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Good and bad news about long term vaccine effectiveness is coming out of Israel. Protection from catching Covid plummets after a few months. Only 1 in 6 people who were vaccinated against Covid in January still have enough protection left to stop themselves catching and spreading Covid. The good news is that five out of six still have good protection against hospitalization and severe disease.
Thanks to David Archibald who says “The coronavirus vaccines are an immunological Potemkin village”
The Israeli data above is what sent the markets sliding on Monday. Ouch!
Vaccine efficacy in Israel from people vaccinated in January, Febuary, March and April this year.
Forget herd immunity and Vax-passports
The new results mean taking a vaccine is more a personal decision about risk benefits, less “one for the team”, though it may reduce the risk of transmission. Toss out the idea that a vaccination passport offers meaningful protection and get used to the idea that people can and will catch Covid from the double vacced. There is little medical justification for giving extra rights or free access to vaccinated people.
Israel used the Pfizer vax mostly.
Efficacy against infection, asymptomatic and symptomatic, falls […]
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 […]
Image by AngMoKio
For anyone trained in genetics the news that China warned of the potential for race based genetic bioweapons in 2011 is just stating what any good SciFi writer has known for years. But the macabre detail may help wake up the rest of the world to the idea “What if”. What would a New Biotech Cold War look like, and does it look like this?
China was spelling out some toe-curling recipes: warning that new biotech could pump up the virulence of infectious agents; it could neutralize antibiotics and vaccines, or potentially make the “target” population more vulnerable by disabling specific genes. Theoretically, adversaries could add genetic material covertly. How about some involuntary “Gene Therapy”coming to an airconditioning system near you?
But hey, they were just speculating right?
Funnily enough, a guy called Miles Yu was working for Mike Pompeo, advising him on China, and he raised the existence of the Chinese submission with the US State Department last December. Pompeo ordered an investigation, but they couldn’t find a copy of China’s original submission at the time (it’s only a global UN convention, yeah?). But when Joe Biden was sworn in, the investigation was shut […]
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.
[…]
Flynn Reef, Queensland, Photo by Wise Hok Wai Lum
Ever since Australia asked for an investigation into the source of Covid, China has been accidentally-on-purpose sticking pins into our trade deals. Pop went the wine, coal, beef, barley and lobster markets.
Now after concreting corals reefs in the South China Sea and plundering the Galapagos, China is suddenly concerned about the Great Barrier Reef. Overnight Chinese players in the UN have pushed it to the top of a list that had 82 more fragile ecosystems ahead of it. Pop, goes the tourism trade as the headlines ring out that UNESCO says the Reef is “in danger”.
At the moment, the only tourists that could possibly be frightened away are a few New Zealanders, because no one else can easily get around the two week quarantine. But when flights reboot, Australia just needs to send photos of the glorious corals to the world and “pop” goes the UN and China’s reputation.
It’s time the West dumped the UN — it’s just a play tool for Sino power
That would “pop” some of the CCP web of influence. What’s a Veto of a dead committee worth?
How many other environmental […]
It’s the sort of news that causes a Geopolitical realignment
There are now three Chinese defectors saying Covid19 was deliberately created by the Chinese Military. The third, Dong Jingwei, is possibly the highest ranking yet, and apparently talked to the DIA in mid February after flying into the US to visit his daughter.
The claims are that he has brought with him terabytes of data or “nearly 19 million documents”. It’s potentially dynamite — allegedly containing studies of Covid, forecasts of spread in the West, and names of Chinese spies in the US with details of payments.
If this is confirmed, and the Chinese Military did release a deadly bioweapon on the world, as Paula Bolyard says, “it ranks as one of the worst crimes against humanity the world has ever seen” — and the media, and some intelligence agencies, helped to cover it up.
The DIA kept the defector a secret from the CIA and FBI because they believed there were Chinese spies within them.
BREAKING: Defector Claiming Chinese Military Responsible for COVID-19 Identified as Top Counterintelligence Official
Paula Bolyard, PJ Media
According to RedState, the data includes:
Early pathogenic studies of the virus […]
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 […]
The good news is that there is a way out of the new mutant load. The bad news is the Swamp is in the way.
India’s caseload has continued to shrink since we last looked at it. Which is great news, but instead of endorsing the approach that worked, the health ministry is now writing to doctors telling them not to use Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.
Indeed the new recommendations even go so far as to say that zinc and multivitamins are out too. Even zinc?
Ponder that Ivermectin is so powerful it even destroys multivitamins.
Is the day coming when we see antivirals suddenly accepted like the Wuhan Lab theory was? Lives depend on it, but vast piles of money do too. The medical censorship swamp is well equipped, and I suspect, has years of experience. There are so many anti-viral medicines, they’ve been around for years and all the financial incentives not to use cheap out-of-patent drugs have always been there.
Here are the graphs of infections in some states of India:
…
So who leaned on the Indian officials? Who knows?
Ivermectin, Doxycycline Dropped From List of COVID-19 Drugs by Health Ministry
New Delhi: […]
Things are turning around in India — starting within days of increasing the use of Ivermectin again.
But where is the media? Who is reporting that the turnaround in some states of India has started within a couple of weeks of the expanded use of Ivermectin — the 50 cent old drug that has been used for 3.7 billion prescriptions worldwide, given to children to treat headlice, scabies and worms and is used by the ton on cattle and sheep farms.
Hallalujah? Or read and weep — how much of the ghastly debacle could have been stopped before it even started?
Ivermectin starts again in India (shaded dark grey) @jjchamie
On April 20th, New Dehli, AIIMs reccommended Ivermectin be added to the take home care package. So people getting tested would be able to start early treatment.
Cases started slowing down almost immediately.
….
On May 10th the Health Minister for Goa recommended the use of Ivermectin in Goa. Indeed, he offered it to the entire adult population.
The next day, the WHO, ever so helpfully, warned against the use of Ivermectin in India.
,,,
By Justus R. Hope, MD, Desert […]
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, […]
China has become the Wild West of bio-research
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The ZMan spots a repeat cycle of knowledge-hauls as China siphons off Western intellectual property, often with the help of the West.
First China hauled (and we gave) the factories, then it was the hi tech industry, now it’s biomedical ingenuity. The pattern repeats. China offered cheap labor for manufacturers and the tech industry with few annoying environmental burdens. Now China offers money and freedom from ethical quandaries for researchers who want to clone, create bioweapons, or hybrid human-animal cells.
The question for the West is, if environmental or ethical standards matter at home, shouldn’t they matter overseas too? If we aren’t happy to buy shirts made by slaves at home, why are foreign slave shirts OK? If we aren’t keen to fund bioweapons research in our own lands, why was it OK to help do that in China? (Thank Anthony Fauci).
Chinese Ethics, The ZMan
China makes it so easy for Western Scientists to collaborate:
There is no doubt that most Western governments operate biological research facilities. The fact that China is doing the same is no surprise. The difference is Western governments have to […]
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 […]
Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?
The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.
This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the […]
Don’t look now, it’s a climate disaster of massive proportions and it has nothing to do with CO2.
Scientists have just discovered what they say was a wild era 42,000 years ago — where the Earth’s magnetic field practically disappeared. They’ve called it the Adams Event (after Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame).
This was hidden previously, just before the Laschamp Excursion which we’ve known about since 1969. That event happened about 41,000 years ago – during which the Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipped. It was a pretty big deal in itself. For 800 years the field strength fell to 28% of it’s current strength and was reversed North-to-south. Due to the weak magnetic field, the theory is that cosmic rays zinged further into the atmosphere and created a layer of enriched beryllium 10 and carbon 14 which remains to this day in a thin slice around the world buried under all the layers of dirt that came after it.
The giant kauri tree log preserved in Ngāwhā, New Zealand, was alive during the Adams Event. Photo: Nelson Parker https://www.nelsonskaihukauri.co.nz/
Extraordinarily, during all this, one giant Kauri tree managed to live for more than 1,700 years. It grew […]
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