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Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, but having dropped restrictions, they are picking them up again only one month later as the Delta variant spreads.
In Tel Aviv, 75 students got infected at one party from a vaccinated person who had caught the virus from another vaccinated person. And though the UK data is better than the Israeli data, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, has had both of her vaccine doses but still has to self isolate for two weeks due to a “near exposure”. How confident are the UK health experts? Not very. With the UK only weeks away from the so-called Freedom day, will double vaxed people have to self isolate for two weeks each time they are exposed?
This belies the key point about “getting vaxed for the nation”. If being vaccinated is about keeping you out of hospital, not so much about infecting your friends, then getting vaxed is more for self protection. The cost-benefit equation might look good for high risk people, but changes dramatically for healthy young people. We need to know how much vaccination slows transmission yet it’s barely a part of the national conversation.
A month […]
For a whole year more people were dying in Mexico than normally died. There’s been one long bloodbath there and an untold story. Mexico may not have hit the “photogenic” headline stage that Brazil, Iran, and India did, but nonetheless, somewhat unnoticed, it’s been continuously bad. Mexico has the dubious honor of being one of the worst for testing, with positivity rates at the virtually the highest in the world, running at 35% and even reaching over 50% at times. Few countries have had higher rates (currently only Tunisia, Namibia, maybe Colombia are worse). The Case Fatality Rate has run at 12% for a year, only confirming that there weren’t enough tests to know the real scale of the infections. The excess deaths graph tells its own story. The wave of 2020 ran for a whole year with deaths running at 50 – 100% higher than in a normal year. Since the pandemic began some 350,000 excess deaths have been recorded. The death toll for Covid in Mexico may be 60% higher than the official Covid casualty count of 230,000. As winter made the situation even worse, things got desperate enough (finally!) for cheap treatments to be organized.
Ivermectin use […]
Well here’s a surprise. A year and a half later and now we find out that Australian labs were also helping China?
And tonight, 520 days after China shared the genetic sequence of SARS-2, Australian scientists are suddenly very concerned about how Australia might still be doing gain-of-function work with viruses? Minister Greg Hunt is asking for a “review” of gain-of-function research in Australia? Did he even know?
It’s amazing what the power of a good reporter can achieve. Hail Sharri Markson and The Australian.
For 500 long pandemic days some publicly funded scientists had millions of reasons apparently, not to talk about how the virus might have been a lab leak. These public servants may have been publicly scoffing at the idea the virus may have leaked from a lab, but they didn’t think to mention that they’d worked with bats, and gain-of-function viruses and even the Wuhan lab itself?
They were ethically bound to speak up. Did they say nothing, or did they talk to Morrison and Hunt in private? After which, given the government’s role, possibly none of them wanted to let that bat out of the bag?
Public trust in these institutions might be about to […]
The new super meta review of Ivermectin is out. It’s 27 pages of fine print detail and 144 references, and it’s very impressive.
Ivermectin…. by Fvasconcellos
Bryant et al soaked themselves in 24 studies involving 3,406 people and found that ivermectin use reduced deaths by a very nice 60% with “moderate certainty”. But ivermectin appears to be at its best when used to prevent infections in the first place. There was “low certainty” but with prophylactic use Covid infections were reduced by an average of 86% . But by the time patients were “in need of mechanical ventilation”, the data, while muddy, suggested ivermectin was not much help.
The bad thing about Ivermectin is that there are not many bad things. It’s too good, too cheap, too safe, and too far out of patent to be profitable.
Given the evidence of efficacy, safety, low cost, and current death rates, ivermectin is likely to have an impact on health and economic outcomes of the pandemic across many countries. Ivermectin is not a new and experimental drug with an unknown safety profile. It is a WHO “Essential Medicine” already used in several different indications, in colossal cumulative volumes.
[…]
In 2017 there was an official Chinese Academy of Science video to showcase the new Wuhan “Level 4” lab. The video shows bats in a cage there and teams monitoring the lab in case there’s “an accident”.
The latest release of video footage tells us a few important things —
The Chinese Officials were lying when they said their were no live bats at the Wuhan Institute. The WHO was helping them lie. Peter Daszak, the President of the US group funneling NIH money to the lab, also lied and helped them to cover it up. In 2017 the Chinese Academy of Science admitted that ten years earlier, no one in China had known how to do this biosecurity research. The French (and presumably US collaborators) taught the Chinese how. They clashed all the way, and the Chinese threw the French out as soon as the lab was finished. French and US intelligence knew there was a high risk of bioweapons. But they didn’t tell the world, nor prepare for it. Instead they’ve done everything they can to cover it up. The Wuhan Institute of Virology viral databases went missing on Sept 12, 2019, before the virus started to spread. […]
Photo: Whispyhistory
The world faced the greatest global health crisis in one hundred years, but it’s taken a whole year to write up a small study that shows hydroxychoroquine could improve the survival rate of people on ventilators by a factor of three, and that the dose matters.
If anyone says “but this is not a big study”, that’s exactly my point. Why is it so hard to get a large study of a drug that was already known to be useful against SARS-1 fifteen years before SARS-2 arrived. A drug that even the President of the US was talking about in the earliest days? In January 2020 we already knew that the three drugs that were “fairly effective” were Remdesivir, Chloroquine and Ritonavir. On February 13, the South Koreans were already recommending hydroxychloroquine and telling us the anti-virals should be “started as soon as possible”. We had that head start, we threw it away.
Apparently the kings-of-compassion in the commentariat would rather see deaths than admit Donald Trump was right. And the experts in Pharmaceutical Giants only cared about the profit line.
And so it comes to pass, finally, that we find out what happened to 255 […]
It’s everywhere nearly. The UK variant (called “Alpha”) has become the dominant strain (see that graph far below). But now the Indian V2 variant (the Delta strain) is taking over from the UK strain. It is rapidly spreading in Russia, Bangladesh and Portugal.
The Nextstrain country comparison site shows which variants are most common — prevalence of the strain — not the absolute numbers. There are “only” 5,000 new cases a day in the UK at the moment (far down from the peak of 60,000 cases a day). But they are increasingly the Indian variant.
In the USA there are only 12,000 new cases a day, and only a hint of the Indian Delta variant.
Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain. https://covariants.org/per-country
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The rate of increase is easier to see if the other variants are deselected.
There are some ominous looking trajectories there.
Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain.
It’s the slope of the trend change in the Delta variant that matters. (The last week of data in India is probably an anomaly.)
The Indian Delta variant has also spread to China, which is doing what it always does, mass testing and lockdowns. The […]
What does the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) do? Fund research into deadly viruses that may leak.
How’s that Threat Reduction working out?
The US military was more closely involved than they let on. What kind of crazy pays adversaries to research deadly weapons?
Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’
The Grants were going to a group called EcoHealth Alliance which got $123 million in total from the US Government from 2013 – 2020. Indeed it got as much as 90% of its money from the US government. It’s almost a government department, but without the accountability. It funneled some of that $123m to the Wuhan lab. The man running Eco Health — Dr Peter Daszak was the one who helped whip up the Lancet paper saying Covid was absolutely definitely natural — about four weeks after most people first heard of the virus. The useless World Health Organisation then invited Daszak to come along on the “investigation into the origin of Covid” in China. Bravo U.N.. Daszak went on to thank […]
Suddenly there is pandemonium about the Lab Leak idea as the West wakes up a year too late. If only they’d been reading unfunded bloggers? It’s old news to readers here, but watch the pea. Why is it suddenly OK to mention now, after being banned on Facebook for months? Because timing is everything in politics.
Imagine how different it would have been in February last year if Western leaders knew then that it was possible the Wuhan flu had leaked from a lab? And talk of it being a bioweapon was all over twitter even in January last year. How fast would those borders have slammed shut, saving literally a million lives or three and so many businesses? Neighbours around China were already snapping doors closed in the first days of February. Remember all the nations that wouldn’t accept, the poor infected Diamond Princess? Even if the West wasn’t sure, the possibility that it was a laboratory leak would have changed everything about the early response. Italy would hardly have run a “hug a Chinese (bioweapon)” campaign.
Image: Scientific Animations
Politics explains so much. Sixteen months of silence served Biden’s backers well. If Donald Trump could have […]
History books will be written and some professors, academics, and bureaucrats will have no excuse.
Which organisations can serve now?
It took two court hearings and major complaints and assertive activism to save eighty year old Judy Smentkiewicz. But how many others died because their sons or daughters didn’t see Pierre Kory on TV? Or they didn’t have the wherewithal to go to court? Or their friends trying to share the message were censored on Facebook? It shouldn’t have to be this way.
This is Judy’s story below, but so much more. Read the whole thing. It’s very well written by Michael Capuzzo. Surely, this is a story that needs an answer. Where are the Forth Estate, the Opposition, The AMA, or the publicly funded professors at our universities?
I am but a cog passing on points of view that should be part of our national conversation. Some things matter: like antivirals and closed borders.
Nick Corbishley says “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world”
Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. … But unfortunately most reporters are not […]
Bragging, so soon? This kind of talk will not endear:
The comments were made by Chen Ping, a Senior Researcher at The China Institute of Fudan University, a CCP affiliated think tank, and a professor at Peking University.
The video, which appeared online recently, was translated by New York-based Chinese blogger Jennifer Zeng:
His main argument is that the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the #CCP has won and “will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution” after the 2020 #CCPVirus #COVID19 pandemic. https://t.co/Z6pUJZIYzp
— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) May 18, 2021
Note the caveat. Professor Ping says that the Biological War was launched against China.
Ping states in the video that “In 2020, China won the trade war, science and technology war, and especially the biological war.”
…“the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the CCP has won and ‘will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution’ after the 2020 CCPVirus (COVID19) pandemic.”
The achievement is unprecedented. This is an epoch-making historical record,” […]
Imperfect storm on the way?
Adam Gaertner has posted a zinger of a provocative article, to say the least. Thanks to David Archibald author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia for pointing me at it.
A New Mutation threatens a Fragile Recovery
What if mass vaccination with imperfect vaccines could promote the survival of nastier strains of Covid? What if the leaky vaccines act like a filter for more dangerous versions of SARS2?
This doesn’t happen with most vaccines, only “leaky” ones. But it has happened in chickens with a virus called Marek’s disease.
Leaky vaccines generate a half-baked immune response — one that stops illness, but allows transmission, so a vaccinated person can theoretically infect others. This is bad but not awful — as long as the virus gets eliminated in a timely fashion. But if the virus can cloak itself from the immune system, and hide in protected cells, then it can keep replicating for a long time, and eventually, randomly, it will escape the imperfect immune response. Those mutants will be resistant to the antibodies or t-cell tricks. Thus newer strains of Covid […]
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We already knew the CCP were acting guilty, destroying all the samples and telling us it was like the flu when it wasn’t. They were blocking it from flying around inside China, but exporting it internationally.
Sharri Markson, at The Australian, has received documents from the US State Department showing that in 2015 Chinese Military scientists were chatting and strategizing in fairly malevolent ways, about how useful bioweapons could be. As far as weapons-of-mass-destruction go, bioweapons are as cheap as chips, could overrun hospitals, strike fear into the hearts of soldiers and people, and wreak chaos on the economy. Tick, Tick and Tick. These weapons are self replicating, as long we feed them new bodies. Think of them as like miniature F-111s that can disassemble the enemy infrastructure and turn our ploughshares into their F-111s so to speak.
Image: Scientific Animations
The question for the last year, was not so much whether it was a man-made creation, but whether it was released deliberately or not. To that end, we don’t know, but if a hostile state was going to release it deliberately, you’d think they would aim for somewhere other than “next door” to the […]
Mutations of SARS2 are roaming. Currently there are 19 million active (known) cases of Covid. Due to copying errors, mistakes are accumulating in the genes of the virus. It’s a relentless process of trial and selection. A trillion monkeys on keyboards blindly working its way around vaccines, and immune systems. To beat this, we need to understand it.
Below is a map of known variants created from the samples which have had full sequences done. This is the remarkable “Nextstrain“ — an opensource tool. I have labelled a few clusters by their “country names”, (though we’re not supposed to do that. Let’s all say “WuFlu”.)
The family tree of SARS-Cov-2 starts at the bottom left corner with two samples from Wuhan around Christmas 2019. This is called the 19A clade, which appears to have almost died out now, though there are still remnants left of this original virus in corners like Iran and PNG. Otherwise, the Wuhan 19A virus has been superseded by its children.
The branches and time marches to the right.
Nextstrain: Latest global SARS-CoV-2 analysis
The code for one full virus is 29,000 bases long and as best as I can tell, all the dots […]
The CCP is still not being honest about bioweapons research in China. How stupid does the West have to be?
The The Mail on Sunday has documents showing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was working with the Chinese military on a big project to study animal viruses that started in 2012.
The title of the project was ‘the discovery of animal-delivered pathogens carried by wild animals’. The man in charge was Xu Jianguo. In 2019 he was heard bragging at a conference that “‘a giant network of infectious disease prevention and control is taking shape’.” He was part of the first expert group called in to deal with Covid in January 2020 and was the one who denied human transmissibility. In mid-January he said that the “epidemic is limited and will end if there are no new cases next week”.
Well that was helpful.
The group had five leaders — one was Professor Shi Zhengli who works in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is known as the “bat woman” for her work hunting in caves for bat viruses. Only last month she denied that there was any military involvement. But one of the other leaders was Cao Wuchun, […]
Could we halve the death rate if we just exercised 25 minutes each day?
..
A lot of people were asked how much they exercised a couple of years ago. In follow up, about 50,000 went on to catch Covid last year. They were sorted into three levels of exercisers — the 7% most active consistently got 150 mins of week of something akin to “brisk walking” or more. The slowest moving 15% qualified as true couch potatoes — doing less than 10 minutes of exercise a week.
Sadly for the least active, they were 2.3 times more likely to need to go to hospital, 1.7 times more likely to be sent to the ICU and 2.5 times more likely to end up in the morgue.
These are pretty stark figures — making sedentary behaviour more risky than obesity, smoking, diabetes and high blood pressure. Which all seems a bit surprising given how many hours of data collection and TV commentary has been spent on all the smaller risks. How did we manage to miss one of the most important variables there is?
Exercise is “one heck of an anti-viral”
If these results are correct, it suggests most […]
There are lessons for conservatives from this eclectic election in the most isolated state on Earth. It was historic, epic, and “A complete and utter landslide“. And the message is “borders”. Remember “Build the Wall?” Conservatives all around the world seem to have forgotten the power and appeal of being able to control who and which viridae, come across the border. If the Democrats in the US fortified the wall, they might not have to fortify election results.
It’s a complete blitz. | The West Australian
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The election Saturday was a wipeout of legendary proportions among democracies anywhere. Only four years ago, the Liberals (conservatives, theoretically) were the ruling party in Western Australia. Today they hold but two, as in one plus one, seats in the lower house of the WA Parliament, out of 59. They may win 3. The Labor Party took 58% of the first preference votes (that’s almost unheard of). Labor will take the Upper House too. See: WA Election Results. Things are so extreme, the talk now is how the Parliament is not big enough to hold the Labor M.P.’s. The rooms are just not designed for one party having almost […]
Just another anti-viral
There was a good but small (tiny) study that came out of Israel three weeks ago about a drug called EXO-CD24. The professor in charge claims to have treated 30 out of 30 people who had moderate to severe cases and had near universal success. All, bar one, were able to leave hospital very quickly. CD24 is normally stuck on the outside of immune system cells. By getting EXO-CD in, apparently they can stop the cytokine storm.
Any day now, the mainstream media will let us know. The media may also mention that unlike vaccines the drug EXO-CD24 and according to Professor Nadir Arber, could be scaled up and mass produced within a few months and they could provide enough doses for the World.
Has Israel found the cure for Covid?
“To date, the preparation has been tried with great success on 30 severe patients, in 29 of whom the medical condition improved within two to three days and most of them were discharged home within three to five days. The 30th patient also recovered but after a longer time,” the hospital reports.
“The drug is based on exosomes, [vesicles] that […]
Maybe getting enough Vitamin B6 will reduce deaths
The main two things that kill people with Covid are blood clotting and an out-of-control inflammation known as a cytokine storm. A group of researchers noticed that both of these were things Vitamin B6 was known to reduce — blood clotting, and inflammation. In particular, there’s a molecule called Interleukin 6 which is a “masterplayer” signal in our immune system and — what do you know — B6 reduces it. Mice that weren’t fed enough B6 got mouse pneumonia more than mice who were fed enough. B6 is anti-inflammatory, anti- and reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS).
The Big Black hole in medical research?
I hoped this paper was report on experiments with Covid patients, but the paper and press release is essentially a literature review of many pre-covid studies and a plea for research into whether vitamin B6 might help stop the deadly cytokine storm.
The bigger, global question they don’t ask, is why despite the millions (billions) going into vaccine design and drug research, hardly anyone is studying the cheap unprofitable and obvious questions? Perhaps we need some government funded research that’s not driven by profits… oh. wait.? What happened to […]
If a new drug reduced deaths by 10% it would almost get a Nobel Prize — that is, as long as it made someone rich.
A free antiviral shining down on you?
At the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona 930 people who turned up with Covid were randomly asked to take a vitamin D3 (calcifediol) treatment or a placebo. Of them, 551 were given four doses of Vitamin D3 over the next four weeks. The other 379 luckless people got the chance to be randomized controls..
The lucky ones got 20,000IU (or 20 normal vitamin D3 tablets) on day one, then 10,000 IU (ten normal tablets) on four other days in the next month. (Technically, the big dose was given was given on day one followed up with half doses on day 3, 7, 15, and 30.)
In the hapless control group as many as 80 people (21%) would go on to need Intensive Care (ICU). And 57 people of the original 379 would end up dying, or about 15%.
Of the 551 people given five dollars worth* of Vitamin D (that’s the cost online) only 30 (5%) would go on to need the ICU, and all up 36 […]
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