Recently in COVID-19 Category
COVID-19 autumn 2023 vaccination programme: JCVI advice, 26 May 2023 - GOV.UK
UK's Joint Commission on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommends COVID-19 boosters only for 65-and-older healthy people plus younger people in special risk groups. Anyone else wanting a booster will have to pay for it privately. The AP "fact check" story says that this is not a ban, but it does indicate a risk-benefit calculation that the risks of the jabs in younger people outweighs their risk of severe illness from the disease. JCVI estimates that you'd have to give the jab to 5,000,000 16-29 year olds in order to prevent one severe hospitalization from COVID in that age group. The UK stopped administering COVID jabs to 15 and under in the fall of 2021.
Disease X, Covid, and medical greed: this has been happening for years | The Spectator Australia
Alexandra Marshall writes: "Years ago, I wrote an article for this publication called, Digital darkness: the third apocalypse. In it, I included a discussion about 'conditioning' in which global bureaucracies were 'training' leaders to respond in a predictable manner to unpredictable scenarios - such as a catastrophic disease outbreak.
"It sounds like a great idea until you realise that bespoke and varied solutions made by unpredictable governments is how we solve problems as a species. Tightly controlled, regimented answers lead to public health disasters, such as we saw during Covid under the godly command of the World Health Organisation and its deeply vested interests.
"Sitting beneath this problem is that of corporate interest. Big Pharma requires predictable responses from government so that it can monetise the next pandemic (even more so than the last one). A product sitting on a pharmacy shelf, or even better, mandated by the state as part of a health passport, is worth a fortune that would make Alexander the Great quiver with desire."
covid: T cells triggered by common cold also fend off Covid: Study - Times of India
"The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, provide further evidence of the protective effects of T cells, an arm of the immune system that's gaining attention as the pandemic stretches into its third year and new variants like omicron erode vaccine protection.
"'Being exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn't always result in infection, and we've been keen to understand why,' said Rhia Kundu, the study's lead author and a researcher at Imperial's National Heart and Lung Institute. 'We found that high levels of pre-existing T cells, created by the body when infected with other human coronaviruses like the common cold, can protect.'"
"Receipts" of the strong claims from Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, President Biden, Rachel Maddow that "the virus stops with every vaccinated person" [Maddow, March 29, 2021], that "vaccinated people do not carry the virus" [Walensky, April 2, 2021], that vaccinated people "become a dead end to the virus" [Fauci, May 16, 2021], that "you're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations" [Biden, July 2021], plus receipts for the redefinition of herd immunity, vaccination, and vaccine. Fauci and others are now gaslighting us to say that they never claimed the vaccine would stop the virus from spreading. "in any sort of just world, we'd be getting ready to ship these pernicious propogandists to guantanamo (and send every media talking head that lobbed them softballs and never asked about their lies and inversions with them)."
Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg | The BMJ
Facebook is preventing circulation of a British Medical Journal peer-reviewed article based on a sloppy "fact-check" article from a Facebook contractor:
"In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia's trial sites.
"The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ's usual high level editorial oversight and review.
"But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about 'Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.' Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share 'false information' might have their posts moved lower in Facebook's News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were 'partly false.'...
"Rather than investing a proportion of Meta's substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task."
Ash Salisbury -- My Aussie Journal
A US-based Australian citizen, Ash Salisbury was unable to return home for over a year to see her parents and her boyfriend because of the two-week hotel quarantine period imposed by Australia. A window of opportunity opened in June, and she spent two weeks isolated in a hotel in Sydney in order to get four days with friends and family in Melbourne, which she logged in a daily journal. The willingness of her fellow Aussies to sacrifice a lot of freedom for the illusion of safety was shocking to her. From her "Afterword."
"Australia got it wrong!
"They found themselves in an elimination strategy and that strategy has no exit. The only way out now is to allow a degree of the virus to be in the community. The fear that has been dished out to Australians means that it's political suicide and no politician is going to overturn the plan but will continue to toe the line. With this, their bureaucrats are now in positions where they have so much power over other people's lives and are starting to enjoy it. It's a real-life Milgram Shock and Zimbardo Experiment that is happening in Australia.
"Even the hotel manager when I checked in on Day One of my quarantine showed little emotion over concerns but clearly enjoyed his power over arrivals. The police reading us the riot act as if we were criminals for simply wanting to return to Australia is all evidenced by a new form of Australia that is massively concerning."
Controlling Nature with Virus Research - Tablet Magazine
Norman Doidge: "Perhaps the biggest problem with the military metaphor, is how it causes us to narrow our focus almost exclusively on 'eradicating the virus,' and 'cases of the infected.' This causes us to miss other important ways of dealing with it, that might help us survive it. Public health officials in the 'the eradication mode' almost never mention how we can boost our immune systems with vitamins D and C, and zinc, exercise and weight loss. Not their focus. And the narrow focus on eradicating the virus is now causing serious 'collateral' harm and death...
"Antibiotic overuse has also occurred, I would argue, because of the military metaphor in medicine, and the eradication mentality. Pathogens are the enemy, and we have a weapon, so we must use it, to eradicate them. Initially we used these drugs for serious illnesses, and then eventually for more and more trivial ones, and often preemptively, as in a dentist's office. Their overuse is dangerous for many reasons, not least of which is that we are filled with many different kinds of organisms, some of which are very good for us, and which even support our immune and other systems, and while antibiotics can indeed kill off 'the enemy pathogens,' they also kill off these good bacteria. The problem is also that 'the bad bacteria' can develop mutations, and evolve, and the more they are needlessly exposed to antibiotics, the more opportunity they have to develop a means of resisting the antibiotics we have. There are now a number of deadly illnesses that we could once treat, that we no longer can. This is a crisis that did not have to occur--a classic case, of the irresistible immoderation generated by the conquest of nature delusion."
Doidge discusses and links to the work of Janelle S. Ayres on COVID-19, Type 2 Diabetes, and metabolism.
The War on Reality - Tablet Magazine
An essay by California public school teacher Alex Gutentag:
"Clearly, quarantining the healthy did exactly the opposite of what was sold to the public: It increased non-COVID-19 excess deaths while leaving elderly and immunocompromised people completely unprotected. While some may excuse the destructiveness of lockdowns as a simple error, the sheer volume of reversals public health officials have made during the pandemic paints a picture of bureaucrats intentionally misleading the public in order to cover up their failures or pursue agendas unrelated to public health....
"The PCR testing protocol for COVID-19 was based on a paper by Christian Drosten, which was peer-reviewed and published within just two days in a journal on whose editorial board Drosten sits. The method was created 'without having virus material available,' using instead a genetic sequence published online. The PCR test amplifies genetic material of the virus in cycles but does not determine whether a case is infectious. A higher number of cycles indicates a lower viral load. The cycle threshold for PCR tests used in the U.S. was usually limited at 37 or 40, highly sensitive levels. In July 2020, Fauci remarked that at these levels, a positive result is '"just dead nucleotides, period.'... It is also likely that 85%-90% of tests that are positive at a cycle threshold of 40 would be negative at a cycle threshold of 30....
"Basic civil, human, and economic rights were violated under demonstrably fraudulent pretenses. The sacrifices we thought we were making for the common good were sacrifices made in vain. Unlawful lockdowns demoralized the population and ruined lives. The tragic reality is that this was all for nothing. The only way to prevent these events from recurring is to exhaustively investigate not just the origin of the virus, but every corrupt and misguided decision made by politicians, NGOs, public health organizations, and scientific institutions made since its fateful emergence."
A final fall on campus | MIT Technology Review
MIT seniors were granted three months on campus this fall, but they will spend the spring semester studying remotely. Alex Meredith '21 describes his time: "When weeks quarantining at home with my parents and younger brothers stretched into months, all I wanted was one last chance to see my friends in person, to say goodbye from six feet apart before we graduated and scattered across the country and the world for good. My time on campus this year may be short, but I'm incredibly glad that I got my chance. Moreover, the limits on this time have given me a strong sense of clarity--I can't turn down an invitation to lunch when there are so few lunches left."
COVID-19 first appeared in Chinese miners in 2012: scientists
"The coronavirus may not have originated at a Wuhan wet market last year but 1,000 miles away in 2012 -- deep in a Chinese mineshaft where workers came down with a mysterious, pneumonia-like illness after being exposed to bats.
"Virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson, both of the non-profit Bioscience Resource Project in Ithaca, arrived at their finding after translating a 66-page master's thesis from the Chinese medical doctor who treated the miners and sent their tissue samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for testing."
