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Heliobas Disciple

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The Truth Behind Omicron’s BA.5 Subvariant Outdoor Transmission, Per Experts
Korin Miller - PREVENTION
Mon, July 11, 2022, 1:08 PM

The Omicron subvariant BA.5 is now the dominant COVID-19 variant in the U.S., and it’s understandable to have questions—especially since this variant has quickly taken over. BA.5 first started as a teeny portion of cases in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) variant tracker in early May, only to now cause nearly 54% of cases in the U.S.

Given how quickly BA.5 has taken over and the fact that it’s happened during warmer months, plenty of people are wondering if you can get BA.5 outdoors. The short answer, infectious disease experts say, is yes, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself and loves ones from getting sick.

So, can you get BA.5 outdoors?

Yes, you can get BA.5 outdoors, but you could also contract other COVID variants outside, says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York. “Outdoors has never been a 100% safe zone,” he says. “You’re much less likely to get infected outdoors than you are indoors—that’s unequivocal. However, if you’re in close quarters with an individual in close quarters for a longer period of time, you’re still at risk of getting infected.” At the end of the day, your likelihood of catching Omicron comes down to proximity to an infected person, and airflow and ventilation of the space you’re in. “Virus disperses quickly and doesn’t fill an area over time as it does in poorly ventilated indoor spaces,” Dr. Russo says.

Factors like not having much wind in the area and the infectiousness of the variant matter, Dr. Russo says. “With BA.5, we think it’s more transmissible than earlier Omicron subvariants.” Meaning, you’re more likely to get BA.5 outdoors than you were to get a different COVID variant, like Delta or even other forms of Omicron.

While BA.5 hasn’t been closely studied, “it’s the most contagious variant we’ve had so far,” says William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “It stands to reason that, under certain circumstances, if you have a spreader at your barbecue party, they can spread it to people outdoors,” he says.

What outdoor settings are the riskiest?

Situations where people are closely crowded together and around each other for longer periods of time are the most concerning, Dr. Russo says. Those can include:
  • Outdoor concerts
  • Outdoor movies
  • Festivals
  • Barbecues
  • Outdoor bars
  • Sports games
“If you go to mass outdoor events where you’re jammed together with a lot of people for a prolonged time, you’re at risk,” Dr. Schaffner says.

What is the BA.5 subvariant, again?

BA.5 is a subvariant of the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID-19. It’s listed as a variant of concern by the CDC (along with other Omicron variants). It has several mutations to its spike protein that allows it to spread more easily between people, Dr. Russo explains.

“It appears to be more infectious than previous variants and able to evade vaccine-induced or prior infection-induced immunity to a greater degree than the earlier Omicron subvariants,” Dr. Russo says. It’s unclear at this point whether BA.5 causes more severe disease than other subvariants, he notes.

And, while some have suggested that BA.5 is as contagious as measles (which is considered the most infectious virus known to man), infectious disease experts aren’t sure yet. “I don’t think any highly reliable likening to measles contagiousness can be made—there’s not enough data at this point and I don’t believe we have the near 100% attack rate seen with measles or its degree of airborne transmission,” says Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

Dr. Schaffner agrees. “It’s an interesting debate but we don’t have any direct measures,“ he says. “We still think measles is the most contagious virus we know, but BA.5 is getting up there.”

How to protect yourself from BA.5

While outdoor transmission of COVID-19 in low-risk settings is “generally uncommon,” Dr. Adalja says that it’s difficult to avoid the virus at this point.

“The goal is to minimize severe disease by being vaccinated and boosted if high risk,” he says. “High-risk people should also think about wearing masks in highly congregated areas, having their close contacts test before interacting with them, receiving Evusheld, and having a plan for Paxlovid and/or monoclonal antibodies if they test positive.” (Evusheld, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a combination of two human monoclonal antibodies—tixagevimab and cilgavimab—which are used to prevent COVID-19.)

If you’re at high risk for COVID-19 complications or just don’t want to get infected, Dr. Russo recommends being cautious about crowds. “In indoor settings, you want to avoid scenarios where people aren’t wearing masks,” he says. “And, in outdoor settings where you’ll be in close proximity with people for a long period of time, you’ll want to wear a high-quality mask.”
 

Heliobas Disciple

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U.S. deaths from antibiotic resistant 'superbugs' rose 15% in 2020
Manas Mishra
Tue, July 12, 2022, 11:14 AM

(Reuters) - U.S. deaths from bacteria resistant to antibiotics, also known as 'superbugs', jumped 15% in 2020 as the drugs were widely dispensed to treat COVID-19 and fight off bacterial infections during long hospitalizations, enabling the bugs to evolve, a U.S. government report said on Tuesday.

Hospital-acquired bacterial infections also rose more than 15% in 2020 from 2019, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

The CDC said that more than 29,400 people died from antimicrobial-resistant infections during the first year of the pandemic and that of those, nearly 40% had acquired the infection in hospital.

Drug resistance occurs with the overuse of antibiotics and other antimicrobials, which allow some bacteria to evolve into "superbugs" that are not affected by the medicines.

There has long been an acute need for new antibiotics to combat these resistant bacteria, but there is little incentive among drugmakers as antibiotics are not especially profitable and overuse must be discouraged, keeping sales down.

Almost 80% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 received an antibiotic - even though they are not useful for viral infections - because of the difficulty in distinguishing COVID-19 from pneumonia when patients first arrived at the hospital, the CDC said.

Between 2012 and 2017, deaths due to antimicrobial resistance fell 18% overall, according to a 2019 CDC report, the last year comprehensive healthcare and community data were available.

"Historic gains made on antibiotic stewardship were reversed as antibiotics were often the first option," said CDC director Rochelle Walensky in the report.

The World Health Organization (WHO) separately on Tuesday released a report identifying 61 vaccine candidates it said should be developed to prevent disease and help control the bacterial infections and antibiotic overuse that leads to antimicrobial resistance.

The WHO said that 1.27 million deaths are due to antimicrobial resistance each year.

The CDC report said antibiotic prescriptions can be appropriate when risks for bacterial or fungal infections are unknown, but that it puts patients at risk for side effects and creates a pathway for resistance to develop.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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FDA Colluded With Moderna to Bypass COVID Vaccine Safety Standards, Documents Reveal
According to Alexandra Latypova, an ex-pharmaceutical industry executive, documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine suggest the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Moderna colluded to bypass regulatory and scientific standards used to ensure products are safe.
By Megan Redshaw
07/12/22

According to an ex-pharmaceutical industry and biotech executive, documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine suggest the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Moderna colluded to bypass regulatory and scientific standards used to ensure products are safe.

Alexandra Latypova has spent 25 years in pharmaceutical research and development working with more than 60 companies worldwide to submit data to the FDA on hundreds of clinical trials.

After analyzing 699 pages of studies and test results “supposedly used by the FDA to clear Moderna’s mRNA platform-based mRNA-1273, or Spikevax,” Latypova told The Defender she believes U.S. health agencies are lying to the public on behalf of vaccine manufacturers.

“It is evident that the FDA and NIH [National Institutes of Health] colluded with Moderna to subvert the regulatory and scientific standards of drug safety testing,” Latypova said.

“They accepted fraudulent test designs, substitutions of test articles, glaring omissions and whitewashing of serious signs of health damage by the product, then lied to the public on behalf of the manufacturers.”
In an op-ed on Trial Site News, Latypova disclosed the following findings:


  1. Moderna’s nonclinical summary contains mostly irrelevant materials.
  2. Moderna claims the active substance — mRNA in Spikevax — does not need to be studied for toxicity and can be replaced with any other mRNA without further testing.
  3. Moderna’s nonclinical program consisted of irrelevant studies of unapproved mRNAs and only one non-GLP [Good Laboratory Practice] toxicology study of mRNA-1273 — the active substance in Spikevax.
  4. There are two separate investigational new drug numbers for mRNA-1273. One is held by Moderna, the other by the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases within the NIH, representing a “serious conflict of interest.”
  5. The FDA failed to question Moderna’s “scientifically dishonest studies” dismissing an “extremely significant risk” of vaccine-induced antibody-enhanced disease.
  6. The FDA and Moderna lied about reproductive toxicology studies in public disclosures and product labeling.
“Moderna’s documents are poorly and often incompetently written — with numerous hypothetical statements unsupported by any data, proposed theories, and admission of using unvalidated assays and repetitive paragraphs throughout,” Latypova wrote.

“Quite shockingly, this represents the entire safety toxicology assessment for an extremely novel product that has gotten injected into millions of arms worldwide.”

Finding 1: Moderna’s non-clinical summary contains mostly irrelevant materials.

According to Latypova, about 80% of the materials disclosed by HHS that FDA considered in approving Moderna’s Spikevax pertain to other mRNA products unrelated to SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19.

“Approximately 400 pages of the materials belong to a single biodistribution study in rats conducted at the Charles River facility in Canada for an irrelevant test article, mRNA-1674,” Latypova said. “This product is a construct of 6 different mRNAs studied for cytomegalovirus in 2017 and never approved for market.”

Latypova said the study showed lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) distribute throughout the entire body to all major organ systems.

Latypova found it odd the study protocol, report and amendments related to the study were copied numerous times throughout the HHS documents, suggesting Moderna may have been trying to meet a minimum word count.

In between the repetitive copies of the “same irrelevant study,” Latypova found “ModernaTX, Inc. 2.4 Nonclinical Overview” for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine with the investigational new drug application reference IND #19745.

Module 2.4, she said, is a standard part of the new drug application and is supposed to contain summaries of nonclinical studies.

Latypova wrote:

“There are three separate versions of Module 2.4 included and many sections appear to be missing. It is not clear why multiple versions are included and there is no explanation provided as to which version specifically was used for the approval of Spikevax by the FDA.”

Latypova noted all three copies of Module 2.4 appear to have the same overview but reference a different set of statements and studies.

Latypova said the description of the finished supplied product differs between the two versions:

“Version 1 (p. 0001466) [says] mRNA-1273 is provided as a sterile liquid for injection at a concentration of 5 mg/mL in 20 mM trometamol (Tris) buffer containing 87 mg/mL sucrose and 10.7 mM sodium acetate, at pH 7.5.

“Version 2 (p. 0001499) [says] the mRNA-1273 Drug Product is provided as a sterile suspension for injection at a concentration of 20 mg/mL in 20 mM Tris buffer containing 87 g/L sucrose and 4.3 mM acetate, at pH 7.5.”

“It appears from reading section 2.4.1.2 Test Material (p.0001499) that Version 2 of the drug product had been used for manufacturing the Lot AMPDP-200005 which was used for nonclinical studies,” Latypova said. But “there is no explanation given for why the drug product in version 1 is different, and no comparability testing studies between the two product specifications are provided.”

Latypova pointed out that the package insert for FDA-approved Spikevax does not contain any information regarding the concentration of the product supplied in its vials.

Finding 2: Moderna said Spikevax mRNA does not need to be studied for toxicity and can be replaced with any other mRNA without further testing.

Latypova alleges Moderna, Pfizer and Janssen — manufacturer of the Johnson & Johnson shot — along with the FDA, have been deceptive in their assertions claiming the risks of COVID-19 vaccines are associated with the LNP delivery platform, and therefore, the mRNA “payload” does not need to undergo standard safety toxicological tests.

The documents state:

“The distribution, toxicity, and genotoxicity associated with mRNA vaccines formulated in LNPs are driven primarily by the composition of the LNPs and, to a lesser extent, by the biologic activity of the antigen(s) encoded by the mRNA.

Therefore, the distribution study, Good Laboratory Practice (GLP)-compliant toxicology studies, and in vivo GLP-compliant genotoxicity study conducted with mRNA vaccines that encode various antigens developed with the Sponsor’s mRNA-based platform using SM 102-containing LNPs are considered supportive and BLA-enabling for mRNA-1273.”

Moderna is “claiming that the active drug substance of a novel medicine does not need to be tested for toxicity,” Latypova said. “This is analogous to claiming that a truck carrying food and a truck carrying explosives are the same thing. Ignore the cargo, focus on the vehicle.”

Latypova called the claim “preposterous,” as mRNAs and LNPs separately and together are “entirely novel chemical entities” that each require their own IND application and data dossier filed with regulators.

“Studies with one mRNA are no substitute for all others,” she added.

According to the European Medicines Agency, this chemical entity is entirely novel:

“The modified mRNA in the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine is a chemical active substance that has not been previously authorized in medicinal products in the European Union. From a chemical structure point of view, the modified mRNA is not related to any other authorized substances. It is not structurally related as a salt, ester, ether, isomer, mixture of isomers, complex or derivative of an already approved active substance in the European Union.

“The modified mRNA is not an active metabolite of any active substance(s) approved in the European Union. The modified mRNA is not a pro-drug for any existing agent. The administration of the applied active substance does not expose patients to the same therapeutic moiety as already authorized active substance(s) in the European Union.

“A justification for these claims is provided in accordance with the ‘Reflection paper on the chemical structure and properties criteria to be considered for the evaluation of new active substance (NAS) status of chemical substances’ (EMA/CHMP/QWP/104223/2015), COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine is therefore classified as a New Active Substance and considered to be new in itself.”

“The reviewers specifically stated ‘modified RNA’ and not just the lipid envelope constitute the new chemical entity,” Latypova said. “All new chemical entities must undergo rigorous safety testing before they are approved as medicinal products in the United States, European Union and the rest of the world.”

Latypova said Moderna failed to cite any studies showing “all toxicity of the product resides with the lipid envelope and none with the payload” of the type and sequence of mRNA delivered to various tissues and organs.

“It is also not a matter of a mistake or rushing new technology to market under crisis conditions,” she added. “This scientifically fraudulent strategy was not only premeditated, it was also never really concealed.”

Latypova gave the example of a 2018 PowerPoint presentation by Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel at a JP Morgan conference where he stated: “If mRNA works once, it will work many times.”

“This describes the deception practiced by the manufacturers, FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NIH and every government health authority or mainstream media talking head who participated in it,” Latypova said.
She continued:

“Imagine Ford Motor Company claiming that its crash testing program should be contained to the vehicle’s tires and that one test is sufficient for all vehicle models.

“After all both F150 and Taurus have tires, what’s in between the tires ‘worked once and will work again,’ and therefore it is inconsequential to safety, does not need to be separately tested and can be replaced at the manufacturer’s will with any new variation.

“This is the claim that Moderna, Pfizer, Janssen and other manufacturers of the gene therapy ‘platforms’ have utilized.
Unlike Ford’s products, theirs have never worked as none of their mRNA-based gene therapy products have ever been approved for any indication. The fact that the regulators did not object to this argument raises an even greater alarm.”

“There is no question of incompetence or mistake,” Latypova said. “If this represents the current ‘gold standard’ of regulatory pharmaceutical science, I have very bad news regarding the safety of the entire supply or new medicines in the U.S. and the world.”

Finding 3: Moderna’s nonclinical program included only one non-GLP toxicology study of the active substance in Spikevax.

According to Latypova, a non-clinical program for a novel product usually includes information on pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, safety pharmacology, toxicology and other studies to determine the carcinogenicity or genotoxicity of a drug and its effects on reproduction.

The more novel the product, the more extensive the safety and toxicity evaluations need to be, she said.
In Module 2.4 described above, Latypova was able to identify 29 unique studies but only 10 were done with the correct mRNA-1273 test particle. The other studies were conducted using a “variety of unapproved experimental mRNAs unrelated to Spikevax or COVID illness.”

For example, the in-vivo genotoxicity studies included an irrelevant mRNA-1706 and a luciferase mRNA that is not in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

“Of the 10 studies using mRNA-1273, nine were pharmacology (‘efficacy’) studies and only one was a toxicology (‘safety’) study,” Latypova said. “All of these were non-GLP studies, i.e., research experiments conducted without validation standards acceptable for regulatory approval.”

There was only one toxicology study included in Moderna’s package related to the correct test particle mRNA-1273, but the study was non-GLP compliant, was conducted in rats and was not completed at the time the documents were submitted to the FDA for approval.

The results of the study were indicative of possible tissue damage, systemic inflammation and potential severe safety issues — and they are also dose-dependent, Latypova said. Moderna noted its findings but “simply moved on, deciding to forgo any further evaluation of these effects.”

[continued next post]
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
[continued from post above]


Regarding reproductive toxicology, the only assessment was conducted on rats.

Pharmacokinetics — or the biodistribution, absorption, metabolism and excretion of a compound — were not studied with Moderna’s Spikevax mRNA-1273.

“Instead, Moderna included a set of studies with another, unrelated mRNA-1647 — a construct of six different mRNAs which was in development for cytomegalovirus in 2017 in a non-GLP compliant study,” Latypova said. “This product has not been approved for market and its current development status is unknown.”

Moderna claimed the LNP formulation of mRNA-1647 was the same as in Spikevax, so the study using this particle was “supportive of” the development of Spikevax.

“This claim is dishonest,” Latypova said. “While the kinetics of the product may be studied this way, the toxicities may not!”
She explained:

“We do not know what happens with the organs and tissues when the delivered mRNA starts expressing spike proteins in those cells. This is a crucial safety-related issue, and both the manufacturer and the regulator were aware of it, yet chose to ignore it.

“The study demonstrated that the LNPs did not remain in the vaccination site exclusively, but were distributed in all organs analyzed, except the kidney. High concentrations were observed in lymph nodes and spleen and persisted in those organs at three days after the injection.

“The study was stopped before full clearance could be observed, therefore no knowledge exists on the full time-course of the biodistribution. Other organs where vaccine product was detected included bone marrow, brain, eye, heart, small intestine, liver, lung, stomach and testes.”

Given that LNPs of the mRNA-1647 were detected in these tissues, it’s reasonable to assume the same occurs with mRNA-1273 and “likewise would distribute in the same way,” Latypova said. “Therefore the spike protein would be expressed by the cells in those critical organ systems with unpredictable and possibly catastrophic effects.”

“Neither Moderna nor FDA wanted to evaluate this matter any further,” she added. “No metabolism, excretion, pharmacokinetic drug interactions or any other pharmacokinetic studies for mRNA-1273 were conducted,” nor were safety pharmacology assessments for any organ classes.

Finding 4: ‘Serious conflict of interest’ exists between Moderna and NIH.

According to Latypova, Moderna’s documents contain a letter from the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases authorizing the FDA to refer to IND #19635 to support the review of Moderna’s own IND #19745 provided in “Module 1.4.”

Although Module 1.4 was not included in the documents provided by HHS, the FDA on Jan. 30 revealed the following timeline for Moderna’s Spikevax.

According to the FDA, Spikevax has two sponsors of its IND application package, including the NIH division that reports to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Biden.

The date of the pre-IND meeting for Spikevax was on Feb. 19, 2020. The IND submission for the NIH’s IND was on Feb. 20, 2020, while Moderna’s own IND was submitted on April 27, 2020.

According to the CDC, as of Jan. 11, 2020, Chinese health authorities had identified more than 40 human infections as part of the COVID-19 outbreak first reported on Dec. 31, 2020.

The World Health Organization on Jan. 9, 2020, announced the preliminary identification of the novel coronavirus. The record of Wuhan-Hu-1 includes sequence data, annotation and metadata from the virus isolated from a patient approximately two weeks prior.

Latypova said this raises several questions warranting further investigation:
  • Preparation for a pre-IND meeting is a process that typically takes several months, and is expensive and labor-consuming. How was it possible for the NIH and Moderna to have a pre-IND meeting for a Phase 1 human clinical trial scheduled with the FDA for a vaccine product a month before the COVID-19 pandemic was declared?
  • “How was it possible to have all materials prepared and the entire non-clinical testing process completed for this specific product related to a very specific virus which was only isolated and sequenced (so we were told) by Jan. 9, 2020?”
  • Ownership of the IND is both a legal and commercial matter, which in the case of a public-private partnership, must be transparently disclosed. “What is the precise commercial and legal arrangement between Moderna and NIH regarding Spikevax?”
  • “Does NIH financially benefit from sales of Moderna’s product? Who at NIH specifically?”
  • “Does forcing vaccination with the Moderna product via mandates, government-funded media campaigns and perverse government financial incentives to schools, healthcare system and employers represent a significant conflict of interest for the NIH as a financial beneficiary of these actions?”
  • “Does concealing important safety information by a financially interested party (NIH and Moderna) represent a conspiracy by the pharma-government cartel to defraud the public?”
Latypova further noted that immediately after the pre-IND meeting with the FDA, an “extremely heavy volume of orders for Moderna stock” began to be placed in the public markets.

This warrants an “additional investigation into the investors that were able to predict the spectacular future of the previously poorly performing stock with such timely precision,” she said.

Finding 5: FDA failed to question Moderna’s ‘scientifically dishonest studies’ dismissing an ‘extremely significant risk’ of vaccine-induced antibody-enhanced disease.

Moderna, prior to 2020, had never brought an approved drug to market.

“Its entire product development history was marked by numerous failures despite millions of dollars and lengthy time spent in development,” Latypova said. “Notably, its mRNA-based vaccines were associated with the antibody-dependent-enhancement phenomenon.”

For example, Moderna’s preclinical study of its mRNA-based Zika vaccine in mice showed all mice “uniformly [suffered from] lethal infection and severe disease due to antibody enhancement.”

The scientists were able to develop a type of vaccine that generated protection against Zika that “resulted in significantly less morbidity and mortality,” but all versions of the vaccine unequivocally led to some level of antibody-dependent-enhancement.

The Primary Pharmacology section for Spikevax includes nine studies evaluating immunogenicity, protection from viral replication and potential for vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease.

“These studies included the correct test article (mRNA-1273), however, all were non-GLP compliant,” Latypova said. The results of these studies are briefly summarized in the text of the document package, yet the study reports are not provided.

In the disclosed documents, Moderna claims “there were no established animal models” for SARS-CoV-2 virus due to its extreme novelty.

Yet, in the next sentence, “despite the extreme novelty of the virus,” Ralph Baric, Ph.D., at the University of North Carolina possessed an already mouse-adapted SARS-CoV-2 virus strain and provided it for some of Moderna’s studies, Latypova said.

According to Latypova’s assessment, there were other numerous contradictions in Moderna’s documents, and when enhanced disease risk was revealed in assays, the company waived off its own results with a statement regarding the invalidity of the assays and methods they used.

“As SARS-CoV-2 neutralization assays are, to this point, still highly variable and in the process of being further developed, optimized and validated, study measurements should not be considered a strong predictor of clinical outcomes, especially in the absence of results from a positive control that has demonstrated disease enhancement,” Moderna said.

“Clearly, both Moderna and FDA knew about disease enhancement and were aware of numerous examples of this dangerous phenomenon, including Moderna’s own Zika vaccine product of the same type,” Latypova said. “Yet, the FDA did not question Moderna’s scientifically dishonest ‘studies’ that dismissed this extremely significant risk without a proper study design.”

Finding 6: FDA and Moderna lied about reproductive toxicology studies in public disclosures and product labeling.

Although the FDA recommends Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for pregnant and lactating women, Moderna conducted only one reproductive toxicology study in pregnant and lactating rats using a human dose of 100 mcg of mRNA-1273.
Although the full study was excluded, a narrative summary of Moderna’s findings state, “high IgG antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 S-2P were also observed in GD 21 F1 fetuses and LD 21 F1 pups, indicating strong transfer of antibodies from dam to fetus and from dam to pup.”

Latypova said safety assessments in the study are very limited, but the following findings are described by Moderna:
“The mothers lost fur after vaccine administration, and it persisted for several days. No information on when it was fully resolved since the study was terminated before this could be assessed.”

In the rat pups, the following skeletal malformations were observed:

“In the F1 generation [rat pups], there were no mRNA-1273-related effects or changes in the following parameters: mortality, body weight, clinical observations, macroscopic observations, gross pathology, external or visceral malformations or variations, skeletal malformations, and mean number of ossification sites per fetus per litter.

“mRNA-1273-related variations in skeletal examination included statistically significant increases in the number of F1 rats with 1 or more wavy ribs and 1 or more rib nodules.

“Wavy ribs appeared in 6 fetuses and 4 litters with a fetal prevalence of 4.03% and a litter prevalence of 18.2%. Rib nodules appeared in 5 of those 6 fetuses.”

Moderna related the skeletal malformations to days when toxicity was observed in the mothers but waived away the finding as “unrelated to the vaccine,” Latypova said.

The FDA then “lied on Moderna’s behalf” in its Basis for Regulatory Action Summary document (p.14) stating “no skeletal malformations” occurred in the non-clinical study in rat pups despite the opposite reported by Moderna.

“No vaccine-related fetal malformations or variations and no adverse effect on postnatal development were observed in the study. Immunoglobulin G (IgG) responses to the pre-fusion stabilized spike protein antigen following immunization were observed in maternal samples and F1 generation rats indicating transfer of antibodies from mother to fetus and from mother to nursing pups.”

“In summary, the vaccine-derived antibodies transfer from mother to child,” Latypova said. “It was never assessed by Moderna whether the LNPs, mRNA and spike proteins transfer as well, but it is reasonable to assume that they do due to the mechanism of action of these products.”

Latypova said studies should have been done to assess the risks to the child by vaccinating pregnant or lactating women before recommending these groups receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

“We should ask the question why are they concealing the critical safety-related information from public, and making the product look better than the manufacturer has admitted,” Latypova said.

“The FDA did not have any objective scientific evidence excluding the skeletal malformations being related to the vaccine,” she added. “Thus, the information should have been disclosed fully in the label of this experimental and poorly tested product — not hidden from the public for over a year and then disclosed only under a court order.”

Latypova said FDA reviewers should have “easily seen through the blatant fraud, omissions, use of inadequate study designs and general lack of scientific rigor.”

The fact that more than half of the document package contains non-GLP studies for irrelevant, unapproved and previously failed chemical entities alone should have been sufficient reason to not approve this product, she added.

It would appear the FDA based its decision that the product is safe to administer to thousands of otherwise healthy humans on two studies in rats, Latypova said. The rest of the 700-page package was deemed to consist of “other supportive studies.”

The FDA noted studies were conducted in “five vaccines formulated in SM-102 lipid particles containing mRNAs encoding various viral glycoprotein antigens” but “failed to mention that these were five unapproved and previously failed products,” she said.

The regulators then concluded that using novel unapproved mRNAs in support of another unapproved novel mRNA was acceptable.

“The circular logic is astonishing,” Latypova said. Regulators allowed and personally promoted the use of failed experiments in support of a different and new experiment directly on the unsuspecting public.

Latypova called for the FDA, pharmaceutical manufacturers and “all other perpetrators of this fraud to be urgently stopped and investigated.”
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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Are Dems Buying Votes By Extending Pandemic Emergency?
by Tyler Durden
Tuesday, Jul 12, 2022 - 11:40 AM

While President Biden mulls declaring a "medical emergency" to promote broader access to abortions, his administration appears ready to extend the ongoing (now 30-month-old) "public health emergency" over COVID-19.
Just this morning we see leaks via NYTimes of an "immune evasive" new variant that will "surge" across America...

The White House is going to warn Americans that a BA5 surge is coming. Some experts think it’s already here. ⁦@AshishKJha46⁩ tells me it’s the most “immune-evasive” sub-variant we have seen. He and Drs. Fauci & Walensky will brief reporters this a.m.As BA.5 Spreads, White House Warns Covid Is Not Over
— Sheryl Gay Stolberg (@SherylNYT) July 12, 2022

And none other than Anthony Fauci warned during a press conference this morning that "those who were infected with the Omicron variant BA1 do not have good protection against variants BA4 and BA5."

Which prompted CDC Director Walensky to urge all Americans to get their second booster shot (which is odd since there's no science that we have seen that shows the boosters offer any protection against the new variants):

NOW - CDC Director: "My message is simple: It is essential that these Americans get their second booster shot right away." pic.twitter.com/S3JmmtBvJL
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 12, 2022

To offer some context for where America is in this 'emergency', the charts below shows the current rate of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths...


Source: Bloomberg


Source: Google

With hospitalizations and deaths having plunged to far-from-emergency levels, the average American voter could be forgiven for asking (without being canceled) why we would need to maintain an emergency status so long after the pandemic has faded from most Americans' daily lives (and fear of infection has been replaced by fear of inflation).

The Biden Administration claims the declaration provides critical regulatory flexibility, but The Wall Street Journal suggests there may be two more notable reasons why the Democrats are unwilling to give up this medical tyranny...

One reason is that in March 2020 Congress barred states from kicking ineligible people off Medicaid rolls during the emergency in return for more federal funding. Medicaid enrollment has ballooned to 95 million - 30% of Americans are now enrolled - from 71 million in December 2019. The emergency expands Medicaid in GOP states that opted out of the ObamaCare expansion. It is also a boon for insurers in states that pay per Medicaid participant. Hospitals and physician groups support extending the emergency because they worry that state Medicaid payments will decline if the federal fillip goes away.
Another reason: Congress in March 2020 suspended food-stamp work requirements during the emergency and sweetened benefits in states that maintained their own declarations. As of April, 41.2 million Americans were receiving food stamps - an average of $228 monthly per person - which is about 4.4 million more than before the pandemic.

So, 4.4 million American voters could lose food stamp benefits if the emergency is halted and insurers, hospitals, and physician groups would lose considerable amounts of government money.

Seems like with the number of job openings remaining extremely high in America, some of those 4.4 million Americans could be more productive (given that COVID fear should be negligible now if you believe that vaccines work?) and while the lobbying dollars from insurers and hospitals help pay the bills for the politicians, we suspect they will find other topics to pressure lawmakers on that don't enable totalitarianism.

As WSJ concluded, COVID shouldn’t be an emergency only when it’s useful to expand the welfare state.

Finally, we wonder if the administration can maintain this 'public health emergency' all the way to November 2024?
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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Dr. Malone Warns of Immune Imprinting After Fauci Floats Second Booster Shots
By Zachary Stieber
July 12, 2022

Dr. Robert Malone is warning of immune imprinting after Dr. Anthony Fauci signaled his backing for second COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all Americans aged 5 and older.

“I couldn’t design a vaccine if I wanted to, to be more likely to drive immune imprinting,” Malone, who helped invent the messenger RNA technology the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are built on, told The Epoch Times.

Immune imprinting refers to a phenomenon whereby initial exposure to a virus strain may prevent the body from producing enough neutralizing antibodies against a new viral strain.

The COVID-19 vaccines currently in circulation are based on the Wuhan strain of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Also known as SARS-CoV-2, the virus causes COVID-19.

A number of strains have emerged and become dominant since the Wuhan strain was prevalent, including the currently dominant Omicron variant.

Researchers with Imperial College London and the United Kingdom Health Security Agency found that people who received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine and were infected with the Wuhan strain had a lower level of protection against later strains when compared to people who had not been infected. Other groups, including researchers with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have found the vaccines much less effective against Omicron subvariants than the Wuhan strain.

A number of studies have found negative effectiveness among vaccinated groups. That means those who get vaccinated are more likely to get infected.

In some areas, the vaccinated account for a majority of those infected or in hospitals or dying with COVID-19. In Louisiana, for example, 70 percent of the deaths recorded between June 23 and June 29 were among the vaccinated.

Second Booster Push

The vaccines were originally promoted as two-shot primary regimens (Pfizer and Moderna) or a one-shot immunization (Johnson & Johnson). They were said to have efficacy as high as 100 percent against symptomatic infection.

Due to waning effectiveness against the emerging variants, U.S. officials authorized booster doses. In March, because the effects of the boosters against infection didn’t last long, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cleared and recommended second boosters for all adults over the age of 50.

Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser, is now saying Americans 5 to 50 should be allowed to get a second booster dose.

Fauci told the Washington Post that the United States “need to allow people who are under 50 to get their second booster shot, since it may have been months since many of them got their first booster.”

“If I got my third shot [in 2021], it is very likely the immunity is waning,” he added.

Fauci has no authority over authorizing or recommending boosters, but has signaled major changes in U.S. vaccine policy in the past.

White House, FDA Respond

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, told reporters on July 12 that “we have conversations all the time about what are possible things we could be doing to better protect the American people” but that the decision on second boosters will be made by the FDA and the CDC.

Fauci uttered a similar statement during the briefing.

“The FDA is evaluating the current situation, including the emerging epidemiology indicating increased hospitalization, and will be open to all potential options to address this, if necessary,” an FDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

Vaccine makers and the FDA are working together to develop variant-specific shots for the fall, which they say will offer better protection. But the updated shots aren’t yet on the market.

Many U.S. adults have received a primary series of a vaccine, including 91 percent of those 65 and older and 77 percent of those 18 and older. But booster doses have been a harder sell. Only 70 percent of elderly persons who got a primary series have received a first booster, along with just 51 percent of those 18 and older, according to CDC data. A second booster has only been administered to 28 percent of the population 50 and older.

Few of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates included a booster, and most of the mandates have been rescinded due to factors like plunging COVID-19 metrics and the waning effectiveness of the vaccines.

The new BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants—which have been edging out other strains in the United States and are thought to be more transmissible, but do not seem to cause more severe illness—are “more likely to lead to vaccine breakthrough infections,” researchers with Columbia University found.

‘Vaccine-driven Disease’

The COVID-19 metrics in the United States have been creeping up in recent weeks, with the weekly average of cases jumping by 75 percent since late March and hospitalizations with COVID-19 doubling since April.

Officials blame the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, which have been edging out other strains in the United States and are thought to be more transmissible, but do not seem to cause more severe illness.

People should get a booster as soon as they’re eligible, which is typically about five months after their last shot, Jha and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said. “Don’t delay,” Jha said.

But Malone is among the scientists who are challenging the idea that the old vaccines are the solution.

“You got a major problem with the new Omicron, that’s the BA.5. The people that are getting infected chronically and hospitalized and dying are predominantly the vaccinated. It’s happening all over the world,” Malone said. “Now they’ve got a problem because they have driven this because of immune imprinting. This is increasingly becoming a vaccine-driven disease.”

Fauci, a major vaccine proponent, “has basically created a situation through the insistence on the hyper vaccination where he’s actually driving the disease in the United States,” he added.

Government officials disagree. Walensky said CDC data show that people who either have not received a vaccine or have not been boosted have less protection than those who have been boosted, including against infection, even as studies show the boost against infection quickly drops after the first and second booster.

Fauci said that people who were previously infected, or have natural immunity from surviving COVID-19, “don’t have a lot of protection” against the new subvariants.

Neither mentioned how natural immunity, according to a new study, remains stronger than the protection from vaccines even with boosters, particularly against severe disease.

Meiling Lee contributed to this report.
 

Heliobas Disciple

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Researchers Suspect New Variants of Rapidly-Progressing Brain Degenerating Diseases from COVID-19 Vaccines
BY Health 1+1 and Marina Zhang
July 12, 2022

Things have not been the same since June 2021 for 53-year-old Douglas Howey from Colorado.

Around a year after he received the second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, the 6 foot 4 and a half inch paraplegic man who once weighed 262 pounds lost over 100 pounds after the sudden onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an incurable and fatal disease that gradually kills a person’s motor neurons.

Though he never told his doctors that he started developing symptoms a month after the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, his family thinks that his sudden sickness a month later and dramatic weight loss within weeks seemed like too much of a coincidence.

This suspicion was further confirmed after Linda Howey, Douglas’s mother, heard a podcast by Del Bigtree where Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talked about her research on possible links between neurodegenerative diseases and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

Once patients are diagnosed with ALS, they are normally given a life expectancy of two to five years. The disease is mostly diagnosed in men, and often between the ages of 55 to 75.

Douglas is younger than this and his illness has progressed much faster than most. He has already entered the late stage of the disease and is experiencing breathing difficulties although he has only been sick for one year.

Linda recalled that Douglas’s fever began in June, around a month after he received his second Moderna COVID-19 vaccine dose on May 21, 2021. He experienced high fever and was bedridden for a month.

Douglas’s father passed away in 2011 after a 25-year battle with a brain degenerative disease called frontotemporal dementia (FTD) that has a genetic component.

Within the last week or so of life, Douglas’s father began to experience ALS symptoms. Though Douglas also has the FTD gene, he was not expecting any significant progression for the next 20 years.

However, after Douglas recovered from his month-long fever, he began to notice constant fatigue and weakness in his grip strength.

Within six weeks of falling ill, he lost 40 pounds and his weight only continued to decline as his appetite deteriorated.
Five months later, Douglas was too weak to handle silverware properly and needed to feed himself with both hands.

Douglas has been a paraplegic since he was hit by a truck in 2012. As a result of that accident, he developed strong upper arms that he used to hoist himself up from bed and to propel himself around in a manual wheelchair.

His ALS disease quickly spread to the motor neurons in his arms so that by January 2022, just seven months after he fell sick, Douglas required a bed hoister and an automatic wheelchair which he now has much difficulty using.

Gone are Douglas’s days of gardening, traveling, working full-time, and acting as an active advocate for people with disabilities. Caregivers that used to help around the house for only a few hours are now there around the clock every day taking care of him.

Douglas has also gradually developed a cough and has trouble speaking.

A test in February 2022 showed that he had lost much of his functional lung capacity and was only using 40 percent of his diaphragm. The once eloquent and talkative physics instructor was reduced to spelling out his words to enable basic communication.

The destruction of his motor neurons has caused him pain and crippled his sleep but he has not been able to verbalize it.

Caregivers may jam his toe in the bed hoister or bruise his back on the machinery yet he could only text his mother Linda who would later tell the caregivers that he was in pain.

“His lack of ability to talk has caused a lot of pain and suffering. When he texts me the details later, I communicate to the caregiver the pain he was enduring when he could not speak at the time the pain or injury was happening. By then, the damage has happened,” Linda told The Epoch Times through an email.

Mundane things that he once did without much thought now needed much effort to instruct caregivers to do, such as wiping his eyes, adjusting his glasses, and moving his cap.

With much effort, Douglas spelled out to his mother that he even needed to tell the caregivers to clean out mucus in his nose.

Linda said that she had searched up the batch numbers of his Moderna injections on How Bad is My Batch, a website that has gathered data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Each search will show the reported adverse events, deaths, and disabilities associated with the batches that have been reported to VAERS.

Douglas’s batch numbers were 001c21a and 25c21a, respectively associated with 779 and 523 reported adverse events, eight and five deaths, and 10 and eight disabilities. However, these numbers were far from the number of reported cases from the batches highest on the list.

According to Pfizer, each batch can consist of 1 to 3 million vaccine doses, though it is not certain if Moderna is the same.

Researchers’ Suspicions

Dr. Stephanie Seneff and many others have been suspicious of the actual safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines from the moment they started to be administered to the population.

Research into this novel technology made her very concerned that the vaccine could cause incurable prion diseases and prion-like diseases within the population in five to 10 years, or even further down the line.

“To have [almost] 100 percent success rate with [a] few months of testing, it just seems completely reckless to me,” she said on the call with The Epoch Times.

In 2021, months after the rollout of the mRNA Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, Seneff published a peer-reviewed paper with Dr. Greg Nigh (pdf).

In the study, she and Nigh declared that a vaccine that produced the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus could be a health concern as the spike protein has a prion region that is able to interact with proteins on human cells.

Prions are common proteins that naturally exist in the human brain. However, in the case of prion diseases, the prion will come into contact with a misfolded (pathogenic) prion, and just like a set of dominoes, the single contact will cause all other normal prions to become pathogenic, slowly killing the individual.

Awful as it sounds, it generally is a slow kill, often taking decades after the first exposure for symptoms to appear.

Examples of prion diseases include Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable and fatal disease.

Recent studies also show neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS have prion-like features with protein misfolding and clumping in the brain which kills neurons. Some studies also suggest these diseases may also be prion disease, though this has not been proven.

Seneff and her colleagues expressed concerned that an mRNA or DNA (adenovirus AstraZeneca) vaccine may serve as a trigger to cause prion or prion-like diseases and that we may see a spike in such diseases in the coming years.

In their rigorously peer-reviewed study (pdf), Seneff and her colleagues speculated that the vaccine may cause prion misfolding, causing damage to the brain in the forms of CJD, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, and so on.

The mRNA and DNA vaccines carry instructions for making the spike protein into cells. Once cells receive these instructions, they start making spike protein. Cells then stick these spike proteins on their cellular surface, and when immune cells recognize the proteins as foreign, an immune response is triggered.

However, mistakes can occur during the process of translating RNA or DNA into protein.

Seneff speculated that errors could also happen for the spike protein, causing misfolding. If misfolding also happens in the prion region, it may be able to interact with human prions and trigger prion disease such as CJD, or prion-like disease.

However, compared to the current CJD, Parkinson’s, and the other neurodegenerative diseases, Seneff said that disease, if caused by the vaccine, would, most likely, progress faster.

Since the vaccine hijacks cellular processes to make more foreign proteins than in a natural infection, there would be greater opportunities for misfolding.

“We suggested that you might not see anything for a year or even five years or a decade…it would take a long time for the symptoms to appear,” Seneff said.

“We were predicting that we would see an increase in the rate of Parkinson’s [and other diseases], and that would happen in younger people in the coming years.

Soon after Seneff appeared on Fox News highlighting her concerns, her inbox was immediately flooded with emails from individuals who believe that they themselves or their loved ones were affected by prion disease or prion-like diseases because of the vaccine.

Some saw a worsening of already-present neurodegenerative symptoms; some developed a neurodegenerative disease just weeks or months after vaccination.

[continued next post]
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
[continued from post above]

A New Variant of Prion and Prion-like Diseases?

The sudden influx of people contacting her suggested to Seneff that the vaccine may have accelerated the process even faster than she expected.

“It’s possibly a new variant [of brain-degenerating disease], because it is sufficiently different than anything we’ve seen before,” she said.

Neurodegenerative diseases such as CJD, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS all take many years for symptoms to manifest.

Seneff’s understanding of prion and prion-like disease is that individuals need to first be exposed to a protein that triggers misfolding of the body’s prions, which then build up for years before showing any symptoms.

“There’s a certain point at which it starts just to show symptoms, but it takes a whole process beforehand,” she said.

“You can have evidence of misfolded amyloid beta (a protein involved in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease) in the spleen … and even in the brain before you have any symptoms … it’s a slow disease, but … it’s a progressive disease.”

Other research studies are also suggesting a possible link between prion and prion-like diseases and the COVID-19 vaccine.

Seneff’s friend and Nobel laureate, the late Dr. Luc Montagnier, co-authored a preprint study on 26 patients that developed CJD and died after receiving the vaccine.

The majority of the cases occurred within 11.38 days after vaccination, with deaths occurring at around 4.76 months.

The authors were fairly confident that the cases were related to the vaccine. The study’s corresponding author Dr. Jean-Claude Perez said his friend Montagnier feared, during the initial release of the vaccine, that the “new form of CJD would affect the millions of adolescents or children vaccinated with COVID-19.”

“All this confirms the radically different nature of this new form of CJD, whereas the classic form requires several decades,” the researchers wrote.

Other studies on worsening of Parkinson’s or similar diseases also surfaced with some researchers pondering the links between the two events.

The “hidden process is happening faster with people who are getting the vaccine such that they’ll get the Parkinson’s disease [and other related diseases] sooner than they would have gotten it without the vaccine,” Seneff said.

Why so Toxic?

Seneff told The Epoch Times that the mRNA technology in the majority of the COVID-19 vaccines may be why we are seeing greater instances of reported adverse effects than from all previous vaccines.

She said she was concerned the moment she heard the term “warp speed,”—the operation between the department of health and vaccine manufacturers to accelerate the vaccine production process—and started studying mRNA technology.

Her immediate verdict was “I was not going to get it; there was no way I was gonna let anyone inject it into my arm,” she said.

Studies have shown that the spike protein on the COVID-19 virus is toxic, therefore the mRNA and DNA (AstraZeneca) vaccines that force a person’s cells to make more toxic proteins are very likely to cause damage, though many media platforms have stated that the spike proteins produced by the vaccines are harmless.

Seneff’s study mostly focused on the mRNA vaccines.

“The coronavirus is very good at adapting, which is why they never were able to develop a vaccine in the past,” she said. Seneff, therefore, could not understand how the technology suddenly became so skilled and was able to do something they could not do before.

Even Bill Gates, a major public figure behind the movement to vaccinate the globe for COVID-19 funded a report through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stating that unprecedented vaccines like the mRNA vaccines would take 10 to 12 years to be fully tested before release.

Further, that of all these unprecedented vaccines, only 2 percent would be able to pass through the clinical trials.

Seneff’s second study highlighted that although existing vaccines confer immunity by mimicking the natural infection process, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines do not mimic natural infection at all.

“The messenger RNA (mRNA) [in the vaccine] is extremely … not natural,” she said.

Compared to natural mRNA that quickly degrades in the cell, the mRNA from the COVID-19 vaccines have been shown to take over two months to degrade, even though the manufacturers promised that degradation would occur in a few days.

“They were so worried about the mRNA not lasting long enough that they way overdid it, I think,” Seneff said.

Unaltered mRNA injected into to the body triggers immediate immune responses, particularly interferon release, that will degrade the mRNA before it can reach target cells to initiate the manufacture of spike proteins. Therefore, in order to evade these fundamental immune defenses, Moderna and Pfizer altered the mRNA’s uridine molecule (a basic component of mRNA) into 1-methylpseudouridine to “dramatically reduce innate immune activation against exogenous (outside sourced) mRNA.”

Natural infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus triggers innate immune responses such as the production of interferon.

Altering the structure of the vaccine mRNA allows the synthetic mRNA to persist in the body as it bypasses these fundamental immune responses. It can be argued that the vaccine’s version of the spike protein is not the same as the native one.

Further, to make the mRNA more stable, Moderna and Pfizer changed the chemical bases that make up the strand of RNA. The original RNA strand in the virus is made up of 36 percent of guanine (G) and cytosine (C).

mRNA low in G and C bases are less stable and degradable; Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines had this percentage raised to 53 percent and 61 respectively.

Previous experiments showed that genes that had higher G and C content were more likely to be read and their information made into proteins. Having a high G content also increases the speed at which the gene is read, but faster reading also means more likelihood of errors, and a higher likelihood of misfolding.

This potentially means that not only will this instruction remain in the cell for longer for its information to be made into protein, cells will also preferentially express information from the vaccine mRNA.

“The increasing evidence [is] that the vaccines do little to control disease spread and that their effectiveness wanes over time,” Seneff’s study read. “SARS-CoV-2 modified spike protein mRNA vaccinations have biological impacts is without question.”

Papers Refused ‘As Soon as the Word Prion Is Mentioned’

It should be noted that many of Seneff’s studies are her own speculations that have not been proven although they have been rigorously peer-reviewed.

It has been difficult for her to develop a solid case, as very few studies examine the negative implications of COVID-19 vaccines. For Seneff and her colleagues, who write papers that tell an alternative story, it has been difficult to find a journal to publish their work.

Dr. Jean-Claude Perez, the co-author of Dr. Luc Montagnier’s study on 26 CJD cases, told The Epoch Times via email that it was very difficult to publish his previous study with Montagnier and Dr. Valère Lounnas in reputable neurology journals.

That study found that Omicron is the only COVID-19 variant that does not contain a prion region, and despite receiving consent from all participants in the study, reputable journals cited ethical constraints as a major barrier to publication.

The authors considered publishing their research in smaller journals, but then fewer people would read it.

The authors therefore chose to publish their work as a pre-print which has less constraints, and although findings published in this way are generally less trusted, a wider range of people can be reached.

“But even certain types of preprints that we will not mention refuse such articles as soon as the word prion is pronounced there, such was the case for our article,” Perez wrote.

Seneff also experienced retraction of her work on spike proteins; both she and Montagnier have had their expertise in the matter questioned by the media and other members of the scientific community.

Linda said that Douglas and she decided to go public with his story as they want to raise awareness about the possible dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines.

“Douglas, pretty much knows he’s gonna die from this … and that’s a terrible thing that happened to a 53-year-old man,” she said.

“If anybody could hear this story, because … the regular news media does not cover this at all.”

Seneff encourages other people affected to report the adverse event to VAERS and investigate and confirm if it may be linked to the COVID-19 vaccines.

Asked about a cure, Seneff says she doesn’t know of any cures but some of her friends have been using herbal medications to treat long COVID-19 symptoms seen in vaccine injured patients to see if such treatments could be efficacious.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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Restrictions in Sweden and Denmark: What Do The Numbers Show?
By Thorsteinn Siglaugsson
July 12, 2022

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Denmark and Sweden took very different approaches. While Denmark imposed mask mandates, closed schools and repeatedly closed so-called “nonessential” businesses, Sweden imposed hardly any all-encompassing restrictions. Lockdown proponents have accused the Swedish authorities of recklessness and claimed their approach has led to an unnecessary death toll.

But now the numbers are out, and according to two Danish professors, Christian Kanstrup Holm, virologist and professor at the University of Aarhus and Morten Petersen, professor of biology at the University of Copenhagen, in an article in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende on July 8th, excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 was in fact the same in both countries.

In Denmark, harsh restrictions were justified by the need to prevent the breakdown of the healthcare system and the public has generally accepted this justification. The professors’ conclusion, however, is that this justification does not hold; despite very little restrictions in Sweden, the Swedish healthcare system was never even close to breaking down.

In 2020 the Swedes certainly saw an excess mortality, while mortality in Denmark remained approximately the same as in previous years. But in 2021 this was reversed according to the data. The two professors also point out that in 2020 there was in fact no excess mortality in Sweden among those below the age of 75, which simply confirms how Covid-19 primarily attacks the oldest.

Excess mortality in Sweden and Denmark

Excess mortality in Sweden and Denmark

According to the models used to justify harsher restrictions in Denmark, about 30,000 people were expected to have died, had Sweden’s strategy been followed. But according to the data, the excess mortality in Sweden over the two years was around 6,000 and in Denmark 3,000, which amounts to the same percentage as the Danish population is about half the Swedish. Thus, the models were off by around 90%.

It might be added that this year we see continued excess mortality in Denmark well above that in Sweden.

“It often happens,“ the authors say, “that individuals, groups or even whole populations get caught in false dichotomies. Those are commonly based on powerful anecdotes and lead to a general acceptance of the validity of one or more claims, which do not stand up to scrutiny.“

While false beliefs may be harmless, “they can also persist for a long time, even if they have serious negative consequences, both for individuals and whole populations.“

They urge the authorities to make sure that in the future all consequences, including negative effects of restrictions on public health, psychological well-being, education and economy be considered. For this to happen “it is crucial to have the courage to debate and analyse.“
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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Increased Risk of Serious Blood Clots Up to Six Months After COVID-19
By BMJ
July 12, 2022

Research uncovered an increased risk of pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in the lung) up to six months after covid-19 infection, deep vein thrombosis (a blood clot in the leg) up to three months, and a bleeding event up to two months. The study from Sweden was published by The BMJ.

According to the findings, there is also a higher risk of events in patients with underlying conditions (comorbidities), patients with more severe covid-19, and during the first pandemic wave compared with the second and third waves.

These results support measures to prevent thrombotic events (thromboprophylaxis), especially for high-risk patients, and strengthen the importance of vaccination against covid-19, according to the researchers.


It is already well established that covid-19 increases the risk of serious blood clots (known as venous thromboembolism or VTE), but less evidence exists on the length of time this risk is increased, if risk changed during the various pandemic waves, and whether covid-19 also increases the risk of major bleeding.

To address these uncertainties, scientists set out to measure the risk of deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and bleeding after covid-19.

Using national registries in Sweden, they identified more than one million people with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection (the virus responsible for covid-19) between February 1, 2020 and, May 25, 2021, matched by age, sex, and county of residence to more than four million people who had not had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result.

They then performed two analyses: in the first, they calculated the rates of deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and bleeding in covid-19 individuals during a control period (before and long after covid-19 diagnosis) and compared it to the rates in different time intervals after covid-19 diagnosis (days 1-7, 8-14, 15-30, 31-60, 61-90, and 91-180).

In the second analysis, they calculated the rates of deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and bleeding during the period 1-30 days after covid-19 diagnosis in the covid-19 group and compared them to the corresponding rates in the control group.

The results show that compared with the control period, risks were significantly increased 90 days after covid-19 for deep vein thrombosis, 180 days for pulmonary embolism, and 60 days for bleeding.

After taking into account a range of potentially influential factors, the researchers found a fivefold increase in the risk of deep vein thrombosis, a 33-fold increase in the risk of pulmonary embolism, and an almost twofold increase in the risk of bleeding in the 30 days after infection.

In absolute terms, this means that a first deep vein thrombosis occurred in 401 patients with covid-19 (absolute risk 0.04%) and 267 control patients (absolute risk 0.01%). A first pulmonary embolism event occurred in 1,761 patients with covid-19 (absolute risk 0.17%) and 171 control patients (absolute risk 0.004%), and a first bleeding event occurred in 1,002 patients with covid-19 (absolute risk 0.10%) and 1,292 control patients (absolute risk 0.04%).

Risks were highest in patients with more severe covid-19 and during the first pandemic wave compared with the second and third waves, which the researchers say could be explained by improvements in treatment and vaccine coverage in older patients after the first wave.

Even among mild, non-hospitalized covid-19 patients, the researchers found increased risks of deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. No increased risk of bleeding was found in mild cases, but a noticeable increase was observed in more severe cases.

This is an observational study, so the researchers cannot establish cause, and they acknowledge several limitations which might have affected their findings. For example, VTE may have been underdiagnosed in patients with covid-19, testing for covid-19 was limited, especially during the first pandemic wave, and information on vaccination was not available.

However, results were largely consistent after further analyses, and are in line with similar studies on the association between covid-19 and thromboembolic events, suggesting that they withstand scrutiny.

As such, the researchers say their findings suggest that covid-19 is an independent risk factor for deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and bleeding, and that the risk of these outcomes is increased for three, six, and two months after covid-19, respectively.

“Our findings arguably support thromboprophylaxis to avoid thrombotic events, especially for high risk patients, and strengthen the importance of vaccination against covid-19,” they conclude.

In a linked editorial, researchers at the University of Glasgow point out that despite the potential for new variants of concern, most governments are removing restrictions and shifting their focus to determining how best to “live with covid.”

However, they say this study “reminds us of the need to remain vigilant to the complications associated with even mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, including thromboembolism.”

Reference: “Risks of deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and bleeding after covid-19: nationwide self-controlled cases series and matched cohort study” by Ioannis Katsoularis, Osvaldo Fonseca-Rodríguez, Paddy Farrington, Hanna Jerndal, Erling Häggström Lundevaller, Malin Sund, Krister Lindmark and Anne-Marie Fors Connolly, 6 April 2022, The BMJ.
DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2021-069590

Funding: Region Västerbotten Agreement for Medical Education and Research funding, Umeå University, the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden, Stroke Research in Northern Sweden, the Swedish Kidney Foundation, the Scandinavian Research Foundation for venous diseases, the Heart Foundation in Northern Sweden, Arnerska Research Foundation, and Kempes Foundation
 

Heliobas Disciple

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Long COVID patients are seeking experimental 'blood washing' treatment abroad, investigation finds
by British Medical Journal
July 12, 2022

Thousands of people experiencing the debilitating symptoms of long COVID are traveling abroad to seek costly but unproven treatments such as "blood washing," according to an investigation carried out by The BMJ and ITV News and released today.

Patients are traveling to private clinics in Cyprus, Germany and Switzerland for apheresis—a blood filtering treatment normally used for patients with lipid disorders that have not responded to drugs—and anti-clotting therapy.

But experts question whether these invasive therapies should be offered without sufficient evidence.

As part of the investigation, ITV News visited a private clinic in Cyprus and spoke to its co-founder Marcus Klotz and several patients.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that between 10% and 20% of patients suffer symptoms for at least two months after an acute COVID-19 infection—a phenomenon commonly known as long COVID.

According to the latest official data, as of May 1, there were nearly two million people in the UK self-reporting long COVID symptoms, which can include fatigue, muscle weakness, breathing and sleep difficulties, memory problems, anxiety or depression, chest pains, and loss of smell or taste.

Currently, there is no internationally agreed treatment pathway for the condition.

Apheresis involves needles being put into each arm and the blood is passed over a filter, separating the red blood cells from the plasma. The plasma is filtered before being recombined with the red blood cells and returned to the body via a different vein.

The investigation includes details of people who have tried the treatment, such as Gitte Boumeester, a trainee psychiatrist in Almelo, the Netherlands, who, after catching the virus, developed severe long COVID symptoms. She was forced to quit her job in November 2021, after two failed attempts to go back to work.

Boumeester learned of the "blood-washing" treatment of apheresis from a Facebook group for long COVID patients.

After visiting The Long COVID Center in Cyprus to receive the treatment, at a cost of more than €50,000 (£42,376), she returned home with no improvement to her symptoms. She received six rounds of apheresis, as well as nine rounds of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and an intravenous vitamin drip at the private Poseidonia clinic, next door to the Center.

Boumeester was asked to sign a consent form at the Long COVID Center before undergoing apheresis, which lawyers and clinicians described as inadequate.

She was also advised to buy hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment package in case she was reinfected with COVID-19, despite a Cochrane review published in March 2021 concluding that it is "unlikely" the drug has a benefit in the prevention of COVID-19.

Marcus Klotz, co-founder of the Long COVID Center told The BMJ, "We as a clinic neither advertise, nor promote. We accept patients that have microcirculation issues and want to be treated with HELP apheresis…If a patient needs a prescription, it is individually assessed by our doctor or the patient is referred to other specialized doctors where needed."

A spokesperson for the Poseidonia clinic said all treatments offered are "always based on medical and clinical evaluation by our doctors and clinical nutritionist, diagnosis via blood tests with lab follow ups as per good medical practice."

While some doctors and researchers believe apheresis and anticoagulation drugs may be promising treatments for long COVID, others worry desperate patients are spending life-changing sums on invasive, unproven treatments.

Shamil Haroon, clinical lecturer in primary care at the University of Birmingham and a researcher on the Therapies for Long COVID in Non-hospitalized patients (TLC) trial, believes such "experimental" treatment should only be done in the context of a clinical trial.

"It's unsurprising that people who were previously highly functioning, who are now debilitated, can't work, can't financially support themselves, would seek treatments elsewhere," he says.

"It's a completely rational response to a situation like this. But people could potentially go bankrupt accessing these treatments, for which there is limited to no evidence of effectiveness."

In February of last year, Dr. Beate Jaeger, an internal medicine doctor, began treating long COVID patients with apheresis at her clinic in Mulheim, Germany, after reading reports that COVID causes issues with blood clotting. She told The BMJ she has now treated thousands in her clinic, with success stories spreading on social media and by word of mouth.

Jaeger accepts that the treatment is experimental for long COVID, but said trials take too long when the pandemic has left patients desperately ill.

The North Rhine Medical Association, which examines whether doctors have violated their professional code of conduct, told The BMJ it has not received any complaints about Jaeger or her clinic from patients or other organizations but will investigate if it does.

The investigation also found that apheresis and associated travel costs are so expensive that patients are setting up fundraising pages on websites like GoFundMe in order to raise the money.

Chris Witham, a 45-year-old businessman and long COVID sufferer from Bournemouth who spent around £7,000 on apheresis treatment (including travel and accommodation costs) in Kempten, Germany, last year, says, "I'd have sold my house and given it away to get better, without a second thought."

Existing research has suggested that "microclots" present in the plasma of people with long COVID could be responsible for long COVID symptoms. But experts contacted by The BMJ and ITV News said more research is needed to understand how microclots form and whether they are causing long COVID symptoms.

Others are also concerned about the lack of follow up care for patients when they leave clinics after being prescribed anticoagulation drugs.

Robert Ariens, professor of vascular biology at the University of Leeds School of Medicine, says, "They [microclots] may be a biomarker for disease, but how do we know they are causal?"

He believes the clinics offering apheresis and anticoagulation therapy are prematurely providing treatment based on a hypothesis that needs more scientific research.

"If we don't know the mechanisms by which the microclots form and whether or not they are causative of disease, it seems premature to design a treatment to take the microclots away, as both apheresis and triple anticoagulation are not without risks, the obvious one being bleeding," he adds.
 

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(fair use applies)

Coinfection with influenza A could suppress replication in SARS-CoV-2
by American Society for Microbiology
July 12, 2022

Coinfection of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus changes neither the trajectory, nor the severity of influenza A virus, regardless of timing. But should the host contract influenza A virus first, the response to that infection can significantly suppress SARS-CoV-2, according to research published this week in the Journal of Virology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.

"The research is important, because the human population now has 2 circulating respiratory RNA viruses with high pandemic potential: SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A," the investigators wrote. "As both viruses infect the airways, and can result in significant morbidity and mortality, it is imperative that we also understand the consequences of coinfection."

Several clinical studies had previously reported on co-infection of SARS-CoV-2 with other viruses. "In particular, coinfection with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus was common early in the COVID-19 pandemic, prior to the enforcement of masks and social distancing," said corresponding author Benjamin R. tenOever, Ph.D., professor of microbiology, New York University, Langone Health, New York, N.Y.. These viruses infect the same cells within the airway.

Notably, the investigators found that influenza A virus interferes with SARS-CoV-2 replication in the lung and can continue to do so even more than 1 week after clearance of influenza A according to the research.

"These data suggest the presence of factors intrinsic to or induced by [influenza A virus] that may restrict the growth of SARS-CoV-2, but it remains unclear whether this effect plays a role on disease severity," the researchers wrote.

The investigators performed the experiments in cultured cells, as well as in a golden hamster animal model. "… animals were administered the 2 viruses simultaneously, and examined at days 1,3, 5, 7 and 14 post infection," said tenOever. The researchers also conducted experiments in which they first challenged the animals with either virus, followed three days later by the other virus, monitoring [them] at days 1, 3, and 5 post-second challenge.

"This study could be used as an example of how an immune response to something unrelated can provide protection against SARS-CoV-2," said tenOever.

The team demonstrated that coinfection does not result in a worse outcome of disease in an animal model. "These results suggest that coinfection with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus does not represent a looming threat for humanity," said tenOever.
 

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Infections, transatlantic surge
25 min 57 sec
Jul 12, 2022
Dr. John Campbell

US, Back to behavioural normal, No public health measures South and West Population level immunity is driving viral evolution, fast BA.5 Antibodies from vaccination and infection offer little protection against infection https://www.washingtonpost.com/health... BA.2.75, next after BA.5 Cases, flat, 100,000 per day Infections, up, perhaps 1 million per day Hospitalizations, up, 0.6% on the week Deaths, flat CDC, stay up to date on vaccines, and take appropriate precautions to protect themselves and others UK covid infections https://health-study.joinzoe.com/data Cases, + 348,001 (Proportionate, 1 million new infections per day in the US) Currently covid symptomatic, 4,296,603 UK data https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk Infections, up Hospitalizations, up Deaths, down UKHSA https://bidstats.uk/tenders/2022/W24/... Requirement for the ongoing supply of additional Lateral Flow Testing and Polymerase Chain Reaction Kits £ 2, 000, 000, 000 Lord Kamall, health minister https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022... If current increase in hospital admissions is affecting the backlog clearly measures may well have to be introduced Current data does not point to cases becoming more severe but also what we have managed to do is break the link between infections and hospitalisations, and hospitalisations and death If that gets out of control then of course we will stand up the measures that we have previously Ziyad Al-Aly, epidemiologist, Washington University St. Louis There are no public health measures at all We’re in a very peculiar spot, where the risk is vivid and it’s out there, but we’ve let our guard down and we’ve chosen, deliberately, to expose ourselves and make ourselves more vulnerable https://www.researchsquare.com/articl... Multiple infections have a higher cumulative risk of a severe illness or death Reinfections may be mild any coronavirus infection carries risk, and the risk of a really bad outcome — a heart attack, for example — builds cumulatively I worry that by the time we have a vaccine for BA.5 we’ll have a BA.6 or a BA.7. This virus keeps outsmarting us Mercedes Carnethon, epidemiologist, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine It feels as though everyone has given up zero covid not plausible Harlan Krumholz, Yale University professor of medicine Percentage of people with severely debilitating symptoms is probably 1 to 5% North Korea North Korea suggests ‘alien things’ from the South brought Covid. Coronavirus entered on foreign objects from South Korea Started in villages near border, after touched “alien things.” State Emergency Epidemic Prevention Headquarters vigilantly deal with alien things brought across the border by balloons, wind other climate phenomena All objects to be reported After two years of claiming to have no Covid cases, North Korea Declared a maximin emergency on May 12 Cases, 4.7 million (Covid-like symptoms) Deaths, 73 (June 15) New infections, 4,570 on Friday, (down from 390,000 mid-May)
 

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BA.5 Latest With Paul Bork (July 12 2022)
43 min 23 sec
Streamed live 7 hours ago
Drbeen Medical Lectures

BA.5 Latest With Paul Bork (July 12 2022) BA.5 is reported to have created a wave of cases. The severity is said to be theoretically greater than its parent. Let's keep an eye on it. If you like this content and want more, I am doing a special lifetime membership offer. Click here: https://www.drbeen.com/yt-special/ Want to support this work?: Buy me a coffee :-) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DrMobeen... Become my patron: https://www.patreon.com/mobeensyed?fa... PayPal: https://paypal.me/mobeensyed?locale.x... My sibstack: https://mobeensyedmd.substack.com/ #drbeen #koolbeens #COVID Disclaimer: This video is not intended to provide assessment, diagnosis, treatment, or medical advice; it also does not constitute provision of healthcare services. The content provided in this video is for informational and educational purposes only. Please consult with a physician or healthcare professional regarding any medical or mental health related diagnosis or treatment. No information in this video should ever be considered as a substitute for advice from a healthcare professional. URL list from Tuesday, Jul. 12 2022 Implications of the emergence and spread of the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern BA.4 and BA.5 for the EU/EEA https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-ev... Weekly COVID-19 country overview https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-1... What Omicron’s BA.4 and BA.5 variants mean for the pandemic https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158... Omicron subvariant BA.5 now accounts for 65% of cases in the U.S. https://www.yahoo.com/news/omicron-ba... Coronavirus (COVID-19) Cases - Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths - Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths - Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths - Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation https://assets.publishing.service.gov...
 

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What Is The Status of Pandemic for The USA?
31 min 39 sec
Streamed live 6 hours ago
Drbeen Medical Lectures

What Is The Status of Pandemic for The USA? If you like this content and want more, I am doing a special lifetime membership offer. Click here: https://www.drbeen.com/yt-special/ Want to support this work?: Buy me a coffee :-) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DrMobeen... Become my patron: https://www.patreon.com/mobeensyed?fa... PayPal: https://paypal.me/mobeensyed?locale.x... My substack: https://mobeensyedmd.substack.com/ #drbeen #koolbeens #COVID Disclaimer: This video is not intended to provide assessment, diagnosis, treatment, or medical advice; it also does not constitute provision of healthcare services. The content provided in this video is for informational and educational purposes only. Please consult with a physician or healthcare professional regarding any medical or mental health related diagnosis or treatment. No information in this video should ever be considered as a substitute for advice from a healthcare professional. URL list from Tuesday, Jul. 12 2022 Updated US Infection- and Vaccine-Induced SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence Estimates Based on Blood Donations, July 2020-December 2021 | Infectious Diseases | JAMA | JAMA Network https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama... Implications of the emergence and spread of the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern BA.4 and BA.5 for the EU/EEA https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-ev... Weekly COVID-19 country overview https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-1... What Omicron’s BA.4 and BA.5 variants mean for the pandemic https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158... Omicron subvariant BA.5 now accounts for 65% of cases in the U.S. https://www.yahoo.com/news/omicron-ba... Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths - Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths Zoe Health Study - COVID Data https://health-study.joinzoe.com/data... SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation https://assets.publishing.service.gov...
 

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Yet Another Booster? Based on What Data? | Biden's Plan for a 4th COVID19 Shot | A Prof Reflects
16 min 10 sec
Jul 12, 2022
Vinay Prasad MD MPH

VIDEO GOES WITH THIS ARTICLE:

(fair use applies)

A second booster for people <50
Biden administration is indifferent to data
Vinay Prasad
18 hr ago

WaPo is reporting the Biden administration plans to push a second booster through for healthy people <50; Here is how the European CDC judges the evidence for that claim


I would have no objection to offering a second booster to people <50 if someone proved to me that giving this shot offered a benefit to recipients or the community.

Unfortunately, when it comes to community benefit, no amount of vaccination is able to stop spread, and the virus will keep circulating, so there is no benefit to others with time.

When it comes to personal benefit, the surgeon general offers these data, but of course they are flawed. People who rush to get the 4th dose are different than those that don’t. There is no assurance that is the 4th dose effect rather than the types of unique individuals who are desperate for it.



Moreover, the ECDC rejects this claim, based on other datasets that stratify by age, but all of these analyses are likely too optimisitc. We need randomized data.

Paul Offit says it best in WaPo

Image

Instead, the white house disregards these analyses and pushes this dose. The worry of course is that need to be seen as offering something for political rather than medical reasons. They need to limit cases right at the moment of the midterm elections.

The other concern is that clearly Pfizer has excess product, and this move will help them unload that supply. Are they merely working in Pfizer’s best interest? When the terms end for people like Marks-Walensky-Jha will they end up working for Pfizer? Serving on the board of directors?

The final concern is that they continue to play fast and loose with the FDA’s credibility. They are spending it like monopoly money. Unfortunately, the massive decline in public acceptance of other vaccines, which is in progress, will be, in part, attributable to their actions.

Ironically Biden has done what we feared Trump would. Interfere repeatedly in vaccine authorization, possibly for political rather than public health reasons.
 
Last edited:

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Can BA.2.75 Sub-Variant lead to another Covid wave?
22 min 35 sec
Streamed live on Jul 6, 2022
India Today

Some static for first two minutes before they fix it.
India Today TV is India's leading English News Channel. India Today YouTube channel offers latest news videos on Politics, Business, Cricket, Bollywood, Lifestyle, Auto, Technology, Travel, Entertainment and a lot more. Stay tuned for latest updates and in-depth analysis of news from India and around the world!
 

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New BA 2 75 Omicron Subvariant Here’s The ‘Centaurus’ Covid 19 Coronavirus
3 min 39 sec
Jul 9, 2022
Business News


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1onD_SWm8I
WHO monitoring new Omicron sub-variant BA 2 75 detected in countries like India
4 min 28 sec
Jul 9, 2022
Health-Health


SAME DESCRIPTION UNDER BOTH VIDEOS:

While it ain’t the “Centaurus” of Covid-19 attention right now, the new BA.2.75 Omicron subvariant does deserve to be closely monitored. This so-called “Centaurus” subvariant, first detected in India, has now appeared in at least 10 other countries including the U. S. And there are eight-not-so-simple reasons why the BA.2.75 could potentially be even more concerning than the already concerning BA.5 subvariant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Before you run around the room flapping your arms in a panic, though, the emphasis here is on the word “potentially” as opposed to “definitely” or “fer sure.” Plus, public health authorities will never say, “OK, everyone, time to panic now.”Speaking of public health authorities, guess who’s now monitoring the BA.2.75? The World Health Organization, that’s who. If you look at the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants website, you’ll now find the BA.2.75 categorized as a VOC-LUM. What the VOC is a VOC-LUM? Well, it stands for Variants of Concern (VOC) Lineage Under Monitoring (LUM), which basically means that these are offshoots of variants that have already been deemed VOCs and deserve to be closely watched. The list of VOC-LUM’s currently includes several sub-lineages of the BA.2 Omicron subvariant (that is, the BA.2.12.1, BA.2.9.1, BA.2.11, BA.2.13, and BA.2.75) along with two sister lineages of the BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron subvariants (consisting of the BA.4 and BA.5). The BA.4 and BA.5 have already proven to be twisted sister lineages, so to speak. During a July 6 media briefing, the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, mentioned that, “On Covid-19, globally reported cases have increased nearly 30% over the past two weeks. Four out of six of the WHO sub-regions saw cases increase in the last week.” Clearly, this goes against the Covid is over narrative that some have been trying to unjustifiably spread. The WHO Director-General then specified that “In Europe and America, BA.4 and BA.5 are driving waves,” before mentioning the Centaurus: “In countries like India a new sub lineage of BA.2.75 has also been detected, which we’re following.”The BA.4 and BA.5 have been essentially making waves in part because they’ve proven more transmissible than previous versions of the virus. However, there may be another inescapable reason for their Covid-19 surge production role: immune escape. Immune escape may sound like a ride in a bad amusement park, but it represents what happens when a virus has accumulated enough mutations to look different enough to avoid any existing immune protection. This would be akin to your high school classmate getting so much plastic surgery or such an extreme makeover that you end up asking him or her during a reunion, “hi, have we met before?” Essentially, mutations may have made the BA. All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee...
 

Heliobas Disciple

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(fair use applies)

Passengers Evacuated due to Covid Outbreak on All-Vaccinated Cruise
One out of 20 is sick -- and the UK is WORSE!

Igor Chudov
15 hr ago

July 11th 2022
233 Retweets424 Likes

I am very sorry, obviously, for the ruined experience of the passengers on that cruise ship. They were all required to be vaccinated (medical exemptions are almost impossible to get in Australia).



It did not help, of course. The result is quite unfortunate, as one out of 20 passengers was diagnosed sick with Covid, and if I may guess, many more were actually infected. The ship was evacuated and the cruises were cut short.

UK
The UK is an island nation, not a cruise ship. Right now, one out of 15 Brits is having an ongoing COVID infection. (this is ZOE data and it always closely agrees with the ONS incidence survey, which runs a couple of weeks behind).



I feel for the affected Brits, who, again for the umpteenth time, have their N-th wave of Covid, reinfecting the unfortunately vulnerable persons. Each subsequent wave looks worse. Is a storm coming?

The problem is that, unlike the Australian cruise ship, the UK cannot be evacuated
. Where would the UK evacuate? To France? Germany? Italy? Those heavily vaccinated countries are having it even worse than the UK; and at least those actually count “Covid cases”, unlike the UK.



What should the UK do? I have my own answer: the UK should fire all “health authorities” who got it to where it is right now. In addition, people should stop listening to the corporate press who lied so much in order to get them into this situation, and then they can start looking for solutions with all-new people in charge — who would hopefully listen to everybody instead of dismissing opponents.

.
 

Heliobas Disciple

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(fair use applies)

relative excess deaths in the most "vaccine hesitant" minorities in UK
digging into more predicative data on overall survival rates.
el gato malo
20 hr ago

whether or not covid vaccines provide overall mortality benefit has been a contentious issue since the beginning.

infamously, theydid not do so in their own vaccine trials. some have argued that this is because those in the trials were so young and healthy and so there was just not sufficient signal. (this, of course, can also be inverted into a criticism of using the vaccines in the young and healthy as well.)

the UK provides something of an interesting natural experiment to assess this as we have one population subgroup that has been extremely uninterested in getting jabbed.

black people in UK have expressed only 28%willingness to vaxx vs 84% in white.

i chose these two groupings because they map cleanly to the all cause mortality data. “asian” gets tricky as pakistani/bangledeshi differ quite a lot and are not broken out in the all cause deaths figures.



vaxx uptake data here.

in comparing these two communities, we immediately run into some challenges, foremost that the black community saw a MUCH higher death toll than the white during covid. i suspect this is due to a variety of factors including higher rates of obesity, heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes known to be severe exacerbating factors for risk of covid death as well as ethnic variances in ACE receptor expression. these all favor higher death the black community.

i used the UK excess death data HERE to graph this. the large divergence can be readily seen. interestingly, however, this variance was much larger pre-vaccination. campaign. i have marked the point at which vaccination reached 5% (and then rose steeply) in the UK on the graph.



several things emerge from this immediately.
  • all cause mortality was much higher in blacks than whites during covid and remained so until ~april of 2022
  • around april 2022, this changed and the two moved into near lockstep
  • both dropped a great deal. this is consistent with less deadly variants and with cohort depletion
  • but the black cohort has seen more attenuation in excess deaths, especially recently. the question then becomes, why?
this is easier to see if we zoom in. this is only the period since vaccination began.



here we see something interesting. in the surge during sept-oct of 2021, black excess mortality rise exceeded white.

this would be consistent with vaccines working and generating overall all cause mortality benefit (or just racial variance). this aligns with what looked to be meaningfully positive covid death benefit (though not necessarily in all cause deaths) from vaccines seen in the UK around that time and with prior data on comorbidities.

but now look at the surge from april 2022 until present.

this apparent efficacy is gone. the two are now the same (despite the longstanding higher risk in the black cohort due to co-morbidity/disposition/etc)

two theories jump to my mind to explain this. the first is “dry tinder.” if the black community has had greater overall excess death then it has more intensely depleted its vulnerable groups. this should lead to less death going forward.
they certainly saw more deaths overall. here is cumulative excess deaths.



and here is the zoom in to just the post vaxx era:



so, this driver may be having some effect. it’s certainly plausible. but i see some issues with this theory as well.

if you go back and look at the excess mortality by week charts above, this change was quite abrupt. if it were cohort depletion, you’d expect convergence in series to be more gradual. but it’s not. we really see no such signal until it suddenly emerges in the spring of 2022, specifically in april.

and i suspect this may be important because something else was happening in april too:



starting in march the BA.2 (and later) sub variants of omicron became dominant in the UK. and a few weeks later, the gap in excess deaths in the highly vaxxed white community and the low vaxx black community disappeared with great suddenness.

given the well established fears of the BA strains as “optimized vaccine escape/OAS variants that are actually vaccine enabled” this is more than a little provocative.

relative case counts in the vaxxed in the UK were exploding in the lead up to this same period. (more HERE)

alas, they then stopped reporting this and many other data series for vaxxed vs unvaxxed and the cynical side of me fears that the excess death shift may be giving us an indication as to why they did not want to talk about this any more especially as there is every reason to expect BA.4-5 to accelerate this variance further.

since the week ending 4/8, white excess deaths have exceeded black for an extended period the first time all covid at 7.8% vs 7.5%.

this was sudden and meaningful and seemed worth looking into.

as a sort of rough test, i set a baseline for each group based on their overall excess death from 3/27/20 until 3/26/21 when vax rates hit 5%. this gives us a sort of “unvaxxed” reference level.

(admittedly, there are a number of potential problems with this approach including not accounting for dry tinder and if people have some better ideas on how to get at this issue, i’d love to hear them)


i then compared current excess death vs baseline. the results were very interesting.



the greater levels of attenuation in the black cohort is readily visible. it’s largely flat to down since the beginning of 2022 and remains at about -30% vs baseline.

but the white cohort has been rising most of the year and rose sharply as BA.2+ hit. in june, some levels actually exceeded baseline.

this makes me increasingly suspect of “dry tinder” as an explanation. the prior lockstep in spread suddenly went away over about a 1 month period instead of gradually fading. that seems more consistent with a strong and temporally focused external driver.

to my eye, this seems most consistent with the following hypothesis:

vaccines provided some level of protection vs overall mortality that was equal to 0 or greater.

maybe they did nothing and whites just had fewer risk factors and/or got better care, maybe vaccines were providing some overall benefit, but this issue has now inverted.

high vaxx looks suddenly associated with higher risk and this looks to have offset a longstanding intrinsic variance.


if this is so, the next month or two ought to provide confirmation if this trend continues and/or relative excess mortality inverts further.

i actually suspect the that vaxxes were helping some on deaths and here’s why:

look at % of overall deaths with covid on the certificate.

it has been consistently higher in the black cohort.

but look what happened in april 2022.

it’s now become generally higher in whites.

that’s quite a switch on a relative basis.



note that this does not prove that VE is now negative for deaths in any given case. VE could still be quite high, say, 50%. but if you become 3X more likely to get covid, even 50% attenuation in deaths per case means a 50% rise on overall death experienced even if the vaccines themselves are causing no deaths (and they clearly are).

this is why these OAS and leaky vaccine driven viral evolution/herd antigenic fixation issues are so critical and why they should have ended these vaxx programs the second they realized the vaccines were non-sterilizing:

because if you push a leaky vaccine, especially one that elicits and fixates around such a narrow response vector, you end up in a spot like this.

you’ve created a lab that WILL create escape and vaccine advantaged variants. it is literally designed to. no other outcome is possible. then the BA strains show up and you start to see the effects and it starts to go faster and faster as the formerly recessive antigens become increasingly dominant.

that’s just evolution: always looking, testing, probing, trying to find a path for the water to flow downhill. selfish genes seek to replicate. give them new selection pressures, you select for different things. this is part of what makes omicron so interesting (and potentially telling). it was not a descendant of delta. the two have no common ancestor unless you go back to even before alpha.



we’re into a whole new serotype and this occurred as a major throwback. some have presumed that this must indicate that omi was another lab escape, but i suspect another explanation may better fit: omi was a failed minor sub-mutation that had been around but was going nowhere. then, the vaccines changed the game. the antigens of omi were suddenly highly advantaged and so it spread like wildfire using the fixated immune response of the vaccinated to do so. “would omicron ever have come to prevalence without covid vaccines?” is actually quite an interesting question. (i’m not sure anyone knows for sure)

but it now seems to be evolving rapidly on a pathway that is infecting the most vaxxed most. benefits from boosters are ephemeral at best (and likely mostly derived from bayesian rigging in definitions.) efficacy in case rates rapidly becomes worse than in the twice jabbed or unjabbed.

this issue would be a helluva lot easier to get to the bottom of if we had good data to work with, but country after country is shutting off the series one would need to do accurate work, limiting access, eliminating reporting, and “taking down the data for revision.”

this does not inspire confidence.

“products so effective we cannot allow you to assess their outcomes” is not much of a sales pitch.
simple data like “all cause mortality by vax status, age, and possibly comorbidity” would make straightforward, high confidence analysis easy.

but it seems pretty clear there is little intention of allowing or enabling that.

i fear we’re at the point where such practice must be interpreted with prejudice.

this is too easy a problem to solve to be mishandled so badly by accident at this point, especially as the data that was leading us there all got discontinued and the folks like CDC that are supposed to monitoring VAERS safety signals are refusing to do so.

so we are left triangulating from what we have.

it’s looking more an more to me like the progression of omicron is aggressively becoming highly vaccine enabled. the timing and the outcomes fit on so many separate metrics. this is, unfortunately, precisely the core evolutionary expectation from society scale non-sterilizing immune fixation.

this analysis from the UK is admittedly a little rough and i’d love some input on better ways to clarify the signal/analysis or ways to get at better data, esp ACM by vaxx status rather than using a race proxy.

it feels to me like there is something here but that i have not quite pinned it down to the standard of “high confidence proof.”

let’s get some crowdsourced eyes and minds on this and see if we can figure it out.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Update regarding Omicron BA.5
Why is Dr. Anthony Fauci and the HHS Administrative State So Wound Up about Boosters?
Robert W Malone MD, MS
18 hr ago

This is going to be a quick one, so that I can reference it in a couple of audio and video broadcasts today and tomorrow. Just a slide deck.

Slide 1.


Slide 2.


Slide 3.


Slide 4.


Slide 5.


Slide 6.


Slide 7.


Slide 8.


Slide 9.


Additional links

 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

WARNING: Parents, in God’s name, we plead, under no condition do you inject your child with the COVID injection as it will subvert their innate immune system and can kill them: you can kill your child
Alexander: these COVID injections will subvert the innate immune system of children and render them susceptible to the confronted glycosylated pathogen, other viruses, and auto-immune attack, cancers
Dr. Paul Alexander
14 hr ago

Dr. Paul Elias Alexander, PhD
We are in the battle of all time, right here and now and the prize is your children. They will stop at nothing, these malfeasants around us, even cause the death of our children with this dangerous gene injection. We are calling out to you parents now, now is your time to stand up and lay your life down too if you must! This is your HOT gates, this is your Thermopylae! This is where you fight and we hold them! This is where we defeat Fauci, Walensky, Albert Bourla of Pfizer, Bancel of Moderna, Francis Collins of NIH, CDC, FDA, NIH, NIAID, PHAC…all of them. We shut them down here and we go back and investigate them and if they did wrong, if it is shown in proper inquiry, we clean them out financially and imprison every one last of them! They, these Horsemen, have caused deaths with their lockdown lunacy and these fraud COVID shots. We imprison all who are shown to have been complicit!

Before discussing the innate immune system and how these COVID injections can damage it in your healthy child, I wish to briefly touch on the present injection landscape in terms of the ineffectiveness and harmfulness of the injection (especially the mRNA gene delivery platform). I will also state that I am not an immunologist or virologist or even a vaccinologist. My training is in epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, clinical epidemiology, medical statistics, research methodology, clinical practice guideline development, and biostatistics.

I have however been heavily worked in COVID given my roles at the World Health Organization (WHO) and Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in Washington, DC, as well as my role in the Trump administration as a senior COVID pandemic advisor. I am one of the key players in the early treatment of COVID having had the fortune of developing under Dr. Harvey Risch, Dr. Zev Vladimir Zelenko, and Dr. Peter McCullough. I am a disciple of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche whom I regard as the foremost expert in virology and immunology as well as vaccinology, to include Dr. Mike Yeadon. My training is built on their informing of me and I cannot forget my Canadian brothers Dr. Byram Bridle and Dr. Howard Tenenbaum.

The COVD injection have failed! Mass vaccination using a sub-optimal non-neutralizing vaccine and into a pandemic and across all age-groups is a complete disaster. As you have seen now. It is the mass vaccination that is driving the infectious variants and ensuring the pandemic continues. The non-neutralizing COVID injection is actually facilitating and enhancing infection of the vaccinated (known as antibody-dependent enhancement of infection (ADEI)).

Do not let these illogical, failed , inept, corrupted, incompetent CDC and NIH and PHAC and SAGE officials and Fauci and Walensky frighten you about BA.5 sub-variant. As far as we see, it is infectious, more than prior variants, but not lethal to unvaccinated. It will not be for your healthy unvaccinated child. It is problematic for vaccinated persons as per clinical reports. It is lots of fear porn at present. Leave your healthy child alone. Please revert to our early treatment algorithms.

Also, it is the COVID vaccine itself that is causing these variants to emerge, not the virus. These are criminals who are doing this. You want this to stop? Then these malfeasants at CDC and NIH and Bourla and Bancel and Fauci and Francis Collins must stop these failed non-neutralizing COVID injections.

The injection today induces non-neutralizing vaccinal antibodies (Abs) that do not sterilize the virus (non-neutralization) and as such does not stop infection, replication, or transmission. We can never get to population-level herd immunity with a non-sterilizing injection and the non-neutralizing vaccinal Abs are sub-optimal, placing sub-optimal immune pressure on the infectiousness of the virus (the spike protein). This immune pressure, in the presence of massive viral infectious pressure, drives selection pressure that results in emergence of infectious variants e.g. Omicron. As long as we use a non-sterilizing injection in the midst of a pandemic, that does not neutralize the virus, then we will never get to herd immunity and this pandemic will go on for 100 years.

It is critical to understand that the human immune system must be approached and understood as a rather complicated, beautifully designed, meticulously balanced ecosystem. It is not simply about ‘neutralizing vaccinal antibodies’. This is very misleading. Antibody levels are not a measure of immune protection.

The immune system is composed of 2 main components (some say compartments) which is the mucosal immune system and a systemic immune system.



The mucosal immune system (the snot and slimy substance in your nose and mouth (nasopharynx) and digestive and respiratory tracts) and the systemic immune system both contain an innate and an acquired-adaptive component (or sub-compartments). The truth is we have only focused on the acquired-adaptive component which we refer to as natural immunity but this is not entirely correct. The innate immune system is also the natural immunity and all must be considered as part of the ‘natural immunity’ umbrella. The innate immune system is the 1st line of defense and has no memory and does not need it, alike the Pretorian guards, and works in concert with the acquired-adaptive component (which has a memory component and is regarded as the 2nd line of defense) and which is for a more virus specific response (antigen-specific).

It is a major error to disregard the innate immune system for it is a critical component of a functional immune response. Innate immunity is absolutely critical across your lifetime and especially so in early childhood for it is there that it gets its training, its education for optimal immune responding. Key to the innate immune system is the ‘innate antibodies’ (iABs) and the natural killer cells (NK cells). The latter is very potent and functions to clear out, eliminate virus that has gotten into cells by killing the cells.

Vanden Bossche reminds us that our children, newborns, infants, young children come with these iABs and are born with them. Yes, there is maternal protection but the innate immune system and the iABs are waiting to be trained as the maternal protection wears off in 4-6 months or so. These iABs are at very elevated concentrations in early infancy, childhood and the key aspect is that they decline from there. This it is critical that the iABs get the training it needs in order to protect the child thereafter. These iABs have disappear with time and they are poly-specific, non-specific, and of low affinity to the antigens (target). They come with the capacity to bind neutralize many different viruses.

As part of its training in early childhood, iABs must bind to live viruses (either live viruses in live attenuated replication competent vaccines or virus that is circulating) and in this binding, they help train and educate the innate immune system to be able to recognize viruses, besides the one it is now confronted with. It also is a key step in helping the immune system recognize non-self entities from self. Remember, it must be able to know what is ‘self’ so that it does not attack ‘self’ as this would lead to autoimmune reactivity and serious illness.

The iABs instruct the innate immune system as to what is ‘self’ versus ‘non-self’ and that it must not attack ‘self. If the iABs are blocked or subverted in any manner, from binding to live viruses, then it cannot be trained and cannot properly instruct the innate immune system. The child from that point, is vulnerable to the virus it is confronted with, future viruses e.g. influenza virus, poxvirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) etc., and to auto-immune disease. It is during early childhood that this training is critical and must not be subverted. If breached, if this training does not occur, it is lost forever. The iABs and innate immune system overall become refined and stronger and better with time, as the child grows and is exposed to pathogen. It actually is learning from its experiences and Vanden Bossche argues it has what can be regarded as a potent memory of sorts. It needs to be taxed and tuned up daily. It demands practice. The innate immune system is part of the immunological ecosystem that includes the virus-host immune response ecosystem.

Remember, the COVID injections are based on tricking your cells into production of spike protein that then results in production of vaccinal antibodies. Ideally, these antibodies from vaccine should be neutralizing. If neutralizing, in other words they are not resisted by the virus, then they would bind much more strongly to the COVID virus’s spike protein. This is the key issue with the devastation caused by the CIOVID injections in that even if they are non-neutralizing (as they are now July 2022), the vaccinal antibodies have a much greater affinity for the spike protein binding sites (e.g. receptor binding domain, N-terminal domain) and bind strongly, and as such outcompete the iABs for the binding sites. The vaccinal antibodies bind to the binding sites and subvert the binding by the iABs. The iABs bind loosely.

What is the result of this subversion by the vaccinal antibodies? Well, the iABs then cannot be trained and educated and thus cannot inform and instruct the innate immune system. The child would be vulnerable to the virus it is confronted with as well as future ‘glycosylated’ viruses and microbial pathogen (viruses with sugars/glycans on surfaces etc.) (unable to fight off various infections e.g. COVID, other respiratory infections and even cancers as there could be subversion of the cancer fighting system) and is also vulnerable to autoimmune illness. There is elevated risk of antigenic shifting and thus potentially novel variants emerging. Sufficiently different to present serious immunological challenges. The overall education of the innate immune system is subverted and compromised in the child via vaccinal antibodies and this is long-lasting (this subversion of the vaccinal antibodies over the iABs has to do with molecular patterns on viruses that they share and are same as patterns on parts of the human body).

The subversion of the iABs will continue as long as there is massive infectious pressure as there is now as we are vaccinating into a pandemic, and each time there is boosting which results in boosting of vaccinal antibody titers. Again, administering these COVID injections in childhood can be devastating to your child and your child can be harmed and actually die as a result. The damage to the innate immune system (iABs) is catastrophic and Vanden Bossche argues life-long.

If the child’s innate immune system (via blocking of iABs binding to live viruses) is impaired and not educated in discerning viruses, then the child will not be able to recognize glycosylated viruses that it confronts and will not be able to know if it is ‘self’ versus ‘non-self’. This is critical and can cause devastating illness and immune pathology in children.

In closing, vaccination of your child with these COVID injections can be harmful and be devastating, and can kill your child! None of the players involved in pushing the injection e.g. CDC, NIH, FDA, FAUCI, Walensky, Francis Collins, Bourla of Pfizer and Bancel of Moderna, as well as Jha, have any liability. They are protected, only your child is exposed. No protection if they are harmed. Do not trust any of these people or public health leaders or agencies. Do not inject your child with these COVID injections! I plead! Demand that they show you data, show you evidence whereby your near zero-risk child needs a vaccine that confers no benefit to them and actually skews towards harms. Shift the burden to them to prove this. To this date, they have not. Natural immunity (COVID exposed, infected, and recovered immunity) has always be extensively robust, optimal, superior, long-lasting and much better than the vaccinal immunity. Natural immunity and especially from the innate immune system (iABs and NK cells) can eliminate the virus and sterilize it! The COVID injections CANNOT!
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Open Letter to Parents Regarding COVID Vaccination: Questions to Ask Your Physician and One Pediatrician’s Responses
By Geert Vanden Bossche
July 13, 2022

Open Letter to Parents Regarding COVID Vaccination by Robert Rennebohm, MD

Part III : Questions to Ask Your Physician and One Pediatrician’s Responses.

PDF 1 : Open letter




PDF 2 : Questions to Ask Your Physician and One Pediatrician’s Responses





PDF 3 : Appendix of medical illustrations


 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

New omicron variant worries experts as it spreads in India, and Moderna says new booster offers better protection against BA.4 and BA.5
By Ciara Linnane
Last Updated: July 11, 2022 at 11:06 a.m. ET

A new, highly infectious subvariant of omicron is raising concerns among scientists and health experts as it spreads in India and other countries, including the U.S.

Scientists say the variant — called BA.2.75 — may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection, as the Associated Press reported.

It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other omicron variants, including the globally prominent BA.5.

“It’s still really early on for us to draw too many conclusions,” Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told the AP. “But it does look like, especially in India, the rates of transmission are showing kind of that exponential increase.”

Whether it will outcompete BA.5, he said, has yet to be determined.

The news comes as the U.S. seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases remains mostly steady and deaths are declining, but hospitalizations and the positivity rate for COVID tests keep on climbing to multimonth highs. The trends are worrying some experts as they come at a time when most Americans appear to have abandoned public safety measures such as face masks and social distancing.

The daily average for new cases stood at 107,533 on Sunday, according to a New York Times tracker, up 5% from two weeks ago but still in the middle of a relatively narrow range that has lasted for the past couple of months.

The number of new cases reported is expected to have been reduced by the Fourth of July holiday, as lower staffing levels may have interfered with counting efforts. And many more people are now testing at home, and those data are not being collected.

Meanwhile, the daily average for hospitalizations rose to 37,472 on Sunday, up 18% in two weeks. And the positivity rate on COVID tests stands at 18%, its highest level since Feb. 1. On the bright side, the daily average for deaths has fallen 7% from two weeks ago to 322.

There was positive news from Moderna MRNA, +1.23%, which said a bivalent COVID-19 booster that equally protects against BA.1 and the original strain of the virus produced a better antibody response against the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants in people who were fully vaccinated and boosted than its currently authorized COVID-19 booster.

The new study tested neutralizing antibody levels one month after the second booster was administered, and the findings were consistent across age groups, the company said.

Moderna is also developing a bivalent booster that specifically targets BA.4 and BA.5 as well as the original strain of the virus, per recent guidance from the Food and Drug Administration. The company has been working on the BA.1-containing bivalent booster for several months.

The U.S. government purchased 3.2 million doses of Novavax Inc.’s NVAX, -6.61% still-investigational COVID-19 vaccine. Novavax’s recombinant protein-based vaccine uses different technology than the mRNA shots developed by Moderna Inc. and Pfizer PFE, +0.34% and BioNTech BNTX, -0.46%.

The vaccine still has to receive authorization from the Food and Drug Administration and the OK of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though an FDA advisory committee has already recommended authorization of the two-dose vaccine.
 

Zoner

Veteran Member

Watch this episode of The Highwire where Del Bigtree does a follow up interview with Geert Vanden Bossche after the ‘Better Way Conference’ in May. In this interview Geert explains how/which vaccines can play a role ... and how/which not.


This is a conference where a number of panelists speak on the advocacy of the vaccines and especially the vaxxing of children. Panel conference occurred in May.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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FDA authorizes Novavax Covid vaccine, in hopes the traditional shot will convince holdouts
By Matthew Herper
July 13, 2022

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Novavax, a small Maryland biotech firm, for people 18 and over, voicing hope that the availability of a more traditional vaccine might help convince those skeptical of the Covid shots using new mRNA technology to get inoculated.

As with other Covid vaccines, the Novavax shot will be free to consumers, because the U.S. government will purchase the doses. But before the vaccine will be widely available, it must also be recommended by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That recommendation will likely follow a July 19 meeting of an expert committee convened by the CDC.

“Authorizing an additional Covid-19 vaccine expands the available vaccine options for the prevention of Covid-19, including the most severe outcomes that can occur such as hospitalization and death,” said FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf in a prepared statement. “Today’s authorization offers adults in the United States who have not yet received a COVID-19 vaccine another option that meets the FDA’s rigorous standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality needed to support emergency use authorization.”

The U.S. has received 3.2 million doses of the vaccine that are ready to be shipped to states once the vaccine is authorized and recommended by the CDC.

“Today’s FDA emergency use authorization of our COVID-19 vaccine provides the U.S. with access to the first protein-based COVID-19 vaccine,” said Stanley C. Erck, Novavax’s CEO. “This authorization reflects the strength of our COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy and safety data, and it underscores the critical need to offer another vaccine option for the U.S. population while the pandemic continues.”

Unlike the vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, the Novavax vaccine has had a bumpy path to the market. Novavax received $1.6 billion in support from the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed project in July 2020. At the time, the hope was that the company might begin making a vaccine by the beginning of 2021. But while the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech shots released data in November of 2020, results were not available for the Novavax vaccine until June of 2021.

There were also questions about the ability to produce the vaccine in large amounts. The original deal between Novavax and Operation Warp Speed would entitle the U.S. to 100 million doses of the vaccine. In the press release announcing the vaccine’s emergency use authorization, FDA officials emphasized that the vaccine had not only met the FDA’s bar for safety and efficacy but also “assessment of the manufacturing processes and information.”

In June, a panel of FDA advisers voted 21 to 0, with one abstention, that the Novavax vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks.

One hope expressed at that meeting was that the existence of another vaccine would help convince some of the millions of Americans who have chosen not to be vaccinated to change their minds. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by a new mechanism in which messenger RNA is used to lead cells to create a protein on the virus’ surface that the immune system can recognize. The Novavax vaccine instead produces this protein in vats of insect cells and delivers it to patients with a chemical adjuvant that spurs the immune system to recognize it.

A similar process is used to make an influenza vaccine that is manufactured by Sanofi.

At the FDA meeting, Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation, said he hoped that the existence of such an option might convince the vaccine hesitant.

“We do have a problem with vaccine uptake that is very serious in the U.S., and anything we can do to make people more comfortable to accept these potentially lifesaving products is something we are compelled to do,” Marks said.

“Optimism that the Novavax vaccine will have a significant impact on the number of unvaccinated Americans is misplaced,” Jason Schwartz, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told STAT.

“A small number of people might have been waiting for a vaccine that doesn’t involve mRNA technology or lacks the remote links to fetal tissue associated with the development of the currently available vaccines, but the vast majority of those unvaccinated have made their choice for unrelated and deeply ingrained reasons,” Schwarz said.

He said it would be a good thing if the Novavax authorization moves even 1% to 2% of unvaccinated people to become vaccinated, but called that “the best-case scenario.”

The new authorization is for a series of two shots, separated by three weeks, in unvaccinated people. It does not cover the use of the Novavax vaccine as a booster shot, which the agency will need to evaluate separately.

The authorization is based on a randomized, blinded and placebo-controlled study conducted in the U.S. and Mexico before the current Omicron variant was dominant. In the study, 17,200 people received the vaccine and 8,300 a saline placebo, with 17 cases of Covid-19 occurring in the vaccine group and 79 cases in the placebo group. That means the vaccine had 90.4% efficacy, although that efficacy is expected to be lower for current variants.

Aside from the side effects expected of a vaccine, such as headaches or fevers, the Novavax vaccine, like the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, is linked to an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, which are an inflammation of the heart or its lining. This side effect is rare and most often occurs in adolescent males and young men, who are at elevated risk for the condition generally.

The safety information provided with the vaccine will say that if they occur, myocarditis symptoms begin within 10 days following vaccination and that vaccine recipients should seek medical attention if they experience chest pain, shortness of breath, or the feeling of a fluttering or pounding heart.

Another vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson, was also authorized but its use has been limited by the FDA because of a rare side effect.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

FDA Grants Emergency Authorization for Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine
By Jack Phillips
July 13, 2022

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday issued an emergency use authorization for Novavax’s protein-based COVID-19 vaccine.

“Authorizing an additional COVID-19 vaccine expands the available vaccine options for the prevention of COVID-19, including the most severe outcomes that can occur such as hospitalization and death,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement.

The agency said the vaccine, under the emergency use authorization, can be given to adults aged 18 and older. The vaccine, which is given in two doses several weeks apart, can become available once the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signs off on the FDA’s authorization.

Califf added that Wednesday’s move gives people “another option that meets the FDA’s rigorous standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality needed to support emergency-use authorization.”

Novavax uses different technology than the vaccines that are currently available. Pfizer and Moderna both use mRNA technology, whereas the Johnson & Johnson shot uses an adenovirus.

Novavax uses a protein-based vaccine that places parts of the COVID-19 spike protein directly in the body. That technology is commonplace in older vaccines such as the ones for shingles and hepatitis.

But clinical trials that were used to authorize the vaccine were carried out in early 2021, coming months before the Delta and Omicron variants spread across the world, according to the FDA’s statement Wednesday.

Studies from across the world have shown Omicron and the latest sub-variants can evade COVID-19 vaccines. Numerous public officials, including White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, have contracted the virus in recent months despite having received two booster shots.

Novavax, of Maryland, previously said that its vaccine could appeal to people who have been reluctant to get the Pfizer, Moderna, or J&J vaccines. According to the CDC’s most recent data, about 22 percent of Americans have not received any vaccine.

“This authorization reflects the strength of our COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy and safety data, and it underscores the critical need to offer another vaccine option for the U.S. population while the pandemic continues,” Novavax Chief Executive Stanley Erck said in a statement after the FDA’s authorization.

Like the Moderna and Pfizer shots, the fact sheets for the Novavax vaccine say that it increases the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart-inflammation conditions, according to the FDA.

The agency said that symptoms of heart inflammation started within 10 days following the administration of the vaccine. Individuals who experience shortness of breath, chest pain, and other serious symptoms should seek immediate medical attention, the agency warned.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is slated to meet on July 19, where they will likely discuss the Novavax emergency use authorization. On Monday, the Biden administration announced the United States has obtained 3.2 million doses of the vaccine.

The FDA’s authorization took “longer than we wanted,” Erck told NBC News. “But we’re there and we have gotten the company’s first approval with the FDA for a vaccine in the United States.”
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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Biden Shakes Hands, Hugs Woman After White House Said He’d ‘Minimize Contact’ in Israel
By Zachary Stieber
July 13, 2022

President Joe Biden shook hands with multiple officials and hugged a woman in Israel on July 13, hours after the White House said he’d seek to “minimize contact” with others because of COVID-19 concerns.

Biden shook hands with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz while touring the Iron Dome defense system near Tel Aviv.
He also shook hands with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Later in the day, Biden hugged Holocaust survivor Giselle Cycowicz and kissed Rena Quint, another survivor, while visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem.

He also spoke to the women while crouching in front of them.

Biden did not wear a mask on Wednesday, nor did Israeli officials or others.

“Did you see the president hug me?” Quint asked. “He asked permission to kiss me and he kept on holding my hand and we were told not to touch him.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters en route to Israel that the White House was “looking to increase masking, reduce contact, to minimize spread.”

“How exactly that plays out in any given interaction is something that we will see unfold,” he added, responding to a query about Biden reportedly planning not to shake hands on his Middle East trip.

Israeli media reported this week that the White House had told Lapid’s office that Biden would refrain from shaking hands during the visit due to the surge in COVID-19 infections in the United States and Israel.

Before Biden travels abroad, White House officials work with host nations to coordinate COVID-19 protocols, including testing for anyone expected to come in close contact with Biden. It’s not a perfect system, as Biden often decides to greet people in large crowds that may not have been universally tested. Separately, everyone traveling in the presidential entourage is required to be tested at least once daily, in addition to any host country protocols.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden was going to follow advice from his doctor and “minimize contact” due to the rise of the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the virus that causes COVID-19.

That was a change from a day before, when Biden mingled and shook hands with members of Congress at a White House picnic.

He bumped fists with Israeli officials who greeted him at Ben Gurion International Airport, but later shook hands and hugged people.

During a speech at the airport, Biden said he wanted to reaffirm the “unshakable commitment of the United States to Israel’s security” but also said he supported a two-state solution, or separate countries for “for Israelis and Palestinians.”
After visiting Israel, Biden is scheduled to fly to Saudi Arabia to meet with officials.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Biden to 'minimize contact' on Middle East trip due to COVID concerns, says press secretary
The White House reportedly told the Israeli prime minister's office that the president would not be shaking hands.
By Sophie Mann
Updated: July 13, 2022 - 10:57am

The White House said Wednesday that President Biden will on his Middle East trip attempt to "minimize" physical contact with other officials due to the rise of new COVID-19 variants.

"The president takes a range of COVID precautions and additional ones when he travels. We’re trying to minimize contact as much as possible where we can," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Her comments follow a report that the White House had informed Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid's office that the U.S. leader would avoid shaking hands during his visit.

Jean-Pierre said that the decision was made due to a recommendation from Biden's doctor and not because he was attempting to avoid being photographed shaking hands with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his visit to Saudi Arabia.

At present, the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the COVID omicron variant comprise the majority of cases in the U.S. and are on the rise globally. Earlier this week, White House health officials briefed reporters on a plan to combat the surging BA.5 variant, which focused primarily on continuing the vaccine campaign and precautions like testing and masking.

Though the 79-year-old Biden has participated in a number of large events at the White House and across the country, officials say they take extra precautions around the president to protect him from contracting the virus, including testing officials before they come into close contact with him and requiring the usage of masks during West Wing meetings.

Biden is vaccinated and boosted and tested negative prior to departing for the international trip.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Fauci still urges COVID vaccines but admits they ‘don't protect overly well’ against infection
Infectious disease specialist says vaccines still worth it because they protect against more severe cases
By John Solomon
Updated: July 13, 2022 - 7:22am

Dr. Anthony Fauci is now acknowledging what many experts have been warning for months: the COVID-19 vaccines "don't protect overly well" against infection.

Fauci, who recently got the coronavirus despite being vaccinated and boosted, told Fox News on Tuesday that the inoculations are still worth it because they clearly help prevent the virus from advancing to a more serious infection.

"One of the things that's clear from the data [is] that even though vaccines - because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus - don't protect overly well, as it were, against infection, they protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death," he said.

"And I believe that's the reason ... why at my age, being vaccinated and boosted, even though it didn't protect me against infection, I feel confident that it made a major role in protecting me from progressing to severe disease," he also said. "That's very likely why I had a relatively mild course."

The nation’s top infectious disease doctor and President Biden's chief medical advisor said he continues to strongly recommend getting the shots.

"My message to people who seem confused because people who are vaccinated get infected - the answer is if you weren't vaccinated, the likelihood [is] you would have had [a] more severe course than you did have when you were vaccinated," he explained.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
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FDA gives emergency use authorization to Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine
By Jen Christensen and Brenda Goodman, CNN
Updated 11:03 PM EDT, Wed July 13, 2022

The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use in adults. It is the fourth coronavirus vaccine available in the United States, and it uses a different type of vaccine technology than the shots already available.

Novavax’s vaccine will be available as two-dose primary series for people 18 and older.

The FDA’s independent Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted in favor of authorization of the vaccine June 7, saying that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh its risks for adults. It is also being used in 170 other countries.

The shots can’t be administered until the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisers weigh in on whether to recommend the vaccine and the CDC director has signed off on the recommendation. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is scheduled to meet July 19.

Like more familiar vaccines such as hepatitis B and pertussis, the Covid-19 vaccine is protein-based, using harmless protein fragments of the virus to teach the immune system how to spot the virus and fight it off. The vaccine was created out of a genetic sequence of the first strain of the coronavirus.

Unlike some other Covid-19 shots, Novavax’s vaccine can be stored in standard refrigeration.

About 1 in 3 Americans has still not been vaccinated against Covid-19, more than 100 million people. Many officials and health care workers hope that a vaccine like Novavax’s, which uses more familiar technology, may be enough to persuade people who’ve been hesitant to get inoculated.

“We believe that some portion of those 100 million people are waiting for our vaccine. And if you look at my in-basket, every day as I come to the office, you’ll see that there are quite a few of those people who are who are saying ‘let’s get this vaccine approved. I want it.’ So I don’t know what the what the portion of that 100 million people is, but but I think it’s not insignificant,” Novavax President and CEO Stanley Erck told CNN.

In addition to the primary series of shots, he says, the company hopes to receive authorization soon to use its shots as boosters to other vaccines.

“We’ve talked with the FDA quite a bit about this,” Erck said. “I believe the FDA will be addressing that approval within weeks.”

Late-stage trials found that the efficacy of the vaccine against mild, moderate and severe disease is 90.4%, according to the company. There is not sufficient evidence to evaluate the impact of the vaccine on transmission of the virus.

Novavax also announced in early July that its vaccine shows “broad” immune response to currently circulating variants, including Omicron subvariants BA.4/5.

Novavax’s vaccine was developed with funding from the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed.

On Monday, the Biden administration announced that it had secured 3.2 million doses of the Novavax vaccine.

The company said Wednesday that it expects the vaccine to be available quickly, pending signoff from the CDC.

“We have vaccine that we’ve manufactured for the US. It is shipped and waiting in the warehouse,” Erck said. “The government has been very anxious to get these doses into their distribution system.

"My anticipation is that it will get widely distributed quickly.”

Erck also said the company was planning to offer vaccines to adolescents and children as young as 2 years. Data on the efficacy of kids’ shots will be available “in the coming months,” and Novavax hopes to offer shots to children later this year.
 

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Fauci Acknowledges Vaccines Don’t Protect “Overly Well” Against COVID Infection
He should know.
Paul Joseph Watson
Published 16 hours ago on 13 July, 2022

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged during an appearance on Fox News that while vaccines may protect from symptoms of the virus, they “don’t protect overly well” when it comes to transmission of COVID.

Fauci made the comments on ‘Your World’ while talking to host Neil Cavuto.

Cavuto asked Fauci to respond to Americans who are unsure about taking another round of the vaccine.

“And they’re beginning to wonder about the regimen for treating it, whether you get two vaccination shots, whether you get a booster, another booster. They just don’t know. What do you tell them?” he asked.

“One of the things that’s clear from the data is that, even though vaccines, because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus, don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection, they protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death,” Fauci responded.

It’s important to remember that we’re not far removed from a time when authorities insisted that vaccines were “100 per cent safe and effective” and anyone who challenged that narrative was demonized as an anti-vaxxer.

Fauci is in a good position to know that vaccines don’t protect against COVID infections.

As we previously highlighted, Fauci tested positive for the virus back in June despite being quadruple vaccinated.

He then caught COVID again for the second time in the space of a fortnight after completing a course of Paxlovid.

But yeah, “100 per cent safe and effective!”
 

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Caltech’s Nanoparticle Vaccine Protects Against a Wide Range of COVID-19-Causing Variants and Related Viruses
By Lori Dajose, California Institute of Technology
July 13, 2022

Nanoparticle Coronavirus Vaccine

“Animals vaccinated with the mosaic-8 nanoparticles elicited antibodies that recognized virtually every SARS-like betacoronavirus strain we evaluated,” says Caltech postdoctoral scholar Alexander Cohen (PhD ’21), co-first author of the new study.

A new type of vaccine provides protection against a variety of SARS-like betacoronaviruses, including COVID-19 variants, in mice and monkeys, according to a new study by Caltech.

Betacoronaviruses, including those that caused the SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 pandemics, are a specific type of coronaviruses that infect humans and animals. The new vaccine works to induce the production of a broad spectrum of cross-reactive antibodies by presenting the immune system with pieces of the spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and seven other SARS-like betacoronaviruses, attached to a protein nanoparticle structure. Notably, when vaccinated with this so-called mosaic nanoparticle, animal models were protected from an additional coronavirus, SARS-CoV, which was not one of the eight represented on the nanoparticle vaccine.

“Animals vaccinated with the mosaic-8 nanoparticles elicited antibodies that recognized virtually every SARS-like betacoronavirus strain we evaluated,” says Caltech postdoctoral scholar Alexander Cohen (PhD ’21), co-first author of the new research. “Some of these viruses could be related to the strain that causes the next SARS-like betacoronavirus outbreak, so what we really want would be something that targets this entire group of viruses. We believe we have that.”

The research was published on July 5 in a paper in the journal Science. The study led by researchers in the laboratory of Caltech’s Pamela Bjorkman, the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Bioengineering.

“SARS-CoV-2 has proven itself capable of making new variants that could prolong the global COVID-19 pandemic,” says Bjorkman, who is also a Merkin Institute Professor and executive officer for Biology and Biological Engineering. “In addition, the fact that three betacoronaviruses—SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2—have spilled over into humans from animal hosts in the last 20 years illustrates the need for making broadly protective vaccines.”

According to Bjorkman, such broad protection is needed “because we can’t predict which virus or viruses among the vast numbers in animals will evolve in the future to infect humans to cause another epidemic or pandemic. What we’re trying to do is make an all-in-one vaccine protective against SARS-like betacoronaviruses regardless of which animal viruses might evolve to allow human infection and spread. This sort of vaccine would also protect against current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants without the need for updating.”

How it works: A vaccine composed of spike domains from eight different SARS-like coronaviruses

The vaccine technology to attach pieces of a virus to protein nanoparticles was developed initially by collaborators at the University of Oxford. The basis of the technology is a tiny cage-like structure (a “nanoparticle”) made up of proteins engineered to have “sticky” appendages on its surface, upon which researchers can attach tagged viral proteins. These nanoparticles can be prepared to display pieces of one virus only (“homotypic” nanoparticles) or pieces of several different viruses (“mosaic” nanoparticles). When injected into an animal, the nanoparticle vaccine presents these viral fragments to the immune system. This induces the production of antibodies, immune system proteins that recognize and fight off specific pathogens, as well as cellular immune responses involving T lymphocytes and innate immune cells.

In this research study, the scientists chose eight different SARS-like betacoronaviruses—including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, along with seven related animal viruses that could have potential to start a pandemic in humans—and attached fragments from those eight viruses onto the nanoparticle scaffold. The team chose specific fragments of the viral structures, called receptor-binding domains (RBDs), that are critical for coronaviruses to enter human cells. In fact, human antibodies that neutralize coronaviruses primarily target the virus’s RBDs.

The idea is that such a vaccine could induce the body to produce antibodies that broadly recognize SARS-like betacoronaviruses to fight off variants in addition to those presented on the nanoparticle by targeting common characteristics of viral RBDs. This design comes from the idea that the diversity and physical arrangement of RBDs on the nanoparticle will focus the immune response toward parts of the RBD that are shared by the entire SARS family of coronaviruses, thus achieving immunity to all. The data reported in Science today demonstrates the potential efficacy of this approach.

MOSAIC 8 Vaccine Infographic
This infographic illustrates the new vaccine, composed of RBDs from eight different viruses. The table shows the broad spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 variants and related coronaviruses that the vaccine induces protection against. Credit: Courtesy of Wellcome Leap, Caltech, and Merkin Institute

Designing experiments to measure the vaccine’s protection in mice

The resulting vaccine (here dubbed mosaic-8) is composed of RBDs from eight coronaviruses. Previous experiments led by the Bjorkman lab showed that mosaic-8 induces mice to produce antibodies that react to a variety of coronaviruses in a lab dish (Cohen et al., 2021, Science). Led by Cohen, the new study aimed to build from this research to see if vaccination with the mosaic-8 vaccine could induce protective antibodies in a living animal upon challenge (in other words, infection) with SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV.

The scientists aimed to compare how much protection against infection was provided by a nanoparticle covered in different coronavirus fragments (mosaic-8) versus a nanoparticle covered in only fragments of SARS-CoV-2 (a “homotypic” nanoparticle).

Three sets of experiments were conducted on mice. In one, the control, they inoculated mice with just the bare nanoparticle cage structure without any virus fragments attached. A second group of mice were each injected with a homotypic nanoparticle covered only in SARS-CoV-2 RBDs, and a third group was injected with mosaic-8 nanoparticles. One experimental goal was to see if inoculation with mosaic-8 would protect the animals against SARS-CoV-2 to the same degree as the homotypic SARS-CoV-2-immunized animals; a second goal was to evaluate protection from a so-called “mismatched virus”—one that was not represented by an RBD on the mosaic-8 nanoparticle.

Notably, the eight strains of coronavirus covering the mosaic nanoparticle intentionally did not include SARS-CoV, the virus that caused the original SARS pandemic in the early 2000s. Thus, the team aimed to also investigate the degree of protection against a challenge with the original SARS-CoV virus, using it to represent an unknown SARS-like betacoronavirus that could spill over into humans.

The mice used in the experiments were genetically engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor, which is the receptor on human cells that is used by SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses to gain entry into cells during infection. In this animal challenge model, unvaccinated mice die if infected with a SARS-like betacoronavirus, thus providing a stringent test to evaluate the potential for protection from infection and disease in humans.

Mosaic vaccine protects mice against a similar SARS-like betacoronavirus

As expected, mice inoculated with the bare nanoparticle structure did die when infected with SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-2. Mice that were inoculated with a homotypic nanoparticle only coated in SARS-CoV-2 RBDs were protected against SARS-CoV-2 infection but died upon exposure to SARS-CoV. These results suggest that current homotypic SARS-CoV-2 nanoparticle vaccine candidates being developed elsewhere would be effective against SARS-CoV-2 but may not protect broadly against other SARS-like betacoronaviruses crossing over from animal reservoirs or against future SARS-CoV-2 variants.

However, all of the mice inoculated with mosaic-8 nanoparticles survived both the SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV challenges with no weight loss or other significant pathologies.

Nonhuman primate research also confirms the mosaic vaccine’s efficacy

The team then performed similar challenge experiments in nonhuman primates, this time using the most promising vaccine candidate, mosaic-8, and comparing the effects of mosaic-8 vaccination versus no vaccination in animal challenge studies. When inoculated with mosaic-8, the animals showed little to no detectable infection when exposed to SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV, again demonstrating the potential for the mosaic-8 vaccine candidate to be protective for current and future variants of the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic as well as against potential future viral spillovers of SARS-like betacoronaviruses from animal hosts.

Importantly, in collaboration with virologist Jesse Bloom (PhD ’07) of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the team found that antibodies elicited by mosaic-8 targeted the most common elements of the RBDs across a diverse set of other SARS-like betacoronaviruses—the so-called “conserved” part of the RBD—thus providing evidence for the hypothesized mechanism by which the vaccine would be effective against new variants of SARS-CoV-2 or animal SARS-like betacoronaviruses. By contrast, homotypic SARS-CoV-2 nanoparticle injections elicited antibodies against mainly strain-specific RBD regions, suggesting these types of vaccines would likely protect against SARS-CoV-2 but not against newly arising variants or potential emerging animal viruses.

As a next step, Bjorkman and colleagues will evaluate mosaic-8 nanoparticle immunizations in humans in a Phase 1 clinical trial supported by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiative (CEPI). To prepare for the clinical trial, which will largely enroll people who have been vaccinated and/or previously infected with SARS-CoV-2, the Bjorkman lab is planning preclinical animal model experiments to compare immune responses in animals previously vaccinated with a current COVID-19 vaccine to responses in animals that are immunologically naïve with respect to SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination.

“We have talked about the need for diversity in vaccine development since the very beginning of the pandemic,” says Dr. Richard J. Hatchett, CEO of CEPI. “The breakthrough exhibited in the Bjorkman lab study demonstrates huge potential for a strategy that pursues a new vaccine platform altogether, potentially overcoming hurdles created by new variants. I am delighted to announce that CEPI will be supporting this novel approach to pandemic prevention in Phase I clinical trials. The accelerated speed the study achieved after receiving Wellcome Leap funding facilitated our relationship with them today. The non-human primate data is extremely encouraging and we’re excited to support the next phase of trials.”

Reference: “Mosaic RBD nanoparticles protect against challenge by diverse sarbecoviruses in animal models” by Alexander A. Cohen, Neeltje van Doremalen, Allison J. Greaney, Hanne Andersen, Ankur Sharma, Tyler N. Starr, Jennifer R. Keeffe, Chengcheng Fan, Jonathan E. Schulz, Priyanthi N. P. Gnanapragasam, Leesa M. Kakutani, Anthony P. West, Greg Saturday, Yu E. Lee, Han Gao, Claudia A. Jette, Mark G. Lewis, Tiong K. Tan, Alain R. Townsend, Jesse D. Bloom, Vincent J. Munster and Pamela J. Bjorkman, 5 July 2022, Science.

DOI: 10.1126/science.abq0839

Wellcome Leap provided critical funding at a crucial time to accelerate the development of the Caltech technology, shortening the timeline to reach Phase 1 clinical trials by more than 18 months. Regina E. Dugan (PhD ’93), CEO of Wellcome Leap, says, “This early transition success demonstrates the value of global partnerships working collaboratively and with the urgency needed to address future pandemic risks.”

The paper is titled “Mosaic RBD nanoparticles protect against challenge by diverse sarbecoviruses in animal models.” Neeltje van Doremalen of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (National Institutes of Health) Rocky Mountain Laboratories is a co-first author along with Cohen.

Additional Caltech co-authors are Jennifer Keeffe, research scientist; Chengcheng Fan, postdoctoral scholar research associate in Biology and Biological Engineering; Priyanthi Gnanapragasam, research technician; former research technician Leesa Kakutani; Anthony P. West Jr., senior research specialist; former research technician Yu Lee; Han Gao, research technician; and former graduate student Claudia Jette (PhD ’22).

Other co-authors are Allison Greaney, Tyler Starr, and Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Hanne Andersen, Ankur Sharma, and Mark Lewis of BIOQUAL; Jonathan Schulz, Greg Saturday, and Vincent Munster of the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories; and Tiong Tan and Alain Townsend of the University of Oxford.

This preclinical vaccine validation study was funded by Wellcome Leap, and built directly on initial development and proof-of-principle studies funded early in the pandemic by Caltech’s Merkin Institute for Translational Medicine. Other ongoing coronavirus work in the Bjorkman group is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Mason Fast Grants.
 

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New COVID-19 Antiviral Medications That Could Prevent Other Coronaviruses From Causing Havoc
By American Chemical Society
July 13, 2022

Speeding up the search for effective new COVID-19 antivirals.

An arsenal of measures to prevent and treat viral infections is needed for the world to put the COVID-19 pandemic in the rearview mirror and prevent other coronaviruses from causing havoc. To develop effective new medications for this purpose, scientists are working to target one protein, nsp13, that these viruses need to replicate.

In a study that will be published today (July 13, 2022) in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Infectious Diseases, one research team describes a new approach to identifying molecules that interfere with this protein, a step toward the development of pan-coronavirus antivirals.

While vaccines prepare the immune system to fight off the virus, antiviral medications treat infections that have already started by interfering with an essential part of the viral machinery. Some antivirals, including molnupiravir, remdesivir, and nirmatrelvir, are already available for COVID-19 patients; however, health authorities want additional options that disrupt infection in distinct ways. Scientists have identified a promising new target within SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, a protein called nsp13. It’s an enzyme that works with other viral proteins to help copy the pathogen’s genetic code by unwinding its double-stranded viral RNA.

Nsp13 fuels this work by breaking bonds between phosphate groups, including those in the energy-storing molecule known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Nsp13 is also involved in capping the viral RNA, which protects it from the human immune system. To speed up the search for drugs that block nsp13, Masoud Vedadi and colleagues developed a new way to screen large numbers of molecules to identify those with the most potent activity.

Because nsp13’s energy-releasing activity increases in the presence of single-stranded nucleic acids, the team devised tests that focus on this activity in the presence and absence of single-stranded DNA. In both cases, the tests glow more brightly when less ATP is broken down, which occurs when something is interfering with nsp13. They used one of these tests to screen a library of 5,000 small molecules, turning up 17 promising results.

Additional work, including performing the second test, narrowed the field to only six compounds — potential starting points for the development of future, more-potent nsp13 inhibitors, according to the researchers. The new tests, meanwhile, could be used to efficiently screen large numbers of small molecules for activity against nsp13, or to confirm results from other approaches, they say.

Reference: “Kinetic Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 nsp13 ATPase Activity and Discovery of Small-Molecule Inhibitors” 13 July 2022, ACS Infectious Diseases.

DOI: 10.1021/acsinfecdis.2c00165

The authors acknowledge funding from the University of Toronto (Toronto COVID-19 Action Initiative-2020) and support of the Structural Genomics Consortium, University of Toronto site.
 

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Microparticles could be used to deliver 'self-boosting' vaccines
by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
July 13, 2022

Most vaccines, from measles to COVID-19, require a series of multiple shots before the recipient is considered fully vaccinated. To make that easier to achieve, MIT researchers have developed microparticles that can be tuned to deliver their payload at different time points, which could be used to create "self-boosting" vaccines.

In a new study, the researchers describe how these particles degrade over time, and how they can be tuned to release their contents at different time points. The study also offers insights into how the contents can be protected from losing their stability as they wait to be released.

Using these particles, which resemble tiny coffee cups sealed with a lid, researchers could design vaccines that would need to be given just once, and would then "self-boost" at a specified point in the future. The particles can remain under the skin until the vaccine is released and then break down, just like resorbable sutures.

This type of vaccine delivery could be particularly useful for administering childhood vaccinations in regions where people don't have frequent access to medical care, the researchers say.

"This is a platform that can be broadly applicable to all types of vaccines, including recombinant protein-based vaccines, DNA-based vaccines, even RNA-based vaccines," says Ana Jaklenec, a research scientist at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. "Understanding the process of how the vaccines are released, which is what we described in this paper, has allowed us to work on formulations that address some of the instability that could be induced over time."

This approach could also be used to deliver a range of other therapeutics, including cancer drugs, hormone therapy, and biologic drugs, the researchers say.

Jaklenec and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Science Advances. Morteza Sarmadi, a research specialist at the Koch Institute and recent MIT Ph.D. recipient, is the lead author of the paper.

Staggered drug release

The researchers first described their new microfabrication technique for making these hollow microparticles in a 2017 Science paper. The particles are made from PLGA, a biocompatible polymer that has already been approved for use in medical devices such as implants, sutures, and prosthetic devices.

To create cup-shaped particles, the researchers create arrays of silicon molds that are used to shape the PLGA cups and lids. Once the array of polymer cups has been formed, the researchers employed a custom-built, automated dispensing system to fill each cup with a drug or vaccine. After the cups are filled, the lids are aligned and lowered onto each cup, and the system is heated slightly until the cup and lid fuse together, sealing the drug inside.

This technique, called SEAL (StampEd Assembly of polymer Layers), can be used to produce particles of any shape or size. In a paper recently published in the journal Small Methods, lead author Ilin Sadeghi, an MIT postdoc, and others created a new version of the technique that allows for simplified and larger-scale manufacturing of the particles.

In the new Science Advances study, the researchers wanted to learn more about how the particles degrade over time, what causes the particles to release their contents, and whether it might be possible to enhance the stability of the drugs or vaccines carried within the particles.

"We wanted to understand mechanistically what's happening, and how that information can be used to help stabilize drugs and vaccines and optimize their kinetics," Jaklenec says.

Their studies of the release mechanism revealed that the PLGA polymers that make up the particles are gradually cleaved by water, and when enough of these polymers have broken down, the lid becomes very porous. Very soon after these pores appear, the lid breaks apart, spilling out the contents.

"We realized that sudden pore formation prior to the release time point is the key that leads to this pulsatile release," Sarmadi says. "We see no pores for a long period of time, and then all of a sudden we see a significant increase in the porosity of the system."

The researchers then set out to analyze how a variety of design parameters, include the size and shape of the particles and the composition of the polymers used to make them, affect the timing of drug release.

To their surprise, the researchers found that particle size and shape had little effect on drug release kinetics. This sets the particles apart from most other types of drug delivery particles, whose size plays a significant role in the timing of drug release. Instead, the PLGA particles release their payload at different times based on differences in the composition of the polymer and the chemical groups attached the ends of the polymers.

"If you want the particle to release after six months for a certain application, we use the corresponding polymer, or if we want it to release after two days, we use another polymer," Sarmadi says. "A broad range of applications can benefit from this observation."

Stabilizing the payload

The researchers also investigated how changes in environmental pH affect the particles. When water breaks down the PLGA polymers, the byproducts include lactic acid and glycolic acid, which make the overall environment more acidic. This can damage the drugs carried within the particles, which are usually proteins or nucleic acids that are sensitive to pH.

In an ongoing study, the researchers are now working on ways to counteract this increase in acidity, which they hope will improve the stability of the payload carried within the particles.

To help with future particle design, the researchers also developed a computational model that can take many different design parameters into account and predict how a particular particle will degrade in the body. This type of model could be used to guide the development of the type of PLGA particles that the researchers focused on in this study, or other types of microfabricated or 3D-printed particles or medical devices.

The research team has already used this strategy to design a self-boosting polio vaccine, which is now being tested in animals. Usually, the polio vaccine has to be given as a series of two to four separate injections.

"We believe these core shell particles have the potential to create a safe, single-injection, self-boosting vaccine in which a cocktail of particles with different release times can be created by changing the composition. Such a single injection approach has the potential to not only improve patient compliance but also increase cellular and humoral immune responses to the vaccine," Langer says.

This type of drug delivery could also be useful for treating diseases such as cancer. In a 2020 Science Translational Medicine study, the researchers published a paper in which they showed that they could deliver drugs that stimulate the STING pathway, which promotes immune responses in the environment surrounding a tumor, in several mouse models of cancer. After being injected into tumors, the particles delivered several doses of the drug over several months, which inhibited tumor growth and reduced metastasis in the treated animals.
 

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New open-source program reveals hidden hooks in SARS-CoV-2 virus
by Rice University
July 13, 2022

1657781173364.jpeg
Rice University computer scientists have developed SARS-Arena to help find conserved parts in proteins from SARS-CoV-2 that could be a key for the development of wide-spectrum vaccines. The program searches for potential matches between regions in nucleocapsid (N) proteins and human leukocyte antigen (HLA) receptors that are central to cellular immunity. Credit: Mauricio Menegatti Rigo/Rice University

Vaccines may need to dig a little deeper to stop SARS-CoV-2. Rice University researchers are providing a new shovel.

The lab of computer scientist Lydia Kavraki at Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering has introduced a program to look for conserved parts of proteins of the virus that causes COVID-19. These parts could help develop future vaccines.

The lab's open-source program, SARS-Arena, identifies peptides that are part of the virus's nucleocapsid protein to see how they could be targeted. Kavraki said the program was designed from the outset to be highly customizable and easy to use.

"Our work does not analyze the surface spike proteins of SARS-related coronaviruses but a protein deep inside the core of such viruses," Kavraki said. "We define and systematize a complex process of discovering fragments of that protein that can serve as a basis for the development of novel vaccines."

Details about SARS-Arena appear in Frontiers in Immunology.

The program builds upon the lab's established HLA-Arena, a customizable pipeline for structural modeling and analysis of complexes formed by peptides—small parts of proteins—and human leukocyte antigen (HLA) receptors, central to the cellular immunity.

SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein is compact and hidden within the SARS shell, where it helps in viral genome packaging. The protein is highly conserved across SARS viruses, and because it is located in the inner part of the virus, it is also less subject to mutation than proteins along the surface envelope, especially the spike protein targeted by most current COVID vaccines.

Surface proteins are a moving target for vaccines, said lead author and postdoctoral researcher Mauricio Menegatti Rigo. The Omicron variant has more than 30 mutations in the spike protein alone, and that has probably contributed to its rapid infection rate.

Nucleocapsid proteins are highly expressed upon infection. That also increases opportunities for the immune system to spot them and move in. Nucleocapsids are highly immunogenic, making them likely to provoke an immune response.

But not all of the well-conserved peptide "hooks" within the nucleocapsid are known, nor is there sufficient data on how they bind to HLAs. Identifying more of them could aid the search for broad-spectrum, long-lasting coronavirus vaccines, Rigo said.

"We are mostly interested in the cellular immune response triggered against nucleocapsid peptides," he said. "So the first part of the paper is about identifying these conserved peptides. In the second part, we provide a way to analyze not only the sequence of the peptides but also how they could bind to HLA molecules.

"Then we can look for clues about how the peptides are presented in the context of the immune response," Rigo said. "We show that through structural analysis, we can identify cross-reactive peptides and also similar peptides that are potentially cross-reactive. These similar peptides that are not described in the literature are putative new targets for vaccines."

There are studies showing that immune-system T cells taken from recovered COVID-19 patients can recognize multiple regions of the nucleocapsid protein, providing long-term protective immunity. So finding peptide targets within the nucleocapsid became a worthy goal, Rigo said.

The new work is a continuation of efforts by the Rice team to simplify the search for coronavirus vaccines. In a November 2020 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers identified a SARS-CoV-2 peptide that affects binding stability with an immune system receptor, influencing a body's ability to attack diseased cells. Another paper published in June by Nature Scientific Reports improves upon their algorithm to predict binding affinity between peptide structures and HLAs. That study has implications for the development of both virus and cancer vaccines.
 

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New study updates evidence on rare heart condition after COVID vaccination
by British Medical Journal
July 13, 2022

A study published by The BMJ today provides an up-to-date summary of evidence on the risk of heart inflammation (myocarditis and pericarditis) after mRNA vaccination against the COVID-19 virus.

The review of more than 8,000 reported cases from 46 studies by researchers in Canada confirms previous reports that myocarditis is rare, but cases are highest among young males shortly after a second dose, and are probably higher after Moderna's mRNA vaccine than after Pfizer's vaccine.

It also shows that while cases are predominantly mild, the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis might be lower when the second dose is given more than 30 days after the first dose.

However, the researchers warn that in general, the evidence is of low certainty and say these findings must be considered alongside the overall benefits of vaccination.

Myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the fluid-filled sac surrounding the heart) are rare but serious conditions, usually triggered by a viral infection. Reports of these conditions after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination have prompted ongoing surveillance and research.

The results show that rates of myocarditis after mRNA vaccines were highest in male adolescents and young male adults (50-139 cases per million in 12-17 year-olds and 28-147 cases per million in 18-29 year-olds).

For girls and boys aged 5-11 years and females aged 18-29 years, rates of myocarditis after vaccination with Pfizer might be fewer than 20 cases per million.

For individuals aged 18-29 years, myocarditis is probably higher after vaccination with Moderna than with Pfizer, and for 12-39 year-olds, myocarditis or pericarditis might be lower when the second dose is given more than 30 days after the first dose.

Data specific to males aged 18-29 years indicates that the dosing interval might need to increase to more than 56 days to substantially drop rates of these conditions.

As such, the researchers say giving Pfizer over Moderna and extending dosing intervals might be beneficial for younger people.

But they point out that the clinical course of myocarditis in children 5-11 years, after a third dose, and for those with previous myocarditis after mRNA vaccination is largely unknown. And although the short term course has consistently shown to be quite mild and self-limiting, they say more data for longer term prognosis is needed.

They also acknowledge some limitations of their review, including the rapidly evolving COVID-19 literature base and the potential for misdiagnosis. However, their comprehensive, peer-reviewed search strategy and use of a range of information sources enabled them to capture the latest data.

As such they conclude, "As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, continued surveillance of myocarditis after mRNA vaccines, especially in younger ages, after dose three (and subsequent doses) and in previous cases is needed to support continued decision making for COVID-19 boosters."

And they call for additional monitoring of people with relevant underlying conditions, long term follow-up of patients with myocarditis, and further studies to "enhance understanding of the mechanism or mechanisms of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination."

This large body of reviewed studies continues to suggest that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are associated with a rare but heightened risk of acute myocarditis and pericarditis, say U.S. researchers in a linked editorial.

They point out that key uncertainties remain, including risks associated with boosters, risks associated with primary vaccination of young children, and the long-term outcomes of those who experience myocarditis.

"But these uncertainties must be placed in the context of the substantial and widely accepted benefits of vaccination," they conclude.
 

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Should you get the Novavax vaccine?
Absolutely not! Here are my top 5 reasons why you shouldn't.
Steve Kirsch
45 min ago

The FDA just approved the Novavax vaccine for COVID under EUA. It won’t be available until the CDC outside committee approves it. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is scheduled to meet July 19.

I have nothing personally against Novavax. It might turn out to be the safest COVID vaccine to date. But “safest” and “safe” are two different animals: one is relative and the other is absolute.

Here are my top 5 reasons to say “No” to Novavax:
  1. COVID is a disease which is easily treatable. Why would you take a risk on a new product with unknown risks when you don’t need to?
  2. As Andrew Wakefield and others point out, we’ve never had a vaccine where the benefits > outweigh the risk. While this might be the first one, you’ll want to wait for an independent study that proves i
  3. You can’t trust the FDA, CDC, or drug companies. They have to come clean and admit their issues before we can ever trust them again.
  4. You run the risk of original antigenic sin (OAS) and/or antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). In short, you run the risk of making yourself worse off.
  5. We just don’t know. We don’t know anything about their adjuvant — Matrix M. We don’t know anything about safety. We don’t know if they can manufacture it properly (they are now on their third contract manufacturer).
For further reading, see these 3 excellent articles, all from Substack authors:

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Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

higher vaccine rates associated with greater rise in hospitalization
if vaccines work to stop severe outcomes, then why aren't they working?
el gato malo
18 hr ago

for this analysis i used the NYT covid hospitalization data. it can be accessed HERE. vaxx rate data from OWID HERE.

my goal was to look at hospitalization rates in relation to vaccine adoption. to do this (and because i could not find a way to automate it) i took the 5 least vaccinated states and compared them to the 5 most vaccinated states. it seems a reasonable variance as the most vaxxed average 80% vaxxed and the least average 56%. because of vagaries in the data, namely an annoying tendency to use “<1” instead of an actual number, i had to throw out VT and RI. i replaced them with HI and NY, the two next most vaxxed. this almost certainly weakened the case against the high vaxx states as VT and RI look to have much greater increases in 70+ (400-600%) but as will be seen, this did not eliminate the signal.

different states report hospitalization so differently and express such different seasonality that it can be difficult to compare them to one another. but they can be compared to themselves, so i took the hospitalization rates for the most vaxxed group (70+) and for “all” and compared them to a year ago to establish % change from july 10th 2021 to july 10th 2022. by using this methodology, they act as their own controls as reporting, age, demographics, and who knows what other imponderables remain constant.

(i would have liked to stratify this by all age groups, but the data was too incomplete and tainted by the non-numerical “<1” result, especially in 2001 data.)

this data was quite striking from the start, esp as the vast majority of states are showing higher hospitalization rates in nearly every category.

this alone (in conjunction with milder variants) gives some real pause on overall outcomes in over 70’s.
(high vaxx blue, low vaxx green)



and even more so in “all” (IN would be green if there were a visible bar)



in both cases, 4 of 5 best performers are low vaxx and 4 of 5 worst are high vaxx.

the extent of the variance becomes clear when we take an average and a median. as can be seen the two measures align well.



in both series, the % rise in low vaxx states was lower than in high vaxx and this was more prevalent in “all” than in “70+” which is a VERY provocative outcome as the old tended to be high vaxx everywhere and the bigger divergences in jab rate came in the young.



it also shows that the old (who are most highly vaxxed and boosted) are seeing greater rise in incidence of hospitalization than the young who are less so. combine that with the high vaxx/low vaxx divergence and the signal here really starts to pop.

we can see something interesting in the scatterplots as well:



the R2 on 70+ is lowish (but noticable), but is mostly suppressed by outliers (ME, TN) and the rest of the series has strong divergence. if you remove those 2, the remaining 8 now fail to overlap and show extremely high R2 for a series this noisy.



one can argue about whether this is fair or amounts to egregious p-hacking (and i’ll probably side with p hacking), but if nothing else, it seems to provide some useful insight, especially as we start to look at the “all” series where we would expect much greater divergence in vaxx rate.

here, we’re seeing quite strong R2 for such a noisy series even before we remove outliers (ME, TN). (shown in red and counted in R2)



the lack of overlap is quite striking. only one low vaxx state exceeds a 67% rise and only one high vaxx state is less than a 136% rise. that’s a very provocative grouping.

and if we remove them just for visualization sake, this becomes more clear and we start getting into extreme alignment. (though again, this starts to look like p hacking and i would urge against to drawing convulsions from it, especially when the full data is still so interesting. this is just to illustrate a point.)



the bottom line is we’re seeing exactly what we would expect if variants were now homing in preferentially on the vaccinated and either becoming more severe for them or (more likely in my view) still providing some protection level of zero or greater but more than swamping it by making contracting covid more likely.

the fact that variance by vaxx level is so much greater in overall than in 70+ bolsters this.

we’re seeing strong association with more vaxx, greater rise in rates of hospitalization for covid, and more oddly, it’s well out of season in most of the high vaxx states.

this sudden unseasonable surges pattern is aberrant relative to past covid outcomes which adds further cause for suspicion of new external drivers. (i suspect one could advance an argument about immune exhaustion from repeated boosting here as well)

new york provides a typical example:



july this year vs july last year does not look good and they have already had one big surge that far exceeded last summer. another seems to be beginning both early and from a worryingly high base. this starts to look more an more like a virus “jumping the banks” due to herd immune fixation and/or a people less and less able to resist it. one would always expect to see that signal most in the oldest whose generalized immune systems are less capable and thus cannot pick up the slack from inapt antibody response.

i realize i’m becoming a bit of a one note flute here, but this signal just keeps popping up everywhere in completely independent data series.

i’m not sure any one can rise to the standard of “proof” but as a mosaic, especially given what we know about the underlying biology, this starts to get awfully compelling to ignore.

the simple fact that this vaccine program is not working on society scale is getting far to obvious to ignore.

if we could get any health agencies interested in actually stepping up and assessing this, then we could all go grab a beer and put our feet up, but as it appears they are disinclined to do so, the pulling of threads is left to us.

and so we shall.

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