I have to vent a little bit. I recall, before the election steal, DJT was giving a speech or press conference and he referred to the CV as a 'spell, a spell that had been cast upon the nation'. That's at least pretty close to what he said. I figured it was just speech making hyperbole but more and more I think it's a reality.
In my neck of the world the '3rd wave' has been declared to have hit, or so says the govt and their ministry of truth. They have an already scared public willingly staying home more, wearing their diapers at all times, and looking for someone to blame.
The reality is that it's just a redo of the previous two waves, which were not even ripples. The 15 month cumulative fatality rate is barely over 200 and most of those had severe pre-existing conditions, the kind you don't recover from. Never mind, the govt calls them CV deaths.
The reality is 99.9% of the population has never and is not sick with CV, but the news coverage makes people believe the death wave is enormous and getting worse.
It's all fake. One funny point is that the national health minister is being called on to resign for bungling this latest outbreak. In reality he's handled it so well in scaring the public, they now think he's failed in keeping the pubic safe. Irony at it's best.
To me, it seems as if a spell has been cast on everyone. I've talked to a couple locals and asked if they know that 99.9% of everyone is perfectly healthy, and I get the blank scared stare. I watch people shopping at the big box store - they wear little plastic gloves to hold the shopping cart with, all wear their diapers, and all look slightly scared. WTF is going on?
WTF indeed! Don't people read the new with some discernment and wonder why they don't see sick and dying people everywhere? Why in the big box shopping store are not people coughing and dragging their sick asses around instead of appearing physically healthy? For a nation that has a population greater than the UK, or France, or Canada, and lives on FB and LINE social media, why isn't the social media lit up like a Christmas tree with reports of sick friends, dying relatives, etc?
I'm sure it's the same back home in many states, albeit more people that actually do get sick - but not sick with a deadly killer virus, just sick with flu-like symptoms.
This really gets me wondering about the psychology of it all. HOW can the majority of the world be convinced there is a pandemic, for what, 15 months and running, and still believe it? I don't believe in magic or spells or any of that, but this sure seems to be as close to one if there ever was.
Sorry for the rant.
I have to vent a little bit. I recall, before the election steal, DJT was giving a speech or press conference and he referred to the CV as a 'spell, a spell that had been cast upon the nation'. That's at least pretty close to what he said. I figured it was just speech making hyperbole but more and more I think it's a reality.
In my neck of the world the '3rd wave' has been declared to have hit, or so says the govt and their ministry of truth. They have an already scared public willingly staying home more, wearing their diapers at all times, and looking for someone to blame.
The reality is that it's just a redo of the previous two waves, which were not even ripples. The 15 month cumulative fatality rate is barely over 200 and most of those had severe pre-existing conditions, the kind you don't recover from. Never mind, the govt calls them CV deaths.
The reality is 99.9% of the population has never and is not sick with CV, but the news coverage makes people believe the death wave is enormous and getting worse.
It's all fake. One funny point is that the national health minister is being called on to resign for bungling this latest outbreak. In reality he's handled it so well in scaring the public, they now think he's failed in keeping the pubic safe. Irony at it's best.
To me, it seems as if a spell has been cast on everyone. I've talked to a couple locals and asked if they know that 99.9% of everyone is perfectly healthy, and I get the blank scared stare. I watch people shopping at the big box store - they wear little plastic gloves to hold the shopping cart with, all wear their diapers, and all look slightly scared. WTF is going on?
WTF indeed! Don't people read the new with some discernment and wonder why they don't see sick and dying people everywhere? Why in the big box shopping store are not people coughing and dragging their sick asses around instead of appearing physically healthy? For a nation that has a population greater than the UK, or France, or Canada, and lives on FB and LINE social media, why isn't the social media lit up like a Christmas tree with reports of sick friends, dying relatives, etc?
I'm sure it's the same back home in many states, albeit more people that actually do get sick - but not sick with a deadly killer virus, just sick with flu-like symptoms.
This really gets me wondering about the psychology of it all. HOW can the majority of the world be convinced there is a pandemic, for what, 15 months and running, and still believe it? I don't believe in magic or spells or any of that, but this sure seems to be as close to one if there ever was.
Sorry for the rant.
Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020)
Brighteon.com is a leading online free platform that empowers free speech, allowing individuals to freely share videos and express their thoughts without any form of censorship. Join us today and be part of our community.www.brighteon.com
Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020), 32:07
Note that when you get the shot the first thing you get is antibodies; you may get a T-cell reaction. This pre-existing knowledge, from SARS (CoV-1) entirely explains why people who just got vaccinated often get hammered by the virus and frequently end up in the hospital or die. It marks the premise of attempting to vaccinate out of a pandemic where transmission is actively occurring as stupid.This T cell-mediated immune response is even more important as studies on humoral immunity to SARS-CoV-1 provided evidence that antibody responses are short-lived and can even cause or aggravate virus-associated lung pathology
Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020)
Brighteon.com is a leading online free platform that empowers free speech, allowing individuals to freely share videos and express their thoughts without any form of censorship. Join us today and be part of our community.www.brighteon.com
Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020), 32:07
What could possibly go wrong??????Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?
Self-spreading vaccines that use viruses to confer immunity instead of disease among wild animals could help stop animal diseases from jumping to humans, quashing the next pandemic before it starts. But the new technology is not without risks.thebulletin.org
Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?
By Filippa Lentzos, Guy Reeves | September 18, 2020
Once a COVID-19 vaccine is approved for public use, officials around the world will face the monumental challenge of vaccinating billions of people, a logistical operation rife with thorny ethical questions. What if instead of orchestrating complicated and resource-intensive campaigns to vaccinate humans against emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, we could instead stop the zoonotic diseases that sometimes leap from animals to people at their source? A small, but growing number of scientists think it’s possible to exploit the self-propagating properties of viruses and use them to spread immunity instead of disease. Can we beat viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, at their own game?
A virus that confers immunity throughout an animal population as it spreads in the wild could theoretically stop a zoonotic spillover event from happening, snuffing out the spark that could ignite the next pandemic. If the wild rats that host the deadly Lassa virus, for example, are vaccinated, the risks of a future outbreak among humans could be reduced. For at least 20 years, scientists have been experimenting with such self-spreading vaccines, work that continues to this day, and which has gained the attention of the US military.
For obvious reasons, public and scientific interest in vaccines is incredibly high, including in self-spreading vaccines, as they could be effective against zoonotic threats. The biologists Scott Nuismer and James Bull generated fresh media attention to self-spreading vaccines over the summer after publishing an article in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. But the subsequent reporting on the topic gives short shrift to the potentially significant downsides to releasing self-spreading vaccines into the environment.
Self-spreading vaccines could indeed entail serious risks, and the prospect of using them raises challenging questions.
Who decides, for instance, where and when a vaccine should be released? Once released, scientists will no longer be in control of the virus. It could mutate, as viruses naturally do. It may jump species. It will cross borders. There will be unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. There always are.
While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?
How they work. Self-spreading vaccines are essentially genetically engineered viruses designed to move through populations in the same way as infectious diseases, but rather than causing disease, they confer protection. Built on the chassis of a benign virus, the vaccines have genetic material from a pathogen added to them that stimulates the creation of antibodies or white blood cells in “infected” hosts.
These vaccines could be particularly useful, some scientists say, for wildlife populations where direct vaccination is difficult due to issues like inaccessible habitats, poor infrastructure, high costs, or lack of resources. The idea, essentially, is to vaccinate a small proportion of a population through direct inoculation. These so-called founders will then passively spread the vaccine to other animals they encounter either by touch, sex, nursing, or breathing the same air. Gradually, these interactions could build up population-level immunity.
A diagram of how a self-spreading vaccine could spread among bats. “Founder” bats inoculated with a self-spreading vaccine passively spread the vaccine to other bats they encounter over time, gradually building up population-level immunity. Credit: Derek Caetano-Anollés.
Self-spreading vaccines have some of their roots in efforts to reduce pest populations. Australian researchers described a virally spread immunocontraception, which hijacked the immune systems of infected animals—in this case a non-native mouse species in Australia—and prevented them from fertilizing offspring. The earliest self-spreading vaccine efforts targeted two highly lethal infectious diseases in the European rabbit population (myxoma virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus). In 2001, Spanish researchers field-tested a vaccinein a wild rabbit population living on Isla del Aire, a small Spanish island just off Menorca. The vaccine spread to more than half the 300 rabbits on the island, and the trial was deemed a success.
In 2015, another team of researchers speculated on the development of a self-spreading vaccine for the Ebola virus that could be used on wild great apes like chimpanzees. Since then, scientists have come to see a wide array of animals—from wildlife such as bats, birds, and foxes to domesticated animals like dogs, pigs, and sheep—as amenable to self-spreading vaccines.
So far, researchers have not developed experimental self-spreading vaccines for humans; there is no clear evidence that anybody is actively working on the technology. Nuismer and Bull argue, rather, that self-spreading vaccines present a revolutionary approach to control emerging infectious diseases before they even spill over from animals into the human population.
Zoonotic spillover is certainly a pressing problem; alongside SARS-CoV-2, HIV, Ebola virus, and the Zika virus, there are over a thousand other new viruses with zoonotic potential that have been detected in wild animals over the last decade. Prevention is better than a cure, Nuismer and Bull say in a New Scientist article. In their Nature Ecology & Evolution article, they claim they are “poised to begin developing self-disseminating vaccines to target a wide range of human pathogens” in animals.
Outside of an experiment, scientists would face massive technical and practical hurdles in identifying the most appropriate targets for intervention and ensuring immunity is maintained in the wildlife populations. Despite these substantial challenges, the potential security implications of self-spreading vaccines are even more serious.
The principal security concern is that of dual-use. In essence, this means that the same research that is used to develop self-spreading vaccines to prevent disease, could also be used to deliberately cause harm. You could, for instance, engineer triggers into a virus that cause immune system failures in infected people or animals, a bit like HIV does naturally. Or you could create triggers in a virus that cause a harmful autoimmune response, where the body starts attacking its own healthy cells and tissues.
The bioweapon question. While researchers may intend to make self-spreading vaccines, others could repurpose their science and develop biological weapons. Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible.
We don’t have to dig very deep for a historical example of weaponized biology. As the apartheid-era South African biowarfare program shows, social, political, and scientific pressures can lead to the misuse of biological innovation.
Codenamed Project Coast, South Africa’s program was primarily focused on covert assassination weapons for use against individuals deemed a threat to the racist apartheid government. In addition to producing contraptions to inject poisons, Project Coast researchers developed techniques to lace sugar cubes with salmonella and cigarettes with Bacillus anthracis.
While there have been many biowarfare programs, including several that were far more elaborate and sophisticated, the South African program is particularly relevant in thinking through malicious uses of self-spreading vaccines. One of Project Coast’s research projects aimed at developing a human anti-fertility vaccine.
The idea took hold during a time of widespread concern over worldwide population explosion. Schalk Van Rensburg, who oversaw fertility-related work at a Project Coast laboratory, told South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for examining the sordid history of the era and laying the foundation for future peace and tolerance, that he thought the project was in line with the World Health Organization’s attempts to curb rising global birth rates. He believed it could bring his lab international acclaim and funding. According to Van Rensburg, Wouter Basson, the director of the biowarfare program, said the military needed an anti-fertility vaccine so that female soldiers would not fall pregnant.
While some of the scientists involved in the project denied awareness of ulterior intentions or even that their fertility work was part of a military endeavor, Van Rensburg and Daniel Goosen, a lab director, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the real intention behind the project was to selectively administer the contraceptive in secret to unwitting Black South African women.
In the end, the anti-fertility vaccine was not produced before Project Coast was officially closed down in 1995, 12 years after it was initiated. An early version was tested in baboons, but never in humans. South Africa isn’t the only country to try and forcibly sterilize parts of its population. European countries, including Sweden and Switzerland, sterilized members of the Roma minority in the early half of the 20th century and some, like Slovakia, continued even beyond that. More recently, analysts have alleged that the Chinese government is sterilizing women in Xinjiang, a province with a large population of Uighur Muslims.
It doesn’t take a massive leap of the imagination to see how the aims of South Africa’s anti-fertility vaccine project would have benefited from research into self-spreading vaccines, particularly if you combine it with current developments in pharmacogenomics, drug development, and personalized medicine. Taken together, these strands of research could help enable ultra-targeted biological warfare.
An expanding potential for abuse. The Biological Weapons Convention, the treaty that bans biological weapons, is nearly 50 years old. Negotiated and agreed to in the depths of the Cold War, the convention suffers from outdated modes of operation. There are also significant compliance assessment challenges. The convention certainly didn’t stop South Africa from pursuing Project Coast in the early 1980s.
Self-spreading vaccine research is a small but growing field. At the moment, about 10 institutions are doing significant work in the area. These laboratories are primarily located in the United States, but some are in Europe and Australia, as well. As the field expands, so does the potential for abuse.
So far research has primarily been bankrolled by US government science and health funders like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Private organizations like the Gates Foundation and academic institutions have also financed projects. Recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sometimes thought of as the US military’s research and development wing, has gotten involved in the research. The University of California, Davis, for example, is working on a DARPA administered project called Prediction of Spillover Potential and Interventional En Masse Animal Vaccination to Prevent Emerging Pathogen Threats in Current and Future Zones of US Military Operation. According to a pamphlet, the project is “creating the world’s first prototype of a self-disseminating vaccine designed to induce a high level of herd immunity (wildlife population level protection) against Lassa virus … and Ebola.”
Military investment in biological innovation for defensive or protective purposes is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention, but it can still send the wrong signals. It could cause countries to doubt one another’s intentions and lead to tit-for-tat investment in potentially risky research, including in self-spreading vaccines. The result of research gone awry or biowarfare could be catastrophic for health and the environment.
At a time when the norm against chemical weapons is degrading, underscored most recently by the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok—a crime for which many European officials blame Russia—the international community simply can’t afford to have the same thing happen to the norm against the use of biological weapons. It would completely defy the spirit of the treaty if it seemed like states would even want to pursue high-risk dual use activities in biology.
Early, open, good-faith conversations about scientific aims and advances that cause particular dual-use concerns, as self-spreading vaccines do, are essential to exploring the broader stakes of certain technical trajectories. The University of California, Davis program is pursuing ways to incorporate an “off switch” to safely control the technology. And DARPA says any field experimentation related to the project would follow biosafety protocols. But these pledges won’t suffice. Our ambition must be to make a collective decision about the technical pathways we are willing, or not willing, to take as a society.
that old movie remade with Will Smith, I am Legend, not saying that will happen, it was just a movie, but......Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?
Self-spreading vaccines that use viruses to confer immunity instead of disease among wild animals could help stop animal diseases from jumping to humans, quashing the next pandemic before it starts. But the new technology is not without risks.thebulletin.org
Scientists are working on vaccines that spread like a disease. What could possibly go wrong?
By Filippa Lentzos, Guy Reeves | September 18, 2020
Once a COVID-19 vaccine is approved for public use, officials around the world will face the monumental challenge of vaccinating billions of people, a logistical operation rife with thorny ethical questions. What if instead of orchestrating complicated and resource-intensive campaigns to vaccinate humans against emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, we could instead stop the zoonotic diseases that sometimes leap from animals to people at their source? A small, but growing number of scientists think it’s possible to exploit the self-propagating properties of viruses and use them to spread immunity instead of disease. Can we beat viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, at their own game?
A virus that confers immunity throughout an animal population as it spreads in the wild could theoretically stop a zoonotic spillover event from happening, snuffing out the spark that could ignite the next pandemic. If the wild rats that host the deadly Lassa virus, for example, are vaccinated, the risks of a future outbreak among humans could be reduced. For at least 20 years, scientists have been experimenting with such self-spreading vaccines, work that continues to this day, and which has gained the attention of the US military.
For obvious reasons, public and scientific interest in vaccines is incredibly high, including in self-spreading vaccines, as they could be effective against zoonotic threats. The biologists Scott Nuismer and James Bull generated fresh media attention to self-spreading vaccines over the summer after publishing an article in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. But the subsequent reporting on the topic gives short shrift to the potentially significant downsides to releasing self-spreading vaccines into the environment.
Self-spreading vaccines could indeed entail serious risks, and the prospect of using them raises challenging questions.
Who decides, for instance, where and when a vaccine should be released? Once released, scientists will no longer be in control of the virus. It could mutate, as viruses naturally do. It may jump species. It will cross borders. There will be unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. There always are.
While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?
How they work. Self-spreading vaccines are essentially genetically engineered viruses designed to move through populations in the same way as infectious diseases, but rather than causing disease, they confer protection. Built on the chassis of a benign virus, the vaccines have genetic material from a pathogen added to them that stimulates the creation of antibodies or white blood cells in “infected” hosts.
These vaccines could be particularly useful, some scientists say, for wildlife populations where direct vaccination is difficult due to issues like inaccessible habitats, poor infrastructure, high costs, or lack of resources. The idea, essentially, is to vaccinate a small proportion of a population through direct inoculation. These so-called founders will then passively spread the vaccine to other animals they encounter either by touch, sex, nursing, or breathing the same air. Gradually, these interactions could build up population-level immunity.
A diagram of how a self-spreading vaccine could spread among bats. “Founder” bats inoculated with a self-spreading vaccine passively spread the vaccine to other bats they encounter over time, gradually building up population-level immunity. Credit: Derek Caetano-Anollés.
Self-spreading vaccines have some of their roots in efforts to reduce pest populations. Australian researchers described a virally spread immunocontraception, which hijacked the immune systems of infected animals—in this case a non-native mouse species in Australia—and prevented them from fertilizing offspring. The earliest self-spreading vaccine efforts targeted two highly lethal infectious diseases in the European rabbit population (myxoma virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus). In 2001, Spanish researchers field-tested a vaccinein a wild rabbit population living on Isla del Aire, a small Spanish island just off Menorca. The vaccine spread to more than half the 300 rabbits on the island, and the trial was deemed a success.
In 2015, another team of researchers speculated on the development of a self-spreading vaccine for the Ebola virus that could be used on wild great apes like chimpanzees. Since then, scientists have come to see a wide array of animals—from wildlife such as bats, birds, and foxes to domesticated animals like dogs, pigs, and sheep—as amenable to self-spreading vaccines.
So far, researchers have not developed experimental self-spreading vaccines for humans; there is no clear evidence that anybody is actively working on the technology. Nuismer and Bull argue, rather, that self-spreading vaccines present a revolutionary approach to control emerging infectious diseases before they even spill over from animals into the human population.
Zoonotic spillover is certainly a pressing problem; alongside SARS-CoV-2, HIV, Ebola virus, and the Zika virus, there are over a thousand other new viruses with zoonotic potential that have been detected in wild animals over the last decade. Prevention is better than a cure, Nuismer and Bull say in a New Scientist article. In their Nature Ecology & Evolution article, they claim they are “poised to begin developing self-disseminating vaccines to target a wide range of human pathogens” in animals.
Outside of an experiment, scientists would face massive technical and practical hurdles in identifying the most appropriate targets for intervention and ensuring immunity is maintained in the wildlife populations. Despite these substantial challenges, the potential security implications of self-spreading vaccines are even more serious.
The principal security concern is that of dual-use. In essence, this means that the same research that is used to develop self-spreading vaccines to prevent disease, could also be used to deliberately cause harm. You could, for instance, engineer triggers into a virus that cause immune system failures in infected people or animals, a bit like HIV does naturally. Or you could create triggers in a virus that cause a harmful autoimmune response, where the body starts attacking its own healthy cells and tissues.
The bioweapon question. While researchers may intend to make self-spreading vaccines, others could repurpose their science and develop biological weapons. Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible.
We don’t have to dig very deep for a historical example of weaponized biology. As the apartheid-era South African biowarfare program shows, social, political, and scientific pressures can lead to the misuse of biological innovation.
Codenamed Project Coast, South Africa’s program was primarily focused on covert assassination weapons for use against individuals deemed a threat to the racist apartheid government. In addition to producing contraptions to inject poisons, Project Coast researchers developed techniques to lace sugar cubes with salmonella and cigarettes with Bacillus anthracis.
While there have been many biowarfare programs, including several that were far more elaborate and sophisticated, the South African program is particularly relevant in thinking through malicious uses of self-spreading vaccines. One of Project Coast’s research projects aimed at developing a human anti-fertility vaccine.
The idea took hold during a time of widespread concern over worldwide population explosion. Schalk Van Rensburg, who oversaw fertility-related work at a Project Coast laboratory, told South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for examining the sordid history of the era and laying the foundation for future peace and tolerance, that he thought the project was in line with the World Health Organization’s attempts to curb rising global birth rates. He believed it could bring his lab international acclaim and funding. According to Van Rensburg, Wouter Basson, the director of the biowarfare program, said the military needed an anti-fertility vaccine so that female soldiers would not fall pregnant.
While some of the scientists involved in the project denied awareness of ulterior intentions or even that their fertility work was part of a military endeavor, Van Rensburg and Daniel Goosen, a lab director, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the real intention behind the project was to selectively administer the contraceptive in secret to unwitting Black South African women.
In the end, the anti-fertility vaccine was not produced before Project Coast was officially closed down in 1995, 12 years after it was initiated. An early version was tested in baboons, but never in humans. South Africa isn’t the only country to try and forcibly sterilize parts of its population. European countries, including Sweden and Switzerland, sterilized members of the Roma minority in the early half of the 20th century and some, like Slovakia, continued even beyond that. More recently, analysts have alleged that the Chinese government is sterilizing women in Xinjiang, a province with a large population of Uighur Muslims.
It doesn’t take a massive leap of the imagination to see how the aims of South Africa’s anti-fertility vaccine project would have benefited from research into self-spreading vaccines, particularly if you combine it with current developments in pharmacogenomics, drug development, and personalized medicine. Taken together, these strands of research could help enable ultra-targeted biological warfare.
An expanding potential for abuse. The Biological Weapons Convention, the treaty that bans biological weapons, is nearly 50 years old. Negotiated and agreed to in the depths of the Cold War, the convention suffers from outdated modes of operation. There are also significant compliance assessment challenges. The convention certainly didn’t stop South Africa from pursuing Project Coast in the early 1980s.
Self-spreading vaccine research is a small but growing field. At the moment, about 10 institutions are doing significant work in the area. These laboratories are primarily located in the United States, but some are in Europe and Australia, as well. As the field expands, so does the potential for abuse.
So far research has primarily been bankrolled by US government science and health funders like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Private organizations like the Gates Foundation and academic institutions have also financed projects. Recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sometimes thought of as the US military’s research and development wing, has gotten involved in the research. The University of California, Davis, for example, is working on a DARPA administered project called Prediction of Spillover Potential and Interventional En Masse Animal Vaccination to Prevent Emerging Pathogen Threats in Current and Future Zones of US Military Operation. According to a pamphlet, the project is “creating the world’s first prototype of a self-disseminating vaccine designed to induce a high level of herd immunity (wildlife population level protection) against Lassa virus … and Ebola.”
Military investment in biological innovation for defensive or protective purposes is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention, but it can still send the wrong signals. It could cause countries to doubt one another’s intentions and lead to tit-for-tat investment in potentially risky research, including in self-spreading vaccines. The result of research gone awry or biowarfare could be catastrophic for health and the environment.
At a time when the norm against chemical weapons is degrading, underscored most recently by the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok—a crime for which many European officials blame Russia—the international community simply can’t afford to have the same thing happen to the norm against the use of biological weapons. It would completely defy the spirit of the treaty if it seemed like states would even want to pursue high-risk dual use activities in biology.
Early, open, good-faith conversations about scientific aims and advances that cause particular dual-use concerns, as self-spreading vaccines do, are essential to exploring the broader stakes of certain technical trajectories. The University of California, Davis program is pursuing ways to incorporate an “off switch” to safely control the technology. And DARPA says any field experimentation related to the project would follow biosafety protocols. But these pledges won’t suffice. Our ambition must be to make a collective decision about the technical pathways we are willing, or not willing, to take as a society.
What could possibly go wrong??????
that old movie remade with Will Smith, I am Legend, not saying that will happen, it was just a movie, but......
Not so many are Denninger fans, but here's a punch line from one of his more recent articles;A long and complex KD rant - read it all at the link if interested.
============
Science Catches Up -- And Burns You All in [Market-Ticker]
2021-04-28 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Covid-19 , 11293 references
Science Catches Up -- And Burns You All*
[Comments enabled]
There is a reason science is a process and until you understand something you should keep your ******ned mouth shut.
Especially when all you have against 40+ years of hard science is computer models.
Massssskss was one of them. I warned early on that physics said masks could not work if the virus was in aerosols or transmitted in feces, no matter whether the feces were manually spread or through aerosols. We knew this was virtually certain when a mass-spread event happened twice in Wuhan and Hong Kong in apartments on the same vertical drain stack where there were no P-traps; the people infected did not know each other and thus any other form of transmission other than through fecal aerosol was wildly improbable. That was ignored. We then had the German meatpacking plant where everyone was wearing masks and yet a huge outbreak took place across tens of feet, a claimed impossibility. Yet it happened and was proved by RNA sequencing; the researchers were able to identify the index and daughter cases and thus conclusively prove that the infections happened in that plant via that route, despite masks.
Now MIT has weighed in and said the same thing. They try to sidestep the mask issue in their "research" but fail; nothing less than an N95, which is not a mask but rather a respirator, stops aerosols, and source control does not work even with N95s because when you exhale the positive pressure escapes around the edges and for aerosols goes right through the gaps. Workplaces and airlines have banned N95s with exhaust valves which preserve the seal on your face and thus are the only ones that will provide protection for you against inhaling said aerosol. Non-valved respirators repeatedly break said seal and thus render it ineffective within minutes. Don't believe me? Put on an N95 without a valve and do some sanding where there's lots of dust, when you take it off let me know what you find around the edges where the respirator used to be. This is why you want the ones with a valve and why the ones I have for such work have a valve.
Pay attention to this paper folks and note its publication date, January 2021. Nobody has paid any attention to it at all yet it is peer-reviewed in Nature, one of the "better" medical publications. I will start right here with what you do not want to read, but you damn well should before you take the shots.
Note that when you get the shot the first thing you get is antibodies; you may get a T-cell reaction. This pre-existing knowledge, from SARS (CoV-1) entirely explains why people who just got vaccinated often get hammered by the virus and frequently end up in the hospital or die. It marks the premise of attempting to vaccinate out of a pandemic where transmission is actively occurring as stupid.
You go get the shot. Five days later you get the virus. You have not yet developed immunity and the partial expression makes it worse.
You would have been better off, by far, taking the same infection straight up front. It likely would have harmed you less.
This generally applies, by the way, to all vaccines and all viruses. The government and researchers know this. They've known this for decades. It's fact. It's why you don't wait until the measles is raging around you to get a measles vaccine and the same is true for the flu shot; you get it before the flu season starts for this very reason. Attempting to vaccinate out of a raging infection does not work and in fact kills people.
Yeah, if you don't get infected during that latent period you get protection. But if you do get infected you're screwed and all of the two-dose shots have a roughly four week window during which you get hosed instead of protected. Israel's data, by the way, proves this is real; Berenson has been reporting on it since the beginning of the year and I've noted it as well.
If you remember I've also pointed out that multiple studies have shown that somewhere between 30-50% of the population is T-cell reactive to Covid-19 despite never having had it, nor SARS or MERS, its alleged "precursors." But those studies were non-specific; that is, they looked for T-cell reactivity but never tried to identify the specific protein sequences and their part of the whole that was involved. This study does, and it finally puts light on basically the entire reason that what we've done is not only wrong it's criminally stupid.
These folks did what we should have done originally -- they isolated a panel of 120 peptides that comprised roughly 10% of the entire virus, containing 57% and 1% of the nucleocapsid and spike proteins. Note that while the "spike" facilitates entry into the cell there is evidence that it is, standing alone, pathological -- that is, it causes disease in the human body without the rest of the virus. The nucleocapsid portion, on the other hand, is the part that is responsible for replication; if it is tagged and the cell containing it is destroyed then viral replication is prevented even though penetration of the cell has occurred.
///snip
A group that sponsored a petition drive to repeal a state emergency law asked the Michigan Supreme Court Friday to order a state elections panel to certify its efforts.
Unlock Michigan went to court after the Board of State Canvassers deadlocked 2-2, along partisan lines, on certifying its petition to repeal the Emergency Powers of Governor Act of 1945.
“In refusing to act, the board failed to fulfill its clear duty to certify and violated plaintiffs’ constitutional rights,” Unlock Michigan and two voters who signed its petition said in a court filing. Disputes over certification of ballot proposals now go directly to the Supreme Court, which is where they have generally ended up anyway.
The emergency law became a hot button issue last spring after Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used it to issue a stay-home order and other restrictions to address the coronavirus pandemic, over the objections of the Republican-controlled Legislature.
'Unlock Michigan' Sues Michigan Bureau of Elections after State Officials will Not Accept Petition to Repeal Gretchen Whitmer's Emergency Lockdowns | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
The Michigan grassroots group “Unlock Michigan” is suing the Michigan Bureau of Elections after the state agency refused to accept their petition to repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency lockdown.www.thegatewaypundit.com
‘Unlock Michigan’ Sues Michigan Bureau of Elections after State Officials will Not Accept Petition to Repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s Emergency Lockdowns
By Jim Hoft
Published May 3, 2021 at 10:01am
The Michigan grassroots group “Unlock Michigan” is suing the Michigan Bureau of Elections after the state agency refused to accept their petition to repeal Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency lockdown.
“Unlock Michigan” launched their campaign as the hypocrite Democrat Governor continues to ruin small businesses and lives across the state with her failed draconian lockdown policies.
Unlock Michigan released this video starring barber Karl Manke who was arrested during Whitmer’s unlimited lockdown policies.
View: https://youtu.be/K63xjWIlA3c
5:26 min
This same agency approved of the fraudulent elections in the state but won’t approve a people’s petition!
They are openly flaunting their tyranny.
Freep.com reported:
Reaching Covid-19 'herd immunity' is unlikely in the US, experts now believe
There is widespread consensus that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable - at least not in the foreseeable future. Read more at straitstimes.com.www.straitstimes.com
Reaching Covid-19 'herd immunity' is unlikely in the US, experts now believe
More than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine.PHOTO: AFP
WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term "herd immunity" came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so people could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim their lives.
- PUBLISHED
MAY 3, 2021, 3:00 PM SGT
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable - at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalisations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.
Continued immunisations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.
"The virus is unlikely to go away," said Professor Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "But we want to do all we can to check that it's likely to become a mild infection."
The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for the public health authorities.
The drive for herd immunity - by the summer, some experts once thought possible - captured the imagination of large segments of the public.
To say the goal will not be attained adds another "why bother" to the list of reasons that vaccine sceptics use to avoid being inoculated.
Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration's top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts' thinking.
"People were getting confused and thinking you're never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is," he said.
"That's why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense," he added. "I'm saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down."
A difficult threshold
Once the coronavirus began to spread across the globe in early 2020, it became increasingly clear that the only way out of the pandemic would be for so many people to gain immunity - whether through natural infection or vaccination - that the virus would run out of people to infect. The concept of reaching herd immunity became the implicit goal in many countries, including the US.
Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the population. Most experts, including Dr Fauci, expected that the US would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.
But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B117 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 per cent more transmissible.
As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 per cent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunised people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.
Polls show that about 30 per cent of the US population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough.
"It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 per cent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say," said Professor Marc Lipsitch, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Although resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the US is unlikely to reach herd immunity, it is not the only one.
Herd immunity is often described as a national target. But that is a hazy concept in a country this large.
"Disease transmission is local," Prof Lipsitch noted.
"If the coverage is 95 per cent in the United States as a whole, but 70 per cent in some small town, the virus doesn't care," he explained. "It will make its way around the small town."
Given the degree of movement among regions, a small virus wave in a region with a low vaccination level can easily spill over into an area where a majority of the population is protected.
At the same time, the connectivity between countries, particularly as travel restrictions ease, emphasises the urgency of protecting not just Americans but everyone in the world, said Dr Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Any variants that arise in the world will eventually reach the US, she noted.
Many parts of the world lag far behind the US on vaccinations. Less than 2 per cent of the people in India have been fully vaccinated, for example, and less than 1 per cent in South Africa, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
"We will not achieve herd immunity as a country or a state or even as a city until we have enough immunity in the population as a whole," said Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the Covid-19 Modelling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin.
What the future may hold
If the herd immunity threshold is not attainable, what matters most is the rate of hospitalisations and deaths after pandemic restrictions are relaxed, experts believe.
By focusing on vaccinating the most vulnerable, the US has already brought those numbers down sharply. If the vaccination levels of that group continue to rise, the expectation is that over time the coronavirus may become seasonal, like the flu, and affect mostly the young and healthy.
"What we want to do at the very least is get to a point where we have just really sporadic little flare-ups," said Professor Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "That would be a very sensible target in this country, where we have an excellent vaccine and the ability to deliver it."
Over the long term - a generation or two - the goal is to transition the new coronavirus to become more like its cousins that cause common colds. That would mean the first infection is early in childhood, and subsequent infections are mild because of partial protection, even if immunity wanes.
Some unknown proportion of people with mild cases may go on to experience debilitating symptoms for weeks or months - a syndrome called "long Covid" - but they are unlikely to overwhelm the healthcare system.
"The vast majority of the mortality and of the stress on the healthcare system comes from people with a few particular conditions, and especially people who are over 60," Prof Lipsitch said. "If we can protect those people against severe illness and death, then we will have turned Covid from a society disrupter to a regular infectious disease."
When and where the hell is this? Just no mask ? Context is mandatoryView: https://twitter.com/i/status/1388851439921864707
.48 min
Man being arrested for not having a mask
Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020)
Brighteon.com is a leading online free platform that empowers free speech, allowing individuals to freely share videos and express their thoughts without any form of censorship. Join us today and be part of our community.www.brighteon.com
Former Cell Phone Company Boss Blows Whistle on 5G Coronavirus (2020), 32:07
Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit.
In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.
Read the full article here. The Liberals Who Can’t Quit LockdownLast year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others. Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.
For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk.