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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 […]
How many unnecessary deaths does it take til people get angry? Angry that the Chief Medical Officers and Health Ministers didn’t ask for studies to be done. Angry that most academics sat by and said nothing. And angry that the media just parroted the institutions.
One good antiviral changes everything. If the world had a safe cheap drug, we could not only reduce deaths and disability, but also slow the rate of mutation down and probably slow the appearance of new mutations down.
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The Chamie-Quintero study from Peru shows the West could be only weeks away from reducing the Covid death toll if we used the safe cheap sheep-dip, lice-killing Ivermectin like less wealthy countries do.
A study across the states of Peru found that after Ivermectin was introduced, deaths started to fall about 11 days later, and within a month after that, deaths were down around 75%.
Ivermectin is a drug so useful early researchers got a Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on it. It’s so well known that in the last thirty years more than 3.7 billion doses of Ivermectin have been given out. It’s so safe we can use it on cats […]
We all could use some good news, and this is quite extraordinary.
“Using gene therapy, a research team has succeeded in getting mice to walk again after a complete cross-sectional injury. The nerve cells produced the curative protein themselves.”
The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse both like this news. | Illustrated by Milo Winter
Normally spinal cord damage is pretty much permanent. Even though we all still have the same genes that built the nerves in the first place, no one seemed to have the right reboot code that could switch on the correct genes in the right order to do the repair. And to give you some idea of the complexity of this, in 2018 a different team estimated that as many as 580 genes may be involved in axon regeneration.
Plenty of researchers have been tapping on the windows and doors of the Nerve Regrowth Holy Grail. This time, instead of just regenerating a nerve in a petri dish, or even even a live animal, they’ve gone a leap further. These mice could walk again.
And all it took was a single injection? “This was a great surprise to the researchers”.
Some things matter. The biggest scandal of Covid — the one worth fighting for — is that there are drugs that work, which are safe and well tested, but they suffer from the crippling problem of being too cheap for our captured public health institutions to use. Because they are old safe, mass produced and out of patent no Pharmaceutical giant will make mass profits, which dooms them to being ignored, under researched, and generally scoffed at in rude dismissive terms.
The biggest failure of our government health agencies right now is the Black Hole of Medicine — the astronomical event horizon beyond which cheap safe drugs disappear without a trace.
3,000 people are dying every day in the USA and 5,000 a day are dying in Europe, mostly from a problem which can be solved to a large extent.
Sure, the media hate HCQ because “Donald”. But it’s not just HCQ and it’s not just Trump — the media ignore all the cheap antivirals and all the rich nations have the same medical Black Hole. This is the work of the Medical Swamp, captured by Big Pharma.
The Age of Antivirals is here and hardly anyone even knows […]
In Europe the second wave is setting new records for daily cases but not for deaths so far (thankfully). So the big question is whether this will stay the same or follow the case tally up.
It’s probably not an accident that infections are spreading fast in mid October. Not only was it late summer in Europe, but the virus has been spreading mostly through 15 to 24 year old healthy young people and when Vitamin D levels were high. But as the Northern Hemisphere tracks away from the Sun, vitamin D levels are falling, temperatures are dropping, and the sterilizing rays of ultra violet grow weak. And, as the days grow colder people gather indoors too. Viral doses are rising.
The enduring scandal of the epidemic is that there are so many ways to treat this virus but they’re not expensive enough for the TGA to recommend them. ;- )
Lots more cases but not many deaths
Exhibit One: The United Kingdom
Some people have used this graph to claim the virus poses no threat. But it isn’t that simple.
UK New cases and Worldometer Deaths graph. (Click to enlarge)
Ten reasons death rates were lower in Europe’s […]
Another day in the strange world of Covid
A new finding suggests Covid-19 doesn’t just bind to the ACE2 receptor, it also binds to a key pain receptor called neuropilin-1 receptor (NRP-1). This could explain why some people with a high viral load are asymptomatic and infectious but unaware they are unwell. It’s like the virus is arriving with it’s own morphine. In theory this might be a successful adaption from the virus’s point of view as it may increase the spread of the disease if infected people wander around able to shed virus for longer.
Despite being fed up with the WuFlu, the efficient perfidy is something to behold (at least to a microbiologist). It’s like a pocketknife.
On the down side, the virus may still be damaging tissues in this painless state, which might explain some of those findings of lung and heart damage even in mild or asymptomatic cases.
There is at least one potentially very nice payoff. The finding from the University of Arizona, may lead to the design of whole new painkillers based on the coronavirus spike that is “better than opioids”. The lead author says he has been contacted by people who had […]
Dr Li-Meng Yan worked in the WHO Coronavirus Reference Lab in Hong Kong. She has just published a detailed paper claiming that the SARS-2 coronavirus was artificially made in a laboratory and appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show today. She also claims it was deliberately spread (though this was slightly ambiguous– listen closely).
We already had enough evidence to know that SARS-Cov2 is a likely bioweapon. (The virus it supposedly evolved from appears to be fake.) This is largely what her paper covers.
Chinese defector virologist Dr Li-Meng Yan publishes report claiming COVID-19 was made in a lab
Phoebe Looms, News.com
Dr Yan had been working at Hong Kong University’s public health laboratory sciences division, a World Health Organisation infectious diseases research centre, when her boss was asked to investigate the outbreak in Wuhan.
Dr Yan claimed her and her team’s scientific findings were suppressed, and they were told only to report cases linked to the Huanan seafood market. After becoming fearful of her safety, she fled China on a flight bound for Los Angeles in late April.
Others in her lab said: “ Dr. Yan’s statement does not accord with the key facts […]
All around the world are dawning headlines wondering if we have founds signs of life on Venus.
Despite the hunt for life on star systems that are lightyears from Earth, it turns out there may be something on the Planet-next-door. “May” being the operative word. A team found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus and can’t think of any other way it could have got there. Phosphine is considered to be a biomarker. And microbes on Earth would have no trouble making it, though none of them could easily survive on Venus where the atmosphere clouds and rain are nearly pure hot sulphuric acid.*
Scientists find gas linked to life in atmosphere of Venus
Ian Sample, The Guardian
Sara Seager, a planetary scientist on the study at MIT in the US, called the finding “mind-boggling”. She hypothesises a lifecycle for Venusian microbes that rain down, dry out and are swept back up to more temperate altitudes by currents in the atmosphere.
For 2bn years, Venus was temperate and harboured an ocean. But today, a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere blankets a near-waterless surface where temperatures top 450C. The clouds in the sky are hardly inviting, […]
It appears people who wear masks are much less likely to get severe infections
This will make some heads spin.
Child Wearing a a Mask. Author vperemen.com
Not only do masks reduce the odds of getting infected, but if people do get infected while wearing a mask — the severity of Covid is so much milder. With masks on, the odds of getting an asymptomatic infection improve. Masks don’t stop all viral particles but they stop the large droplet clusters, and thus reduce the viral load. If asymptomatic people get some protection (and we still don’t know for sure) it could solve so much.
Consider the two cruise ships where the asymptomatic rate varied from 18 to 81%:
One used masks and one didn’t:
In February, one of the first outbreaks of COVID-19 outside of China occurred on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Yokohama, Japan. Of the 634 people on board who tested positive, about 18 percent of infections were asymptomatic. In March, an Argentinian cruise ship found itself in a similar predicament, but of the 128 people on board who eventually tested positive, 81 percent were asymptomatic— Ghandi et al.
Nations that use […]
Be wary of junk data and junk conclusions
Death data has become a political tool (stretched both up and down by vested interests). We’ve all heard of the motorcyclist who crashed into the Covid tally, and the payments for US docs. We know there’s junk data out there, but the suggestion we only count deaths “from” Covid, and not the deaths “with” Covid is unscientific in the extreme.
Stick with me. We all want WuFlu to be nothing, but scientists and skeptics need to pick their targets carefully. Don’t lose sight of the real scandal and the real solutions. It’s a travesty that people are dying while cheap vitamins and antivirals are being ignored. Let’s fight for Vitamin D, HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potentials like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc. But let’s not get distracted by a hopeful fantasy that the true US “death tally” is only 6% of Covid deaths in the US.
There’s an idea out there that only 9,680 people have died of Covid in the US, not 161,392 people. It’s because of this CDC quote:
“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with […]
I didn’t think cough syrups even worked against coughs, but one new paper suggests that bromhexine in common cough syrups reduces both Covid-19 rates of ICU and of mortality.
The era of antivirals has come, not that Big Pharma want you to know that cheap out-of-patent drugs might help. But for years we were told that medical science didn’t have an answer to viruses.
Bromhexine was patented in 1961 and is commonly found in OTC pharmacy cough syrups with names like Bisolvon, Robitussin, and Duro-Tuss (Wiki has a long list).
Theoretically Bromhexine sabotages one of our molecules — with the snappy name of TMPRSS2 (which is shorter than saying Transmembrane protease S2). A protease is a fancy pair of molecular scissors, it chops or tweaks the viral spike and if that doesn’t happen, the virus can’t get into the cell (at least not through its favourite path).
The nice thing about an antiviral acting against our molecules, rather than against the virus itself, is that it’s harder for the virus to mutate to get around it. That means it’s less likely the virus can develop resistance. The downside of targeting our own molecules is that it might fritz things up. […]
The first case of a definitive reinfection was reported today
Before we look at whether a cold gives us protection let’s point out we don’t know how well a SARS 2 infection gives us protection.
A 33 year old man in Hong Kong was tested positive nearly five months after his first infection, and with a slightly different variant of the virus, so it’s very likely this was a second infection rather than a resurgence of the first. It hints that Covid may be a bit like the common cold, and our immunity may be partial and temporary which is not good news for the herd immunity idea and the vaccine plan, but it’s only one case. On the plus side, he had a three day fever, cough and sickness in March, but is asymptomatic this time, suggesting that maybe there is enough residual immunity to help him beat the second infection.
There have been other reports of people getting reinfected but none of the previous cases had genetic testing of both infections to show they were different. But 13% of 4,000 doctors who were surveyed in May (even at that early stage) believed that at least one of their […]
Lessons from Coronavirus
Lockdowns and border closures mean many diseases have been prevented
It’s peak season for flu here in Australia and there’s almost no sign of it. As Chris Gillham wrote here back in May, we know lockdowns stop viruses, because flu cases are 85% down. Now he shows that this extends to other diseases too, and Chris has used data from the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System to calculate that just shy of 200,000 fewer Australians contracted any of the notifiable diseases in the first seven months of 2020 compared to the first seven months of 2019.
Is some of that disease burden just the price of holiday-makers bringing back diseases from overseas each year?
No one wants to stop the planes returning to the skies, but it begs the question — do we have to accept the onslaught of winter germs every year?
The answer may lie with other things we’ve discovered in the Covid pandemic too — that sick people should stay home from work and school, and that we have a lot of anti-viral tools we can use. Perhaps it’s time that travellers considered taking preemptive anti-virals, which might improve their holidays and also reduce […]
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