CORONA Main Coronavirus thread

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


New test can ID patients at risk of severe COVID-19, study finds
by University of Virginia
September 16, 2022

A genomic test being developed by a Charlottesville, Va., company can predict a patient's risk of developing severe COVID-19, new research from UVA Health suggests. That information could help doctors identify patients at high risk for poor outcomes and quickly begin tailored treatment.

The approach proved more than 90% accurate at predicting outcomes among more than two dozen patients in the intensive care unit at UVA and 100 patients from publicly available data generated at Duke and Harvard. The test, called CovGENE, analyzes genes expressed in a person's blood to determine whether they may experience a severe disease course with increased risk of death.

"We have come far in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in the past two years. Regardless, we still struggle to identify patients at highest risk for severe disease. Our study uses a gene-analysis approach to identify an immune cell signature, distinct from other respiratory illnesses, that correlates with worse outcomes," said researcher Alexandra Kadl, MD, of UVA Health's Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.

"This knowledge has the potential to help evaluate patients' immune profile with commonly, readily available assays to identify patients at risk for bad outcomes who would benefit from closer monitoring and advanced therapies to aid their recovery."

Predicting COVID-19 Severity

Based on the promising results of the UVA research, CovGENE's developer, AMPEL Biosolutions, is seeking to partner with a diagnostic testing company or pharmaceutical company to bring the approach to market as a simple PCR-based blood test.

"This unique collaboration with our colleagues from the University of Virginia has provided an easy and novel means to assess an individual patient's response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and predict the clinical outcome," said Peter Lipsky, MD, AMPEL's CEO, chief medical officer and co-founder.

"Now that this unique approach has been validated, we look forward to its rapid development as a precision-medicine tool that can improve the outcome of patients with COVID-19 and reduce the number of hospitalizations, especially the most vulnerable."

The researchers have published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Disease spillover risk poorly communicated, oversimplified during COVID-19 pandemic
by American Institute of Biological Sciences
September 16, 2022

COVID-19 has been the first pandemic that has taken place alongside the interconnectivity of the Internet. Consequently, the spread of ideas and information about the disease has been unprecedented—but not always accurate. One of the widely circulated headlines was that of the relationship between land change and the spillover of diseases from wildlife to humans.

Writing in BioScience, Andre D. Mader of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and colleagues survey primary and secondary literature, as well as webpage content on the subject of land change and zoonotic disease risk. Based on the patterns picked up from this literature and media coverage, Mader and colleagues describe what amounts to a case study in improper science communication and its possible consequences.

According to the authors, media messaging consistently described direct causality between zoonotic disease spread and land use change, despite the fact that only 53% of the surveyed peer-reviewed literature made this association. The authors delve into theoretical scenarios that would demonstrate the difficulty of tracing the real risk of zoonotic spillover, emphasizing that the "complexity of pathogen responses to land change cannot be reduced to one-size-fits-all proclamations."

The authors found that as the literature moves from primary research to review articles and commentaries, and finally to webpages, the "overstating of the evidence" increases, with 78% of secondary papers implying the land use–zoonotic spillover association and all but one of the sampled webpages making this association. The authors also noted that secondary sources and webpages often failed to mention the uncertainty associated with their conclusions.

The potential consequences of simplistic messaging and a lack of proper communication regarding zoonotic spillover can erode credibility, neglect local community's specific needs when it comes to policy making, and detract attention from other factors that can lead to zoonotic spillover, say Mader and colleagues. The authors recommend more accurate, nuanced, and explanatory dissemination of the studies on zoonotic spillover risk, arguing that such an approach would also benefit science more broadly.

As the authors conclude, "if the goal of science communication is to improve understanding, it must strike a balance: sufficient simplicity to be grasped by as broad an audience as possible but sufficient nuance to capture the complexity of an issue and contribute meaningfully to the discussion around it, especially when it goes viral."
 

MinnesotaSmith

Membership Revoked

1663401794303.png
Gail Seiler back to work after recovery in 2022.

Woman Escapes COVID-19 Hospital Treatment Protocols, Says Others Not So Lucky​

By Matt McGregor

September 15, 2022

"Over a week after Gail Seiler’s physician had given her a terminal diagnosis, her husband, Brad Seiler, wheeled her out of the back door of the hospital where she had been admitted for COVID-19 on Dec. 3, 2021.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Seiler, but you are going to die,” she recalled her physician telling her on Dec. 5.

On Dec. 15, despite resistance from hospital staff, Brad extracted Seiler from Medical City Plano hospital in Plano, Texas, where the couple lives.

Seiler is one of the few patients who has lived to tell her story about what she said she witnessed on the inside with COVID-19 hospital treatment protocols.

“It became clear to me that people are not dying in hospitals from COVID. They are dying from these protocols,” Seiler told The Epoch Times.

Seiler went in for a monoclonal antibody infusion with the request that she be given the early-treatment protocols prescribed through the Front Line Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), which included the use of ivermectin and budesonide.

However, when staff discovered she was unvaccinated, “the whole tone changed,” she said.

“I quickly lost the right to advocate for my own medical care,” she said.

‘I Didn’t Come Here to Die’​

After a 26-hour wait, she finally got a bed in the intensive care unit (ICU), but no family members were allowed to visit, she said.

This is where she met Dr. Giang Quach, the physician who told her she was going to die because she was unvaccinated, she said.

“I told him, ‘I didn’t come here to die,’” she said.

Seiler said Quach pushed her to take remdesivir, a drug known to cause kidney failure. She repeatedly asked for a different doctor, but her pleas went unanswered and Quach remained in charge of her care, she said.

In 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Right to Try Act into law, which allowed patients with life-threatening diseases who have exhausted all other options to try certain unapproved treatments.

Because Quach had given Seiler a terminal diagnosis, she was entitled to try FLCCC protocols to treat COVID-19, but the hospital denied her those treatments, she said.

Quach also denied Seiler her right to see a priest to administer her last rites, she said.

So, Seiler made a deal with Quach, she said.

She said she would submit to a round of remdesivir if Quach let her see her priest for final sacraments.

Quach agreed, and Seiler was allowed to see her priest, she said.

“Then, we denied the remdesivir,” Seiler said. “They were pretty angry about it, but honestly, I felt I was in a fight for my soul. When the priest left, I had this renewed feeling that I was going to live and not be killed.”

Epoch Times Photo Gail Seiler’s last day at the hospital in 2021. (Courtesy of Gail Seiler)

‘Every Day I Would Tell Them I’m Not a DNR’​

Every day, Seiler said, she made it known that she did not want Quach in charge of her care and insisted on seeing a different provider, but Quach always returned.

Seiler’s daughter had access to her online records, where she found that Seiler was classified as Do Not Resuscitate (DNR), she said.

Seiler said she was not supposed to be listed as DNR.

“The scariest part of it was every day I would tell them I’m not a DNR, but them telling me I’m a DNR,” Seiler said.

In order to be resuscitated, Seiler said, hospital staff told her she had to go on the ventilator, the final stage for many who have reported similar hospital stories that ended in death.

Each of the standard treatment protocols for COVID-19, beginning with remdesivir and ending with the ventilator, are reimbursed with lucrative payoffs from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), leading many to believe this is the reason hospitals continue to use these protocols while denying early treatment.

In a Sept. 7 conference titled “Remdesivir Death: Landmark Lawsuit” in Fresno, California, two attorneys announced lawsuits against three hospitals for what they allege are the hospitals using remdesivir without informed consent, leading to wrongful death.

The lawsuit addressed what the attorneys called “the remdesivir protocol,” in which the patients may be admitted to the hospital—often for problems unrelated to COVID-19—and then diagnosed with COVID-19 or COVID pneumonia.

The patients are then isolated and malnourished before being told remdesivir is their only treatment option, according to the lawsuit.

The patients are also placed on a BiPap machine, which uses pressure to push oxygen into the lungs at a high rate, the lawsuit says, with the patients’ hands often tied down so they can’t remove it.

The final stage of the protocol is intubation, at which point the patients die an average of nine days after being admitted, the lawsuit states.

In the end, the hospital can get up to $500,000 in reimbursement per patient for the protocol, according to the lawsuit.

‘Things Just Got Worse’​

Seiler goes into more detail about her story on the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation’s COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project.

She became the Texas chairperson for the foundation, where she gathers stories similar to hers to submit to the project’s documented cases.

The foundation also offers multiple online support group meetings where others can tell their stories.

The number of people who say they’ve had family members die in hospitals at the hands of what they call the “death protocols” continues to surface. However, for many of them, their loved ones’ deaths left them with inconceivable stories of administrative cruelty.

Patients and families are scared into accepting treatment such as remdesivir without being informed about the risks such as kidney failure.

Families have reported that physicians will tell them that the patient needs oxygen and rest, then the oxygen is used to such a high degree that later a ventilator is required because the lungs are damaged.

When a patient tries to remove the BiPap mask, they are deemed agitated and given sedatives, leaving them at the mercy of hospital staff, many reported, while being denied access to basic nutrition, hygiene, and exercise.

For Seiler, the lack of nutrition caused hair loss, and she developed a fungal infection called thrush because no one removed her BiPap mask to clean her mouth, she said.

Seiler said the doctors and nurses wouldn’t allow her to even sit up, resulting in bed sores, and she eventually lost her ability to walk.

After two days on a catheter that she said was forced on her because nurses told her they couldn’t take her to the bathroom, she got another infection from the catheter.

“Things just got worse,” Seiler said. “People were dying around me in other rooms. Quite frankly, it was quite scary, and I knew that time was short.”

‘I’m Going to Take You Out of There’​

On Dec. 14, 2021, Seiler’s husband, a former nurse and U.S. Army veteran, called 911 to have the Plano Police Department perform a welfare check, she said.

When the police officer arrived, Seiler said she attempted to explain to him what she had experienced.

“I told him they’re going to murder me,” she said. “He said, ‘We don’t have a protocol for this,’ and he left.”

Having exhausted all other options, Brad Seiler and Seiler’s daughter—who had been contacting politicians for help—came up with a plan to get her out of the hospital and take her home.

Brad Seiler set up oxygen and obtained medications with the help of a home consultation service and Dr. Richard Bartlett’s protocols, which emphasize the use of budesonide, she said.

On Dec. 15, Brad called and told her, “I’m going to take you out of there.”

Brad arrived with a cease-and-desist letter and two pieces of patients’ rights legislation, written to allow access to at least one visitor: Texas Senate Bill 572 and Senate Bill 2211.

The state’s House and Senate bills prohibit hospitals from denying visitation, including clergy visitation, during disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seiler said Quach found a loophole in the House bill where it says the doctor can write an order for five days limiting visitation to one person, and then renew that order.

“And that’s what Dr. Quach had done to keep me isolated,” she said. “Still, Quach broke the premise of that bill, because I wasn’t allowed any visitors.”

The Senate bill, which was written by state Sen. Bob Hall, permits a spiritual counselor, she said.

This was written to include family members, which is why Brad was brandishing the legislation—to invoke himself as the spiritual head of the family, Seiler said.

Epoch Times Photo Gail Seiler’s progress in getting off the mask, 2022. (Courtesy of Gail Seiler)

‘I Anticipate There Will be Future Hearings’​

Hall, who was involved in making calls to the hospital to petition for Seiler’s care, has been outspoken against “the commandeering of medical practices by the government.”

In June 2022, the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services held a hearing where families testified about their loved ones’ experiences with the medical system during the pandemic.

In a statement to The Epoch Times, Hall said he anticipates future hearings after the committee heard the personal testimonies.

“Patients and doctors must be empowered to make decisions on treatment protocols without fear of threats and intimidation if they differ from government-mandated procedures,” Hall said.

It was the persistence of Seiler’s husband and daughter, Hall said, that made Seiler “one of the few hospital COVID patients to get out of the hospital in time to survive.”

Echoing Seiler’s earlier statement, Hall said “more people died in hospitals like Medical City Plano because of hospital policies, than died of COVID.”

In a statement to The Epoch Times, a Medical City Plano spokesperson said that “like other hospitals in our area, our hospital relies on licensed, independent physicians who use their extensive training and experience to assess patients’ needs and determine the course of treatment. We support our physicians by giving them information and resources, including the latest research to help them provide the best possible care to our patients.”

Of the many consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the erosion of confidence in the medical profession’s “best possible care” has been the most damaging, Hall said.

“The circumstances triggered a number of egregious policies and practices never before seen in our modern hospitals,” Hall said. “Patients were isolated from their families and loved ones, intimidated or coerced into receiving medical protocols with which they disagreed, and in some cases, outright neglected. Government-mandated protocols, which did more harm than good, added fuel and distrust to the fire.”

‘I Know for Certain I Will Die at Your Hands’​

Brad Seiler had gone beyond the stage of distrust when he entered the hospital and somehow charged his way into the ICU as security chased him, Gail Seiler said.

When told to leave, Brad told staff, “You’re not going to murder my wife. She’s coming home with me,” Seiler said.

From there, it became almost like an all-day hostage negotiation, Seiler said, with six police officers who were there not to help them, but to make Brad leave.

Hall got involved, telling Brad not to resist if officers were to arrest him, Seiler said, while one of the doctors told her that if she were to leave with Brad, she would die.

“I told her that if I died tonight, ‘I’d prefer it be with Brad trying to save me rather than die at your hands because I know for certain I will die at your hands,’” Seiler said.

Epoch Times Photo Police were present when Gail Seiler’s husband negotiated with the hospital so Gail would be allowed to leave Medical City Plano hospital in Plano, Texas, in 2021. (Courtesy of Gail Seiler)
Seiler needed a wheelchair because her legs didn’t work due to a lack of physical therapy, she said.

When she was packed and ready to leave, Seiler said the floor nurse led them out through what he called “the shortcut,” which turned out to be the way through the morgue where the funeral homes pick up bodies.

“I think it was to send us a message,” Seiler said.

‘A Medical Matrix’​

Despite the physician telling Brad Seiler that his wife wouldn’t make it 24 hours if she left the hospital, she lives today to tell her story.

It wasn’t easy, Gail Seiler said, and her healing at home had more to do with recovering from her experience at the hospital than from the virus itself.

However, it was Bartlett’s treatment that saved her life, she said.

“Everything he put in place works,” she said. “I started to improve right away.”

The Seilers later contacted their state representative who contacted Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct an investigation, Gail said.

HHS assigned the investigation to the hospital, which concluded that the hospital had “done a stellar job,” Gail said.

“No one contacted us, and they certainly didn’t look at our medical records because—if anything—even making someone a DNR when they tell you they aren’t a DNR is against the law, right?” Sieler said.

The Seilers were sure no one would believe their story, but as they continued to tell it on podcast and radio interviews, more and more people contacted them to share their own experiences.

Seiler managed to escape the hospital and recover, but she said most of the stories she hears from other people don’t have happy endings, leaving those families wracked with guilt when they realize what took place.

The majority of the cases have ended in the death of the patient, Seiler said, with the family only realizing they had been gaslit after it was over.

“What we’re seeing is doctors aren’t being honest with the patient, and by the time you realize they’re harming you, you’ve not only been harmed, you’ve also been gaslit, and you can’t just leave,” Seiler said. “You’re on a high flow of oxygen and you’re told if you leave, you’ll die. If you get intubated, the only way out is to be transferred to another hospital.”

Patients have generally had the right to advocate for their own medical treatment, and even deny recommendations, but with the emergency declarations related to COVID, hospital staff have been given authority over patients they’ve historically not had, Seiler said.

In some cases, patients have been given remdesivir and other medications not only without informed consent but also after the patient had put in writing that they didn’t want the drug, Seiler said.

Despite this overreach being exercised in hospitals, Brad and the Seiler’s daughter was able to bring enough attention to the case through networking with Hall and Lt. Col. Allen West, Seiler said.

West had also been treated there and—in addition to Hall—made several calls to the hospital on the Seilers’ behalf, which Seiler said she suspects is why staff had to eventually acquiesce to letting Brad remove her.

The Seilers were also helped by the legal team of Paul M. Davis & Associates in Frisco, Texas, a firm that’s representing clients who have also gone through the hospital protocols.

There have been cases in which people have just walked out, but they are rare, Seiler said.

“Once you enter the hospital, you’re in this medical matrix, and the only way out is through death or if someone comes and takes you out,” Seiler said.

Today, Seiler’s mission is to bring awareness by sharing her story and the stories of others, she said.

“My goal is to keep people out of hospitals because this truly is a hospital holocaust.”
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Hong Kong, the latest Kid on the Covid-19 Vaccine Trainwreck Block, Bears Watching as it hits World Leading Vaccination and Booster Uptake Rates.
If UK ONS Data holds, showing deaths of 1/73 vaccinated persons within 17 months of vaccine rollout, Hong Kong could be looking at a premature loss of 1.3% of their population.
SuperSally888

Sep 16

Hong Kong, the vibrant colorful city that never slept, the city with a heartbeat and a pulse! I loved Hong Kong, lived there for a while, and travelled there frequently. It had among the best airport lounges in the world! I have colleagues and many people I care about still living there. I haven’t been to Hong Kong since January of 2020, stopped by their extreme covid-19 measures and stringent border controls. These measures have resulted in an exodus of people from Hong Kong, as expatriates and even locals move to less restrictive regions.

Vaccination started in Hong Kong on 26 February 2021. There are two approved vaccines for use in Hong Kong. These are CoronaVac and Comirnaty.

It is very difficult to live unvaccinated in Hong Kong as they have implemented the vaccine pass system and require QR codes to access most work sites and nearly all public services and spaces. No restaurants, no markets, no stores, no entertainment without passes! Order online for delivery only! The Government updated this with the enhanced red and amber coded covid pass system last 8th August 2022.


Hong Kong is the next city to watch in the unfolding covid-19 vaccine saga.​

The Hong Kong SAR Government provides information to residents, including the claim (disproven by Australian and UK data) that under vaccinated (1 dose only) and unvaccinated are 10x more likely to die compared to those who have received 2 or 3 doses. Home isolation for Covid-19 infected persons also comes with mandatory electronic wrist bands.



Hong Kong’s stringent measures and Dynamic Zero Covid Policy seemed to work for a good while! Up until 16 February 2022, to be precise, when the carefully crafted strategy failed, and failed dismally. Cases and deaths exploded on 16th February 2022 when vaccine uptake hit 67% fully vaccinated. Those cases and deaths fueled further vaccination uptake as fearful people were convinced to rush to get protected!



Hong Kong is rapidly becoming one of the most vaccinated regions on the planet.

As of 10 September 2022, 92% of Hong Kong residents have received at least 1 dose of covid-19 vaccine!



88.5% have completed the initial protocols.



78% are boosted, with uptake rising rapidly.



As of 10 September 2022, Hong Kong’s total confirmed Covid-19 Deaths stand at 1,309 / million population, nearly 10,000 people. They have a population of about 7.5 million.

Covid-19 Deaths Cannot Explain All of Hong Kong’s Excess Deaths​

The latest excess death data for Hong Kong is only available up to 30th April 2022. At that time total confirmed Covid-19 deaths stood at 1,242/ million. Even assuming (falsely) that all excess deaths were due to Covid-19, these could not explain the excess deaths / million which stood at 1,805 per million, 563 extra/million on the same date. Something else has been killing Hong Kong residents, and it wasn’t just Covid-19. No excess death data has been published since 30 April 2022, more than 4 months ago.



Hong Kong again has rapidly rising covid-19 cases; nearly 10,000 cases a day!


Vaccine Adverse Reactions, Hong Kong​

Hong Kong does issue pharmacovigilance reports, here is one as of 31 July 2022. They claim adverse reaction rates at about 0.04%. While deaths have been reported post vaccination, they report that none have been causally linked with the received vaccination.




No deaths associated with vaccination flies in the face of population data out of the UK from the UK Government, discussed here, which shows that 1/482 vaccinated people die within a month of vaccination, 1 / 246 die within 60 days of vaccination, 1/ 73 die within 17 months of vaccination! [Death rates could get far worse as long-term sequelae accumulate].

At 93% of 7.5 million vaccinated, if Hong Kong followed this trending, she could be looking at nearly 100,000 deaths in currently vaccinated persons, a loss of 1.3% of their population. That is 10x higher than the covid-19 deaths to date.

Regardless, with soaring cases, covid-19 deaths and excess deaths, and an exodus of people compounding workforce shortages across all industries, it sure looks like Hong Kong is in trouble!

Will the government share information and data to reveal what is actually happening? Will they investigate fully? Will they take steps to lead Hong Kong out of this disaster? Or has the narrative grown too big to ever be admitted being at fault?
.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Is Paul Offit a Sitting Duck for ADE?
Read his position on why he won't be taking the bivalent "booster". CDC's data suggests he might be in a group of people who could be in trouble. Let's hope not.

James Lyons-Weiler
17 hr ago

According to MedPage Today, Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, a well-known vaccine zealot and well-known apologist for aluminum toxicity against evidence, has decided that he’s had enough of COVID-19 vaccines. He won’t be getting another booster or the updated, bivalent vaccine. Yes, you read that right.

Medpage Today quotes him thusly:

“I have received three doses of the ancestral strain vaccine and contracted a mild case of COVID in May. As a result, all the evidence suggests that I have high frequencies of virus-specific memory B and T cells, which should protect me against severe disease this winter.”

Offit continues:

“I do not plan to get another dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines until it is clear that people who have been primed, boosted, and naturally infected are nonetheless at high risk of serious illness when encountering the virus.

Here’s the question:

How do you tell the difference between vaccine failure and disease enhancement, as in antibody-dependent enhancement? Answer: with vaccine failure, you get asymptomatic disease.

With ADE, you get severe illness.

When Offit sees the data from CDC, he is going to find that people who have been primed and boosted may be susceptible to increased risk of hospitalization if they are infected with newer variants, due to ADE.

According to CDC, as of Sep. 07, 108,953,688 Americans had received a booster, or 48.6 percent of the country's fully vaccinated population.

Also according to CDC, 75.5% of adult Americans have been “fully vaccinated”.

According to math, 48.6% of 75.5% = 36.69% are, at this time, boosted

The reports that 44% of those hospitalized were boosted (e.g., WebMd citing CDC data) does not bode well for the booster program, and here’s why:

At COVID-19 vaccine program effectiveness = 0, the rate would be 36.7% of the hospitalized were boosted. But instead, it’s 44%. HIGHER than expected.

This implies negative effectiveness.

This is the full report with the concerning results that support negative effectiveness of boosting.

I’m not sure yet how those who also, like Offit, had a SARS-CoV-2 infection will fare, and will of course I hope everyone, injected or not, does well this winter, I suspect many will not. Perhaps (and I hope) Offit’s immunity from the SARS-CoV-2 infection will have provided him with diverse B- and T-cells to antigens other than the spike protein.

It seems likely given Omicron’s R0 (ease of spread) that nearly everyone who has been vaccinated likely by now has also had an infection. This “silent boosting” in the vaccinated via natural infection was reported years ago by Japanese medical researchers in Japan.

Here’s Dr. Vinay Prasad discussing some of the problem. He does a good job calling out a doctor (Robert Califf, Commissioner of Food and Drugs of the FDA) for claiming on Twitter that the bivalent vaccine will protect people with zero data from humans in the second sentence of Califf’s tweet.

But Prasad does not seem to recognize the implications of CDC’s data showing negative effectiveness; he thinks Califf’s first sentence is a-ok. And he reports Offit’s refusal of the bivalent booster near the end, too, providing 11 reasons why an annual COVID-19 “booster” is not like an annual flu shot. [POSTED ON THIS THREAD A FEW DAYS AGO, SCROLL UP]

NB: I need everyone on Twitter to Tweet this with #BringBackJack. Let Califf and Twitter know that by shutting down my account, they have activated the masses.

NB2: The artwork used in this Substack article involves a doctor duck image. In no way is this meant to imply anything about Dr. Offit other than the potential self-imposed risk of ADE implied by the title of this article.
 

MinnesotaSmith

Membership Revoked

NYC's science-deniers are punishing unvaccinated children

by Zachary Faria, Commentary Writer |
September 16, 2022

"Science deniers abound over two years after the pandemic. You can find them in New York City’s Democratic government.

Children are continuing to be forced out of after-school programs, including after-school sports, if they have not been vaccinated for COVID-19. Children do not need the vaccine to attend classes, but according to the New York City Department of Education, COVID-19 magically becomes more dangerous to children once the school day ends.

“Vaccinations are still required to participate in high-risk extracurricular activities, including high-risk PSAL sports,” the department said.

Even if those “high-risk” activities included coughing directly into each other’s mouths, this would be anti-science nonsense. Children are not, and have never been, at serious risk from COVID-19. All available data show that children face a higher risk of health complications from the flu. Only about 0.001% of children who contracted COVID-19 died, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

What do we know puts people at serious risk of being hospitalized or killed by COVID-19? Obesity. A CDC study last year found that 78% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese. If anything, New York City is putting children at more risk by preventing them from playing after-school sports such as football, volleyball, and basketball.

You would have to be an anti-science, COVID-paranoid zealot to think that mandating coronavirus vaccines for children would keep anyone safe, especially children themselves. Yet that is exactly what Mayor Eric Adams and his government are. They are not protecting anyone from COVID-19; they are punishing unvaccinated children so that they can pretend they care about public health. Why? Because children can’t fight back.

There is no justification for this, and it should be completely disqualifying. Adams and everyone working in the city’s Education Department belong nowhere near any sort of political power. New York City politicians and bureaucrats are destroying the lives of children because they don’t understand COVID-19 data or simply don’t care. This is the kind of damage that real science deniers cause, and it is coming from the self-proclaimed “party of science.”"
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Covid testing providers scale back despite worries of another winter surge

Shannon Pettypiece
Sat, September 17, 2022, 7:00 AM

WASHINGTON — Covid testing labs and at-home test manufacturers have been downsizing after government funding cuts and waning demand, despite concerns from health officials that the country could face another winter surge in infections.

It is unclear what trajectory the pandemic will take as the U.S. enters the cooler fall and winter months that have preceded past spikes in cases; some public health groups are forecasting another winter wave of infections.

Just how severe that wave will be will depend on whether the virus mutates to evade immunity from previous infections. But should the U.S. see a surge similar to last winter's, Americans could find themselves in a similar testing bind, with at-home tests quickly selling out and people encountering long waits for laboratory PCR test results, public health officials said.

Manufacturers of rapid at-home Covid tests are making only half the number of tests as they were in February, when they ramped up production in response to the omicron wave, and the White House committed to buying 1 billion at-home tests, according to data compiled by Mara Aspinall, a professor at Arizona State University who has consulted with companies and institutions on testing.

But since last winter, demand for testing has gone down and the White House has run out of money to keep purchasing tests on such a large scale, causing some companies to cut back on capacity.

“There are definitely manufacturers stepping back without full confidence there will be a government or any market for Covid tests,” said Aspinall. “That being said, I believe some of the larger providers will remain committed to the market. Some of the smaller ones, there is a question.”

Laboratories that process PCR tests have also cut their capacity by a third as more people turn to at-home tests, and public health guidance has become more relaxed around testing for schools and travel, according to Aspinall's data.

Opko Health’s BioReference Labs, for example, has gone from processing 3 million PCR tests in the second quarter last year to 1 million in the same period this year. As a result, it has cut its testing workforce by more than 4,000 since its peak, including laying off 700 workers in June and July, the company said during its quarterly earnings report last month.

Companies making Covid tests, equipment and supplies have also seen a hefty drop in Covid-related sales. Becton Dickenson saw its Covid testing revenues tumble to $76 million in the most recent quarter, from $300 million a year earlier, and executives said they expect demand to continue to decline throughout the year.

The number of reported Covid cases is currently a quarter of what it was at its peak last winter. But Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, estimates that only 4% to 5% of infections are being reported, because so many are uncovered through at-home tests and aren't reported to public health departments, or they aren't being detected at all. He expects to see infections start to increase next month and continue to rise through the winter.

"Waning immunity from the last Ba.5 round of infections and waning immunity from vaccination combined with people being indoors should combine to mean that we should see infections start to go back up starting in October and go up quite a bit," Murray said.

The Biden administration had aimed to provide some stability to the Covid testing market by purchasing a steady supply of Covid tests to send to Americans for free. But Congress has failed to pass a Covid spending package that included $2 billion for testing, and last month the White House said it was ending its free Covid testing program.

With its remaining funds, the White House said this month it would buy 100 million more tests to stockpile in case of another surge, far short of what the administration had hoped to do had its funding from Congress come through, administration officials said.

IHealth Labs, one of the biggest beneficiaries of federal spending on Covid tests earlier this year, said it was now making around a tenth of the tests it was in February. But the company said it was prepared to quickly ramp up production — up to 50 million tests per month — if there is another winter surge.

“We need to prepare for the fall and winter. We don’t know if there’s any new wave, but we need to be ready because it’s happened for the last few winters,” said Jack Feng, CEO of iHealth. “We are always convinced there will be an end, but it always comes back.”

State and local governments have also been running short on funding to provide free PCR tests, making pop-up Covid testing centers on street corners or at large gathering sites a thing of the past in many areas.

Among state and local health officials, many have largely shifted their attention away from Covid, especially with the rise of monkeypox, and there is little talk of ramping up to prepare for a potential winter surge, said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. His group represents the public health agencies of all 50 states, Washington, D.C., five U.S. territories and three Freely Associated States.

“Even public health people seem to have this kind of magical thinking that everything is going to be OK and maybe it won’t be OK, but I don’t think anybody’s gearing up. I think for the most part, everybody’s waiting to see what happens and they’ll gear up if the needs arise,” said Plescia. “I think it’s kind of human that everybody’s just taking a break and waiting to see what happens.”

Part of that mindset comes from confidence in treatments, like Pfizer’s Paxlovid, that reduce the risk of severe disease, and new boosters specifically targeted at omicron, health officials said.

But as the virus continues to spread, there remains the threat that a new variant could develop that would evade the immunity much of the population has from past infections and vaccinations, Murray said.

“There’s only so much capacity, so much staff, so much mental bandwidth to tackle Covid," Murray said. "I think the problem now is the public health community may be more focused currently on what’s happening and trying to think about relatively small effects on the big picture for Covid, as opposed to putting a lot of energy into the sort of preparedness plans if a bad variant comes along."

Test manufacturers and laboratories say they are in a stronger position than last year to be able to quickly scale up capacity should there be another surge because of the investments they have already made in equipment and facilities.

Abbott, one of the largest makers of at-home tests, said it has continued to make “tens of millions” of rapid tests at its two facilities in Maine and Illinois, and has the capacity to produce 100 million tests per month if needed. Abbott saw its Covid testing revenue decline by 29% in the most recent quarter, though its sales nearly doubled over the past year.

“Maintaining our domestic rapid test manufacturing infrastructure is mission critical for pandemic preparedness,” the company said in a statement. “This includes responding quickly to seasonal Covid waves and new variants, and ensuring that rapid tests are readily available so that Covid therapeutic treatments can be administered quickly.”

One of the biggest barriers to being able to quickly scale up would be finding enough people to work in the labs and manufacturing lines or collect samples from patients.

“One of our limitations like every industry right now is people,” said Alex Greninger, an assistant director of the clinical virology laboratories at the University of Washington Medical Center. “The burnout is real. It’s hard to do. We’ve done about 105 years of testing in the last two and a half years. Imagine you had to increase your productivity like 50-fold.”

The decline in PRC testing and a shift to at-home tests also leaves public health officials increasingly flying blind with regard to the spread of infections because few at-home test results are reported to public health departments, unlike with laboratory tests. That could make it more difficult for testing manufacturers and laboratories to see a surge coming and ramp up accordingly.

There have also been other concerns about the accuracy of at-home tests, which tend to be less sensitive than PCR tests.

“I do worry that the public has gotten a little bit too reliant or trusting in the sensitivity of home tests,” said Plescia. “I think they’re a good tool, but they’re clearly imperfect.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
 

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Fauci "Misled Congress" About Gain-Of-Function Research, But 'Protected By Biden Admin'; Former CDC Chief Says

by Tyler Durden
Saturday, Sep 17, 2022 - 08:00 PM

Just last week, Senator Rand Paul appeared on Fox News and slammed Anthony Fauci for taking the default position of trying to “cover up” his activities, including potentially encouraging social media companies to censor medical information.

“I think that all of America should be appalled that America’s doctor, the leading expert on COVID in public health, doesn’t want to divulge information, doesn’t want to divulge his communications with Big Tech,” Paul urged, adding that Fauci’s “modus operandi” is to “cover up”.

A month before that, Senator Paul spoke after first ever Senate hearing on gain of function research, having revealed that there is a committee that is supposed to oversee such experimentation with potentially lethal viruses, but that it is above the oversight of Congress.

“We don’t know the names. We don’t know that they ever meet, and we don’t have any records of their meetings,” the Senator reiterated, adding “It’s top-secret. Congress is not allowed to know. So whether the committee actually exists, we’re uncertain.”
“We do know that they’ve met three times and there are thousands of gain-of-function research proposals. They’ve only met three times, they’ve only reviewed three projects,” Paul continued.

The Senator added that “When Dr. Fauci said, ‘Oh, we’ve reviewed this and the experts have looked at this, and said it’s not gain-of-function,’ even that wasn’t true. There was a committee that was formed after 2017 to look at this dangerous research. They didn’t look at this research at all because they never reviewed it. So no one reviewed this to say it wasn’t gain-of-function research. They didn’t review it, period.”

“So we learned a lot of things, but I think we reconfirmed that Dr. Fauci is not being honest with us,” Paul urged, adding “Yes, the NIH funded gain-of-function research. Yes, it was dangerous. And yes, nobody looked over this. Nobody reviewed the research. Yes, a million people died. And there still seems to be a significant lack of curiosity on the part of Democrats.”

Of course, Fauci shrugged this off as just more 'vast-right-wing-conspiracy-theory' or some-such.

But, Dr. Fauci has a problem now... Just The News' Greg Piper reports that the former Center for Disease Control and Prevention director who was cast as a conspiracy theorist for saying the evidence supported the lab-leak explanation for COVID-19 – allegedly provoking death threats – claims that the real "conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community."

Robert Redfield told former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci "knew" he funded gain-of-function research that makes viruses more dangerous, and "misled Congress" when he denied it."

Rand Paul was right after all... and it wasn't a vast right wing conspiracy? Shock horror!

"Everyone had to agree to the narrative" pushed by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a "wet market" in Wuhan, not the Fauci-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away, to avoid becoming a public target of the two officials, he said.

Redfield said he believes The Lancet spring 2020 letter that lumped in the lab-leak hypothesis with "conspiracy theories" was "orchestrated ... under direction of Fauci and Collins, trying to nip any attempt to have an honest investigation of the pandemic’s origin."

"There was nothing scientific about that letter. It was just an attempt to intimidate people," he also said.

"I was threatened, my life was threatened," he said.

"I have letters I got from prominent scientists, that previously gave me awards, telling me that the best thing I could do for the world was to shoot myself because of what I said."

He believes that "Fauci and Collins were behind a lot of" the conspiracy and "anti-Asian hate" claims about the lab-leak theory

So, finally, we ask, how has Fauci been able to survive all this (politically, bureaucratically, and freedom-wise)?

Dr.Redflied has the answer - and you won't like it:

"[n]othing's going to happen as long as the Biden administration is here."

The part of science, though, remember!
 

Heliobas Disciple

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Dr. Harvey Risch: Biggest Lie of last 29 Months of COVID Pandemic Was Hydroxychloroquine – Hundreds of Thousands Died as a Result
By Jim Hoft
Published September 17, 2022 at 5:22pm

Steve Deace recently interviewed Dr. Harvey Risch, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Risch’s work has been cited nearly 50,000 times in journals and studies. He is also an MD.

Steve Deace asked Dr. Risch what was the biggest lie of the last 29 months of COVID pandemic.

Dr. Risch says it was the lies about hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID 19.

The FDA hid the evidence that HCQ was effective in the early treatment of the disease. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of this lie. The CDC-FDA officials promoted the questionable experimental vaccines instead and this helped Big Pharma make billions.

This was a must-see interview:

Dr. Harvey Risch is Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
His work has been cited nearly 50k times.
He’s also an MD.
I asked him what the biggest lie of the last 29 months of COVID has been.
Hold onto your butts.pic.twitter.com/rGREuMjwl0
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) September 15, 2022

Eric Metaxas argues: It has become impossible to avoid the conclusion that the FDA and CDC caused hundreds of thousands to die, that they colluded with Big Pharma to push the dangerous vaccine INSTEAD of actually saving lives. There MUST be a reckoning. Do not be silent.

It has become impossible to avoid the conclusion that the FDA and CDC caused hundreds of thousands to die, that they colluded with Big Pharma to push the dangerous vaccine INSTEAD of actually saving lives. There MUST be a reckoning. Do not be silent. https://t.co/QG4Hic7B0N
— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) September 16, 2022

The Gateway Pundit has reported on the effectiveness of HCQ for over two years now.

hcq-covid19.jpg


There have now been over 67 Ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies that show a 67% improvement in COVID patients.

ivermectin-studies.jpg


There have been 362 Hydroxychloroquine studies that show a 64% improvement in patients for COVID-19 patients.

hcq-covid-studies.jpg


Despite the science, Dr. Fauci and the medical elites have blocked the use of these effective treatments for coronavirus patients.

Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccines, accused Dr. Fauci and others of lying and causing the death of over 500,000 Americans by preventing HCQ and Ivermectin, and other treatments from COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Malone is right. It is well documented that Dr. Fauci and top US doctors conspired to disqualify and condemn hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment.
Millions died as a result of this.
 

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850 more unvaxxed NYC teachers, aides fired for not complying with mandate
By Susan Edelman
September 17, 2022

The city Department of Education has axed another 850 teachers and classroom aides — bringing the total to nearly 2,000 school employees fired for failure to comply with a vaccine mandate increasingly struck down in court.

About 1,300 DOE employees who took a year’s unpaid leave — with benefits — agreed to show proof of COVID vaccination by Sept. 5 or be “deemed to have voluntarily resigned.”

Of those staffers, 450 got a shot by the deadline and “are returning to their prior schools or work locations,” DOE officials told The Post. They include some 225 teachers and 135 paraprofessionals.

The 850 let go makes roughly 1,950 DOE staffers terminated since the vaccine mandate took effect on Oct. 29, 2021.

Rachelle Garcia, an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn for 15 years and mother of two, worked fully in person during the pandemic and never got sick, she said.

But she refused to get vaccinated, finally taking leave after the DOE denied her requests for a religious exemption.

“I really put my eggs in one basket, hoping and praying that at the last minute our mayor would turn everything around in time for me to go back to work,” she said.

Mayor Adams never lifted the vaccine mandate, while other cities and states are dropping such requirements due to relaxed CDC guidelines.

“I’m angry, I’m hurt, to be cast aside like I was nothing. Because I couldn’t give a proper goodbye to my students, other teachers told me they kept asking, ‘When is Ms. Garcia coming back?’ That made me cry so much.”

She is now applying for jobs on Long Island.

In all, NYC has fired more than 2,600 municipal workers not fully vaccinated, according to City Hall tallies.

But last week, a Manhattan judge ruled that an unvaccinated NYPD officer, one of the dozens terminated, can’t be fired because the city gave no explanation of why it rejected his religious exemption request.
 

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The Long Haul
Inside one neurologist’s quest to solve the mystery of COVID’s most puzzling complication.

By Mark Caro
September 13, 2022, 10:29 am

In his compact office at Northwestern Medicine’s Searle Medical Research Building in Streeterville, Igor Koralnik leans into one of two computer screens perched atop his uncluttered desk. The neurologist’s team of doctors, researchers, and medical students has assembled for a video meeting to reveal their latest findings about patients with long-term effects from COVID-19. Koralnik, now 60, softly yet insistently directs a question at a young doctor presenting fresh data.

“What jumps to your mind?” he asks. “What is something that we’ve never, ever thought about?”

Senior neuroimmunology fellow Gina Perez-Giraldo says she’s surprised the rates of depression and anxiety are higher for long-COVID patients who weren’t hospitalized than for those who were?—?16 percent compared with 9 percent. It’s counterintuitive because you’d think milder cases would lead to fewer ongoing complications.

But that’s not the case. Lingering post-COVID headaches, for instance, are also more common among patients who have not been hospitalized. Same for the loss of smell and taste. Brain fog, an umbrella term covering various neurocognitive symptoms, is present at similar levels among the hospitalized and nonhospitalized, but the causes may differ. For the former, “we think it’s mostly caused by brain damage during hospitalization,” Koralnik tells me, citing the trauma of being on a ventilator. For the latter, it more likely stems from the virus lingering in the body or the autoimmune system’s reaction to it.

These are just some of the perplexing findings about a condition that has confounded medical experts from the start. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines long COVID, also known as “post-COVID conditions,” as symptoms that appear, persist, or return at least four weeks after the initial infection. But more than two years into the pandemic, many aspects of this syndrome?—?notably its causes and remedies?—?remain a mystery.

The Swiss-born Koralnik, who is Northwestern’s chief of neuroinfectious disease and global neurology, is at the forefront of the quest to better understand long COVID’s effects on the brain. After making his name studying various neurological disorders, including those associated with HIV, he arrived at Northwestern on the eve of the pandemic. Since then, he has become one of the world’s leading experts, opening a clinic to treat neurologically affected long-COVID patients and publishing numerous papers to boost our understanding of this condition and its ominous implications for all of us.

The upshot: There may be no correlation between the severity of your COVID case and the lasting effect on your brain. You thought COVID felt like having a cold? Great, but you still may not know what the virus has done, or is doing, to your body. “Acute COVID-19 is a respiratory disease,” Koralnik says. “But long COVID is mostly about the brain.”

And plenty of people are developing it. Long COVID is now the country’s third leading neurological disorder, the American Academy of Neurology declared in July. As of the end of May, there were 82.5 million COVID survivors in the United States, and 30 percent of them?—?about 24.8 million?—?were considered “long-haulers.” A recent study of Northwestern’s Neuro COVID-19 Clinic patients showed that most neurological symptoms persist for an average of nearly 15 months after the disease’s onset.

The vaccines are certainly helping. Before they became available, about one-third of everyone infected with the virus came down with long COVID, Koralnik says. “There is brand-new data showing that if you’ve been double vaccinated and boosted, then the risk of developing long COVID, if you get COVID, is probably more like 16, 17 percent.” That’s the good news. The bad news is those 1-in-6 odds still translate to a lot of people: For every million vaccinated people who get COVID, 160,000 to 170,000 will develop long COVID.

“A lot of people think, Well, COVID is going away. But in fact, it’s not,” Koralnik says. “People still get COVID after the vaccination and double booster, and they can still get long COVID despite that.”

So Koralnik and his neuro-COVID research team are taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to cracking the long-COVID code and developing treatments to alleviate the often incapacitating neurological symptoms. And they’re also scrambling to persuade others to care?—?including, crucially, those with the power to finance their research.

Koralnik finds it infuriating that critical funding has been slow in coming. “Where is the sense of urgency?” he asks. “If this is not enough to create urgency, what is?”

In January 2020, Jenny Nowatzke, Northwestern Medicine’s national media relations manager, introduced herself to Koralnik and asked whether he could talk on a local TV news program about a new virus from China.

“I don’t know much about it,” he responded. “It’s a respiratory disease. I’m a neurologist.”

But Koralnik, who had been at Northwestern for only two months, agreed to go on camera with the caveat that he’d need a tie. Nowatzke borrowed one from someone down the hall.

Koralnik had spent the previous three years as the neurology department chair at Rush University Medical Center. For the 21 years before that, he was at Harvard Medical School, where he rose to chief of the neuroimmunology division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, making his reputation with his work on HIV.

Koralnik attended medical school in Geneva in the mid-1980s, at the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He studied neurology because, as Koralnik puts it, “I’m interested in how the brain works.” HIV was not initially thought to be a neurological disease, but over time young patients started experiencing such symptoms as dementia and spinal cord issues, suggesting to Koralnik “a new area” of study. “Neurologists are not necessarily drawn to infectious diseases, and infectious disease physicians don’t practice neurology,” he says. “So I decided to specialize in the neurologic manifestation of HIV and, by extension, of infectious diseases.”

At Beth Israel, he founded and directed the HIV/Neurology Center, a clinic focused on treating the often overlooked neurological symptoms of HIV. “He made a name for himself in recognition that HIV had neurological implications to it and advocating for those patients,” says Eric Liotta, an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern and a neurocritical care specialist on Koralnik’s research team. “He is, in a little way, repeating history now with COVID.”

Koralnik also became known for studying progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML, a rare and deadly neurological disorder. Affecting 5 percent of HIV patients, he says, PML is caused by the JC virus, which is harmless in most people but can be fatal to those with weakened immune systems. “I became specifically interested in PML because it is a disease for which there is no known cure,” Koralnik says. By studying how the virus grows in the brain and how the immune system fights it, he was able to develop new therapies. Omar Siddiqi, an assistant neurology professor at Harvard Medical School, says Koralnik’s seminal work on PML once led a prominent neurologist to refer to it as “Koralnik’s disease.”

While at Beth Israel, Koralnik mentored Siddiqi, a neurology resident who wanted to deliver neurological care to underserved populations in Africa. Siddiqi and Koralnik collaborated on what would become a neuroscience center in Zambia, a country that had lacked neurologists and experience in treating HIV and nervous system disorders. Siddiqi, who moved to Zambia in 2010, says Koralnik not only supported the research but also helped him navigate the National Institutes of Health funding system and directed grant money to him. “He provided me with a major portion of my salary support for two to three years,” says Siddiqi, who had a young family at the time. “I can’t thank him enough for that.” The Zambian program, directed by Johns Hopkins Medicine neurologist Deanna Saylor, now includes an inpatient treatment center and a teaching hospital that trains neurologists.

Koralnik is currently helping to create neuro-COVID programs in Nigeria and Colombia; Perez-Giraldo, a Colombia native, is taking the lead on the latter. By collecting data from different spots around the globe, she says, their hope is to gain a broader understanding of long COVID.

Koralnik views that search for answers?—?as well as the mentoring of the next generation of practitioners?—?as critical to his mission at a university hospital. “He’s definitely a calm and collected individual, but he’s extremely motivated to answer questions that he thinks are important and to ensure that his patients are being taken care of,” says Jeffrey Robert Clark, a fourth-year medical student on his research team.

Clark initially sought out Koralnik based on the neurologist’s work on the JC virus. This was in early 2020, around the time Nowatzke was asking the doctor to appear on live TV to discuss that new infectious disease from China. Little did Koralnik know that this virus would soon dominate his professional life?—?and the lives of every single person watching that night.

By April 2020, the world had changed. Obscure no more, COVID had exploded across the United States, leading to exponential increases in hospitalizations and deaths. While the disease was known to attack the lungs, Koralnik suspected greater implications, and that month he formed his neuro-COVID research team, including Liotta and Clark.

They ran an analysis of the first 509 COVID patients treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and, in a paper published later that year, reported that 42 percent of them experienced neurological symptoms upon contracting COVID, 63 percent upon being hospitalized, and 82 percent over the entire course of the disease.

In May 2020, Koralnik and his team opened the Neuro COVID-19 Clinic at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. One of the first of its kind in the nation, it not only treats patients but also collects data on demographics, quality of life, and cognitive test results. “We thought that we were going to see mostly patients who were hospitalized, who survived and now needed some ongoing care for neurology as an outpatient,” Koralnik says. “But what we saw is the opposite. The main population of the clinic is the people who were never hospitalized with COVID, who had only a mild sore throat, a cough that went away, or a bit of fever?—?and then [experienced] the lingering, persistent, and then debilitating brain fog, headaches, dizziness, muscle pain, trouble with smell and taste, blurry vision, tinnitus, and intense fatigue.”

Other research has backed that up. “Turns out people with the mild cold-like symptoms are the people with the neurological manifestations,” says Avindra Nath, clinical director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Those symptoms corresponded with patients’ self-reporting of a lower quality of life and issues regarding cognition, anxiety, depression, and sleep. The patients also performed worse than expected on tests of processing speed, attention, executive function, and memory.

The consequences can be profound. “Cognition may be affected in a way that you can’t multitask the way you were multitasking before,” Koralnik says. “You can’t be, you know, a reporter because you can’t figure out all the different deadlines that you have. You can’t be a police officer or a nurse or a businessperson. So that affects people in their ability to keep their current job.” The Brookings Institution reported in August that between two million and four million Americans aren’t working because of the effects of long COVID. Says Nath: “Once you damage the brain, the societal consequences are enormous.”

Northwestern Medicine expanded its efforts to treat COVID patients in January 2021 by opening the Comprehensive COVID-19 Center, which covers 12 subspecialties, including clinics for pulmonology, cardiology, dermatology, endocrinology, ENT, gastroenterology, hematology, infectious diseases, and nephrology. Koralnik says the Neuro COVID-19 Clinic has the most patients “by far.”

Koralnik and his team have authored a dozen COVID-related papers, with three more on the way, and their work has drawn much attention in the medical world and beyond. Koralnik uses Altmetric, a data tracking tool, to monitor the many mentions of their research across social and traditional media. “It’s important in the sense that people learn about what you’re doing, and so they learn about what long COVID is doing to the brain,” he says. A paper he wrote with Liotta and Northwestern neurologist Edith Graham published in July by the journal Neurotherapeutics states that given the large number of individuals experiencing a diminished quality of life and productivity, the neurological manifestations of long COVID are “likely to have major and long-lasting personal, public health, and economic consequences.” It notes the “critical need” for a greater understanding of how the disease works and the development of therapies to treat these serious, persistent symptoms.

That “critical need” is the backdrop for Koralnik’s current frustration. He was able to land ample financial support to study and treat the neurological effects of HIV. Same with PML, a rare brain disease affecting “only a handful of people in the world,” he says. Citing his 25-year track record of obtaining funding, he makes a point of saying: “I love NIH. I think it’s the greatest institution that supports research in the world.” That said, he is dismayed that the government agency overseeing public health has been much less responsive to the neurological issues associated with long COVID, a disease afflicting close to 25 million Americans. “Now I’m studying the most frequent disease in the world, which is COVID, and the third most frequent disease in the U.S. today, which is long COVID, and I have to spend even more time to convince people that, one, it’s real; two, it should be studied; and, three, it should be funded by NIH,” he says.

So where is the federal government’s long COVID research funding going? In late 2020, Congress granted the NIH $1.15 billion, which the agency has committed to an initiative called RECOVER, a four-year data-collecting study seeking to assess COVID’s long-term effects. As of presstime, RECOVER reported it had enrolled 7,758 adults of an intended 17,680. A June 2022 Science magazine article noted that the study “has come under fire from patient advocates and some scientists who say it lacks transparency and is moving far too slowly?—?a ponderous battleship when a fleet of hydroplanes are what’s needed.”

Koralnik complains that no government money has been earmarked specifically for research into long COVID’s significant neurological manifestations, and that the NIH hasn’t assigned a neurologist to review such grant applications. “Therefore, it’s been very difficult, if not impossible, to get funded for the research for neuro-COVID,” he says.

His Northwestern team partnered with a large consortium of research teams in the United States, Latin America, and Europe to apply for a grant, but Koralnik says their application wasn’t selected. His team has submitted eight COVID-related grant applications to the NIH so far, and the only success has been a one-year supplement to an existing grant to a neurologist examining the impact of sleep on cognition in older adults. As part of that study, Koralnik will focus on the impact of sleep on cognition in older adults with COVID.

Meanwhile, more than 1,450 patients have come through Northwestern’s Neuro COVID-19 Clinic, many “affected by terrible brain fog or headaches or fatigue despite the fact that they were vaccinated and boosted,” Koralnik says. Desperate for a cure, they ask him whether they can participate in a clinical trial or whether he has identified a cause for their symptoms. Which is what he is working to do. “This is the most important health crisis in our lifetime, hopefully, and the fact that there hasn’t been a more comprehensive response outside of the RECOVER initiative is really mind-boggling,” he says.

A request to interview RECOVER cochair Walter Koroshetz, the director of NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, about Koralnik’s work was met with a response that he was unavailable. But the NIH’s Nath agrees with Koralnik about the need to study long COVID. “Chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, post-Lyme syndrome, sick building syndrome?—?nobody knows what causes them, but if you look at them, they’re very similar complaints,” Nath says. “If you study long COVID and figure this one out, maybe we can benefit these other ones at the same time.”

For Koralnik, “it’s been a difficult and frustrating journey,” he says, but he isn’t pessimistic. “You need to have a certain amount of optimism that at the end of the day, the greater good will prevail.”

So he’s placing his bets, once again, on science, research, and the power of the brain. They’ve worked for him so far.
 

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Province in China Locks Down High School Students and Staff Without Notifying Parents
By Sophia Lam
September 17, 2022

Over 2,000 secondary school students and 300 teaching staff of a private high school in China’s southwestern Guizhou Province are locked down amid the communist regime’s zero-COVID policy.

Guiyang Happy Valley International Experimental School was found to have “abnormal PCR test results” on Sept. 6, as reported by Netease, a popular digital news portal in China. The report didn’t mention how many abnormal results had been detected or what was meant by “abnormal.”

Located in the Wudang District of the provincial capital Guiyang City, the boarding school reportedly has 2,624 students and 300 teachers and staff members, with students’ ages varying from 12 to 18.

The local authorities immediately took over the school, imposing a complete lockdown of the campus. Students were either confined to their dormitories or transferred to quarantine hotels and makeshift hospitals. Neither the teachers nor parents were informed of the whereabouts or status of the students, according to some parents.

Concerned and anxious parents posted online messages asking for help as they searched for their children. They blasted the local authorities for covering up the true situation of the outbreak and are worried about the physical and mental well-being of their children.

Parents Told Nothing

“The government told us nothing. Even the teachers had no idea where their students were; we told them [the teachers] after we found our children by calling the local hotels,” Ms. Hao (pseudonym), parent of a student at the school, told The Epoch Times.

“At first, on Sept. 2, the school administration informed us that there was an outbreak of the pandemic in the city and that the boarders couldn’t go home,” Hao said.

She said that her child was not allowed to leave the dormitory on Sept. 2, which was shared by six students. Then, on the early morning of Sept. 7, the students were suddenly notified they had to have a PCR test. “But they were actually taken to a quarantine hotel. They brought no daily necessities at all because they were thinking they would return to the dorm after the test,” Hao said.

“I made 20 calls within four minutes, trying to find my child,” said the desperate mother, “I almost collapsed at the time.”

Though worried about her child who is still in the quarantine hotel, Hao said that her child is among the lucky ones, as the hotel can provide food and drink to the students staying there.

Ms. Liang (pseudonym), whose niece is also a student of the school, told the publication on Sept. 12: “My niece was taken to a hotel for isolation at noon today, but she hasn’t called us yet, and we haven’t been able to find out which hotel she is in.”

Mr. Wu (pseudonym), a parent of another student, told the publication that parents could do nothing at all.

“A parent called Guizhou municipal pandemic prevention and control center, and a staffer only replied: ‘The situation is very serious.’ But they didn’t tell us how serious it is and how many students and teachers have been infected [by the COVID-19 virus]. We can do nothing. We live in panic and anxiety every day,” said Wu in the interview.

According to a post on Weibo, China’s Facebook-like social media platform, students were cut off from communicating with the outside on Sept. 6.

“We are students of Happy Valley International Experimental School, and this is the fifth day we have been locked in our dorms,” the post said, adding that the students were banned from leaving their dorms at around 6.40 a.m. on Sept. 6 and that communication was cut off at about 7 a.m. or 8 a.m., “not allowing us to tell anyone any information.”

The Epoch Times was not able to verify the authenticity of the post.

Students Face Risk of Infection and Psychological Trauma

“The children who are still isolated in the school must be in extreme panic,” said Hao.

She said that a student who developed a fever was taken directly to a makeshift hospital. “Children have psychological trauma to a different extent, as they have no idea how they will be treated and where they will be taken,” added Hao.

She said in the process of locating her child, she came to know that students with more serious symptoms were taken to makeshift hospitals, which are in reportedly poor condition.

“They are just large unpartitioned spaces, with one doctor overseeing the whole place. Students become volunteers there,” Hao said. She was worried that they were exposed to high risk of exposure to the COVID-19 virus in that environment.

Students sent to makeshift hospitals didn’t get any medical treatment. They were told to drink more water, according to Hao.

Distrustful of Official Data: Parent

The school had a total of 16 asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 as of Sept. 11, according to the regime’s major mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency.

Hao was doubtful of the official data.

“The inside information I saw was that 147 people were confirmed infected,” Hao told The Epoch Times.

A screenshot of an online post viewed by the publication reveals detailed information about the 147 confirmed cases as of 4.00 a.m. on Sept. 11, including the number of positive cases of students in various classes and grades and the teachers.

The Epoch Times is not able to verify the authenticity of those numbers.

The official data is difficult to verify, as the communist regime routinely alters or suppresses information.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Wudang District Education Department on Sept. 12, and the staffer answering the call replied to our request for comment, “We can’t say; we all follow the arrangements of the higher authorities.”

A staff member of Ramada Encore Guiyang confirmed to The Epoch Times that some students were transferred to the hotel from Happy Valley International Experimental School several days ago, but she said that she couldn’t give the exact number of students.

“The landline phone in the room cannot be used for outside calls. We tell the teachers the room number and the teachers tell the parents, who can call their children from outside,” she said when she described ways for parents to contact their children staying at the hotel.

A Shuangfu Hotel staffer confirmed to The Epoch Times that there were dozens of students of Happy Valley International Experimental School in the hotel. “They are all close contacts; they are all junior high school students. Senior high school students are sent to many hotels. I don’t know the specifics; I can’t say,” the staffer said.

Zhao Fenghua and Hong Ning contributed to the article.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ip9Dlf0KLg
US, Mass disabling event
13 min 27 sec

Sep 17, 2022
Dr. John Campbell

7.5% of US adults are currently reporting Long Covid, is the a mass disabling event? Nearly One in Five American Adults Who Have Had COVID-19 Still Have “Long COVID” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nc... More than 40% of adults in the United States reported having COVID-19 in the past Of this 40% 19% are currently still having symptoms of “long COVID” (20 minutes, online survey) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/puls... For all U.S. adults, the new data show Overall, 1 in 13 adults in the U.S. (7.5%) have “long COVID” symptoms, (symptoms lasting three or more months first infection) UK comparison, is 3.1% Male v female Women, 9.4% Men, 5.5% UK comparison, also more common in women Older v younger Nearly three times more common in 50-59 than 80 and older. UK comparison, also more common in 35 to 69 years Ethnicity (adult data) Nearly 9% of Hispanic adults currently have long COVID Non-Hispanic White (7.5%) Black (6.8%) Asian adults (3.7%) Sexual orientation Bisexual adults, 12% have current long COVID symptoms Transgender adults, 15% Differences between States Highest prevalence Kentucky, 12.7% Alabama, 12.1% Tennessee, 11.6% South Dakota, 11.6% Highest prevalence Hawaii, 4.5% Maryland, 4.7% Virginia, 5.1% The Great Resignation Event https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2022/art... Over the last year, rate of job quitting, highest since records began in 2000 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LM... Available jobs, 11.3 million Is this a Mass Disabling Event? Caused by the ‘The Great Resignation Event’ White collar workers Teachers Health care workers Restaurant and food workers Comparison with UK, ONS data https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati... As of 1st September, 2022 (from 21 July, 2022) People experiencing self-reported long COVID 2.0 million (3.1% of the population) Of this 2 million Symptoms for at least 12 weeks, 83% Symptoms for at least 1 year, 45% Symptoms for at least 2 years, 22% The most common long COVID symptoms Fatigue, 62% Shortness of breath, 37% Difficulty concentrating, 33% Muscle ache, 31% Symptoms adversely affected the day-to-day activities In 73% of those with self-reported long COVID  More common in Aged 35 to 69 years Females Living in more deprived areas Workers in social care Another activity-limiting health condition or disability Less common in those looking for work
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


VSS Scientific Updates During Pandemic Times #38

By Geert Vanden Bossche
September 17, 2022


1. Lancet Report Claiming COVID Could Have Come from U.S. Lab Met With Uproar

“A top medical journal at the heart of several pandemic-related controversies published a major COVID-19 Commission report Wednesday that concluded the deadly pathogen might possibly have leaked from a United States laboratory.”


2. COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment

“Using CDC and sponsor-reported adverse event data, we find that booster mandates may cause a net expected harm: per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented in previously uninfected young adults, we anticipate 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade =3 reactogenicity which interferes with daily activities. Given the high prevalence of post-infection immunity, this risk-benefit profile is even less favourable.”


3. Immune Boosting by Omicron Depends on Previous SARS-CoV-2 Exposure

“This “hybrid immune damping” indicates substantial subversion of immune recognition and differential modulation through immune imprinting and may be the reason why the B.1.1.529 (Omicron) wave has been characterized by breakthrough infection and frequent reinfection with relatively preserved protection against severe disease in triple-vaccinated individuals.”


4. Johns Hopkins Slows Frequency of Covid-19 Data Publication

“We have seen a dramatic shift in the way that state and local governments not only collect this data but share it publicly,” said Beth Blauer, associate vice provost for public-sector innovation at Johns Hopkins and data lead for the school’s Coronavirus Resource Center. “That deeply constrains the way that we can actually report.”


5. FDA Warns Monkeypox Could Mutate if Antiviral Drug is Overused

“The regulator says lab and animal studies, and evidence from a human case of this family of viruses, suggest monkeypox has "several genetic pathways" to evolve resistance to tecovirimat. Many "require only a single amino acid change," the FDA said.”


6. Nearly 3 Million Birds Culled as UK Grapples with ‘Unprecedented’ Wave of Bird Flu

“While the devastating impact of the disease has been well documented among wild birds – especially in seabird populations around Scotland, Wales and northern England – the figures seen by The Independent reveal the enormous toll the outbreak is taking on livestock.”

 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


closing ranks against the truth
the problem with conspiracies is that even when they work, it's hard to make them last

el gato malo
16 hr ago

one of the great questions in the covidian chronicles is perhaps the simplest and thus the least asked.

“how did we go from “that which everybody knew” which was sound and reasoned and in accordance with accepted perception and practice to “that which made no sense” and had never before seemed plausible?”

it occurred so quickly one might mistake it for a phase change.

one day, there was no problem and you should go on a cruise. the next we need to close the world.

one day, it was pretty obvious that the “coincidence” of this new virus with its implausible history and genetic structure was likely a lab leak from the wuhan institute of virology that was doing research on gain of function in these exact viruses and the next, that was crazy talk spread by dangerous loons and conspiracists.

watching the whole of the ranks of public health and politics close around this unsupported belief beggaring claim as iron bar certainty and launch offensives to discredit disagreement was really quite astonishing, especially as some clearly knew better and some likely knew for certain.

now the latter, we can understand, that was covering up culpability in what was not only a crime, but perhaps the most harm done to the world by the fewest people in the entire history of the human race manhattan projected included. i mean, if they created this, daszak, baric, and shi zhengli make oppenheimer look like a piker.

but what of the former? what of the folks who knew better but were not implicated? how were they sidelined and silenced? what pressure was brought to bear or incentive was dangled to induct them into omerta?

the interesting case of former CDC head robert redfield emerges.

because robert knew better. and he spoke out. and then he went silent and was heard from no more as the axis of fauci and collins and daszak and baric took over informational control.

but now he is speaking again.

and what he’s saying is alarming on a number of vectors.

paul thacker had a recent interview here

“Tony and I are friends, but we don't agree on this at all,” Redfield told me. “The potential for conspiracy is really on the other side. The conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community that has acted in an antithetical way to science.”
Speaking with me from his home in Baltimore, Redfield said that evidence in favor of a lab accident in China continues to accumulate and he expects more classified information to become public

he said A LOT of things that pretty much everyone knew in feb of 2020 but that by the end of march would get you kicked off social media and howled down by the talking point industrial complex of agency swamp creatures and the politicos who both control and rely upon them.

Paul D. Thacker @thackerpd
REDFIELD: When I reviewed the classified documents we had early on about the furin cleavage site, I said, “This isn’t natural.” The DNA that codes for the amino acid isn’t from bats, they’re human. /4
September 15th 2022
97 Retweets376 Likes

i remember this. redfield was outspoken then suddenly silent on this issue. it was rapidly dominated by the “dirty hands” gang at the NIH that was funding THIS:



completely shutting down discussion. it was “a conspiracy theory” and you were not allowed to talk about it.



it was a full blown fox commission investigating the henhouse murders.

this has been an epic cover up.

and the names of the architects are clear.

and those who are now clear of the wall of silence around “public service” are speaking up.

Image

and these faucian freeze outs are not the sort of actions that the innocent undertake.

the evidence was always there.

bad cattitude
more evidence fauci, daszak, and the NIH are STILL lying about wuhan
since the moment this all began (and likely quite a ways before any of us knew about it) fauci, the NIH, ecohealth (EHA), and a cast of who knows how many have been in full cover up and deny mode on …
Read more
a year ago · 164 likes · 151 comments · el gato malo


most was not ever in any sort of factual dispute, it was just a small, well connected group using the “shaggy defense” of “wasn’t me.”

but that’s been disproven for some time.



this has all held together for quite a while, but the thing about conspiracies is that when they start to unravel, they can really come apart quickly.

once you find the line of the lie and start to pull, the time from “sweater” to “pile of yarn” is but a brief flicker.

you can threaten underlings into drinking big glasses of shut the hell up if they ever wanna work in this (incredibly small and clubby) town again, but once the dam starts leaking, everyone runs for cover.

and even last year you could see this gang getting ready to run.

and now it’s becoming clear why.

and the truth they sought to suppress is going mainstream.

people will tell themselves all kinds of stories here about what could or could not have been known and by whom and when, but the basic shape of this was always obvious if you took the time to look and this was hardly even arguable at least a year ago and was a clear prime suspect right from the beginning.

bad cattitude
peter daszak: supervillain origin story
there are a million stories in the naked city, but perhaps the story that really ought to be keeping you up at night is the story of the (increasingly ironically named) ecohealth alliance (EHA) and i…
Read more
a year ago · 437 likes · 338 comments · el gato malo


and that’s coming to the fore. the more rational rats have been jumping ship and joining the other team for some time, but seeing “the lancet” who so aggressively pushed so much baseless conspiracy theory on the impossibility of this being a lab leak flipping is a sign that the levee is breaking. bigly.




"No independent, transparent, and science-based investigation has been carried out regarding the bioengineering of SARS-like viruses that was underway before the outbreak of COVID-19," writes The Lancet's Covid-19 commission, following two years of work.
"Independent researchers have not yet investigated the US laboratories engaged in the laboratory manipulation of SARS-CoV-like viruses, nor have they investigated the details of the laboratory research that had been underway in Wuhan. Moreover, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has resisted disclosing details of the research on SARS-CoV-related viruses that it had been supporting, providing extensively redacted information only as required by Freedom of Information Act lawsuits."

goodness. one certainly might pause to ponder from whence the iron bar certainty expressed in their letter of 2020 came:

(note daszak’s name among the authors. coincidence, i’m sure…)



because that’s quite a strident set of claims from the folks now attesting that to this day that no meaningful investigation has been carried out.

conveniently self-serving too.

huh.

also note that this is the same committee that peter hotez was trying to get anyone who dared claim “gain of function leak” kicked off ofto the point of wanting to use a hate crimes act against people spreading such ideas.

one can certainly see why he directed so many attacks at jeffrey sachs.



it’s all pretty clear how the wagons got circled here and why.



this one is too far out in the open now. it reeks like a fish head i once lost back behind the fridge. and someone is going to find it.

because this was always an obvious frontrunner as an explanation. it is clearly got shelved because the dastards that did the deed covered it up in what turns out to be a hyperconnected and clannish little realm and they got reams of scientific, industry, and political air cover as they did.

and you can see much of the why. who would want THIS blamed on them? these are some seriously arrogant, legacy loving people. of course they’d lie to you to protect themselves from accusations of being typhoid tony, covid creator.

but as we winkle the facts from this shell, let us not forget how many others remain unopened.

and let’s make sure we get to those too, because while this was one simple, obvious volte face, there were clearly many others and a great many questions remain unanswered.

  1. what was the origin of the mRNA payloads for the vaccines. moderna licensed theirs straight from NIH. pfizer from bioNtech, a company bill gates just happened to buy a big chunk of in november 2019. where did BNT and NIH get it? (i’ll bet you the path leads to wuhan)
  2. who in the government has been getting royalties on these? there is a stunning lack of requirement for NIH and CDC employees to disclose payments from pharma that makes the congressionally allowed insider trading rules look like kid stuff. the size of that conflict of interest beggars belief.
  3. how did we go from “lockdowns are crazy and do not work” to “lock down to save to world” in a matter of 2 weeks? who actually drove that and who made the decisions and why? it was certainly not based in science. so what was it? politics? money? foreign influence? panic? how was everyone whipped into perfect synchrony on this issue like well drilled rockettes?
  4. how did we lose the idea that “testing asymptomatic people using high Ct PCR is a terrible idea that will generate reams of faulty data” and instead kick off a testing complex worth a $1 billion a week in the US alone at some points? whose idea was that?
  5. how did masks go from “these don’t work, don’t protect you, don’t stop spread and here’s a ream of WHO and other data that says so” to “if you don’t mask up, you’ll kill every grandma and teacher alive!" overnight?
  6. why were safe, possible effective treatments eliminated and excoriated in unprecedented fashion to the point of outright bans while junk drugs that failed their trials were whisked through on shoddy studies and after the fact endpoint alteration?
  7. how did we seamlessly pivot from “vaccines will stop spread” to “vaccines were only supposed to reduce severity” without even taking a pause to reflect when the dangers of leaky vaccines are so clear?
  8. and exactly how did all these agencies interact with media, social or otherwise, to shape messages, villify and suppress dissent, censor and cancel alternate views and whistleblowers, and elevate such a cavalcade of complete incompetents using credentials to push the worst woo-woo in public health history while erasing and effacing all signs of sense?
there were SO many manipulations and misstatements here and so many complete 180 degree changes of position. the same people who told you one thing immediately and all in unison would suddenly pivot to the exact opposite.

it seems too unified and blatant and oddly specific to be just a simple emergent phenomenon.

i’m sure nascent fear topologies and the perfect A/B testing of the atavistic terror amplifiers of social media played a role in spread, but so many top down diktats came from agencies in direct contravention of not only what they knew but of what they had just said, that it feels like agenda.

and the search for “who are we going to throw under the bus” appears well underway.



THIS is quite an interesting (and lengthy) article and it’s certainly thought provoking. it’s always temping to blame the james bond villain in a cardigan (and i’m certainly no fan) but i struggle to see this as a full explanation and i suspect there is quite a lot more.

this is not set of questions we can afford to get half-assed answers on.

without a thorough understanding of the root causes and culprits here, this WILL happen again over any one of 100 pretexts.

let’s not do that, shall we?
.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


A new report prepared for the Liberal Party of Canada shows that the vaccines have no benefit for those under 60
Conclusion: "The Ontario data show that vaccination currently makes little difference in terms of hospitalization and death rates for those below age 60."

Steve Kirsch
Sep 17





A new report prepared by a group of highly qualified experts analyzed the government data in Ontario and concluded that the vaccines don’t reduce hospitalization and death in those under 60.

In other words, we’ve been lied to. Are you surprised?

Also, don’t assume the report endorses vaccination for those over 60. It doesn’t.

Here’s the full report (26-page PDF file).

It concludes:

Given the statistical evidence provided in this report, the public health policy tools such as mass vaccination campaigns, mandates, passports and travel restrictions need to be reevaluated for relevance in this phase of SARS-CoV-2. The abundance of evidence documented by Public Health Ontario (PHO), Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and top-tier scientific journals demonstrates that the vaccines do not prevent infection or hospitalization. The Ontario data show that vaccination currently makes little difference in terms of hospitalization and death rates for those below age 60.
Additionally, since there are known risks of adverse events and unknown long term effects, these must be considered in developing vaccine policies.

The empirical evidence investigated in this report from PHO and PHAC does not support continuing mass vaccination programs, mandates, passports and travel bans for all age groups. Rather, it may be prudent to utilize a more targeted and cost-effective approach focused on vaccinating the high-risk group, while factoring in an individual’s potential risk of vaccine-related adverse events.

That’s what you get when the people writing the report remain anonymous and are free to speak the truth without fear of retribution. Interesting, isn’t it?
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Alexander: Parents must understand that not one healthy child in America died from getting COVID: "Here are all the reasons why parents should not be giving their kids the COVID shot" LIFESITE News
Makary: found that 100 percent of pediatric COVID-19 deaths were in children with a pre-existing, chronic, severe health condition.

Dr. Paul Alexander
16 hr ago

Author: Dr. Paul Elias Alexander, PhD

LIFESITE News core site:

(LifeSiteNews)

Think twice, three times, and ever after before you decide to inject healthy American children with COVID gene injections. Why? Because not one healthy child – zero, none – infected with COVID in America has died. Consider them immune and already vaccinated.

Leave our healthy children alone!

In a recent Kaiser survey of parents following the recent FDA’s approval of the vaccine in children as young as 6 months old, parents agreed that their reluctance to have their children jabbed was due to “concerns about the newness of the vaccine and not enough testing or research, concerns over side effects, and worries over the overall safety of the vaccines.” In my opinion, this is very positive: it means parents are “getting it” and are on top of the science more than our CDC, NIH, and FDA health officials are. Estimates are that only 5 percent have opted to vaccinate their child, and in my opinion, this was 5 percent too much.

Where do I begin? The fact is that any rapid mass vaccination campaign that uses a sub-optimal, antigen-specific, non-neutralizing vaccine (such as the COVID vaccines) that does not sterilize the virus, aims at vaccinating all age groups, and takes place during an active ongoing pandemic of a highly mutating and highly infectious respiratory virus with high infectious pressure due to circulating virus, can only result in the generation of a continued series of new variants that are increasingly infectious, increasingly vaccine-resistant (due to viral “immune escape”), and inevitably more virulent—that is, potentially lethal.

In short, the mass vaccination campaign that has been implemented by our governments and their COVID advisors during the COVID pandemic can potentially keep the pandemic going for many years with a potential more virulent sub-variant emerging. Most recently we have the new FDA Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) for the bi-valent injections that are based on the legacy Wuhan strain and the BA.4/BA.5 variants. But this pandemic will never come to a close if we keep inoculating with these non-sterilizing sub-optimal injections that do not stop infection, replication, or transmission.

Importantly, this vaccine implementation has been damaging the initiation of education and instruction (training) of the innate immune system, which is the first line of immune defense. The side effects and deaths that have accrued due to the COVID injection itself have been horrendous and in part due to the vaccine makers not properly testing the vaccine for harms. Harms were never ‘excluded’ due to the small sample sizes, stopping early for benefit, and, critically, not running the studies to the powered sample sizes as well as the proper longer duration. The vaccine studies have never been carried out for durations that would definitively indicate their safety profile.

READ: Dr. Paul Alexander: Fauci, Birx, and others must be held accountable for their lies

It is the damage and subversion to the natural innate immune system of children that most concerns me, and I have gained a deep appreciation and understanding of this critical aspect of natural immunity from both Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche and Dr. Mike Yeadon. Parents must understand that when the COVID injection is given to young children (infants, children, younger persons), this prevents the child’s innate antibodies from eliminating the virus confronting them now, and prevents the active training and teaching of the innate immune effector cells on how to properly recognize (glycosylated) viruses and distinguish them from “self” antigens (i.e., distinguish between “self” and “non-self.”). That is, the child’s immune system will not be trained on what it should attack and eliminate versus what it should leave alone because it belongs to the child.

Moreover, the innate immune system will not be properly trained to handle the broad range of pathogens the child will confront in the environment as the child gets older. The training of innate antibodies and the innate immune system educates the immune response to pathogens confronted at present (like the COVID virus), pathogens to be confronted in the future, and the differentiation of ‘self’ versus ‘non-self’ components as well as all the variations in-between. These can include ‘self-like’ and ‘self-mimicking,’ given the virus uses components of the self to trick the immune system. It can take on the appearance of the self to evade the immune system. Therefore, it is a critical education that mitigates vulnerability to auto-immune disease.

This is a critical window of innate immunity training in early childhood development. Any immune system must learn at an early stage of life (once passive maternal immune protection is no longer available, i.e., at about 4 to 6 months) to provide for a healthy and appropriate immune response in the future. Interference with the initiating foundational education of a child’s developing innate immune system can cause a COVID-vaccinated child to be less capable of handling glycosylated viruses (and glycosylated pathogens in general). This predisposes such children to immune pathology (e.g., autoimmune disease). Moreover, such children will be at risk of serious illness from a broad range of pathogens and not only glycosylated viruses. We are seeing a range of illnesses in children now in the era of COVID vaccination, and we argue that this can be explained in part by damage to and subversion of the immune system.

The issue is that the COVID gene injection induces antigen-specific vaccinal antibodies that are highly specific to the target antigen, and they can potentially outcompete and sideline the innate antibodies from their binding to viruses and thus the training of the innate immune system. By the vaccinal antibodies binding to the antigen (e.g., receptor binding domain, N-terminal domain, and other binding sites), this blocks the innate antibodies from binding and as such its capacity to clear out the virus. This can render the child’s immune system sub-optimal and dysfunctional, and thus the child will be very vulnerable to pathogens and pathology.

Parents must understand that not one healthy child in America died from getting a COVID infection.

Dr. Marty Makary’s research team (Johns Hopkins) showed this conclusively. (Johns Hopkins and FAIR health study utilized nearly one half of the U.S.’s health insurance data.) They found that 100 percent of pediatric COVID-19 deaths were in children with a pre-existing, chronic, severe health condition.

Their study showed that not one healthy child died from COVID during the pandemic in the United States.

What does this suggest to you as a parent? Well, it shows what I and others have argued for 2.5 years now: that children have basically zero risk. It shows that, based on proper risk-benefit calculations, children absolutely do not need these injections. I argue no child needs them, but parents may consider vaccinating their high-risk child who has serious comorbidities (that is, has chronic severe health conditions, or is immunocompromised). This can be a consideration for children who are seriously overweight or obese. This should be done case-by-case and is not the same as mandating vaccines across the board for all age-groups and certainly not in any healthy child given their near statistical zero risk of severe outcome if COVID infected. This is certain, given that the vaccine has been shown to be harmful, causing myocarditis, pericarditis, blood clots, bleeding, and other side effects.

Recall that Marshall et al. reported on “7 cases of acute myocarditis or myopericarditis in healthy male adolescents who presented with chest pain all within 4 days after the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination.”

So why would a parent inject their healthy child or teenagers with these COVID injections? There is no basis to do so. None! Even the new MIS-C cases (potentially linked to COVID) as Makary reported, have decreased to zero. Furthermore, “this week, a CDC report on child hospitalizations for COVID-19 in March and April, 2021 found zero deaths in the entire cohort of children studied.”

There is an important opinion written by pediatricians that may be a year old now but is very seminal and applicable. They wrote, “As pediatricians, we say please don’t use precious coronavirus vaccines on healthy children.” Makary has pointed to this piece by Malley and Finn, in which the authors point to the need for safety to be proven before the vaccines are offered. “The universal vaccination of healthy children 2 to 11 years old simply shouldn’t be a priority and may ultimately prove unnecessary. The relatively small group of children at risk because of underlying medical conditions should of course be offered the coronavirus vaccines, once they have been established as safe and effective for that age group,” they write.

Let me remind you of the seminal paper by Turner et al. published a year ago in Nature, “SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans,” showing us that natural immunity based on prior infection is life-long. My argument is that our children are largely immune, and we must not submit them to this COVID gene injection. Even the CDC reported in February 2022 (MMWR) that the immunity in children was approximately 75 percent to 80 percent. At this time, it is near 100 percent.

We also knew that long-lived bone marrow plasma cells (BMPCs) provided robust protection. We always knew this (see 1,2,3,4,5,6,7). We also knew that once you were COVID-recovered, you were at significantly lower risk of reinfection with the COVID virus and that the virus had to be appreciably different (substantially mutated on the target antigen) to breach immunity (see 8,9,10). Omicron is highly infectious (e.g. BA.4 and BA.5 clades) and presents as a sufficiently different virus, given the multiple mutations on the spike protein, to present the immune system with a challenge and a potential breach. However, the predominant symptoms are mild, akin to the common cold.

We know of the robust study by Shrestha et al. that looked at employees of the Cleveland Health System; they reported that “not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.” This was another seminal study that was ignored by mainstream media, for it showed that natural COVID recovered immunity was robust and called into question the wisdom of vaccinating COVID-recovered people. These potent studies published in 2020 and 2021 were disregarded by the legacy media, the CDC, NIH, and FDA because the deceptive narrative relied on the idea that natural immunity was inferior to vaccinal immunity. But they all knew better than that. They all knew they were were misleading the public to force the use of vaccines. They were lying!

We also know that natural immunity (innate and acquired-adaptive) can last 100 years. In Yu et al.: “Neutralizing antibodies derived from the B cells of 1918 influenza pandemic survivors,” the authors wrote, “here we show that of the 32 individuals tested that were born in or before 1915, each showed sero-reactivity with the 1918 virus, nearly 90 years after the pandemic.” If our children are now immune from near certain prior exposure to COVID virus, infection, and recovery – and they were largely asymptomatic – then don’t bother them with these gene injections.

[continued next post]
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
[continued from post above]

Are children at risk for COVID that would warrant a vaccine?

Let me remind you that the infection mortality rate (IFR) is (and has remained) roughly similar (or likely lower once all infection data are collected) to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people under 70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00 percent to 0.57 percent, with a median of 0.05 percent across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04 percent). Survival for those under 70 years is 99.5 percent. Moreover, with a focus on children, “[t]he estimated IFR is close to zero for children and young adults.” The global data is unequivocal that “deaths from COVID are incredibly rare” in children.

The published evidence is conclusive that the risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19 in children is almost nil (statistical zero), and this evidence has accumulated for well over a year now. In fact, we knew this for over 18 months. It is clear that children are at very low risk of spreading the infection to other children, of spreading to adults, as household transmission studies show, or of taking it home, or of becoming ill, or of dying, and this is settled scientific global evidence. Children are less at risk of developing severe illness courses, and also are far less susceptible and likely to spread and drive SARS-CoV-2 (references 1, 2, 3, 4). This implies that any mass injection/inoculation or even clinical trials on children with such near zero risk of spread and illness or death is contraindicated, unethical, and potentially associated with significant harm.

I would also add material (see 6 pieces of evidence below) I published in Jeff Tucker’s magazine Brownstone, asking Pfizer to leave our children alone. The reality is that children are not candidates for the COVID vaccines (see evidence here and here), are immune, and can be considered naturally “fully vaccinated.”

Is there more evidence I wish to table in my clarion call to you parents? Yes, there is:

1) The virus uses the ACE 2 receptor to gain entry to the host cell, and the ACE 2 receptor has less expression and presence in the nasal epithelium of young children (potentially in upper respiratory airways). This partly explains why children are less likely to be infected in the first place, or spread it to other children or adults, or even get severely ill. The biological molecular apparatus is simply not there in the nasopharynx of children, as Patel and Bunyavanich reported. By bypassing this natural protection (i.e., that limited nasal ACE 2 receptors in young children) and entering the shoulder deltoid, this could release vaccine, its mRNA and LNP content (e.g. PEG), and generated spike into the circulation that could then damage the endothelial lining of the blood vessels (vasculature) and cause severe allergic reactions (e.g. here, here, here, here, here).

2) Research (August 2021) by Loske deepened our understanding of this natural biological/molecular protection even further by showing that pre-activated (primed) antiviral innate immunity in the upper airways of children work to control early SARS-CoV-2 infection, resulting in a stronger early innate antiviral response to SARS-CoV-2 infection than in adults.

3) When one is vaccinated, or gets infected naturally, this drives the formation, tissue distribution, and clonal evolution of B cells which is key to encoding humoral immune memory. There is research evidence by Yang published in Science (May 2021) that blood examined from children retrieved prior to COVID-19 pandemic have memory B cells that can bind to SARS-CoV-2, suggestive of the potent role of early childhood exposure to common cold coronaviruses. This is supported by Mateus et al. who reported on T cell memory to prior coronaviruses that cause the common cold (cross-reactivity/cross-protection).

4) Building on research work by Kumar and Faber, Weisberg and Farber et al. suggested that the reason children can more easily neutralize the virus is that their T cells are relatively naïve. They argue that since children’s T cells are mostly untrained, they can thus immunologically respond more rapidly and nimbly to novel viruses.

5) A Yale University report (Yale and Albert Einstein College of Medicine report, Sept. 18, 2020, in the journal Science Translational Medicine) indicated that children and adults display very diverse and different immune system responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection. This helps explain why they have far less illness or mortality from COVID. “Since the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak, scientists have observed that children infected with the virus tend to fare much better than adults,” they wrote.

Continuing, “researchers reported that levels of two immune system molecules — interleukin 17A (IL-17A), which helps mobilize immune system response during early infection, and interferon gamma (INF-g), which combats viral replication — were strongly linked to the age of the patients. The younger the patient, the higher the levels of IL-17A and INF-g, the analysis showed…these two molecules are part of the innate immune system, a more primitive, non-specific type of response activated early after infection.”

6) Dowell et al. (2022) published research on antibody and cellular immunity in children (aged 3-11 years) and adults. Their findings confirm a biological basis for why SARS-CoV-2 infection is generally mild or asymptomatic in children. They reported that antibody responses against spike protein were elevated in children, and seroconversion “boosted responses against seasonal Beta-coronaviruses through cross-recognition of the S2 domain. Neutralization of viral variants was comparable between children and adults. Spike-specific T cell responses were more than twice as high in children and were also detected in many seronegative children, indicating pre-existing cross-reactive responses to seasonal coronaviruses.”

Key findings were that children maintained and preserved “antibody and cellular responses 6 months after infection, whereas relative waning occurred in adults. Spike-specific responses were also broadly stable beyond 12 months. Therefore, children generate robust, cross-reactive, and sustained immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 with focused specificity for the spike protein.”

What can be concluded? Pulling these emerging research findings together strengthens the case that children are not candidates for the COVID vaccines and are to be considered already “fully and completely COVID-vaccinated.” Furthermore, as lucidly outlined by Whelan, it is potentially disastrous to children if we move forward with vaccines without proper study of the possible harms to them. Vaccine developers failed to conduct the proper safety studies and for the duration that would unravel any harms.

Is the COVID injection a consideration for a child who has underlying medical conditions or is obese or immunocompromised? Maybe, and this is a risk management decision you parents must make with your doctor. I argue that this should be done on case-by-case basis. This is your decision to make as parents. However, know that you are charged with protecting your child. You must think carefully, given the lack of benefit from the injection, its known harms from the injection, and near zero risk of death from COVID in children.

There should be no mandate, and no healthy child should be in receipt of these injections, none! There is no basis as children’s risk of death from COVID is near zero. We know that there is a steep age-risk curve that places children at basically zero. This was so in January 2020 and remains so in September 2022. We know children have a potent innate immune system that, still developing and being trained, is robust enough to protect them. There is no case made by anyone, no public health official or agency, that justifies these COVID injections for healthy children. No one has made the case, not CDC, not NIH, not FDA, not Fauci, not Francis Collins, not Walensky, not Bourla, not Bancel – no one!

Leave the children alone. The recent FDA approval (and CDC rubber-stamp) of the gene injection in children 6 months old to 5 years was a catastrophic mistake, not only because there was no evidence to support this, but because the evidence put forth by the vaccine makers was ludicrously thin and, really, non-existent. The FDA should hang its head in shame for this EUA approval. The FDA is acting very recklessly and dangerously.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Pfizer's mRNA Vaccine Adverse Events Include Severe Injuries to Penis
Without information such as this, true informed consent cannot be given.

Amy Kelly
8 hr ago

DailyClout’s COO and Program Director of the War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Project, Amy Kelly, discusses more harms to men’s reproductive health from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Injuries to the penis and its functions are listed among the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID shot’s known adverse events, or side effects, including:
  • Penile vein thrombosis (blood clot), also known as Mondor’s Disease
  • Penile neoplasm (a malignant lesion)
  • Penile squamous cell carcinoma (a type of cancer)
  • Penile infection and
  • Penis injury

4 min 8 sec

Potential Side Effects:

• Penile vein thrombosis (blood clot) - Mondor's disease

• Penile neoplasm (malignant lesion)

• Penile squamous cell carcinoma (cancer) - If it goes undetected, it can spread to the lymph system and then start circulating throughout the body.

• Penile infection (ulcers, rashes, sore, pain, etc.)

Amy Kelly: "These harms were known during the [Pfizer] clinical trials, and they were not brought to the attention of people before the vaccines were rolled out."

.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


My government turned me into an ‘anti-vaxxer
A government power grab created the anti-vax movement

Julie Sladden
8 September 2022 4:00 AM

I’ll come clean. Like most people defending their position on the Covid jabs, I used to start my apology with, ‘I’m no anti-vaxxer!’

Having probably received more vaccines than most, given I am both a doctor and fairly well travelled, I naively thought this approach might earn credibility with vaccine enthusiasts. I should have saved my breath.

Over the last two years, the government-endorsed segregation and dehumanisation of those who exercised their right to refuse the jab, has forced me to change my identity.

When Australia locked down in 2020, I soon tired of the daily command ‘Stay Home, Save Lives!’ mantra, turned the TV off, and started researching.

I discovered the government-imposed lockdown measures were replacing perfectly good pandemic plans that were updated August 2019. These were plans which, from what I could tell, hardly saw the light of day despite how much they cost to put together.

Australia, and much of the world, was ‘off script’.

No attention was being given to the well-documented costs of lockdowns and no effort was directed toward early treatment options. Nor were there attempts to improve the immune health of Australians through measures like nutrition, reducing alcohol consumption, and exercising. None.

With all this hand-washing, comfort eating, drinking, isolating, and fear mongering Australians were sitting ducks as far as their health was concerned. Meanwhile, the government and Chief Health Officers told us to sit tight and wait for the ‘saviour’ vaccine to arrive.

In August 2020, when Scott Morrison announced: ‘I would expect (the vaccine) to be as mandatory as you could possibly make it,’ I felt my eyebrows rise. Just how was our Prime Minister going to do that? The ethical, medical, and legal implications concerned me.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority (AHPRA) position statement on Covid vaccination arrived in the mail in March 2021, and I felt my eyebrows rise again. AHPRA effectively told doctors to fall in line with government policy, warning that regulatory action may follow if a practitioner promoted anti-vaccination statements or undermined the immunisation campaign. More groundwork being laid.

Finally, in June 2021, Lt. General John Frewen was appointed as head of the National Covid Vaccine Taskforce. It became apparent we were part of a military-style operation, especially considering there were actual military forces policing our streets.

When the vaccine arrived in Australia, I decided to perform a personal risk-benefit analysis.

As a cancer survivor (I’m well now, thanks for asking), it had taken years to regain full health and I was keen to stay that way. The Covid risk calculator estimated my chance of survival at over 99 per cent. Not bad.

I then looked to the mRNA vaccines. Early data from overseas showed some concerning safety signals and surprising evidence of similar transmission rates by both vaccinated and unvaccinated. I could only surmise: we had new drug technology, with limited data, worrying safety signals, and indications it didn’t prevent infection or transmission.

For me, the risks did not outweigh the benefits, especially if it meant I could still infect my patients.

When the Tasmanian government mandated vaccines for all healthcare workers, I personally went, research in hand, and spoke to as many politicians as I could, recommending they adopt a risk management approach.

I spent hours writing, phoning, and visiting – arguing the point based on scientific evidence, ethics, and medical resource management.

I reasoned our state couldn’t afford to lose any healthcare professionals who would rather walk than take the vaccine.

I pleaded for the middle ground and a strategic approach including personal protective equipment (PPE), rapid antigen testing, and Telehealth – not just vaccination – to preserve both autonomy and the workforce so the healthcare system didn’t suffer further.

Many sympathised behind closed doors, but were unwilling to speak publicly (except Senator Eric Abetz, thanks Eric).

When the mandates came into effect, I chose to remain unvaccinated along with hundreds of others and was forced to stop work. I wasn’t even allowed to do Telehealth (can someone please explain that to me?). It felt punitive.

Now the truth is coming out.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced no difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated as the vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission.

In addition, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has received more adverse reports in 2021 through June 2022 (18 months) for Covid vaccines than over the past 50 years for all other vaccines combined. This is not simply because of the number of Covid vaccinations.

Around the world there has been a significantly higher rate of reported adverse events and deaths for Covid vaccinations when compared with non-Coid vaccines like measles, polio, and flu vaccines.

And finally, the latest hospital admission statistics do not support the claim that the unvaccinated are more at risk of serious Covid disease, hospitalisation or death.

Just how bad is it? We don’t know. There is no long-term toxicity, carcinogenicity (cancer-causing), genotoxicity (effect on genes), or fertility studies.

This ‘thing’ that we have been doing the past two years, is not healthcare. I don’t know what it is, but it is not healthcare, and it was obvious from the start. It is not benefiting the ‘greater good’. It is not looking after grandma. It is not ‘doing our bit and protecting others’. It is not saving lives.

It never was.

As the fog of Covid-war lifts, I suspect we will realise more people have been harmed because of this single-minded ‘vaccine-or-bust’ approach than any other intervention foisted on the people before now. It truly is an iatrogenic crisis caused by bureaucrat-prescribed ‘medical’ treatment.

If an ‘anti-vaxxer’ is someone who cannot give informed consent to a ‘vaccine’ that fails to prevent infection or transmission, has alarming safety signals, must be taken to earn back the right to live and work in society, for a disease that has a greater-than 99 per cent survivability rate, then ‘yes’, I’m an anti-vaxxer…

My government made it so.

Dr Julie Sladden is a doctor and freelance writer with a passion for transparency in healthcare.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

New Study - Organ Recipients Rejecting Transplants...
Interesting...

Sheldon Yakiwchuk
17 hr ago

About a week ago, I figured we should be seeing a surplus of organs…

Yakk Stack
There Should be a Surplus of Available Organs...
Read more
6 days ago · 59 likes · 66 comments · Sheldon Yakiwchuk

But as it turns out, there may actually be some issues with the rejections of these transplants and while this report is somewhat specific to acute corneal allografts - eye surgery, there really still is a lot more to try and sift through to see what is actually going on here, you can read the full article →Link



But this seems to be indicating that there could be some issues caused by a systemic inflammatory response elicited post-jab.

Japanese researchers compiled data from 23 studies. A total of 23 eyes from 21 patients who had undergone corneal graft procedures were assessed. Graft rejection occurred anywhere from one day to six weeks after vaccination in all patients–some who underwent the procedure as far back as twenty years ago.
And this is particularily troubling…because, not only are the vaccines seemingly making people sick…but they may also be causing irreparable damage in areas where they may have never caused the damage to begin with.

Had Eye issues pre-jab?

Now your problems are worse because of your body rejecting transplanted organs.

And that’s pretty ****ed up!

There are still a lot of questions surrounding this, as in…

Are the organs from Vaccinated Donors functional in their full capacity?

Have the been polluted to be toxic to recipients?

Were these previous donors vaccinated or not?

While we don’t have a full idea as to what is going on here, what we can see (did this on purpose), is that there is definitely something going on here to the point where we should be asking a lot more questions or having “The Science” better explained.

I’ve started to drill into additional cases of organ transplant rejections following vaccinations and to be honest, it’s actually quite terrifying. I’m no doctor but if there are treatments that are being imposed under duress and not through this information in consenting to them, as bad as I thought things will look over the next 3-5 years with our Health Care System in Canada, may be worse…A LOT WORSE!

How far does this extend?

Will existing medications be less effective?

Is it possible that radiation and chemotherapy will not only have less impact on Cancer, but actually worsen the condition through these systemic inflammatory responses?

The troubling thing is…



Each one of these “Adverse Events Following Injections”, are actually an immune response. All of them, no matter how minor they may seem, this is a taxation on your immune system. Chronic taxation given in multiple jabs, where your chances of severe reaction to the jabs increases with each jab, may not only be a cause of ADE - Antibody-dependent enhancement, but what about every other condition that you may face or have already faced in past.

Resurgence of the Herpes Virus…Shingles…Arthritis?

We were all in the control groups for testing of previous procedures and the development of medical treatments but with the jabs causing systemic inflammation…all of the previous understandings may be completely worthless and we may be starting again…on EVERYTHING!

Now…while a lot of us view traditional medicine as mere Pharmaceutical Approaches and doctors to only being drug dealers…there are most likely some medications that will improve on some situations.

Maybe?

I don’t know…

But if we’ve lost all relevant data by changing the way the body will react to previously predictable courses of treatments…we’re ****ed!

Completely ****ed!

And we have no idea how long this will be present. How long will it take to clear these mRNA demons from the general jabbed population and is it even possible at this point?

Or have we caused permanent damage to the genetics of the human race?

Yes…this is purely speculative…but given what I’ve seen about the impacts of the jabs, AEFIs and AESIs…blood mutations and organ rejections…how deep does this rabbit hole really go?

Something to chew on over the weekend…
 

psychgirl

Has No Life - Lives on TB
(fair use applies)


closing ranks against the truth
the problem with conspiracies is that even when they work, it's hard to make them last

el gato malo
16 hr ago

one of the great questions in the covidian chronicles is perhaps the simplest and thus the least asked.

“how did we go from “that which everybody knew” which was sound and reasoned and in accordance with accepted perception and practice to “that which made no sense” and had never before seemed plausible?”

it occurred so quickly one might mistake it for a phase change.

one day, there was no problem and you should go on a cruise. the next we need to close the world.

one day, it was pretty obvious that the “coincidence” of this new virus with its implausible history and genetic structure was likely a lab leak from the wuhan institute of virology that was doing research on gain of function in these exact viruses and the next, that was crazy talk spread by dangerous loons and conspiracists.

watching the whole of the ranks of public health and politics close around this unsupported belief beggaring claim as iron bar certainty and launch offensives to discredit disagreement was really quite astonishing, especially as some clearly knew better and some likely knew for certain.

now the latter, we can understand, that was covering up culpability in what was not only a crime, but perhaps the most harm done to the world by the fewest people in the entire history of the human race manhattan projected included. i mean, if they created this, daszak, baric, and shi zhengli make oppenheimer look like a piker.

but what of the former? what of the folks who knew better but were not implicated? how were they sidelined and silenced? what pressure was brought to bear or incentive was dangled to induct them into omerta?

the interesting case of former CDC head robert redfield emerges.

because robert knew better. and he spoke out. and then he went silent and was heard from no more as the axis of fauci and collins and daszak and baric took over informational control.

but now he is speaking again.

and what he’s saying is alarming on a number of vectors.

paul thacker had a recent interview here

“Tony and I are friends, but we don't agree on this at all,” Redfield told me. “The potential for conspiracy is really on the other side. The conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community that has acted in an antithetical way to science.”
Speaking with me from his home in Baltimore, Redfield said that evidence in favor of a lab accident in China continues to accumulate and he expects more classified information to become public

he said A LOT of things that pretty much everyone knew in feb of 2020 but that by the end of march would get you kicked off social media and howled down by the talking point industrial complex of agency swamp creatures and the politicos who both control and rely upon them.

Paul D. Thacker @thackerpd
REDFIELD: When I reviewed the classified documents we had early on about the furin cleavage site, I said, “This isn’t natural.” The DNA that codes for the amino acid isn’t from bats, they’re human. /4
September 15th 2022
97 Retweets376 Likes

i remember this. redfield was outspoken then suddenly silent on this issue. it was rapidly dominated by the “dirty hands” gang at the NIH that was funding THIS:



completely shutting down discussion. it was “a conspiracy theory” and you were not allowed to talk about it.



it was a full blown fox commission investigating the henhouse murders.

this has been an epic cover up.

and the names of the architects are clear.

and those who are now clear of the wall of silence around “public service” are speaking up.

Image

and these faucian freeze outs are not the sort of actions that the innocent undertake.

the evidence was always there.

bad cattitude
more evidence fauci, daszak, and the NIH are STILL lying about wuhan
since the moment this all began (and likely quite a ways before any of us knew about it) fauci, the NIH, ecohealth (EHA), and a cast of who knows how many have been in full cover up and deny mode on …
Read more
a year ago · 164 likes · 151 comments · el gato malo


most was not ever in any sort of factual dispute, it was just a small, well connected group using the “shaggy defense” of “wasn’t me.”

but that’s been disproven for some time.



this has all held together for quite a while, but the thing about conspiracies is that when they start to unravel, they can really come apart quickly.

once you find the line of the lie and start to pull, the time from “sweater” to “pile of yarn” is but a brief flicker.

you can threaten underlings into drinking big glasses of shut the hell up if they ever wanna work in this (incredibly small and clubby) town again, but once the dam starts leaking, everyone runs for cover.

and even last year you could see this gang getting ready to run.

and now it’s becoming clear why.

and the truth they sought to suppress is going mainstream.

people will tell themselves all kinds of stories here about what could or could not have been known and by whom and when, but the basic shape of this was always obvious if you took the time to look and this was hardly even arguable at least a year ago and was a clear prime suspect right from the beginning.

bad cattitude
peter daszak: supervillain origin story
there are a million stories in the naked city, but perhaps the story that really ought to be keeping you up at night is the story of the (increasingly ironically named) ecohealth alliance (EHA) and i…
Read more
a year ago · 437 likes · 338 comments · el gato malo


and that’s coming to the fore. the more rational rats have been jumping ship and joining the other team for some time, but seeing “the lancet” who so aggressively pushed so much baseless conspiracy theory on the impossibility of this being a lab leak flipping is a sign that the levee is breaking. bigly.




"No independent, transparent, and science-based investigation has been carried out regarding the bioengineering of SARS-like viruses that was underway before the outbreak of COVID-19," writes The Lancet's Covid-19 commission, following two years of work.
"Independent researchers have not yet investigated the US laboratories engaged in the laboratory manipulation of SARS-CoV-like viruses, nor have they investigated the details of the laboratory research that had been underway in Wuhan. Moreover, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has resisted disclosing details of the research on SARS-CoV-related viruses that it had been supporting, providing extensively redacted information only as required by Freedom of Information Act lawsuits."

goodness. one certainly might pause to ponder from whence the iron bar certainty expressed in their letter of 2020 came:

(note daszak’s name among the authors. coincidence, i’m sure…)



because that’s quite a strident set of claims from the folks now attesting that to this day that no meaningful investigation has been carried out.

conveniently self-serving too.

huh.

also note that this is the same committee that peter hotez was trying to get anyone who dared claim “gain of function leak” kicked off ofto the point of wanting to use a hate crimes act against people spreading such ideas.

one can certainly see why he directed so many attacks at jeffrey sachs.



it’s all pretty clear how the wagons got circled here and why.



this one is too far out in the open now. it reeks like a fish head i once lost back behind the fridge. and someone is going to find it.

because this was always an obvious frontrunner as an explanation. it is clearly got shelved because the dastards that did the deed covered it up in what turns out to be a hyperconnected and clannish little realm and they got reams of scientific, industry, and political air cover as they did.

and you can see much of the why. who would want THIS blamed on them? these are some seriously arrogant, legacy loving people. of course they’d lie to you to protect themselves from accusations of being typhoid tony, covid creator.

but as we winkle the facts from this shell, let us not forget how many others remain unopened.

and let’s make sure we get to those too, because while this was one simple, obvious volte face, there were clearly many others and a great many questions remain unanswered.

  1. what was the origin of the mRNA payloads for the vaccines. moderna licensed theirs straight from NIH. pfizer from bioNtech, a company bill gates just happened to buy a big chunk of in november 2019. where did BNT and NIH get it? (i’ll bet you the path leads to wuhan)
  2. who in the government has been getting royalties on these? there is a stunning lack of requirement for NIH and CDC employees to disclose payments from pharma that makes the congressionally allowed insider trading rules look like kid stuff. the size of that conflict of interest beggars belief.
  3. how did we go from “lockdowns are crazy and do not work” to “lock down to save to world” in a matter of 2 weeks? who actually drove that and who made the decisions and why? it was certainly not based in science. so what was it? politics? money? foreign influence? panic? how was everyone whipped into perfect synchrony on this issue like well drilled rockettes?
  4. how did we lose the idea that “testing asymptomatic people using high Ct PCR is a terrible idea that will generate reams of faulty data” and instead kick off a testing complex worth a $1 billion a week in the US alone at some points? whose idea was that?
  5. how did masks go from “these don’t work, don’t protect you, don’t stop spread and here’s a ream of WHO and other data that says so” to “if you don’t mask up, you’ll kill every grandma and teacher alive!" overnight?
  6. why were safe, possible effective treatments eliminated and excoriated in unprecedented fashion to the point of outright bans while junk drugs that failed their trials were whisked through on shoddy studies and after the fact endpoint alteration?
  7. how did we seamlessly pivot from “vaccines will stop spread” to “vaccines were only supposed to reduce severity” without even taking a pause to reflect when the dangers of leaky vaccines are so clear?
  8. and exactly how did all these agencies interact with media, social or otherwise, to shape messages, villify and suppress dissent, censor and cancel alternate views and whistleblowers, and elevate such a cavalcade of complete incompetents using credentials to push the worst woo-woo in public health history while erasing and effacing all signs of sense?
there were SO many manipulations and misstatements here and so many complete 180 degree changes of position. the same people who told you one thing immediately and all in unison would suddenly pivot to the exact opposite.

it seems too unified and blatant and oddly specific to be just a simple emergent phenomenon.

i’m sure nascent fear topologies and the perfect A/B testing of the atavistic terror amplifiers of social media played a role in spread, but so many top down diktats came from agencies in direct contravention of not only what they knew but of what they had just said, that it feels like agenda.

and the search for “who are we going to throw under the bus” appears well underway.



THIS is quite an interesting (and lengthy) article and it’s certainly thought provoking. it’s always temping to blame the james bond villain in a cardigan (and i’m certainly no fan) but i struggle to see this as a full explanation and i suspect there is quite a lot more.

this is not set of questions we can afford to get half-assed answers on.

without a thorough understanding of the root causes and culprits here, this WILL happen again over any one of 100 pretexts.

let’s not do that, shall we?
.
This one right here sums it all
 

psychgirl

Has No Life - Lives on TB
I had a longer reply, ^^^^ but it wouldn’t go through on the software here.


So, those questions listed are the same ones I’ve had for two years.
They have been discussed in my very own household.

Especially numbers 1-3; WHO/WHERE did those instructions originate from?! HOW DID THIS HAPPEN SO SEAMLESSLY??

The entire globe acted as in perfect lockstep without a hitch. It’s too strange and just a little too “perfect”
The enormity boggles the mind!
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
Insider Pape
@TheInsiderPaper
23m

JUST IN Biden said he believes the Covid-19 pandemic is "over" - 60 Minutes interview
(fair use applies)


Biden says the 'pandemic is over' despite the US maintaining one of the highest death rates worldwide with nearly 400 Americans dying of COVID-19 daily
Isabella Zavarise - Business Insider
Sun, September 18, 2022, 11:56 PM

  • President Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over in an interview with CBS News on Sunday.
  • "We're still doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over," said Biden.
  • According to the CDC, the US is averaging around 400 deaths per day.

President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over in an interview with CBS News on Sunday, despite the US maintaining one of the highest death rates worldwide.

The comment was made during a tour of the Detroit Auto Show with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. As they were walking, Pelley asked Biden: "Is the pandemic over?"

"The pandemic is over," Biden said, but acknowledged the virus is still a problem. "We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it," he added.

Gesturing to attendees who weren't wearing masks to support his point, Biden said "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it."

While cases are falling, Biden's comments come as hundreds of Americans continue to die from the infectious disease. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US is averaging around 400 deaths per day.

As of September 17, data from Johns Hopkins University found that the US has some of the highest COVID-19 figures globally in terms of cases and deaths. Next to the US is Japan, with 1,139 deaths recorded over the previous week.

States across the US are rolling back pandemic-related restrictions such as lifting mask mandates. Federal regulations still require passengers flying to the US from international destinations to be vaccinated.

In May, the President told Americans to not grow numb as the country's death toll rose to 1 million people.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson from the World Health Organization said the "end is in sight" but urged countries to maintain their vigilance, according to Reuters.

The news outlet reported that experts from the organization will meet again in October to decide whether the pandemic is still an international public health emergency.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
That is Joe Biden politicking before the midterm elections.

The official date for the 2022 midterm elections is on Tuesday, November 8, 2022.

I don't know, I think he may have gone off-script again. He did this once before a few weeks back and the WH took it back. I expect a walk-back sometime later today this time too, especially because they have this new 'booster' to push. I could be wrong, but if he sticks with it he may end up with egg on his face if a new variant pops up that isn't controlled with vaccines (the Geert variant) so this will be one to watch to see what his handlers do.

ETA: I've been thinking about this some more. This may actually be the new strategy, the WHO has declared pretty much the same thing and they all go in lockstep. Then if something does pop up again, they can all say - "hey, we were ready to let it go, but science caught up with us. Don't blame us." Either way, what's happening now has been the status quo since at least April, so whatever is happening isn't 'new' or a status change. If you believe it over in April, it's still over. If you are waiting to see what happens with BA2.75, you're still going to be waiting. I hope and pray it's over. I'm done with covid, but I'm not sure it's done with us. It's a bio-weapon after all.
 
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Potent New Boosters Are Here. Will Weary Americans Bother?
Jack Healy, Sharon Otterman and Amy Qin - NY Times
Sun, September 18, 2022, 10:21 AM

It was vaccination time at Ethel Brown’s long-term-care home in the Bronx, New York. Again. Brown, 95, had already gotten four COVID shots, and while she was happy to submit to a fifth, this latest booster prompted a few questions.

“Why are we getting another one?” Brown asked as she and other residents waited for their shots Wednesday. “Will this be the last booster shot?”

With a jumble of confusion, eagerness and vaccine fatigue, America embarked in earnest this past week on a sprawling new campaign to get omicron-specific boosters into the arms of a pandemic-weary country.

The new boosters are one of the last remaining weapons in America’s arsenal against the coronavirus now that the country has scrapped most requirements to mask, quarantine or distance, as the smoldering pandemic has faded into the background for many. The push for a new vaccine — barely noticed so far by some people — will test how the country responds at a time when the sense of crisis over COVID has abated.

Millions of doses of boosters targeting the hypercontagious omicron variant arrived with little ceremony at pharmacies, nursing homes and clinics across the country, ready to be administered in what health officials now expect to become a yearly inoculation ritual akin to a flu shot.

Early numbers from states and several cities showed what health officials described as a robust early response in a moment when vaccine rates have stagnated. California administered about 397,000 doses. About 116,000 people in Texas got the new booster in a span of a few days. Illinois administered at least 137,900 shots.

The rollout felt methodical but muted compared with the frenzied urgency of earlier waves of vaccinations, when thousands of people jockeyed outside stadiums for scarce doses and politicians got their shots on live television. It was a picture that came into focus in interviews with more than 50 health officials and Americans getting (or refusing) the booster across five states.

This time, the campaign was so understated that some Americans willing to get boosted did not even realize a new shot was available.

“I hadn’t heard,” said Jeff Conrad, 33, a custodian in central Washington state who still regularly wears a mask.

To people who got boosted, worried their immunity was waning, the new shots could not come soon enough.

“I don’t care what other people do, but I have to take precautions,” said Mario Reyes, 67, who got a flu shot and an omicron booster — one in each arm — at a senior center in Chicago. Reyes recently had a heart transplant and lost a nephew to COVID, and he said getting boosted again was a no-brainer.

Health officials called the early response encouraging, especially since the overall pace of vaccination had recently fallen to its lowest level since the shots became widely available in early 2021. About 68% of Americans are fully vaccinated with the original shots, but only one-third have gotten any booster shot, even though earlier boosters first became available in September 2021.

The new boosters, which were authorized by the Food and Drug Administration in August, are called bivalent vaccines because they are tailored to protect against omicron subvariants now circulating as well as the original version of the virus. People age 12 and older are eligible for a new shot at least two months after their most recent vaccine or booster dose.

Across the country, health officials and booster-seeking Americans said shots and appointments seemed plentiful, particularly in larger cities and suburbs.

All week long, people filed into Walgreens and CVS clinics in cities like Washington, San Francisco and Austin, Texas. They drove to rural health centers in the Dakotas and on the Navajo Nation. In nursing homes, caregivers began administering the booster room by room.

There was a line outside the Quinn Center of Saint Eulalia, a social-outreach ministry in Maywood, a suburb west of Chicago, before a vaccine clinic Monday morning. “We hope this good turnout will continue,” said Randall Mcfarland, the center’s vaccine ambassador.

But these first waves of Americans eager to be reboosted may be the exception.

In Phoenix, Ariana Valencia, 37, sat in a doctor’s waiting room just steps away from free booster services being offered by Mountain Park Health Center, a local clinic. A steady stream of patients was trickling in for the new shot, but Valencia said she had no interest in joining them.

She had already gotten vaccinated and said the demands of her family now outweighed her concerns about COVID. Between juggling the needs of one son enlisting in the Marines, a grandchild on the way and a grandmother who had experienced a stroke, Valencia said life left no time for boosters.

“I know COVID is coming back around, but I don’t think it’s necessary,” she said of the booster. “I’m fine.”

Some vaccinated people said they could not spare the time away from work or arrange child care to accommodate the hassle or side effects of getting another booster.

Others said they felt protected enough already or had soured on vaccines after contracting COVID despite having two shots and a booster. Studies have found that boosters reduce the chances of infection with omicron and substantially lower an infected person’s risk of hospitalization or dying of COVID.

In Washington, Ranya Asmar and her family had been among the throngs of residents who had rushed to get vaccinated early last year, when the shots were still scarce. She has gotten boosted once and weathered her children’s multiple bouts of COVID. But she had no plans to get the new booster.

“I think we’ve plateaued,” Asmar, 52, said. “It’s no biggie anymore.”

Others had been left in the dark. Pandemic-related news has faded into the background, and local vaccination efforts have quietly closed down as some pandemic funding ebbs.

President Joe Biden and local and state officials have issued reams of statements about the new booster — how it is free, widely available and most likely the best defense against a shape-shifting virus still killing more than 400 people a day. The Biden administration has bought 171 million doses of the bivalent vaccines. Federal data on how many shots of the new booster have been administered was not yet available this weekend.

But health experts said the urgency around COVID had faded as deaths and infections dipped to lower levels. To many, the message about a new, different booster simply was not penetrating.

“Is there a booster campaign? Where is it? Because I can’t find one,” said Drew Altman, president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “I don’t mean to be cynical, but there’s no reason to expect a huge turnaround and all of America to run out and get boosted.”

In Phoenix, Rita Garcia, 61, has gotten every shot recommended by health officials, her full vaccine card a testament to how seriously she takes the pandemic. But Garcia said it has gotten harder to find news about the pandemic, and she heard about the new booster only when a roving vaccine outreach van happened to stop in front of her house.

This time around, the task of locating and scheduling vaccines has been left largely up to individuals, potentially leaving out people without cellphones or internet connections. Mass vaccination sites are now mostly closed. Some programs that brought vaccines directly into communities with vans or door-to-door nurses have cut back or ended altogether.

In New York City, for example, eight mobile vaccination units will fan out to offer the new shots, mostly for people who are homeless. In July 2021, by comparison, 70 mobile units and pop-up locations blanketed the city.

But across the country, there are still health teams flushing out the unboosted. At the Thurmond Heights public housing complex in Austin, organizers of an immunization clinic were handing out $20 grocery cards, raffle tickets and turkey sandwiches, incentives to get boosted just like in the early chapters of the pandemic.

Health officials said the boosters were reaching rural clinics and Native American reservations, which have experienced some of the worst death rates of the pandemic. The Indian Health Service reported that 94,000 doses of the new booster had been sent out so far. The agency did not give numbers on how many of the shots had been administered.

There were some snags. Some nursing homes said they did not get the new boosters until midway last week, several days behind other clinics and pharmacies. Unlike the first wave of vaccinations, when teams from pharmacy chains streamed into nursing homes to vaccinate residents, long-term-care facilities are giving the vaccines in house.

Lisa McAfee said the Tennessee nursing home where her 101-year-old mother lives had been slow to organize a plan to vaccinate residents. Her mother was protected by the earlier vaccines, but McAfee said there have been recent infections in the home, and she was anxious for her mother to get the new shot.

“She’s in the most vulnerable range of age and health,” McAfee said. “If it’s available, there’s no reason not to give it to her. That’s my frustration.”

Some people may end up delaying their booster in anticipation of another cold-weather surge. And the roughly 70,000 people still getting sick every day are recommended to wait for three months after their infection to get boosted.

Even liberal San Francisco offered a case study in the challenges of revving people up for the new booster. In the Mission District on Tuesday, Paloma Trigueros, 29, felt overwhelmed by the Groundhog Day feeling of getting shot after shot.

“I think everyone should get maybe one a year — not, like, five, six of them,” she said. “That’s kind of obsessive.”
 

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Dreaded Side Effect Rears Its Ugly Head in Latest COVID Variant

David Axe
Sun, September 18, 2022, 8:14 PM

All over the world, the rates of death and hospitalization from COVID keep dropping. But our successful mitigation of the worst outcomes of the 33-month-old pandemic belie a growing crisis.

More and more people are surviving COVID and staying out of the hospital, but more and more people are also living with long-term symptoms of COVID. Fatigue. Heart problems. Stomach problems. Lung problems. Confusion. Symptoms that can last for months or even a year or more after the infection clears.

As many as 21 percent of Americans who caught the SARS-CoV-2 virus this summer ended up suffering from long COVID starting four weeks after infection, according to a new study from City University of New York.

That’s up from 19 percent in figures the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in June.

Compare those numbers to the recent rates of death and hospitalization from COVID in the U.S.—three percent and .3 percent, respectively. Long COVID is by far the likeliest serious outcome from any novel-coronavirus infection. And possibly getting likelier.

The CUNY study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, focused on American adults, but the results have implications for the whole world. Globally, long-term symptoms are partially replacing COVID deaths. After all, more COVID survivors means more people at risk of long-term symptoms. And long COVID is cumulative—people get sick and stay sick for a while.

“Despite an increased level of protection against long COVID from vaccination, it may be that the total number of people with long COVID in the U.S. is increasing,” epidemiologist Denis Nash, the CUNY study’s lead author, told The Daily Beast. That is, every day more people catch long COVID than recover from long COVID.

But understanding long COVID, to say nothing of preventing it, isn’t a priority in the global epidemiological establishment. That needs to change, Nash said. “I believe it is long past time to be focusing on long COVID in addition to preventing hospitalizations and deaths.”

In recent weeks, authorities have logged around half a million new COVID cases a day, worldwide. That’s not quite as low as the 400,000 new cases a day health agencies tallied during the biggest dip in case-rates back in February 2021. But it’s close.

What’s really remarkable, however, is how few of those half-a-million-a-day COVID infections are fatal. Lately, just 1,700 people have been dying every day—that’s a fifth as many died daily in February last year, when the number of new infections every day was only slightly greater.

Hospitalizations for serious COVID cases are down, too. Global statistics aren’t available, but in the U.S., COVID hospitalizations dropped from 15,000 a day 19 months ago to just 3,700 a day now.

It’s not hard to explain the decrease in the death and hospitalization rates. Worldwide, around two-thirds of adults are at least partially vaccinated. Billions of people also have antibodies from past infections they survived. Every antibody helps to blunt the absolutely worst outcomes.

But the incidence of long COVID appears to be ticking upward. The high reinfection rate could be one reason. Currently, one in six people catches the virus more than once. Repeated infections come with elevated risk of a whole host of problems that, not coincidentally, match the symptoms of long COVID, a team of scientists at Washington University School of Medicine and the U.S. Veterans Administration's Saint Louis Health Care System concluded in a study this summer. The more reinfections, the more long COVID.

Crunching the numbers from back in July, Nash’s team concluded that 7 percent of all American adults—that’s more than 18 million people—had long COVID at the time. If the same rate applies to the whole world—and there’s no reason to believe it doesn’t—the global caseload for long COVID could’ve exceeded 560 million this summer.

That number is probably a lot higher now, considering the summer spike in infections resulting from BA.5—a million worldwide new cases a day in July.

One thing that surprised Nash and his teammates is that the risk of long COVID isn’t uniform across the population. Young people and women are more likely to catch long COVID, the CUNY team found. Nash said the higher vaccination rate among older adults and seniors could explain the former. But the latter remains a mystery. “Further study of these groups may provide some clues about risk factors,” he said.

Why there’s a sex gap in long COVID risk is just one unanswered question that scientists and health officials could be trying to answer. They could also be working up new vaccine strategies and public-health messaging specifically for long COVID.

But by and large, they’re not doing much to address the risk of long-term symptoms, Nash said. Nearly three years into the COVID pandemic, authorities are still overwhelmingly focused on preventing hospitalizations and deaths—and only preventing hospitalizations and deaths.

“Exclusively focusing on these outcomes could arguably make the long COVID situation worse,” Nash explained, “since there is a substantial amount of long COVID among people that have only had mild or less severe SARS-CoV-2 infections.”

In that sense, long COVID is a silent crisis. One that affects potentially more than half a billion people, but which isn’t a major focus of research or public health policy. “It’s certainly valuable to save lives, but quality of life is very important, too—and that can be lacking in people who have long COVID,” Cindy Prins, a University of Florida epidemiologist, told The Daily Beast.

We’re not powerless to prevent long COVID, of course. The same tools that can prevent hospitalization and death from COVID can also reduce the likelihood of long-term symptoms—all by lowering the chance of any COVID, short or long. Get vaccinated. Keep current on your boosters. Mask up in crowded indoor spaces.

But given the trend in SARS-CoV-2’s evolution, long COVID could become a bigger and bigger problem even among the most careful people—and a problem begging for specific solutions. The virus is still mutating. And every new variant or subvariant has tended to be more contagious than the last, meaning more and more breakthrough infections in the fully-vaccinated and boosted.

If you’re currently up to date on your jabs, the chances of COVID killing you or putting you in the hospital are low. But the chances of it making you sick, potentially for a very long time, are substantial—and apparently getting higher.
 

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The #1 COVID Symptom More People Should be Talking About
Michael Martin
Sun, September 18, 2022, 8:00 AM

Although it's been long known that COVID-19 can cause a wide range of symptoms beyond a simple cold or flu, people continue to talk about the coronavirus as if it's primarily a respiratory illness. That's especially the case since the advent of the Omicron variant, which tends to cause milder illness in people who aren't at risk of severe outcomes. However, even the Omicron variant and BA.5 can result in the debilitating chronic syndrome known as long COVID, whose causes are not understood and currently has no cure (or even effective treatment). One set of symptoms can be particularly destructive. Read on to find out more—and to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had COVID.

1. COVID Often Causes Neurological Problems

Since the beginning of the pandemic, it's been clear that COVID symptoms can linger for weeks or months after the virus has cleared the body, amounting to a phenomenon known as "long COVID." Even mild cases of COVID can result in these long-lasting, debilitating symptoms. And some experts warn that because the Omicron variant was so contagious, the nation could be facing an epidemic of long COVID in the coming months.

One particularly serious and enduring aspect of COVID: It can affect the neurological system in some people, causing a wide range of symptoms that can be extreme—including crippling fatigue, brain fog, even difficulty finding words or trouble swallowing.

2. "I Couldn't Say Words Out Loud"

This week, KOMO News profiled a Seattle resident whose bout with COVID now requires she see a speech therapist multiple times a week to cope with her inability to find words. "My husband asked me a question and I couldn't answer it," she said. "I started having trouble speaking. I had words in my head and I couldn't say them out loud."

3. COVID Can Strike This Central Operating System

This week, researchers said that these brain-related symptoms—which may also include fatigue, voice problems, dizziness, rapid heart rate and trouble swallowing—may be related to the virus damaging the vagus nerve, a central part of the nervous system.

In the study, Spanish researchers looked at vagus nerve functioning in a group of long COVID patients. They found 66% had at least one symptom that suggested vagus nerve dysfunction. The most common symptoms were diarrhea (73%), rapid heart rate (59%), dizziness (45%), swallowing problems (45%), voice problems (45%), and low blood pressure (14%). The average duration of symptoms was 14 months.

4. How to Reduce Your Risk

To reduce your risk of developing long COVID, get fully vaccinated and boosted. A review of 15 international studies released this week found that getting vaccinated slashes your chances of developing long COVID, and even improves long COVID symptoms if you contracted the virus before getting vaccinated.

"In two studies, fully vaccinated people were less likely than unvaccinated people to develop medium- or long-term symptoms such as fatigue, headache, weakness in the arms and legs, persistent muscle pain, hair loss, dizziness, shortness of breath, loss of smell or lung scarring," reported WebMD. "In addition, three studies comparing long COVID symptoms before and after vaccination found that most people reported an improvement in symptoms after vaccination, either immediately or over several weeks."
 

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People vaccinated against Covid share common symptom after testing positive
Laura Hampson - Independent
Mon, September 19, 2022, 1:01 AM

While it may be widely known that common symptoms of Covid include fatigue, a sore throat, and headaches, there is another widespread symptom being cited among sufferers.

According to data gathered by the ZOE Health Study app, diarrhoea is a common symptom of Covid for vaccinated Britons.

Data shows that there was a rise in people reporting this symptom in January 2022, and that some of this was related to the Omicron variant of Covid-19.

However, the ZOE team pointed out that there seemed to be a “wave of other non-Covid tummy bugs going around too”.

The team said that diarrhoea can be an early symptom of the virus, starting on the first day of infection and getting worse throughout the week.

“It usually lasts for an average of two to three days, but can last up to seven days in adults,” the ZOE team said.

The data found this symptom has become less prevalent with each variant, as nearly a third of adults aged over 35 reported having diarrhoea during the Alpha wave, while just one in five said they experienced it during the Omicron and Delta waves.

The people who experienced it during the latter two waves had been vaccinated either twice or had also received their booster jab.

The NHS says diarrhoea is common in adults, and the most important thing to do is to stay hydrated.

The health service also advises to stay home and get plenty of rest, and eat food when you feel able to.

If you have diarrhoea along with other common Covid symptoms, like a high temperature, a new cough, and a loss or change of your sense of taste or smell, make sure you take a Covid test and follow government guidelines if you test positive.
 

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8 Potential Bivalent Omicron Booster Vaccine Side Effects to Anticipate
Zee Krstic - Good Housekeeping
Sat, September 17, 2022, 8:00 AM

  • Newly approved bivalent booster vaccines targeted at Omicron subvariants may prompt a similar group of side effects noted by researchers in earlier formulations.
  • Americans shouldn't expect to experience brand new side effects or symptoms and are less likely to have a severe reaction to this new booster vaccine.
  • Those who have recently recovered from a COVID-19 illness also have special directives to consider before receiving a booster shot, which are outlined below.
Americans are learning more about the new set of bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccines made by teams at Pfizer and Moderna after officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized its rollout earlier this month. With clinics and pharmacies across the nation (including CVS and Walgreens) now offering vaccination appointments, you may be curious to know more about this updated vaccine and what kind of side effects may be affecting you after the shot.

If you haven't heard of the term "bivalent" just yet, it refers to the fact that this updated vaccine contains genetic code targeted to the original strain of virus that spreads COVID-19, known as SARS-CoV-2 — in addition to parts of the Omicron-based strains that are circulating currently.

Updated #COVID19 vaccines are now available to every American 12 & older who has received their primary series.
In the latest #DirectorDebrief, @CDCDirector Dr. Rochelle Walensky discusses what you need to know about updated COVID-19 vaccines. pic.twitter.com/lRX4y6RhUx
— CDC (@CDCgov) September 6, 2022

"Half of it is the same as the original vaccine," explains Richard Martinello, M.D., the medical director of infection prevention at Yale New Haven Health System. "The other half is focused on the new sub-variants that have been causing nearly all the disease we've been seeing over the past few months."

Scientists have readily admitted that this particular batch of bivalent vaccines, targeted towards BA.4 and BA.5 sub-Omicron variants, have yet to be studied in humans officially. But you shouldn't be worried about any increase in side effects here, Dr. Martinello explains, as FDA regulators have seen a similar bivalent booster vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech for the "stealth" Omicron variant that spread rampantly last winter — and those bivalent boosters were extensively studied before they were rolled out. Current authorizations are based on these previous studies, as laid out by health regulators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"The data that was already generated from the bivalent BA.1 vaccine, the human data, really gave the FDA the confidence that they could approach approving this new bivalent shot," Dr. Martinello says, adding that this kind of approval system is similar to the annual flu vaccine.

What does available data suggest about any side effects of a bivalent booster compared to a primary COVID-19 vaccine or earlier boosters administered in 2021? Virologists and vaccine experts explore what we know below.

Potential Omicron bivalent booster vaccine side effects:

Data collected by the FDA for earlier bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccines suggests that these shots successfully provided immunogenicity (a boost to your immunity!) and elicited consistent side effects as compared to other COVID-19 vaccines, according to Dr. Martinello.

Sherrill Brown, M.D., medical director of infection prevention for AltaMed Health Services, indicates that current side effect notices published by the FDA sourced data from both Pfizer and Moderna's separate clinical trials for the earlier BA. 1 vaccines. In both trials, the most commonly reported side effects within a week of injection were:
  • Pain at the injection site, alongside redness and/or swelling
  • Extended fatigue
  • Headaches
  • Widespread muscle pain
  • Joint pain
  • Chills
  • Fever
  • Nausea and vomiting

According to current FDA publications, there's also a chance that swelling may occur in lymph nodes within the same arm as the injection site.

You'll notice that all of these side effects warnings are the same that came with original vaccine formulations. But it's interesting to note that the severity of side effects caused by bivalent vaccines were reported as less severe; Pfizer's clinical trial found that less than 1% of patients experienced severe pain or headaches, whereas a majority of participants (52%) reported only mild pain at the injection site.

Similar figures were true for Moderna recipients, as 59% of patients indicated they'd experienced fatigue after their shot, but only 4% reported it at a severe level.

It's expected that the likelihood of severe side effects caused by COVID-19 vaccines will decrease as patients receive more boosters over the next few years, Dr. Brown explains. "Some rare side effects such as myocarditis and pericarditis have been shown to be even less common with subsequent booster doses compared to the primary series second dose shot," she adds.

The updated bivalent #COVID19 boosters help restore protection that has decreased since previous vaccination and provide broader protection against the newer BA.4 and BA.5 variants.
To search for a location to get your updated booster, go to Find COVID‑19 vaccine locations near you. pic.twitter.com/PjtSr3YgUT
— CDC (@CDCgov) September 15, 2022

Will I experience a similar reaction after my 4th vaccine as earlier ones?

Both federal health officials and leading virologists polled by Good Housekeeping for this article suggest that you should expect similar side effects this time around if you experienced them after earlier vaccinations. Since the formulation of this particular round of bivalent booster vaccines was made in a very similar process to earlier options, experts aren't expecting any new subsets of potential side effects to present this fall.

Shruti Gohil, M.D. associate medical director of infection prevention at UCI Health and a professor at the University of California, Irvine, posits an analogy that this bivalent vaccine is like a riff on a standard brownie recipe: "You're going to have almost the same ingredients, and bake it for the same time at the same temperature — but this time, instead of just chocolate chips, you add dark chocolate, too," she tells Good Housekeeping. "The resulting brownie is the same, though."

It's important to note that individuals will react to these bivalent booster vaccines differently — while the most common side effect is pain or swelling at the injection site, many people may feel more severe side effects, and unique combinations of the symptoms listed above. And if you didn't experience any side effects at all during your initial vaccine series or from the boosters after, there's a good chance you won't this time around, either.

"There's no way for us to predict how somebody is going to respond, but we know that the spectrum of severity is the same as what we've seen with original vaccines," Dr. Martinello adds. "We do not expect [the public] to experience anything that would be out of the ordinary from our experience with the original vaccination."

Will side effects be different for anyone who has recently recovered from COVID?

While it's not a hard-and-fast rule, CDC officers have made recommendations to Americans to consider delaying receiving this bivalent booster vaccine at least three months from the date of your last COVID-19 infection. According to materials published by the American Medical Association, research on the timing between infection and another injection indicates that an increased timeline in this range could better bolster your body's immune response compared to receiving a shot earlier.

But if you do choose to receive a bivalent booster within three months of your last sickness, you shouldn't expect to experience wildly different or worse side effects as compared to if you had waited, Dr. Martinello stresses. You also shouldn't expect a lighter immune response, either.

"I encourage people who have had COVID — once, or even multiple times — to still seek out vaccination, as it's going to really optimize the level of protection that you have against getting COVID yet again this fall and winter," he advises.

The bottom line:

Experts aren't expecting a dramatic shift in side effects triggered by new COVID-19 bivalent booster vaccines targeted toward Omicron spread. Those receiving a bivalent booster and notice side effects within a week of injection are recommended to do the following by CDC officials:
  • Rest as much as possible
  • Drink plenty of water and other better-for-you fluids to stay hydrated
  • Take over-the-counter medication like ibuprofen, acetaminophen, aspirin, and antihistamines as needed
  • Apply a cold compress or a wet washcloth over the injection site if experiencing redness or swelling
  • Exercise your arm after injection to mitigate discomfort
Dr. Brown believes that this will not be the last time a new booster vaccine is offered to the American public — in fact, experts are projecting that annual vaccines against the spread of COVID-19 may become commonplace soon.

"I expect the COVID-19 booster shot to become an annual recommendation with small changes needed each year to keep up with, and protect against, new variants that arise," she explains. "This is a similar process that we go through with our annual influenza vaccination."
 
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