force."

"Many of these firms, by virtue of their Chinese government support and connections to large PRC-based conglomerates, conceivably could access sources of capital from public or private markets to support their U.S. operations," according to the authors.

"To date, Congress has not conducted any meaningful oversight over China's access to PPP loans," they write. "Nor has it restricted access to companies with military ties to Beijing, those that have been accused of IP theft and other predatory behaviors, or those that have been documented as national security risks."

It's been well-documented that the PPP program, while in many ways a success, was also rife with fraud, much of which likely remains undetected. But granting incidental financial favors to CCP-backed companies, as American small businesses suffer, adds a disturbing new twist to the record of ill-intentioned exploitation of the signature pandemic relief program.

 

[Dozdoats]

A long and complex KD rant - read it all at the link if interested.
============

Science Catches Up -- And Burns You All in [Market-Ticker]

2021-04-28 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Covid-19 , 11293 references
Science Catches Up -- And Burns You All*
[Comments enabled]

There is a reason science is a process and until you understand something you should keep your ******ned mouth shut.
Especially when all you have against 40+ years of hard science is computer models.

Massssskss was one of them. I warned early on that physics said masks could not work if the virus was in aerosols or transmitted in feces, no matter whether the feces were manually spread or through aerosols. We knew this was virtually certain when a mass-spread event happened twice in Wuhan and Hong Kong in apartments on the same vertical drain stack where there were no P-traps; the people infected did not know each other and thus any other form of transmission other than through fecal aerosol was wildly improbable. That was ignored. We then had the German meatpacking plant where everyone was wearing masks and yet a huge outbreak took place across tens of feet, a claimed impossibility. Yet it happened and was proved by RNA sequencing; the researchers were able to identify the index and daughter cases and thus conclusively prove that the infections happened in that plant via that route, despite masks.

Now MIT has weighed in and said the same thing. They try to sidestep the mask issue in their "research" but fail; nothing less than an N95, which is not a mask but rather a respirator, stops aerosols, and source control does not work even with N95s because when you exhale the positive pressure escapes around the edges and for aerosols goes right through the gaps. Workplaces and airlines have banned N95s with exhaust valves which preserve the seal on your face and thus are the only ones that will provide protection for you against inhaling said aerosol. Non-valved respirators repeatedly break said seal and thus render it ineffective within minutes. Don't believe me? Put on an N95 without a valve and do some sanding where there's lots of dust, when you take it off let me know what you find around the edges where the respirator used to be. This is why you want the ones with a valve and why the ones I have for such work have a valve.

Pay attention to this paper folks and note its publication date, January 2021. Nobody has paid any attention to it at all yet it is peer-reviewed in Nature, one of the "better" medical publications. I will start right here with what you do not want to read, but you damn well should before you take the shots.

This T cell-mediated immune response is even more important as studies on humoral immunity to SARS-CoV-1 provided evidence that antibody responses are short-lived and can even cause or aggravate virus-associated lung pathology

Note that when you get the shot the first thing you get is antibodies; you may get a T-cell reaction. This pre-existing knowledge, from SARS (CoV-1) entirely explains why people who just got vaccinated often get hammered by the virus and frequently end up in the hospital or die. It marks the premise of attempting to vaccinate out of a pandemic where transmission is actively occurring as stupid.

You go get the shot. Five days later you get the virus. You have not yet developed immunity and the partial expression makes it worse.

You would have been better off, by far, taking the same infection straight up front. It likely would have harmed you less.

This generally applies, by the way, to all vaccines and all viruses. The government and researchers know this. They've known this for decades. It's fact. It's why you don't wait until the measles is raging around you to get a measles vaccine and the same is true for the flu shot; you get it before the flu season starts for this very reason. Attempting to vaccinate out of a raging infection does not work and in fact kills people.

Yeah, if you don't get infected during that latent period you get protection. But if you do get infected you're screwed and all of the two-dose shots have a roughly four week window during which you get hosed instead of protected. Israel's data, by the way, proves this is real; Berenson has been reporting on it since the beginning of the year and I've noted it as well.
If you remember I've also pointed out that multiple studies have shown that somewhere between 30-50% of the population is T-cell reactive to Covid-19 despite never having had it, nor SARS or MERS, its alleged "precursors." But those studies were non-specific; that is, they looked for T-cell reactivity but never tried to identify the specific protein sequences and their part of the whole that was involved. This study does, and it finally puts light on basically the entire reason that what we've done is not only wrong it's criminally stupid.

These folks did what we should have done originally -- they isolated a panel of 120 peptides that comprised roughly 10% of the entire virus, containing 57% and 1% of the nucleocapsid and spike proteins. Note that while the "spike" facilitates entry into the cell there is evidence that it is, standing alone, pathological -- that is, it causes disease in the human body without the rest of the virus. The nucleocapsid portion, on the other hand, is the part that is responsible for replication; if it is tagged and the cell containing it is destroyed then viral replication is prevented even though penetration of the cell has occurred.

///snip

 

[marsh]

STARNES: Michiganders Surrendered Their Freedoms and Now They're Surprised the Governor Won't Give Them Back - Todd Starnes

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced Thursday she will lift coronavirus restrictions after enough residents submit to getting the vaccine, Breitbart reports.

www.toddstarnes.com

STARNES: Michiganders Surrendered Their Freedoms and Now They’re Surprised the Governor Won’t Give Them Back

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced Thursday she will lift coronavirus restrictions after enough residents submit to getting the vaccine, Breitbart reports.

The Democrat governor, who recently lied about traveling to Florida during spring break, received her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine while she made the comments.

“On our path to vaccinating 70 percent of Michiganders 16 and up, we can take steps to gradually get back to normal while keeping people safe,” Whitmer said, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Nationally syndicated radio host Todd Starnes slammed Whitmer for tying personal freedoms to a vaccine.

“If you don’t get that vaccine, you’re not going to be a free state. You will live under the draconian rules of Gretchen Whitmer. This is unbelievable,” he said Friday on the Todd Starnes Radio Show. “But ultimately the fault lies with Michiganders who gladly surrendered their civil liberties in the name of public safety. And they’re really that surprised the Democrat governor refuses to restore their rights?”

Whitmer also said it is a “very real possibility” she and President Biden will allow citizens to celebrate Independence Day without restrictions — if enough Americans get stabbed.

In a cringeworthy tweet, the pro-lockdown governor tweeted a video of her getting poked with the caption: “Shot girl summer!”

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1387841070055280646

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1387841070055280646
(gif)

 

[TammyinWI]

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020)

Brighteon.com is a leading online free platform that empowers free speech, allowing individuals to freely share videos and express their thoughts without any form of censorship. Join us today and be part of our community.

www.brighteon.com

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020), 32:07

Everyone needs to see this!

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?

Self-spreading vaccines that use viruses to confer immunity instead of disease among wild animals could help stop animal diseases from jumping to humans, quashing the next pandemic before it starts. But the new technology is not without risks.

thebulletin.org

Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?
By Filippa Lentzos, Guy Reeves | September 18, 2020

Once a COVID-19 vaccine is approved for public use, officials around the world will face the monumental challenge of vaccinating billions of people, a logistical operation rife with thorny ethical questions. What if instead of orchestrating complicated and resource-intensive campaigns to vaccinate humans against emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, we could instead stop the zoonotic diseases that sometimes leap from animals to people at their source? A small, but growing number of scientists think it’s possible to exploit the self-propagating properties of viruses and use them to spread immunity instead of disease. Can we beat viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, at their own game?

A virus that confers immunity throughout an animal population as it spreads in the wild could theoretically stop a zoonotic spillover event from happening, snuffing out the spark that could ignite the next pandemic. If the wild rats that host the deadly Lassa virus, for example, are vaccinated, the risks of a future outbreak among humans could be reduced. For at least 20 years, scientists have been experimenting with such self-spreading vaccines, work that continues to this day, and which has gained the attention of the US military.

For obvious reasons, public and scientific interest in vaccines is incredibly high, including in self-spreading vaccines, as they could be effective against zoonotic threats. The biologists Scott Nuismer and James Bull generated fresh media attention to self-spreading vaccines over the summer after publishing an article in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. But the subsequent reporting on the topic gives short shrift to the potentially significant downsides to releasing self-spreading vaccines into the environment.

Self-spreading vaccines could indeed entail serious risks, and the prospect of using them raises challenging questions.

Who decides, for instance, where and when a vaccine should be released? Once released, scientists will no longer be in control of the virus. It could mutate, as viruses naturally do. It may jump species. It will cross borders. There will be unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. There always are.

While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?

How they work. Self-spreading vaccines are essentially genetically engineered viruses designed to move through populations in the same way as infectious diseases, but rather than causing disease, they confer protection. Built on the chassis of a benign virus, the vaccines have genetic material from a pathogen added to them that stimulates the creation of antibodies or white blood cells in “infected” hosts.

These vaccines could be particularly useful, some scientists say, for wildlife populations where direct vaccination is difficult due to issues like inaccessible habitats, poor infrastructure, high costs, or lack of resources. The idea, essentially, is to vaccinate a small proportion of a population through direct inoculation. These so-called founders will then passively spread the vaccine to other animals they encounter either by touch, sex, nursing, or breathing the same air. Gradually, these interactions could build up population-level immunity.

A diagram of how a self-spreading vaccine could spread among bats. “Founder” bats inoculated with a self-spreading vaccine passively spread the vaccine to other bats they encounter over time, gradually building up population-level immunity. Credit: Derek Caetano-Anollés.

Self-spreading vaccines have some of their roots in efforts to reduce pest populations. Australian researchers described a virally spread immunocontraception, which hijacked the immune systems of infected animals—in this case a non-native mouse species in Australia—and prevented them from fertilizing offspring. The earliest self-spreading vaccine efforts targeted two highly lethal infectious diseases in the European rabbit population (myxoma virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus). In 2001, Spanish researchers field-tested a vaccinein a wild rabbit population living on Isla del Aire, a small Spanish island just off Menorca. The vaccine spread to more than half the 300 rabbits on the island, and the trial was deemed a success.

In 2015, another team of researchers speculated on the development of a self-spreading vaccine for the Ebola virus that could be used on wild great apes like chimpanzees. Since then, scientists have come to see a wide array of animals—from wildlife such as bats, birds, and foxes to domesticated animals like dogs, pigs, and sheep—as amenable to self-spreading vaccines.

So far, researchers have not developed experimental self-spreading vaccines for humans; there is no clear evidence that anybody is actively working on the technology. Nuismer and Bull argue, rather, that self-spreading vaccines present a revolutionary approach to control emerging infectious diseases before they even spill over from animals into the human population.

Zoonotic spillover is certainly a pressing problem; alongside SARS-CoV-2, HIV, Ebola virus, and the Zika virus, there are over a thousand other new viruses with zoonotic potential that have been detected in wild animals over the last decade. Prevention is better than a cure, Nuismer and Bull say in a New Scientist article. In their Nature Ecology & Evolution article, they claim they are “poised to begin developing self-disseminating vaccines to target a wide range of human pathogens” in animals.

Outside of an experiment, scientists would face massive technical and practical hurdles in identifying the most appropriate targets for intervention and ensuring immunity is maintained in the wildlife populations. Despite these substantial challenges, the potential security implications of self-spreading vaccines are even more serious.

The principal security concern is that of dual-use. In essence, this means that the same research that is used to develop self-spreading vaccines to prevent disease, could also be used to deliberately cause harm. You could, for instance, engineer triggers into a virus that cause immune system failures in infected people or animals, a bit like HIV does naturally. Or you could create triggers in a virus that cause a harmful autoimmune response, where the body starts attacking its own healthy cells and tissues.

The bioweapon question. While researchers may intend to make self-spreading vaccines, others could repurpose their science and develop biological weapons. Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible.

We don’t have to dig very deep for a historical example of weaponized biology. As the apartheid-era South African biowarfare program shows, social, political, and scientific pressures can lead to the misuse of biological innovation.

Codenamed Project Coast, South Africa’s program was primarily focused on covert assassination weapons for use against individuals deemed a threat to the racist apartheid government. In addition to producing contraptions to inject poisons, Project Coast researchers developed techniques to lace sugar cubes with salmonella and cigarettes with Bacillus anthracis.

While there have been many biowarfare programs, including several that were far more elaborate and sophisticated, the South African program is particularly relevant in thinking through malicious uses of self-spreading vaccines. One of Project Coast’s research projects aimed at developing a human anti-fertility vaccine.

The idea took hold during a time of widespread concern over worldwide population explosion. Schalk Van Rensburg, who oversaw fertility-related work at a Project Coast laboratory, told South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for examining the sordid history of the era and laying the foundation for future peace and tolerance, that he thought the project was in line with the World Health Organization’s attempts to curb rising global birth rates. He believed it could bring his lab international acclaim and funding. According to Van Rensburg, Wouter Basson, the director of the biowarfare program, said the military needed an anti-fertility vaccine so that female soldiers would not fall pregnant.

While some of the scientists involved in the project denied awareness of ulterior intentions or even that their fertility work was part of a military endeavor, Van Rensburg and Daniel Goosen, a lab director, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the real intention behind the project was to selectively administer the contraceptive in secret to unwitting Black South African women.

In the end, the anti-fertility vaccine was not produced before Project Coast was officially closed down in 1995, 12 years after it was initiated. An early version was tested in baboons, but never in humans. South Africa isn’t the only country to try and forcibly sterilize parts of its population. European countries, including Sweden and Switzerland, sterilized members of the Roma minority in the early half of the 20th century and some, like Slovakia, continued even beyond that. More recently, analysts have alleged that the Chinese government is sterilizing women in Xinjiang, a province with a large population of Uighur Muslims.

It doesn’t take a massive leap of the imagination to see how the aims of South Africa’s anti-fertility vaccine project would have benefited from research into self-spreading vaccines, particularly if you combine it with current developments in pharmacogenomics, drug development, and personalized medicine. Taken together, these strands of research could help enable ultra-targeted biological warfare.

An expanding potential for abuse. The Biological Weapons Convention, the treaty that bans biological weapons, is nearly 50 years old. Negotiated and agreed to in the depths of the Cold War, the convention suffers from outdated modes of operation. There are also significant compliance assessment challenges. The convention certainly didn’t stop South Africa from pursuing Project Coast in the early 1980s.

Self-spreading vaccine research is a small but growing field. At the moment, about 10 institutions are doing significant work in the area. These laboratories are primarily located in the United States, but some are in Europe and Australia, as well. As the field expands, so does the potential for abuse.

So far research has primarily been bankrolled by US government science and health funders like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Private organizations like the Gates Foundation and academic institutions have also financed projects. Recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sometimes thought of as the US military’s research and development wing, has gotten involved in the research. The University of California, Davis, for example, is working on a DARPA administered project called Prediction of Spillover Potential and Interventional En Masse Animal Vaccination to Prevent Emerging Pathogen Threats in Current and Future Zones of US Military Operation. According to a pamphlet, the project is “creating the world’s first prototype of a self-disseminating vaccine designed to induce a high level of herd immunity (wildlife population level protection) against Lassa virus … and Ebola.”

Military investment in biological innovation for defensive or protective purposes is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention, but it can still send the wrong signals. It could cause countries to doubt one another’s intentions and lead to tit-for-tat investment in potentially risky research, including in self-spreading vaccines. The result of research gone awry or biowarfare could be catastrophic for health and the environment.

At a time when the norm against chemical weapons is degrading, underscored most recently by the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok—a crime for which many European officials blame Russia—the international community simply can’t afford to have the same thing happen to the norm against the use of biological weapons. It would completely defy the spirit of the treaty if it seemed like states would even want to pursue high-risk dual use activities in biology.

Early, open, good-faith conversations about scientific aims and advances that cause particular dual-use concerns, as self-spreading vaccines do, are essential to exploring the broader stakes of certain technical trajectories. The University of California, Davis program is pursuing ways to incorporate an “off switch” to safely control the technology. And DARPA says any field experimentation related to the project would follow biosafety protocols. But these pledges won’t suffice. Our ambition must be to make a collective decision about the technical pathways we are willing, or not willing, to take as a society.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

COVID-19 cure: Scientists plan to develop 'self-spreading' coronavirus vaccine - EconoTimes

While some countries are already seeing progress in containing or the slowing down of the spread of the coronavirus, millions of people are still affected by COVID-19 elsewhere. As scientists ramp up efforts in developing...

econotimes.com

(fair use applies)

COVID-19 cure: Scientists plan to develop 'self-spreading' coronavirus vaccine
Monday, September 28, 2020 12:27 PM UTC

While some countries are already seeing progress in containing or the slowing down of the spread of the coronavirus, millions of people are still affected by COVID-19 elsewhere. As scientists ramp up efforts in developing a cure for COVID-19, a group of researchers has proposed a kind of vaccine that could be transmitted.

Express reports researchers have proposed developing a kind of vaccine that could be transmitted from person to person. Called “self-disseminating vaccines,” they explain that this kind of COVID-19 cure could potentially prevent transmission of coronaviruses between animals and humans. However, this unusual method also comes with risks, such as the possibility of an accidental mutation that could have a negative or fatal effect on humans and wildlife. This risk comes despite the method being economical.

This proposal was in a piece published in Nature magazine called “Self-disseminating vaccines to suppress zoonoses.” The authors of the piece noted how advances in genetic engineering can help solve health crises like this through vaccines that could be transmitted from one person to another.

According to the University of Idaho’s James J. Bull and Scott L. Nuismer, “It is now more apparent than ever that we need a better and more proactive approach,” in stopping coronavirus outbreaks. The two researchers also explain a kind of method of vaccines that could self-transmit through “wild animal reservoirs” to keep the disease from potentially infecting human populations. The downside to this method is that it could bring the original virus back to its harmful state among other “unintended” effects.

Previously, another group of researchers has made a breakthrough in finding a potential COVID-19 cure. Researchers from the University of Bristol led by Professor Christiane Schaffitzel of the School of Biology and Professor Imre Berger from the Max Planck Bristol Center for Minimal Biology found that the coronavirus has a “pocket” on its surface that could be injected with antiviral drugs. This would stop the virus before it even enters a human cell. They found that the virus makes use of a molecule called linoleic acid to bind itself to human cells, and from there it starts replicating.

With these findings, the researchers are now faced with a challenge of how to use this attribute of the virus against itself to end the pandemic.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

see also:

Self-disseminating vaccines to suppress zoonoses - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Vaccines that can spread autonomously through animal populations could help to prevent zoonoses before they spillover into humans. This Perspective discusses the epidemiological theory and the practical challenges associated with transmissible and transferable vaccines.

www.nature.com

Safety and security concerns regarding transmissible vaccines - Nature Ecology & Evolution

www.nature.com

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

The novel coronavirus’ spike protein plays additional key role in illness - Salk Institute for Biological Studies

LA JOLLA—Scientists have known for a while that SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive “spike” proteins help the virus infect its host by latching on to healthy cells. Now, a major new study shows that the virus spike proteins (which behave very differently than those safely encoded by vaccines) also play a...

www.salk.edu

(fair use applies)

The novel coronavirus’ spike protein plays additional key role in illness
Salk researchers and collaborators show how the protein damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a primarily vascular disease
April 30, 2021

LA JOLLA—Scientists have known for a while that SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive “spike” proteins help the virus infect its host by latching on to healthy cells. Now, a major new study shows that they also play a key role in the disease itself.

The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research, also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease, demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system on a cellular level. The findings help explain COVID-19’s wide variety of seemingly unconnected complications, and could open the door for new research into more effective therapies.

Representative images of vascular endothelial control cells (left) and cells treated with the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein (right) show that the spike protein causes increased mitochondrial fragmentation in vascular cells. Click here for a high-resolution image. Credit: Salk Institute


“A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.”

Salk researchers collaborated with scientists at the University of California San Diego on the paper, including co-first author Jiao Zhang and co-senior author John Shyy, among others.

While the findings themselves aren’t entirely a surprise, the paper provides clear confirmation and a detailed explanation of the mechanism through which the protein damages vascular cells for the first time. There’s been a growing consensus that SARS-CoV-2 affects the vascular system, but exactly how it did so was not understood. Similarly, scientists studying other coronaviruses have long suspected that the spike protein contributed to damaging vascular endothelial cells, but this is the first time the process has been documented.

In the new study, the researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls.

The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted ACE2’s molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented.

Previous studies have shown a similar effect when cells were exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this is the first study to show that the damage occurs when cells are exposed to the spike protein on its own.

“If you remove the replicating capabilities of the virus, it still has a major damaging effect on the vascular cells, simply by virtue of its ability to bind to this ACE2 receptor, the S protein receptor, now famous thanks to COVID,” Manor explains. “Further studies with mutant spike proteins will also provide new insight towards the infectivity and severity of mutant SARS CoV-2 viruses.”

The researchers next hope to take a closer look at the mechanism by which the disrupted ACE2 protein damages mitochondria and causes them to change shape.

Other authors on the study are Yuyang Lei and Zu-Yi Yuan of Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China; Cara R. Schiavon, Leonardo Andrade, and Gerald S. Shadel of Salk; Ming He, Hui Shen, Yichi Zhang, Yoshitake Cho, Mark Hepokoski, Jason X.-J. Yuan, Atul Malhotra, Jin Zhang of the University of California San Diego; Lili Chen, Qian Yin, Ting Lei, Hongliang Wang and Shengpeng Wang of Xi’an Jiatong University Health Science Center in Xi’an, China.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Shaanxi Natural Science Fund, the National Key Research and Development Program, the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University; and Xi’an Jiaotong University.

DOI: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.121.318902



PUBLICATION INFORMATION
JOURNAL
Circulation Research
TITLE
SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Impairs Endothelial Function via Downregulation of ACE2
AUTHORS
Yuyang Lei, Jiao Zhang, Cara R Schiavon, Ming He, Lili Chen, Hui Shen, Yichi Zhang, Qian Yin, Yoshitake Cho, Leonardo Andrade, Gerald S Shadel, Mark Hepokoski, Ting Lei, Hongliang Wang, Jin Zhang, Jason X-J Yuan, Atul Malhotra, Uri Manor, Shengpeng Wang, Zu-Yi Yuan, and John Y-J Shyy

 

[155 arty]

Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?

Self-spreading vaccines that use viruses to confer immunity instead of disease among wild animals could help stop animal diseases from jumping to humans, quashing the next pandemic before it starts. But the new technology is not without risks.

thebulletin.org

Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?
By Filippa Lentzos, Guy Reeves | September 18, 2020

Once a COVID-19 vaccine is approved for public use, officials around the world will face the monumental challenge of vaccinating billions of people, a logistical operation rife with thorny ethical questions. What if instead of orchestrating complicated and resource-intensive campaigns to vaccinate humans against emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, we could instead stop the zoonotic diseases that sometimes leap from animals to people at their source? A small, but growing number of scientists think it’s possible to exploit the self-propagating properties of viruses and use them to spread immunity instead of disease. Can we beat viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, at their own game?

A virus that confers immunity throughout an animal population as it spreads in the wild could theoretically stop a zoonotic spillover event from happening, snuffing out the spark that could ignite the next pandemic. If the wild rats that host the deadly Lassa virus, for example, are vaccinated, the risks of a future outbreak among humans could be reduced. For at least 20 years, scientists have been experimenting with such self-spreading vaccines, work that continues to this day, and which has gained the attention of the US military.

For obvious reasons, public and scientific interest in vaccines is incredibly high, including in self-spreading vaccines, as they could be effective against zoonotic threats. The biologists Scott Nuismer and James Bull generated fresh media attention to self-spreading vaccines over the summer after publishing an article in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. But the subsequent reporting on the topic gives short shrift to the potentially significant downsides to releasing self-spreading vaccines into the environment.

Self-spreading vaccines could indeed entail serious risks, and the prospect of using them raises challenging questions.

Who decides, for instance, where and when a vaccine should be released? Once released, scientists will no longer be in control of the virus. It could mutate, as viruses naturally do. It may jump species. It will cross borders. There will be unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. There always are.

While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?

How they work. Self-spreading vaccines are essentially genetically engineered viruses designed to move through populations in the same way as infectious diseases, but rather than causing disease, they confer protection. Built on the chassis of a benign virus, the vaccines have genetic material from a pathogen added to them that stimulates the creation of antibodies or white blood cells in “infected” hosts.

These vaccines could be particularly useful, some scientists say, for wildlife populations where direct vaccination is difficult due to issues like inaccessible habitats, poor infrastructure, high costs, or lack of resources. The idea, essentially, is to vaccinate a small proportion of a population through direct inoculation. These so-called founders will then passively spread the vaccine to other animals they encounter either by touch, sex, nursing, or breathing the same air. Gradually, these interactions could build up population-level immunity.

A diagram of how a self-spreading vaccine could spread among bats. “Founder” bats inoculated with a self-spreading vaccine passively spread the vaccine to other bats they encounter over time, gradually building up population-level immunity. Credit: Derek Caetano-Anollés.

Self-spreading vaccines have some of their roots in efforts to reduce pest populations. Australian researchers described a virally spread immunocontraception, which hijacked the immune systems of infected animals—in this case a non-native mouse species in Australia—and prevented them from fertilizing offspring. The earliest self-spreading vaccine efforts targeted two highly lethal infectious diseases in the European rabbit population (myxoma virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus). In 2001, Spanish researchers field-tested a vaccinein a wild rabbit population living on Isla del Aire, a small Spanish island just off Menorca. The vaccine spread to more than half the 300 rabbits on the island, and the trial was deemed a success.

In 2015, another team of researchers speculated on the development of a self-spreading vaccine for the Ebola virus that could be used on wild great apes like chimpanzees. Since then, scientists have come to see a wide array of animals—from wildlife such as bats, birds, and foxes to domesticated animals like dogs, pigs, and sheep—as amenable to self-spreading vaccines.

So far, researchers have not developed experimental self-spreading vaccines for humans; there is no clear evidence that anybody is actively working on the technology. Nuismer and Bull argue, rather, that self-spreading vaccines present a revolutionary approach to control emerging infectious diseases before they even spill over from animals into the human population.

Zoonotic spillover is certainly a pressing problem; alongside SARS-CoV-2, HIV, Ebola virus, and the Zika virus, there are over a thousand other new viruses with zoonotic potential that have been detected in wild animals over the last decade. Prevention is better than a cure, Nuismer and Bull say in a New Scientist article. In their Nature Ecology & Evolution article, they claim they are “poised to begin developing self-disseminating vaccines to target a wide range of human pathogens” in animals.

Outside of an experiment, scientists would face massive technical and practical hurdles in identifying the most appropriate targets for intervention and ensuring immunity is maintained in the wildlife populations. Despite these substantial challenges, the potential security implications of self-spreading vaccines are even more serious.

The principal security concern is that of dual-use. In essence, this means that the same research that is used to develop self-spreading vaccines to prevent disease, could also be used to deliberately cause harm. You could, for instance, engineer triggers into a virus that cause immune system failures in infected people or animals, a bit like HIV does naturally. Or you could create triggers in a virus that cause a harmful autoimmune response, where the body starts attacking its own healthy cells and tissues.

The bioweapon question. While researchers may intend to make self-spreading vaccines, others could repurpose their science and develop biological weapons. Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible.

We don’t have to dig very deep for a historical example of weaponized biology. As the apartheid-era South African biowarfare program shows, social, political, and scientific pressures can lead to the misuse of biological innovation.

Codenamed Project Coast, South Africa’s program was primarily focused on covert assassination weapons for use against individuals deemed a threat to the racist apartheid government. In addition to producing contraptions to inject poisons, Project Coast researchers developed techniques to lace sugar cubes with salmonella and cigarettes with Bacillus anthracis.

While there have been many biowarfare programs, including several that were far more elaborate and sophisticated, the South African program is particularly relevant in thinking through malicious uses of self-spreading vaccines. One of Project Coast’s research projects aimed at developing a human anti-fertility vaccine.

The idea took hold during a time of widespread concern over worldwide population explosion. Schalk Van Rensburg, who oversaw fertility-related work at a Project Coast laboratory, told South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for examining the sordid history of the era and laying the foundation for future peace and tolerance, that he thought the project was in line with the World Health Organization’s attempts to curb rising global birth rates. He believed it could bring his lab international acclaim and funding. According to Van Rensburg, Wouter Basson, the director of the biowarfare program, said the military needed an anti-fertility vaccine so that female soldiers would not fall pregnant.

While some of the scientists involved in the project denied awareness of ulterior intentions or even that their fertility work was part of a military endeavor, Van Rensburg and Daniel Goosen, a lab director, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the real intention behind the project was to selectively administer the contraceptive in secret to unwitting Black South African women.

In the end, the anti-fertility vaccine was not produced before Project Coast was officially closed down in 1995, 12 years after it was initiated. An early version was tested in baboons, but never in humans. South Africa isn’t the only country to try and forcibly sterilize parts of its population. European countries, including Sweden and Switzerland, sterilized members of the Roma minority in the early half of the 20th century and some, like Slovakia, continued even beyond that. More recently, analysts have alleged that the Chinese government is sterilizing women in Xinjiang, a province with a large population of Uighur Muslims.

It doesn’t take a massive leap of the imagination to see how the aims of South Africa’s anti-fertility vaccine project would have benefited from research into self-spreading vaccines, particularly if you combine it with current developments in pharmacogenomics, drug development, and personalized medicine. Taken together, these strands of research could help enable ultra-targeted biological warfare.

An expanding potential for abuse. The Biological Weapons Convention, the treaty that bans biological weapons, is nearly 50 years old. Negotiated and agreed to in the depths of the Cold War, the convention suffers from outdated modes of operation. There are also significant compliance assessment challenges. The convention certainly didn’t stop South Africa from pursuing Project Coast in the early 1980s.

Self-spreading vaccine research is a small but growing field. At the moment, about 10 institutions are doing significant work in the area. These laboratories are primarily located in the United States, but some are in Europe and Australia, as well. As the field expands, so does the potential for abuse.

So far research has primarily been bankrolled by US government science and health funders like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Private organizations like the Gates Foundation and academic institutions have also financed projects. Recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sometimes thought of as the US military’s research and development wing, has gotten involved in the research. The University of California, Davis, for example, is working on a DARPA administered project called Prediction of Spillover Potential and Interventional En Masse Animal Vaccination to Prevent Emerging Pathogen Threats in Current and Future Zones of US Military Operation. According to a pamphlet, the project is “creating the world’s first prototype of a self-disseminating vaccine designed to induce a high level of herd immunity (wildlife population level protection) against Lassa virus … and Ebola.”

Military investment in biological innovation for defensive or protective purposes is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention, but it can still send the wrong signals. It could cause countries to doubt one another’s intentions and lead to tit-for-tat investment in potentially risky research, including in self-spreading vaccines. The result of research gone awry or biowarfare could be catastrophic for health and the environment.

At a time when the norm against chemical weapons is degrading, underscored most recently by the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok—a crime for which many European officials blame Russia—the international community simply can’t afford to have the same thing happen to the norm against the use of biological weapons. It would completely defy the spirit of the treaty if it seemed like states would even want to pursue high-risk dual use activities in biology.

Early, open, good-faith conversations about scientific aims and advances that cause particular dual-use concerns, as self-spreading vaccines do, are essential to exploring the broader stakes of certain technical trajectories. The University of California, Davis program is pursuing ways to incorporate an “off switch” to safely control the technology. And DARPA says any field experimentation related to the project would follow biosafety protocols. But these pledges won’t suffice. Our ambition must be to make a collective decision about the technical pathways we are willing, or not willing, to take as a society.

What could possibly go wrong??????

 

[glennb6]

Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?

Self-spreading vaccines that use viruses to confer immunity instead of disease among wild animals could help stop animal diseases from jumping to humans, quashing the next pandemic before it starts. But the new technology is not without risks.

thebulletin.org

Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?
By Filippa Lentzos, Guy Reeves | September 18, 2020

Once a COVID-19 vaccine is approved for public use, officials around the world will face the monumental challenge of vaccinating billions of people, a logistical operation rife with thorny ethical questions. What if instead of orchestrating complicated and resource-intensive campaigns to vaccinate humans against emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, we could instead stop the zoonotic diseases that sometimes leap from animals to people at their source? A small, but growing number of scientists think it’s possible to exploit the self-propagating properties of viruses and use them to spread immunity instead of disease. Can we beat viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, at their own game?

A virus that confers immunity throughout an animal population as it spreads in the wild could theoretically stop a zoonotic spillover event from happening, snuffing out the spark that could ignite the next pandemic. If the wild rats that host the deadly Lassa virus, for example, are vaccinated, the risks of a future outbreak among humans could be reduced. For at least 20 years, scientists have been experimenting with such self-spreading vaccines, work that continues to this day, and which has gained the attention of the US military.

For obvious reasons, public and scientific interest in vaccines is incredibly high, including in self-spreading vaccines, as they could be effective against zoonotic threats. The biologists Scott Nuismer and James Bull generated fresh media attention to self-spreading vaccines over the summer after publishing an article in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. But the subsequent reporting on the topic gives short shrift to the potentially significant downsides to releasing self-spreading vaccines into the environment.

Self-spreading vaccines could indeed entail serious risks, and the prospect of using them raises challenging questions.

Who decides, for instance, where and when a vaccine should be released? Once released, scientists will no longer be in control of the virus. It could mutate, as viruses naturally do. It may jump species. It will cross borders. There will be unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. There always are.

While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?

How they work. Self-spreading vaccines are essentially genetically engineered viruses designed to move through populations in the same way as infectious diseases, but rather than causing disease, they confer protection. Built on the chassis of a benign virus, the vaccines have genetic material from a pathogen added to them that stimulates the creation of antibodies or white blood cells in “infected” hosts.

These vaccines could be particularly useful, some scientists say, for wildlife populations where direct vaccination is difficult due to issues like inaccessible habitats, poor infrastructure, high costs, or lack of resources. The idea, essentially, is to vaccinate a small proportion of a population through direct inoculation. These so-called founders will then passively spread the vaccine to other animals they encounter either by touch, sex, nursing, or breathing the same air. Gradually, these interactions could build up population-level immunity.

A diagram of how a self-spreading vaccine could spread among bats. “Founder” bats inoculated with a self-spreading vaccine passively spread the vaccine to other bats they encounter over time, gradually building up population-level immunity. Credit: Derek Caetano-Anollés.

Self-spreading vaccines have some of their roots in efforts to reduce pest populations. Australian researchers described a virally spread immunocontraception, which hijacked the immune systems of infected animals—in this case a non-native mouse species in Australia—and prevented them from fertilizing offspring. The earliest self-spreading vaccine efforts targeted two highly lethal infectious diseases in the European rabbit population (myxoma virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus). In 2001, Spanish researchers field-tested a vaccinein a wild rabbit population living on Isla del Aire, a small Spanish island just off Menorca. The vaccine spread to more than half the 300 rabbits on the island, and the trial was deemed a success.

In 2015, another team of researchers speculated on the development of a self-spreading vaccine for the Ebola virus that could be used on wild great apes like chimpanzees. Since then, scientists have come to see a wide array of animals—from wildlife such as bats, birds, and foxes to domesticated animals like dogs, pigs, and sheep—as amenable to self-spreading vaccines.

So far, researchers have not developed experimental self-spreading vaccines for humans; there is no clear evidence that anybody is actively working on the technology. Nuismer and Bull argue, rather, that self-spreading vaccines present a revolutionary approach to control emerging infectious diseases before they even spill over from animals into the human population.

Zoonotic spillover is certainly a pressing problem; alongside SARS-CoV-2, HIV, Ebola virus, and the Zika virus, there are over a thousand other new viruses with zoonotic potential that have been detected in wild animals over the last decade. Prevention is better than a cure, Nuismer and Bull say in a New Scientist article. In their Nature Ecology & Evolution article, they claim they are “poised to begin developing self-disseminating vaccines to target a wide range of human pathogens” in animals.

Outside of an experiment, scientists would face massive technical and practical hurdles in identifying the most appropriate targets for intervention and ensuring immunity is maintained in the wildlife populations. Despite these substantial challenges, the potential security implications of self-spreading vaccines are even more serious.

The principal security concern is that of dual-use. In essence, this means that the same research that is used to develop self-spreading vaccines to prevent disease, could also be used to deliberately cause harm. You could, for instance, engineer triggers into a virus that cause immune system failures in infected people or animals, a bit like HIV does naturally. Or you could create triggers in a virus that cause a harmful autoimmune response, where the body starts attacking its own healthy cells and tissues.

The bioweapon question. While researchers may intend to make self-spreading vaccines, others could repurpose their science and develop biological weapons. Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible.

We don’t have to dig very deep for a historical example of weaponized biology. As the apartheid-era South African biowarfare program shows, social, political, and scientific pressures can lead to the misuse of biological innovation.

Codenamed Project Coast, South Africa’s program was primarily focused on covert assassination weapons for use against individuals deemed a threat to the racist apartheid government. In addition to producing contraptions to inject poisons, Project Coast researchers developed techniques to lace sugar cubes with salmonella and cigarettes with Bacillus anthracis.

While there have been many biowarfare programs, including several that were far more elaborate and sophisticated, the South African program is particularly relevant in thinking through malicious uses of self-spreading vaccines. One of Project Coast’s research projects aimed at developing a human anti-fertility vaccine.

The idea took hold during a time of widespread concern over worldwide population explosion. Schalk Van Rensburg, who oversaw fertility-related work at a Project Coast laboratory, told South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for examining the sordid history of the era and laying the foundation for future peace and tolerance, that he thought the project was in line with the World Health Organization’s attempts to curb rising global birth rates. He believed it could bring his lab international acclaim and funding. According to Van Rensburg, Wouter Basson, the director of the biowarfare program, said the military needed an anti-fertility vaccine so that female soldiers would not fall pregnant.

While some of the scientists involved in the project denied awareness of ulterior intentions or even that their fertility work was part of a military endeavor, Van Rensburg and Daniel Goosen, a lab director, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the real intention behind the project was to selectively administer the contraceptive in secret to unwitting Black South African women.

In the end, the anti-fertility vaccine was not produced before Project Coast was officially closed down in 1995, 12 years after it was initiated. An early version was tested in baboons, but never in humans. South Africa isn’t the only country to try and forcibly sterilize parts of its population. European countries, including Sweden and Switzerland, sterilized members of the Roma minority in the early half of the 20th century and some, like Slovakia, continued even beyond that. More recently, analysts have alleged that the Chinese government is sterilizing women in Xinjiang, a province with a large population of Uighur Muslims.

It doesn’t take a massive leap of the imagination to see how the aims of South Africa’s anti-fertility vaccine project would have benefited from research into self-spreading vaccines, particularly if you combine it with current developments in pharmacogenomics, drug development, and personalized medicine. Taken together, these strands of research could help enable ultra-targeted biological warfare.

An expanding potential for abuse. The Biological Weapons Convention, the treaty that bans biological weapons, is nearly 50 years old. Negotiated and agreed to in the depths of the Cold War, the convention suffers from outdated modes of operation. There are also significant compliance assessment challenges. The convention certainly didn’t stop South Africa from pursuing Project Coast in the early 1980s.

Self-spreading vaccine research is a small but growing field. At the moment, about 10 institutions are doing significant work in the area. These laboratories are primarily located in the United States, but some are in Europe and Australia, as well. As the field expands, so does the potential for abuse.

So far research has primarily been bankrolled by US government science and health funders like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Private organizations like the Gates Foundation and academic institutions have also financed projects. Recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sometimes thought of as the US military’s research and development wing, has gotten involved in the research. The University of California, Davis, for example, is working on a DARPA administered project called Prediction of Spillover Potential and Interventional En Masse Animal Vaccination to Prevent Emerging Pathogen Threats in Current and Future Zones of US Military Operation. According to a pamphlet, the project is “creating the world’s first prototype of a self-disseminating vaccine designed to induce a high level of herd immunity (wildlife population level protection) against Lassa virus … and Ebola.”

Military investment in biological innovation for defensive or protective purposes is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention, but it can still send the wrong signals. It could cause countries to doubt one another’s intentions and lead to tit-for-tat investment in potentially risky research, including in self-spreading vaccines. The result of research gone awry or biowarfare could be catastrophic for health and the environment.

At a time when the norm against chemical weapons is degrading, underscored most recently by the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok—a crime for which many European officials blame Russia—the international community simply can’t afford to have the same thing happen to the norm against the use of biological weapons. It would completely defy the spirit of the treaty if it seemed like states would even want to pursue high-risk dual use activities in biology.

Early, open, good-faith conversations about scientific aims and advances that cause particular dual-use concerns, as self-spreading vaccines do, are essential to exploring the broader stakes of certain technical trajectories. The University of California, Davis program is pursuing ways to incorporate an “off switch” to safely control the technology. And DARPA says any field experimentation related to the project would follow biosafety protocols. But these pledges won’t suffice. Our ambition must be to make a collective decision about the technical pathways we are willing, or not willing, to take as a society.

that old movie remade with Will Smith, I am Legend, not saying that will happen, it was just a movie, but......

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

What could possibly go wrong??????

There's been a lot of discussion lately of vaccine shedding, which many in the MSM is saying is impossible and just some 'woo' theory. I'm not saying or even implying they accomplished it, but this show's it's not as 'impossible' to conceive of as they are stating as scientists have already been working on it.

that old movie remade with Will Smith, I am Legend, not saying that will happen, it was just a movie, but......

For those who don't remember the movie:
I Am Legend Opening Scene
4min 58 seconds

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DaQ-QhKwtI

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

New Cell Atlas of COVID Lungs Reveals Why SARS-CoV-2 Is Different and Deadly

A new study is drawing the most detailed picture yet of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lung, revealing mechanisms that result in lethal COVID-19, and may explain long-term complications and show how COVID-19 differs from other infectious diseases. Led by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos Co

scitechdaily.com

New Cell Atlas of COVID Lungs Reveals Why SARS-CoV-2 Is Different and Deadly
By Columbia University Irving Medical Center
May 2, 2021

A new study is drawing the most detailed picture yet of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lung, revealing mechanisms that result in lethal COVID-19, and may explain long-term complications and show how COVID-19 differs from other infectious diseases.

Led by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, the study found that in patients who died of the infection, COVID-19 unleashed a detrimental trifecta of runaway inflammation, direct destruction and impaired regeneration of lung cells involved in gas exchange, and accelerated lung scarring.

Though the study looked at lungs from patients who had died of the disease, it provides solid leads as to why survivors of severe COVID may experience long-term respiratory complications due to lung scarring.

“It’s a devastating disease, but the picture we’re getting of the COVID-19 lung is the first step towards identifying potential targets and therapies that disrupt some of the disease’s vicious circuits. In particular, targeting cells responsible for pulmonary fibrosis early on could possibly prevent or ameliorate long-term complications in survivors of severe COVID-19,” says Benjamin Izar, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, who led a group of more than 40 investigators to complete in several months a series of analyses that usually takes years.

This study and a companion paper led by researchers at Harvard/MIT, to which the Columbia investigators also contributed, were published in the journal Nature on April 29.

Study creates atlas of cells in COVID lung

The new study is unique from other investigations in that it directly examines lung tissue (rather than sputum or bronchial washes) using single-cell molecular profiling that can identify each cell in a tissue sample and record each cell’s activity, resulting in an atlas of cells in COVID lung.

“A normal lung will have many of the same cells we find in COVID, but in different proportions and different activation states,” Izar says. “In order to understand how COVID-19 is different compared to both control lungs and other forms of infectious pneumonias, we needed to look at thousands of cells, one by one.”

Izar’s team examined the lungs of 19 individuals who died of COVID-19 and underwent rapid autopsy (within hours of death)—during which lung and other tissues were collected and immediately frozen—and the lungs of non-COVID-19 patients. In collaboration with investigators at Cornell University, the researchers also compared their findings to lungs of patients with other respiratory illnesses.

Drugs targeting IL-1ß may reduce inflammation

Compared to normal lungs, lungs from the COVID patients were filled with immune cells called macrophages, the study found.

Typically during an infection, these cells chew up pathogens but also regulate the intensity of inflammation, which also helps in the fight.

“In COVID-19, we see expansion and uncontrolled activation of macrophages, including alveolar macrophages and monocyte-derived macrophages,” Izar says. “They are completely out of balance and allow inflammation to ramp up unchecked. This results in a vicious cycle where more immune cells come in causing even more inflammation, which ultimately damages the lung tissue.”

One inflammatory cytokine in particular, IL-1ß, is produced at a high rate by these macrophages.

“Unlike other cytokines such as IL-6, which appears to be universally prevalent in various pneumonias, IL-1ß production in macrophages is more pronounced in COVID-19 compared to other viral or bacterial lung infections,” Izar says. “That’s important because drugs exist that tamp down the effects of IL-1ß.”

Some of these drugs are already being tested in clinical trials of COVID patients.

Severe COVID also prevents lung repair

In a typical infection, a virus damages lung cells, the immune system clears the pathogen and the debris, and the lung regenerates.

But in COVID, the new study found that not only does SARS-CoV-2 virus destroy alveolar epithelial cells important for gas exchange, the ensuing inflammation also impairs the ability of the remaining cells to regenerate the damaged lung.

Though the lung still contains cells that can do the repairs, inflammation permanently traps these cells in an intermediate cell state and leaves them unable to complete the last steps of differentiation needed for replacement of mature lung epithelium.

“Among others, IL-1ß appears to be a culprit in inducing and maintaining this intermediate cell state,” says Izar, “thereby linking inflammation and impaired lung regeneration in COVID-19. This suggests that in addition to reducing inflammation, targeting IL-1ß may help take the brakes off cells required for lung repair.”

Preventing accelerated fibrosis

The researchers also found a large number of specific fibroblast cells, called pathological fibroblasts, that create rapid scarring in COVID-19 lungs. When the fibroblast cells fill the lung with scar tissue, a process called fibrosis, the lung has less space for cells involved in gas exchange and is permanently damaged.

Given the importance of pathological fibroblasts in the disease, Izar’s team closely analyzed the cells to uncover potential drug targets. An algorithm called VIPER, developed previously by Andrea Califano, Dr, chair of systems biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, identified several molecules in the cells that play an important role and could be targeted by existing drugs.

“This analysis predicted that inhibition of STAT signaling could alleviate some of the deleterious effects caused by pathological fibroblasts,” Izar says.

“Our hope is that by sharing this analysis and massive data resource, other researchers and drug companies can begin to test and expand on these ideas and find treatments to not only treat critically ill patients, but also reduce complications in people who survive severe COVID-19.”

Team effort by several Columbia labs

“Pulling this study together in such a short period of time was only possible with the help of several teams of researchers at Columbia,” Izar says.

Critically, in the first few months of the pandemic, Columbia’s Department of Pathology & Cell Biology decided to flash-freeze many tissues from deceased COVID patients to preserve the cells’ molecular state. Hanina Hibshoosh, MD, director of the department’s tissue bank, initiated the collaboration with Izar’s lab, which has expertise in conducting single-cell analyses with frozen tissue. Pathologist Anjali Saqi, MD, professor of pathology & cell biology, was also instrumental in procuring and evaluating the samples.

Jianwen Que, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, and his laboratory provided expertise in identifying and characterizing cells in the lung and their regenerative potential. Fibrosis expert Robert Schwabe, MD, associate professor of medicine, was essential in dissecting mechanisms by which COVID-19 propelled lung scarring.

“We are incredibly grateful to all the labs contributing to this effort and very fortunate to be at Columbia with all the necessary expertise at hand in one collaborative environment,” Izar says.

Reference: “A molecular single-cell lung atlas of lethal COVID-19” by Johannes C. Melms, Jana Biermann, Huachao Huang, Yiping Wang, Ajay Nair, Somnath Tagore, Igor Katsyv, André F. Rendeiro, Amit Dipak Amin, Denis Schapiro, Chris J. Frangieh, Adrienne M. Luoma, Aveline Filliol, Yinshan Fang, Hiranmayi Ravichandran, Mariano G. Clausi, George A. Alba, Meri Rogava, Sean W. Chen, Patricia Ho, Daniel T. Montoro, Adam E. Kornberg, Arnold S. Han, Mathieu F. Bakhoum, Niroshana Anandasabapathy, Mayte Suárez-Fariñas, Samuel F. Bakhoum, Yaron Bram, Alain Borczuk, Xinzheng V. Guo, Jay H. Lefkowitch, Charles Marboe, Stephen M. Lagana, Armando Del Portillo, Emmanuel Zorn, Glen S. Markowitz, Robert F. Schwabe, Robert E. Schwartz, Olivier Elemento, Anjali Saqi, Hanina Hibshoosh, Jianwen Que and Benjamin Izar, 29 April 2021, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03569-1

The researchers were supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (grants K08CA222663, U54CA225088, R37CA258829, R01HL152293, R01HL132996, T32CA203702, UL1TR002384, R01CA194547, R01CA234614, R01AI107301, R01DK121072 and R03DK117252); FastGrants; a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists; the Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Scholars Program; the U.S. Department of Defense (Discovery Award PR200616); Volastra, Janssen, and Eli Lilly research grants; the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (grants SCOR 7012-16, SCOR 7021-20, and SCOR 180078-02); an Irma Hirschl Trust Research Award Scholar; and the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation (DRQ-03-20).

This research was funded in part through the NIH Support Grant S10RR027050 for flow cytometry analysis and the NIH/NCI Cancer Center Support Grant P30CA013696 at Columbia University’s Genetically Modified Mouse Model Shared Resource, Molecular Pathology Shared Resource, and Tissue Bank.

Benjamin Izar is a consultant for Merck and Volastra Therapeutics. Olivier Elemento is scientific advisor and equity holder in Freenome, Owkin, Volastra Therapeutics, and OneThree Biotech. Robert E. Schwartz is a member of the scientific advisory board of Miromatrix Inc. Daniel T. Montoro is a consultant for LASE Innovation.

 

[glennb6]

A long and complex KD rant - read it all at the link if interested.
============

Science Catches Up -- And Burns You All in [Market-Ticker]

2021-04-28 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Covid-19 , 11293 references
Science Catches Up -- And Burns You All*
[Comments enabled]

There is a reason science is a process and until you understand something you should keep your ******ned mouth shut.
Especially when all you have against 40+ years of hard science is computer models.

Massssskss was one of them. I warned early on that physics said masks could not work if the virus was in aerosols or transmitted in feces, no matter whether the feces were manually spread or through aerosols. We knew this was virtually certain when a mass-spread event happened twice in Wuhan and Hong Kong in apartments on the same vertical drain stack where there were no P-traps; the people infected did not know each other and thus any other form of transmission other than through fecal aerosol was wildly improbable. That was ignored. We then had the German meatpacking plant where everyone was wearing masks and yet a huge outbreak took place across tens of feet, a claimed impossibility. Yet it happened and was proved by RNA sequencing; the researchers were able to identify the index and daughter cases and thus conclusively prove that the infections happened in that plant via that route, despite masks.

Now MIT has weighed in and said the same thing. They try to sidestep the mask issue in their "research" but fail; nothing less than an N95, which is not a mask but rather a respirator, stops aerosols, and source control does not work even with N95s because when you exhale the positive pressure escapes around the edges and for aerosols goes right through the gaps. Workplaces and airlines have banned N95s with exhaust valves which preserve the seal on your face and thus are the only ones that will provide protection for you against inhaling said aerosol. Non-valved respirators repeatedly break said seal and thus render it ineffective within minutes. Don't believe me? Put on an N95 without a valve and do some sanding where there's lots of dust, when you take it off let me know what you find around the edges where the respirator used to be. This is why you want the ones with a valve and why the ones I have for such work have a valve.

Pay attention to this paper folks and note its publication date, January 2021. Nobody has paid any attention to it at all yet it is peer-reviewed in Nature, one of the "better" medical publications. I will start right here with what you do not want to read, but you damn well should before you take the shots.

Note that when you get the shot the first thing you get is antibodies; you may get a T-cell reaction. This pre-existing knowledge, from SARS (CoV-1) entirely explains why people who just got vaccinated often get hammered by the virus and frequently end up in the hospital or die. It marks the premise of attempting to vaccinate out of a pandemic where transmission is actively occurring as stupid.

You go get the shot. Five days later you get the virus. You have not yet developed immunity and the partial expression makes it worse.

You would have been better off, by far, taking the same infection straight up front. It likely would have harmed you less.

This generally applies, by the way, to all vaccines and all viruses. The government and researchers know this. They've known this for decades. It's fact. It's why you don't wait until the measles is raging around you to get a measles vaccine and the same is true for the flu shot; you get it before the flu season starts for this very reason. Attempting to vaccinate out of a raging infection does not work and in fact kills people.

Yeah, if you don't get infected during that latent period you get protection. But if you do get infected you're screwed and all of the two-dose shots have a roughly four week window during which you get hosed instead of protected. Israel's data, by the way, proves this is real; Berenson has been reporting on it since the beginning of the year and I've noted it as well.
If you remember I've also pointed out that multiple studies have shown that somewhere between 30-50% of the population is T-cell reactive to Covid-19 despite never having had it, nor SARS or MERS, its alleged "precursors." But those studies were non-specific; that is, they looked for T-cell reactivity but never tried to identify the specific protein sequences and their part of the whole that was involved. This study does, and it finally puts light on basically the entire reason that what we've done is not only wrong it's criminally stupid.

These folks did what we should have done originally -- they isolated a panel of 120 peptides that comprised roughly 10% of the entire virus, containing 57% and 1% of the nucleocapsid and spike proteins. Note that while the "spike" facilitates entry into the cell there is evidence that it is, standing alone, pathological -- that is, it causes disease in the human body without the rest of the virus. The nucleocapsid portion, on the other hand, is the part that is responsible for replication; if it is tagged and the cell containing it is destroyed then viral replication is prevented even though penetration of the cell has occurred.

///snip

Not so many are Denninger fans, but here's a punch line from one of his more recent articles;

" How do you solve the problem when a program is going broke? Kill the recipients. "
This was in reference to Medicare. Read on and do you suppose many in the fed bureaucracies and many state governors too the same pragmatic fiscal view?

The Market Ticker Error: Post Not Available

market-ticker.org

Death. Yours.
[Comments enabled]

Below the radar, mostly, is a proposal by Biden to move the Medicare age down to 60 from 65.
This was part of the campaign, if you remember, but it largely disappeared once the voting was over.
Or did it?
Well, not really. Biden is being pushed hard to include it in the next reconciliation bill, which if you recall is limited to tax and spending measures, as it can then be passed without any Republican support, bypassing the filibuster. This would qualify.
The impact would be very material for both employers and other people in the current 60-65 bracket, where health "insurance" (not really, as I've discussed repeatedly) is ridiculously expensive and winds up forcing people out of the workforce involuntarily. Yes, I know, it's illegal to force someone out on the basis of age. If you think it doesn't happen you're smoking crack.
Most people who get Medicare pay nothing for their Medicare Part "A" because they earned sufficient credits during their working years. This isn't "free"; you paid into it with the Medicare tax during your working life. If you weren't working enough of those years then you get a bill, and it's pretty sizeable too -- but most people aren't exposed to that.
Medicare Part "B" virtually everyone pays for; the premium is income-based. If you have under about $90,000 in income as a single person then it's pretty cheap; about $150/month. It goes up if you have a higher income to as high as $500, but you have to be making a half-million a year to be hit that hard. Part "B" covers medical other than hospitals.
There are also options for Part "D" (drugs) and "C" (which subsumes the others; this is Medicare Advantage, and is one-premium.) Of note if you do not sign up when you become eligible there is a permanent penalty for signing up late with no way out of it.
Medicare is an 80/20 plan; you pay 20%. There is also a modest deductible. Note that unlike "private insurance", however, you cannot be "balance billed" if on Medicare and in addition while you get hit for the 20% it is at the Medicare negotiated rate always, which means no game-playing and butt****ery that is commonly served up upon privately insured or uninsured (including on Obamacare) persons. These protections are very real and extending them down, along with wiping out the "screw you" rates as you age, would be quite beneficial to a huge number of people.
If you live.
However, remember that there is no free lunch. Without breaking up the medical monopolists and imprisoning them someone is going to pay and the someone will be those who don't qualify. Note that Bernie Sanders wants the eligibility age moved down to 50 instead of 60 -- I rate the odds of that as basically zero.
But moving it to 60 might well happen. The medical and insurance lobby is wildly opposed to this, as you might expect, as those people in that five-year bracket are some of their most-valuable customers.
You'd think that I'd find this to be quite useful for a lot of people, and it is wildly popular among the population.
Well, my view is not to oppose it. It is to point out that you had better not need it, which means as I've warned for more than a decade you better do everything in your power to get rid of a need for medical care at all.
Folks, with the budget-busting BS that Biden has accelerated, but Trump was doing just as badly with the Covid garbage that this will blow up in our face is a fiscal certainty, whether Biden does this or not. If you need significant medical care over the next decade or two you may as well figure out your will and plans for disposal of your remains because you are going to die and, if it's from a condition rather than by your own hand when the obvious decline begins you're not going to like it.
If you think that "care" you were promised and think you deserve will exist and be able to be funded you're nuts.
If you think they won't simply deny care and kill you you're wrong. They will. It's proved they will. This is not some conspiracy theory, it's fact. We know it's fact because they've been doing it for the last year and slaughtered over 400,000 of said Americans.
Do you know why there are a whole bunch of dead people allegedly from "The Coof" over the last year?
Because the government paid them a bonus for each toe tag and an even bigger one if they used a pointedly-useless ventilator, while at the same time setting "corporate standards" that inexpensive, known safe and likely-effective drugs, known by summer, were not to be used and thus said old people will die and stop consuming Medicare funds.
Don't think so?
Then explain why those with serious and progressive lung diseases, COPD and Emphysema to name two, had fewer deaths in 2020 than 2019 despite a raging respiratory infection pandemic!
I'll explain it again as I did the other day: Virtually every one of those people was already on one of those safe, reasonably inexpensive and now known effective drugs -- inhaled steroids. They couldn't cut those drugs off for those people without it being obvious that they were murdering people but they refused to hand them out to everyone who got infected even though they knew they worked as they had the data and intentionally disregarded it. There are approximately 30 million such Americans and they should have dropped like flies -- they did not.
Never mind that most of the people with COPD and Emphysema are older and generally quite-morbid, so CMS (Medicare) has extensive data on every single one of them and their medical charts; is it really very hard to run a few SQL queries? Obviously, no. They knew, they didn't give a crap and the more old people who die due to intentional refusal to treat the less money the government spends.
What did you say the average age of a Covid-19 death was in the US again?
Hint: 80% of all people who died "of" Covid-19 thus far in the US were on Medicare.
How do you solve the problem when a program is going broke? Kill the recipients.
Note that if you moved the age for Medicare to 50, forcing everyone on it at 50 years of age, 96% of those who died would have been permanently removed from said benefits.
They already killed 1% of all the Social Security and Medicare recipients with this round. This is not pocket change; CMS spent $1.794 trillion last year so we're talking about $18 billion each and every year for those who died "early" plus whatever Social Security doesn't have to fork up.
Do you really think you'll get whatever treatment you need down the road when the government has already proved they will withhold, on purpose, $5 worth of pills and a $7 inhaler (if bought in the EU or India; they want $300 for them here in the US) so as to cause you to die this time around?
The government intentionally killed your grandmother -- and you're next if you need medical attention.
Any questions?

 

[marsh]

'Unlock Michigan' Sues Michigan Bureau of Elections after State Officials will Not Accept Petition to Repeal Gretchen Whitmer's Emergency Lockdowns | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

The Michigan grassroots group “Unlock Michigan” is suing the Michigan Bureau of Elections after the state agency refused to accept their petition to repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency lockdown.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

‘Unlock Michigan’ Sues Michigan Bureau of Elections after State Officials will Not Accept Petition to Repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s Emergency Lockdowns

By Jim Hoft
Published May 3, 2021 at 10:01am

The Michigan grassroots group “Unlock Michigan” is suing the Michigan Bureau of Elections after the state agency refused to accept their petition to repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency lockdown.

“Unlock Michigan” launched their campaign as the hypocrite Democrat Governor continues to ruin small businesses and lives across the state with her failed draconian lockdown policies.

Unlock Michigan released this video starring barber Karl Manke who was arrested during Whitmer’s unlimited lockdown policies.

View: https://youtu.be/K63xjWIlA3c
5:26 min

This same agency approved of the fraudulent elections in the state but won’t approve a people’s petition!

They are openly flaunting their tyranny.

Freep.com reported:

A group that sponsored a petition drive to repeal a state emergency law asked the Michigan Supreme Court Friday to order a state elections panel to certify its efforts.

Unlock Michigan went to court after the Board of State Canvassers deadlocked 2-2, along partisan lines, on certifying its petition to repeal the Emergency Powers of Governor Act of 1945.

“In refusing to act, the board failed to fulfill its clear duty to certify and violated plaintiffs’ constitutional rights,” Unlock Michigan and two voters who signed its petition said in a court filing. Disputes over certification of ballot proposals now go directly to the Supreme Court, which is where they have generally ended up anyway.

The emergency law became a hot button issue last spring after Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used it to issue a stay-home order and other restrictions to address the coronavirus pandemic, over the objections of the Republican-controlled Legislature.

 

[marsh]

Obese are the real Covid super-spreaders… ‘They produce 1,000X times the infected air particles as normal people’…

Super-spreaders really do exist. Scientists have found people who produce 1,000 times as many as aerosol particles as their peers when they breathe out, making them a far greater risk. &nbsp…

citizenfreepress.com

Obese are the real Covid super-spreaders… ‘They produce 1,000X times the infected air particles as normal people’…

Posted by Kane on May 3, 2021 2:45 pm



Super-spreaders really do exist. Scientists have found people who produce 1,000 times as many as aerosol particles as their peers when they breathe out, making them a far greater risk.

The older and more overweight people were, the more likely they were to be among the 20 per cent who exhaled 80 per cent of aerosol droplets, the study showed.

The information could be key in understanding the dynamics of the pandemic, the researchers said. It is now well established that Covid-19 is driven by “super-spreading”. Most people with the virus do not infect anyone else, but a small number of people infect many others.

SOURCE — THE TIMES

 

[marsh]

Reaching Covid-19 'herd immunity' is unlikely in the US, experts now believe

There is widespread consensus that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable - at least not in the foreseeable future. Read more at straitstimes.com.

www.straitstimes.com

Reaching Covid-19 'herd immunity' is unlikely in the US, experts now believe

More than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine.PHOTO: AFP

• PUBLISHED
  MAY 3, 2021, 3:00 PM SGT

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term "herd immunity" came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so people could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim their lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable - at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalisations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunisations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

"The virus is unlikely to go away," said Professor Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "But we want to do all we can to check that it's likely to become a mild infection."

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for the public health authorities.

The drive for herd immunity - by the summer, some experts once thought possible - captured the imagination of large segments of the public.

To say the goal will not be attained adds another "why bother" to the list of reasons that vaccine sceptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration's top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts' thinking.

"People were getting confused and thinking you're never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is," he said.

"That's why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense," he added. "I'm saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down."

A difficult threshold
Once the coronavirus began to spread across the globe in early 2020, it became increasingly clear that the only way out of the pandemic would be for so many people to gain immunity - whether through natural infection or vaccination - that the virus would run out of people to infect. The concept of reaching herd immunity became the implicit goal in many countries, including the US.

Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the population. Most experts, including Dr Fauci, expected that the US would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.

But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B117 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 per cent more transmissible.

As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 per cent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunised people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.

Polls show that about 30 per cent of the US population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough.

"It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 per cent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say," said Professor Marc Lipsitch, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Although resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the US is unlikely to reach herd immunity, it is not the only one.

Herd immunity is often described as a national target. But that is a hazy concept in a country this large.

"Disease transmission is local," Prof Lipsitch noted.

"If the coverage is 95 per cent in the United States as a whole, but 70 per cent in some small town, the virus doesn't care," he explained. "It will make its way around the small town."

Given the degree of movement among regions, a small virus wave in a region with a low vaccination level can easily spill over into an area where a majority of the population is protected.

At the same time, the connectivity between countries, particularly as travel restrictions ease, emphasises the urgency of protecting not just Americans but everyone in the world, said Dr Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Any variants that arise in the world will eventually reach the US, she noted.

Many parts of the world lag far behind the US on vaccinations. Less than 2 per cent of the people in India have been fully vaccinated, for example, and less than 1 per cent in South Africa, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

"We will not achieve herd immunity as a country or a state or even as a city until we have enough immunity in the population as a whole," said Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the Covid-19 Modelling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin.

What the future may hold
If the herd immunity threshold is not attainable, what matters most is the rate of hospitalisations and deaths after pandemic restrictions are relaxed, experts believe.

By focusing on vaccinating the most vulnerable, the US has already brought those numbers down sharply. If the vaccination levels of that group continue to rise, the expectation is that over time the coronavirus may become seasonal, like the flu, and affect mostly the young and healthy.

"What we want to do at the very least is get to a point where we have just really sporadic little flare-ups," said Professor Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "That would be a very sensible target in this country, where we have an excellent vaccine and the ability to deliver it."

Over the long term - a generation or two - the goal is to transition the new coronavirus to become more like its cousins that cause common colds. That would mean the first infection is early in childhood, and subsequent infections are mild because of partial protection, even if immunity wanes.

Some unknown proportion of people with mild cases may go on to experience debilitating symptoms for weeks or months - a syndrome called "long Covid" - but they are unlikely to overwhelm the healthcare system.

"The vast majority of the mortality and of the stress on the healthcare system comes from people with a few particular conditions, and especially people who are over 60," Prof Lipsitch said. "If we can protect those people against severe illness and death, then we will have turned Covid from a society disrupter to a regular infectious disease."

 

[marsh]

The ‘consensus’ about no Covid herd immunity is political, not scientific

Covid-19 is here to stay, and if you're a freedom-loving conservative, a Covid-vaccine-skeptic, or both, it's all your fault. Well,

conservativeplaybook.com

The ‘Consensus’ About No Covid Herd Immunity Is Political, Not Scientific

The New York Times is playing their part in the long game of perpetual Covid-19 authoritarianism running every aspect of our lives.

by JD Rucker
May 3, 2021

Covid-19 is here to stay, and if you’re a freedom-loving conservative, a Covid-vaccine-skeptic, or both, it’s all your fault. Well, mostly. According to the NY Times, there is some blame to be passed along to the Chinese-created coronavirus itself as it mutates faster than Dr. Anthony Fauci’s talking points. But really, the overarching message from the NY Times that is being echoed by leftists on social media is that it’s all your fault, you anti-science knuckle-dragging hillbilly MAGA bigot!

The NY Times article declares, “Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe.” They call it a “consensus.” They used scienc-esque sounding words to make us believe there is no light at the end of the tunnel, mostly because of the people who are concerned about vaccines that are experimental, not FDA-approved, and did not fit the definition of “vaccine” until they changed the meaning in the Merriam-Webster dictionary a few weeks ago.

If you’re reading this article, chances are you engage in some combination of fighting against face masks, social distancing, lockdowns, or vaccines, and therefore our readers are the target market for the hatred being pushed by the NY Times.

But this isn’t really about the science. If we wanted herd immunity, we would have done what has always been done since the notion of herd immunity came into being. We would have kept things open, dumped the masks (whose efficacy is questionable at best), loaded up on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and allowed otherwise healthy people to live their lives. Over time, herd immunity could have been achieved. Meanwhile, we could have protected the most vulnerable by enacting policies that were the exact opposite of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo until herd immunity amongst the younger population was achieved.

No, I’m not a doctor. I’ve only read or listened to what real doctors have been saying for over a year. Call me a medical junky; I was following Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Joseph Mercola since before it was cool. And what those who are apparently not part of the “consensus” have been saying all along is that we need to protect the vulnerable and let everyone else take their chances if they so wish. Freedom was the path to herd immunity and the formerly freest nation in the world failed to walk it.

Now, the narrative is being formed around no future herd immunity. This is political, 100%. It’s about keeping us blaming each other, but more importantly it’s the latest phase in the “get vaccinated you dumb Neanderthal” agenda. But the biggest reason they’re putting this “consensus” out there now is to set the stage for Covid-19, Covid-22, Covid-23, Covid-25… to be our ongoing top-of-mind policy master in perpetuity. According to the NY Times article:

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.”

Did you hear (read) what Fauci said? He referred to stopping using the term herd immunity in the “classic sense.” What he’s really saying is that the concept of herd immunity is for us to forget ever getting there. Why? Because we’re much closer to getting there than Fauci or the Covid tyrants want us to realize.

There are many common misconceptions about herd immunity, so let’s debunk a few. For herd immunity to be achieved, that does not mean everyone or even nearly everyone needs to be immune. We achieved herd immunity for past diseases when around 40% were immune. That number makes it too challenging for a disease to properly flourish, allowing it to die off naturally. With a disease as contagious as Covid-19, the number may approach 50%. But it’s not 65%, 80%, or even 100% as I’ve heard from some so-called experts.

Way back when before pretty much everyone in mainstream media was conscripted into the Covid tyrants’ army, there was even a report on Newsweek through MSN that said Covid herd immunity could be achieved at 47% infection rate. Where are we now? Some say we’re as high as 40%, but the consensus (a real one this time) is that around 1/3rd of the population has been infected at one point or another over the last year.

As mentioned before, it’s not ALL about us hillbillies keeping the nation down with our embrace of freedom and skepticism of vaccine pseudo-science. The disease has to take some of the blame because states like Florida and Texas are doing better without lockdowns than states like California, New York, or Michigan where lockdowns are the new permanent normal. They needed a scapegoat and the disease allegedly provided it by creating new strains every couple of days, or so it seems. The NY Times article made sure to create the strains boogeyman to drive the fear of the Covid gods into the hearts of mortal men:

Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 to 70 percent of the population. Most experts, including Dr. Fauci, expected that the United States would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.

But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B.1.1.7 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 percent more transmissible.

As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.

Polls show that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough. “It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 percent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Though resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the United States is unlikely to reach herd immunity, it is not the only one.

The narrative the Covid tyrants have created is a two-edged sword. Either we allegedly reach “herd immunity” by vaccinating everyone, in which case they win, or we never reach herd immunity, in which case they win. Either way, it’s the people who lose.

 

[marsh]

https://archive.fo/WDcT7 [NY Times]

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe

Widely circulating coronavirus variants and persistent hesitancy about vaccines will keep the goal out of reach. The virus is here to stay, but vaccinating the most vulnerable may be enough to restore normalcy.

Vaccinations at the American Airlines Arena in Miami on Thursday. Though there is consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable, it may not be all bad news.Credit...Saul Martinez for The New York Times


y Apoorva Mandavilli
May 3, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.”

Why reaching the threshold is tough

Image
Crowds on the National Mall in April. Resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the United States is unlikely to reach herd immunity, but it is not the only one.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

Once the novel coronavirus began to spread across the globe in early 2020, it became increasingly clear that the only way out of the pandemic would be for so many people to gain immunity — whether through natural infection or vaccination — that the virus would run out of people to infect. The concept of reaching herd immunity became the implicit goal in many countries, including the United States.

Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 to 70 percent of the population. Most experts, including Dr. Fauci, expected that the United States would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.

But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B.1.1.7 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 percent more transmissible.

As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.

Polls show that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough. “It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 percent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Though resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the United States is unlikely to reach herd immunity, it is not the only one.

Herd immunity is often described as a national target. But that is a hazy concept in a country this large.

 

[marsh]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1388851439921864707

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1388851439921864707
.48 min

Man being arrested for not having a mask

 

[TammyinWI]

'Unlock Michigan' Sues Michigan Bureau of Elections after State Officials will Not Accept Petition to Repeal Gretchen Whitmer's Emergency Lockdowns | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

The Michigan grassroots group “Unlock Michigan” is suing the Michigan Bureau of Elections after the state agency refused to accept their petition to repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency lockdown.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

‘Unlock Michigan’ Sues Michigan Bureau of Elections after State Officials will Not Accept Petition to Repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s Emergency Lockdowns

By Jim Hoft
Published May 3, 2021 at 10:01am

The Michigan grassroots group “Unlock Michigan” is suing the Michigan Bureau of Elections after the state agency refused to accept their petition to repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency lockdown.

“Unlock Michigan” launched their campaign as the hypocrite Democrat Governor continues to ruin small businesses and lives across the state with her failed draconian lockdown policies.

Unlock Michigan released this video starring barber Karl Manke who was arrested during Whitmer’s unlimited lockdown policies.

View: https://youtu.be/K63xjWIlA3c
5:26 min

This same agency approved of the fraudulent elections in the state but won’t approve a people’s petition!

They are openly flaunting their tyranny.

Freep.com reported:

Praying for this group to prevail, as they should! All of the oppressive, illegal stuff has got to be stopped!

 

[TammyinWI]

Reaching Covid-19 'herd immunity' is unlikely in the US, experts now believe

There is widespread consensus that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable - at least not in the foreseeable future. Read more at straitstimes.com.

www.straitstimes.com

Reaching Covid-19 'herd immunity' is unlikely in the US, experts now believe

More than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine.PHOTO: AFP

• PUBLISHED
  MAY 3, 2021, 3:00 PM SGT

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term "herd immunity" came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so people could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim their lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable - at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalisations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunisations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

"The virus is unlikely to go away," said Professor Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "But we want to do all we can to check that it's likely to become a mild infection."

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for the public health authorities.

The drive for herd immunity - by the summer, some experts once thought possible - captured the imagination of large segments of the public.

To say the goal will not be attained adds another "why bother" to the list of reasons that vaccine sceptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration's top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts' thinking.

"People were getting confused and thinking you're never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is," he said.

"That's why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense," he added. "I'm saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down."

A difficult threshold
Once the coronavirus began to spread across the globe in early 2020, it became increasingly clear that the only way out of the pandemic would be for so many people to gain immunity - whether through natural infection or vaccination - that the virus would run out of people to infect. The concept of reaching herd immunity became the implicit goal in many countries, including the US.

Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the population. Most experts, including Dr Fauci, expected that the US would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.

But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B117 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 per cent more transmissible.

As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 per cent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunised people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.

Polls show that about 30 per cent of the US population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough.

"It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 per cent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say," said Professor Marc Lipsitch, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Although resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the US is unlikely to reach herd immunity, it is not the only one.

Herd immunity is often described as a national target. But that is a hazy concept in a country this large.

"Disease transmission is local," Prof Lipsitch noted.

"If the coverage is 95 per cent in the United States as a whole, but 70 per cent in some small town, the virus doesn't care," he explained. "It will make its way around the small town."

Given the degree of movement among regions, a small virus wave in a region with a low vaccination level can easily spill over into an area where a majority of the population is protected.

At the same time, the connectivity between countries, particularly as travel restrictions ease, emphasises the urgency of protecting not just Americans but everyone in the world, said Dr Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Any variants that arise in the world will eventually reach the US, she noted.

Many parts of the world lag far behind the US on vaccinations. Less than 2 per cent of the people in India have been fully vaccinated, for example, and less than 1 per cent in South Africa, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

"We will not achieve herd immunity as a country or a state or even as a city until we have enough immunity in the population as a whole," said Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the Covid-19 Modelling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin.

What the future may hold
If the herd immunity threshold is not attainable, what matters most is the rate of hospitalisations and deaths after pandemic restrictions are relaxed, experts believe.

By focusing on vaccinating the most vulnerable, the US has already brought those numbers down sharply. If the vaccination levels of that group continue to rise, the expectation is that over time the coronavirus may become seasonal, like the flu, and affect mostly the young and healthy.

"What we want to do at the very least is get to a point where we have just really sporadic little flare-ups," said Professor Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "That would be a very sensible target in this country, where we have an excellent vaccine and the ability to deliver it."

Over the long term - a generation or two - the goal is to transition the new coronavirus to become more like its cousins that cause common colds. That would mean the first infection is early in childhood, and subsequent infections are mild because of partial protection, even if immunity wanes.

Some unknown proportion of people with mild cases may go on to experience debilitating symptoms for weeks or months - a syndrome called "long Covid" - but they are unlikely to overwhelm the healthcare system.

"The vast majority of the mortality and of the stress on the healthcare system comes from people with a few particular conditions, and especially people who are over 60," Prof Lipsitch said. "If we can protect those people against severe illness and death, then we will have turned Covid from a society disrupter to a regular infectious disease."

These a-hole idiots changed the definition of the phrase, or they are trying to...one lie and deception after another. They need to change it back to the true definition.

 

[155 arty]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1388851439921864707

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1388851439921864707
.48 min

Man being arrested for not having a mask

When and where the hell is this? Just no mask ? Context is mandatory

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Vaccine Passports Are Coming To Sports Venues

MONDAY, MAY 03, 2021 - 05:20 PM

Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being deployed at over 60 US stadiums and other venues this summer to get the economy "back to normal," according to Reuters.

Major League Baseball's San Francisco Giants and New York Mets are some of the first teams demanding fans present proof of vaccination or a recent negative test via an app called Clear to verify their COVID-19 status. The teams will accept medical paperwork as proof, but they encourage all sports fans to download the Clear app for convenience.

Clear already streamlines the process of traveling through airports by securing all travel documents into an app. It allows travelers to expedite their way through security. Now Clear is being applied outside airports to over 60 US stadiums and other venues.

"Clear powers fast, touchless experiences that keep you moving at airports, sports stadiums, and other venues nationwide. No crowds, no waiting, keep moving," the company said on its website.


Besides MLB stadiums, Clear also partnered with NBA teams "to help get fans back to the game by verifying health insights for a safer and touchless entry at select venues for the 2020 - 2021 season," the company said.

A recent Rasmussen poll revealed that almost half of Americans support the introduction of health passports to reopen the economy.

As the use of vaccine passports snowballs from airports to sporting venues, concerns about the app's potential reach and implications are growing.
Privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation fears Clear will hold sensitive medical data of users and transform it into consumer trackers. Clear said users control their health records.

As of April, Clear has about 142k downloads.



Clear users upload a driver's license and take a selfie, which the system matches them before connecting to COVID-19 test results from hundreds of labs.

Some sporting venues also require additional symptom questionnaires that can be quickly filled out on Clear or an automated temperature check at a Clear kiosk. Once they pass, users get a "green" pass with their headshot and a QR code that venue staff scan at entrances.

Health passports have already migrated from airports to sporting venues within a year - we wonder what is next?

Will passports be needed at shopping malls, gyms, schools, government buildings, supermarkets, and or any other mass gathering event or indoor area?

Also, how does a vaccine passport help if the vaccine is impotent in protecting an individual from infection and its furtherance through transmission, particularly when there are increasing mutant forms of the virus?

Already, several US states have shown a resolve against the premise of the vaccine passports. They include Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Mississippi at the moment. We're assuming more will follow.

These health passports are nothing more than creeping totalitarianism and dictatorship by the government that wants to control and track everything we do.

 

[Countrymouse]

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020)

Brighteon.com is a leading online free platform that empowers free speech, allowing individuals to freely share videos and express their thoughts without any form of censorship. Join us today and be part of our community.

www.brighteon.com

Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020), 32:07

Can we have an article I can READ? A Script? A Synopsis?


I can READ in FIVE minutes what it would suck up 32 minutes of my life to sit and WATCH on this video!

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Evidence Reveals That Military Team Collaborated With Lab Where COVID-19 Pandemic Originated

TUESDAY, MAY 04, 2021 - 10:16 AM
Authored by Nicole Hao via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Chinese regime has said its controversial virology institute had no relationship with the military, but the institute worked with military leaders on a government-sponsored project for almost a decade.

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan city, Hubei Province, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) participated in a project, sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)—a regime-funded scientific research institution—from 2012 to 2018. The project was comprised of a team of five military and civil experts, who conducted research at WIV labs, military labs, and other civil labs leading to “the discovery of animal pathogens [biological agents that causes disease] in wild animals.”

The WIV is located in central China’s Wuhan City, the COVID-19 pandemic ground zero. As an advanced virology institution, the WIV has the only P4 lab—the highest biosafety level lab—in China and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, is “96 percent identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus,” Chinese researchers wrote in a research article (pdf) published in February 2020.

In recent months, the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry and Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her research on coronaviruses of bat origin, denied there is a connection between the WIV and military, and said that no WIV researchers were infected with COVID-19.

However, according to an investigation conducted by the U.S. State Department, “several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

“The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017,” states a State Department fact sheet.

However, Shi denied that the WIV engaged in research with the Chinese military. “I don’t know of any military work at the WIV. That information is incorrect,” Shi said at a public webinar on March 23. Shi didn’t mention that the WIV was used by a Chinese military medical team in early 2020 for developing COVID-19 vaccines.

Shi told Science magazine in July 2020 that no pathogen leaks or personnel infections had occurred. The magazine reported that according to Shi, “there is ‘zero infection’ among staff or students with SARS-CoV-2 [2019 novel coronavirus] or SARS-related viruses.”

In late March, overseas Chinese media reported that three WIV staff members started to have symptoms similar to COVID-19 as early as November 2019. Soon thereafter, Chinese state-run media China News reported that the news was based on rumors.

China News reported that a Chinese specialist told the WHO investigation team—which visited China in February to investigate the origin of the CCP virus—that cases dating back to 2019 were patients at WIV-related hospitals, rather than members of WIV staff.

Security personnel gather near the entrance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Military-Civil Cooperation
The NSFC put research results about the animal pathogens on its website on Feb. 1, 2018. It also stated that the project “discovered over 1,640 types of new viruses by using the metagenomics technology,” and the research was performed by a civil and military team.

Cao Wuchun, 58, a member of the project’s military team, is a colonel and top epidemiologist in the Chinese military. He has been a researcher at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences since September 2017, but has worked there for the last 21 years. He served as the academy’s director from 2007 to 2017, according to his official resume. Cao served on the team as second in command to Major General Chen Wei, China’s top biowarfare expert.

On Jan. 26, 2020, Cao accompanied Chen to Wuhan and they took over command of the WIV. Chinese state-run media reported, at that time, that the main purpose of the military take-over was to develop a vaccine against the CCP virus.

Cao also co-led the NSFC project with Shi (the WIV virologist), and the Chen-Cao team had taken over the WIV when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Wuhan.

Workers are seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)
The other three team leaders of the NSFC project were Liang Guodong, Zhang Yongzhen, and Xu Jianguo, researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Among them, Xu was the project leader or the manager of the other four team members.

Xu, 69, is the director of the CDC’s state key laboratory for communicable disease prevention and control, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and director of the Research Institute of Public Health at Nankai University. Xu’s resume states that he received $987,820 in funding from the NSFC for the project.

As one of China’s top virus specialists, Xu went to Wuhan to serve as a team leader in early 2020. On Jan. 14, 2020, Xu told China’s Science magazine, “All 763 close contacts aren’t infected. The pandemic isn’t severe, and it might stop next week if there’s no more new infection.”

In fact, Wuhan people started to crowd inside hospitals for their pneumonia symptoms from early January 2020, but the regime refused to recognize that the virus can transmit among humans until Jan. 20, 2020. The late announcements fooled people into traveling and allowed the virus to spread all around the world from Wuhan.

A team of scientists and science students from Chulalongkorn University paint the toenails of a wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bat after sampling as a way of tagging it at an on-site lab near the Khao Chong Pran Cave in Ratchaburi, Thailand, on Sept. 12, 2020. (Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images)

Bat Woman
Shi, 56, directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at WIV. In 2000, she received her Ph. D. degree in virology from the University of Montpellier II in France, after studying there for four years.

Shi started to investigate coronaviruses when China suffered from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002 and 2003.

Beijing authorities said the SARS virus was transmitted from civets (a meat-eating animal) to humans in southern China’s Guangdong Province in November 2002, and spread to other Chinese cities and neighboring Hong Kong because the regime didn’t allow people to discuss this infectious disease in the first two months. SARS eventually killed at least 774 people, and infected 8,096 people from 31 countries.

Chinese state-run CCTV reported on Dec. 29, 2017, that Shi and her team didn’t believe that civets were the natural hosts of SARS, and were only the intermediate host. They started to investigate bats from different Chinese regions in 2004.

In 2011, Shi’s team detected a SARS-like virus from bats living in a cave in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province. They then named this virus “WIV1” and conducted further studies. CCTV didn’t report the details of the virus, but said Shi’s team continued to get samples from the same cave for five years.

Since 2015, Shi’s team has been publishing their test results in international magazines, including Virologica Sinica, Nature, and Lancet.

Weeks after the Chinese regime publicly announced the COVID-19 outbreak, Shi and her team published an article in Nature, linking COVID-19 to bats.

Shi’s team discovered the bat coronavirus in the bats that they had collected from an abandoned copper mine in Tongguan township, Mojiang county in Yunnan Province. The WIV researchers had visited the mine for several days even after six workers had gotten infected while working there.

On July 15, 2020, virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson from Ithaca, N.Y., co-published an article in Independent Science News after translating a 66-page master’s thesis by Li Xu, a Chinese medical doctor who treated the miners and sent their tissue samples to the WIV for testing.

Li’s thesis was submitted in May 2013. He wrote that six miners removed the bat feces from a mine in April 2012. After working there for 14 days, all workers felt sick with severe symptoms, such as high fever, dry cough, and sore limbs.

Kunming Medical University, School of Clinical Medicine, where Li studied, received and treated the miners. Finally, three of the miners died. Their samples were sent to WIV for further investigation.

 

[marsh]

Report: Some Liberals Have Trouble Quitting Coronavirus Lockdowns

Some left-wing Americans are having trouble emerging from coronavirus lockdowns, according to a new report in the Atlantic.

www.breitbart.com

Report: Some Liberals Have Trouble Quitting Coronavirus Lockdowns
189

Say_No_To_Turtles / Flickr / CC / Cropped
JOEL B. POLLAK4 May 2021505

Some left-wing Americans are having trouble emerging from coronavirus lockdowns, according to a new report in the Atlantic.

“Progressive communities have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policy makers have left scientific evidence behind,” writes reporter Emma Green, who notes that some ordinary Americans of liberal political persuasions have become so committed to lockdowns that they are having trouble returning to normal life.

To some extent, the difficulty in returning to normal life may simply reflect human nature, and inertia. In Genesis 8:14-17, in the Old Testament, Noah has trouble leaving the Ark despite the end of the Flood. Eventually, God has to tell him to leave.

For those who have been able to work from home, shop from home, and enjoy entertainment at home, the lockdowns are simply a new reality.

Many older Americans, who have been at greater risk during the pandemic, may have adjusted their preferences permanently, and there is some concern that they may never return to using in-person services, even as the economy reopens.

The Wall Street Journal also noted last month that the coronavirus lockdowns have been comforting to some people with anxiety disorders, who struggle with some everyday interactions that are easier to manage in a stay-at-home setting.
But the Atlantic documents a different kind of reluctance — one encouraged by politics:

Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit.

In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.

Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others. Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.

For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk.

Read the full article here. The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown

 

[marsh]

Cotton: 'The CDC Is a Thoroughly Politicized Agency' and Their School Reopening Advice Should Be Disregarded

On Monday's broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "Faulkner Focus," Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called for people to disregard the advice of the "thoroughly | Clips

www.breitbart.com

Cotton: ‘The CDC Is a Thoroughly Politicized Agency’ and Their School Reopening Advice Should Be Disregarded

IAN HANCHETT3 May 2021579

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Faulkner Focus,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called for people to disregard the advice of the “thoroughly politicized” CDC on reopening schools.

Cotton said, “The CDC is a thoroughly politicized agency. Most Americans disregard their advice on things like steaks and hamburgers and beers.

Increasingly, they should disregard their advice when it comes to school reopenings. Schools need to be open. Schools have been open in Arkansas five days a week, in-person since last August, and it’s been largely fine. That’s been the case all across the country as well. We shouldn’t have a politicized public health bureaucracy like the CDC answering at the beck and call of the teachers’ unions. We need kids back in school, and back in real school, not sitting in a classroom doing a Zoom session with teachers who are not in the classroom. We need kids in schools with their teachers now.”

 

[vestige]

I agree

CDC is like tits on a boar hog

 

[marsh]

FDA to authorize Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for those as young as 12

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for youngsters ages 12 to 15 by next week, according to a federal official and a person familiar with …

www.kron4.com

FDA to authorize Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for those as young as 12

by: Tiffany Hudson
Posted: May 4, 2021 / 04:27 AM PDT / Updated: May 4, 2021 / 04:27 AM PDT

File- This Dec. 4, 2017, photo shows the Pfizer company logo at the company’s headquarters in New York. The federal government has agreed to pay nearly $2 billion for 100 million doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by the U.S. drugmaker and its German partner BioNTech. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

WASHINGTON (NewsNation Now) — Teenagers as young as 12 could soon get the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine shot.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for young adults age 12 and older by next week, a federal official and a person familiar with the process told the Associated Press, setting up shots for many before the beginning of the next school year.

Currently, those 16+ are approved for the shot.

The federal official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the FDA’s action, said the agency was expected to expand its emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine by early next week, and perhaps even sooner. The person familiar with the process, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, confirmed the timeline and added that it is expected that the FDA will approve Pfizer’s use by even younger children sometime this fall.

The FDA and Pfizer refused to comment about possible authorization.
Pfizer has been testing the vaccine for children between the ages of 12-15 for the past several months and announced recently they would seek authorization from the FDA to expand access.

Pfizer asks FDA for emergency approval to allow kids to get vaccine

In March, the drugmakers said the vaccine was found to be safe, effective and produced robust antibody responses in 12- to 15-year olds in a clinical trial.

Kids had side effects similar to young adults, the company said. The main side effects are pain, fever, chills and fatigue, particularly after the second dose. The study will continue to track participants for two years for more information about long-term protection and safety.

The FDA action will be followed by a meeting of a federal vaccine advisory committee to discuss whether to recommend the shot for 12- to 15-year-olds.

Shots could begin after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adopts the committee’s recommendation. Those steps could be completed in a matter of days.

The New York Times first reported on the expected timing for the authorization.
Pfizer isn’t the only company seeking to lower the age limit for its vaccine.

Results also are expected by the middle of this year from a U.S. study of Moderna’s vaccine in 12- to 17-year-olds.

But in a sign that the findings were promising, the FDA already allowed both companies to begin U.S. studies in children 11 and younger, working their way to as young as 6 months old.

While younger people are at dramatically lower risk of serious side effects from COVID-19, they have made up a larger share of new virus cases as a majority of U.S. adults have been at least partially vaccinated and as higher-risk activities like indoor dining and contact sports have resumed in most of the country.

Officials hope that extending vaccinations to teens will further accelerate the nation’s reduced virus caseload and allow schools to reopen with minimal disruptions this fall.

 

[marsh]

How COVID WILL eventually decay and disappear

Zoë M. McLaren, an associate professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, wrote in that the concept of exponential decay shows how the virus may start to disappear soon.

www.dailymail.co.uk

The math behind the end of the pandemic: How COVID 'decays' as quickly as it 'surges' - and why the worst of the pandemic may be over sooner than you think

• Zoë M. McLaren wrote that the mathematical concept of exponential decay shows how the virus may start to disappear soon
• However, McLaren said that just because there may be steep drops in cases does not mean that COVID-19 is approaching its end
• 'Exponential growth means case numbers can double in just a few days. Exponential decay is its opposite,' McLaren wrote
• McLaren noted that exponential decay has already been seen in the United States
• It took just 22 days for the number of daily cases to fall 100,000 from its peak of about 250,000 on January 8 to around 150,000 on January 31
• But it took more than three times as long for daily cases to fall another 100,000

By ADAM SCHRADER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 20:48 EDT, 1 May 2021 | UPDATED: 12:22 EDT, 2 May 2021

A professor has explained how cases of the coronavirus pandemic decline as quickly as they surge - but warns the virus could hang around the US for much longer.

Zoë M. McLaren, an associate professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times about the mathematical concept of exponential decay in relation to COVID-19.

'The United States is still a long way from reaching herd immunity, but things could improve a lot before then. The worst of the pandemic may be over sooner than you think,' McLaren wrote.


However, McLaren - who studies policies to combat infectious disease epidemics - said that just because there may be steep drops in cases does not mean that COVID-19 is approaching its end.

'Exponential growth means case numbers can double in just a few days.

Exponential decay is its opposite. Exponential decay means case numbers can halve in the same amount of time,' McLaren wrote.

McLaren explained that 'understanding exponential dynamics makes it easier to know what to expect in the coming phase of the pandemic.'

A chart shows the exponential growth and exponential decay phases of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States

Zoë M. McLaren wrote that the mathematical concept of exponential decay shows how the virus may disappear soon

She wrote that the situation will 'improve quickly as vaccination rates rise.'

There have been 243,463,471 doses of COVID-19 vaccines given in the United States as of Saturday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

McLaren stressed the importance of vaccines in getting the numbers 'to plummet' writing that 'every case of COVID-19 that is prevented cuts off transmission chains, which prevents many more cases down the line.'

However, those declines slow down over time and cases would likely rise again 'if people ease up on precautions too soon.'

'For example, reducing 1,000 cases by half each day would mean a reduction of 500 cases on Day 1 and 125 cases on Day 3 but only 31 cases on Day 5,' she wrote.


McLaren noted that exponential decay has already been seen in the United States as it took just 22 days for the number of daily cases to fall 100,000 from its peak of about 250,000 on January 8 to around 150,000 on January 31.
But it took more than three times as long for daily cases to fall another 100,000, McLaren wrote.

According to the CDC, the current 7-day moving average of daily new cases is 52,528 marking a 79% decrease from January 8.

The concept of exponential growth and decay as applied to the coronavirus pandemic had already been explained in an article in March in Design News - a publication for the engineering community.

'No virus can grow at an exponential rate forever. Virus growth is bounded by available resources, such as uninfected hosts, transmission medium, nutrients, water, etc. Still, the initial exponential growth of viruses do increase at an alarming rate,' the outlet reported.

'Fortunately, this type of infectious growth rate doesn’t continue infinitum. As the growth rate peaks and begins to fall, the curve changes from an exponential one to a normal distribution or bell curve ... as the growth pattern begins to decrease.'

McLaren wrote that 'reaching herd immunity is a key goal.'

'It drives cases toward zero by slowing the spread of the virus through a combination of vaccination and infection-acquired immunity to maintain exponential decay — even as society resumes normal activities,' she wrote.

A map of the United States shows that there have been 32,369,584 total coronavirus cases with 576,553 deaths

A chart shows that there have been a total of 32,351,728 cases of coronavirus in the United States since the start of the pandemic

A chart shows the daily number of coronavirus infections in the United States in March and April

A chart shows that there have been a total of 576,291 coronavirus deaths in the United States since the start of the pandemic


A chart shows the daily number of coronavirus deaths in the United States in March and April

Take a look at the latest COVID-19 data updates within the US

https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/prev...171254478/636x382_MP4_3370415838171254478.mp4 1:42 min

However, McLaren warned that reaching herd immunity does not prevent all outbreaks - just that they can be 'snuffed out' easily as they happen until the 'outbreaks themselves become less and less common.'

In another op-ed in The New York Times on Saturday, Drs. Carl T. Bergstrom and Natalie Dean noted that 'once enough immunity has been built in the population, each person will infect fewer than one other person.'

'But an epidemic that is already underway will continue to spread,' Bergstrom and Dean wrote. 'If 100,000 people are infectious at the peak and they each infect 0.9 people, that’s still 90,000 new infections, and more after that.'

They added: 'A runaway train doesn’t stop the instant the track begins to slope uphill, and a rapidly spreading virus doesn’t stop right when herd immunity is attained.'

Bergstrom and Dean wrote that if the pandemic went uncontrolled in the United States, 'it could continue for months after herd immunity was reached, infecting many more millions in the process.'

'By the time the epidemic ended, a very large proportion of the population would have been infected — far above our expected herd immunity threshold of around two-thirds,' Bergstrom and Dean wrote.

In her article, McLaren said COVID numbers can be brought down quickly through the concept of exponential decay 'even before vaccination rates reach herd immunity.'

She explained that the way to do that is through wearing masks and other preventative measures.

She wrote: 'Every single thing people can do to slow transmission helps — including wearing masks, getting tested and avoiding crowded indoor spaces — especially given concerns about current and future variants, since it could be what gets us past the threshold into exponential decay.'

 

[vector7]

Coronavirus Research

04.05.2021

Researchers make discovery - Covid-19 not a respiratory disease afterall A study from the USA shows that the so-called spike protein of the coronavirus plays a far greater role in triggering Covid-19 than assumed.

Frankfurt / San Diego - Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, a district of San Diego, have found that Covid-19 is primarily a vascular disease. The institute announced this in a press release. The so-called spike protein plays a key role in the Covid 19 disease caused by the Sars Cov-2 virus. These spike proteins are located in the shell of coronaviruses and enable the virus to enter a new cell.

So far, the spike protein of the coronavirus has mainly been associated with the particular risk of infection from Sars-Cov-2. Now, a new study published in the journal Circulation Research shows how the Sars-Cov-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system at the cellular level. There is already a growing consensus among scientists about this process. But how exactly this happens was not yet known. Likewise, researchers studying other coronaviruses have long suspected that the spike protein contributes to damage to vascular endothelial cells, but this is the first time the process has been documented.

Corona discovery: Covid-19 not a respiratory disease after all

In their study, the researchers also found that Covid-19 is not a respiratory disease as previously assumed: "Many people think that it is a respiratory disease, but in reality it is a vascular disease," says Uri Manor, one of the authors of the study, in a press release from the Salk Institute. That could explain why some people have strokes or complications in other parts of the body, says Manor: "What they have in common is that they all have vascular foundations."

The researchers followed up on this discovery in the blood vessels in their study. To do this, they created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by the classic crown of spike proteins from Sars-Cov-2, but that did not contain an actual virus. This pseudovirus caused damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model. This proves that the spike protein alone is enough to trigger the disease, according to the researchers. The tissue samples also showed inflammation in the endothelial cells that line the inside of the blood vessels.

Covid-19 discovery: the dangerous spike protein damages the vascular system The team repeated this process in the laboratory and exposed healthy endothelial cells to the spike protein. It was found that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. Angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is mainly produced by cells in the lungs, where it can serve as an entry point for the virus on the cell surface. The binding disrupted the molecular signaling of ACE2 to mitochondria (organelles that produce energy for cells), thereby damaging and fragmenting the mitochondria.

Previous studies have shown a similar effect when cells have been exposed to the Sars-Cov-2 virus, but this is the first study to show that the damage occurs when cells are exposed to the spike protein alone.

Corona research - Further studies are to follow

"If you remove the replication abilities of the virus, it still has a great damaging effect on the vascular cells, simply because of its ability to bind to this ACE2 receptor, the S-protein receptor, which is now known thanks to Covid", explains Manor. "Further studies with mutated spike proteins will also provide new insights into the infectivity and severity of the mutated Sars-Cov-2 viruses."

Next, the researchers want to take a closer look at the mechanism by which the disrupted ACE2 protein damages the mitochondria and causes them to change their shape. (Anna Charlotte Groos)

Two mRNA vaccines and one vector vaccine are currently very popular for corona vaccination worldwide.

Corona-Studie will belegen, dass Covid-19 keine Atemwegserkrankung ist

Forschende finden heraus, dass das sogenannte Spike-Protein des Coronavirus bei der Auslösung von Covid-19 eine weitaus größere Rolle spielt als bisher angenommen.

www.fr.de