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Could Pfizer have wished for more?
Eight weeks ago, Australians weren’t that interested in the vaccines to an exotic foreign disease. Back then, only 7% of the population were fully vaccinated, and now, viola, it’s 21% of the nation (which is a quarter of all adults).
By letting the virus leak in to a Limo Driver, who could have been protected with a $50 Hazmat suit, and then being too slow to act, the Premier of New South Wales has lit a fire under the rush to vaccination, not just in NSW but indirectly across the rest of Australia, since nearly every state has now been infected with a Covid strain that has a post-mark from Sydney. By trying to do a minimalist response, she ensured maximal type of lockdown.
On June 24th, only 2.8 million doses of vaccines have been given, now it’s 15.3 million. That’s some uptake. Eighty percent of all the vaccinations in Australia have happened in the last eight weeks.
Guardian Graph plus annotations by Jo.
She’s now saying the Delta virus can’t be eliminated, even though most other states have done that, and everyone knows it.
Big Pharma must be delighted. The […]
Please share and sign. Closing tonight!
Some drugs are apparently too cheap to approve.
They want us to trust them, but if they won’t investigate cheap options, they don’t appear to have our interests at heart. Who do they serve?
Even if a long-used safe cheap drug reduced infections or deaths by 10% the cost-benefits of using it are obvious for everyone (except the companies that sell expensive competing products). The studies we have suggest one antiviral (and there are many others) could reduce infections by 86% and deaths by 50% or more. The antiviral successes against Covid in India, Mexico and Peru are there for all to see. If antivirals were being used in Sydney perhaps they could have halved the Ro (or more), slowed the spread, saved lives and businesses and shortened the lockdown?
Which brings us to the awkward questions that almost no one seems to be even asking: Why aren’t cheap low risk drugs already well tested ten times over? Why aren’t the TGA and Health Ministry urgently working to fix obvious clinical vitamin deficiencies like D3? Where is the ABC and our publicly funded institutions and our academics? Isn’t the point of publicly funded universities […]
Which industry spends more than any other in Washington? Big Pharma
Over the last 20 years no industry spent more than Pharmaceuticals and Health products on lobbying and campaign contributions. Fully $4,700 million dollars traveled from pharmaceutical giants to politicians, parties and lobbyists.
In 2018 the citizens of the US spent $345 billion on prescription drugs in pharmacies… which works out to about $1,000 per person per year. Adjusted for inflation, that has doubled since 1999 which is not that long ago. Despite competition, discovery and efficiency gains, Americans are spending more than ever.
Maybe Americans are getting much better painkillers, antibiotics, and blood pressure medications than ever before, or maybe government regulations are doing more to protect profits rather than people?
All that lobbying is quite legal, but it isn’t enough. Somehow Big Pharma keep getting caught being naughty as well, lying and hiding things from customers. And if there is no reputational damage from outright deceit and fraud, perhaps the billion-dollar fines are just another cost on the balance sheet. (If only The Media wanted to shine a light on that…)
The Black Pigeon lists some crimes: ..
Oliver Wouters study on Lobbying…
Lobbying Expenditures and Campaign Contributions […]
These first generation vaccinations are not the Get-Out-Of-Pandemic Card some politicians dream of
What a can of nematodes
Fully-vaccinated people who catch Delta Covid variant really may be JUST as infectious as the un-jabbed, Government figures suggest
Emily Craig, Daily Mail
Public Health England say viral loads appear similar among people infected with the Delta variant in both groups, meaning, theoretically, they are equally contagious.
But health chiefs insisted the current crop of vaccines still cut the risk of catching the virus in the first place.
Vaccinated people may be less likely to catch Covid (at least for a few months until it wears off) but when vaccinated people do get infected the viral loads are pretty much the same as when unvaccinated people do. In other words, fully vaccinated people can still be dangerous to the people around them. And if they fly in without quarantine, they can bring outbreaks and new mutants too. So much for the freedom jabs. Though, in fairness, at the moment, they still offer some freedom from hospital, just not freedom from masks, quarantines, and restrictions.
Vaccination clearly isn’t going to stop the spread, eliminate the […]
UPDATE: New readers might find it hard to get their head around this post. Stick with me. There is a path to freedom from masks, mandatory vaccines and from Chinese bioweapons. But we must plan ahead and understand virology. Strangely, the tool no one wants to mention is Sovereign Borders.
* * *
There might have been no lockdown in Sydney (and then Melbourne, Perth, and Brisbane) if that one Limo driver had been protected
Nobody is talking about the best way to stop lockdowns in Australia — stop the virus leaking in through shoddy quarantine in the first place. “Hard Borders”.
Odds are, we could have stopped the July lockdowns if we made sure drivers of flight crews and international arrivals weren’t put at risk. It’s not about vaccines, which reduce but don’t stop people catching the virus, it’s about a $50 type solution that stops a billion dollar lockdown. The economy of a city of five million (and indirectly the rest of the nation) is relying on just leaky vaccines, masks and hand sanitizer when there are so many better options.
So far, thanks to one leak, 2,227 people have been infected, 10 people have […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
[…]
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: […]
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 […]
This might be one of the most incompetent studies of 2o21
Hanigan, Dear and Woodward have done a “unique”, first of, *groundbreaking study* that finally shows climate change is having a detrimental effect on our health (so they say). With great effort to ignore almost every variable that mattered, they found the seasonal ratio of deaths in Australia has changed:
”More people die in winter than summer, but climate change may see this reverse
In our study published today, we show some of the first evidence climate change has had observable impacts on Australians’ health between 1968 and 2018.
We found long-term heating is associated with changed seasonal balance of deaths in Australia, with relatively more deaths in summer months and relatively fewer deaths in winter months over recent decades.
Our findings can be explained by the gradual global warming associated with climate change. Over the 51 years of our study, annual average temperatures increased by more than 1°C in Australia. The last decade (2011 to 2020) was the hottest in the country’s recorded history.
The other interpretation is that it got warmer and deaths in winter declined more than deaths in […]
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 […]
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 […]
The STOIC study gave an asthma drug to Covid patients, but it worked so astonishingly well, they had to stop the trial early, as it was unfair to keep giving the placebo to people who were ending up in hospital ten times as often as people who got Budesonide.
“We were hoping for 50% reduction [in severity]. We got 90%, which … is off the charts”
–h/t Eric W at WUWT
Though to keep some perspective, out of about 140 people enrolled, 70 got the drug and 70 got the placebo, with 10 of the placebo group going to hospital and only 1 in the Budesonide group.
You’ll be shocked to know that giving the drug early works better than waiting for the virus to replicate wildly. You’ll also be shocked that there were some doctors using this 7 or more months ago, and yet the media didn’t mention it Apart from Newsmax. (Eg See Dr Richard Bartlett talk about this back in July last year, who talks of using a nebulizer, not an inhaler. )
Common asthma drug slashes Covid hospitalisation by 90%, experts say
Vanessa Chambers, The Sun
A […]
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.
…
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”.
The Sunlight Vitamin
UPDATED! Mea Culpa from me. The post has been corrected*. Thanks to Rob.
__________________
More junk reporting from the Australian government broadcaster the ABC which just copies the junk science press release. Is this what we pay $1b a year for?
The Journalists missed the key factor which was blood levels of participants.
The headline says Clinical trial finds vitamin D does not ward off colds and flu but all it really shows is that in a group that already have *normal, non-deficient levels* of Vitamin D, taking big doses of Vitamin D once a month won’t will raise your blood levels — but won’t make a big difference to your risk of respiratory infections. And it only applies to people aged 60 -74.
Most participants in the study had a normal but sub-optimal Vit D levels and after five years of sporadic high doses, were raised to optimal levels at the end.
After taking 60,000 IU each month, supplementers apparently went from having 77.5 nmol/L up to 114.8 nmol/L,. To put this in perspective, normal levels of Vitamin D start at “50” and above, and there are professors who point out that there are […]
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 […]
Trump was right, but Biden gets the glory
Pfizer held off the discovery in what appears to be a petty political gamble
All along we were told a vaccine “by October” was unlikely and that 50-60% efficacy would be OK. On Sept 16, Trump said “a vaccine for COVID-19 could be ready in three or four weeks.” Presumably because he was expecting these results or others like them. On Sept 18th, Biden said he was irrational: ““The idea that there’s going to be a vaccine and everything’s gonna be fine tomorrow – it’s just not rational, not reasonable,” and the Medical Swamp supported Biden.
But Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, said a vaccine by October was unlikely. So did Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most prominent and popular member of the White House coronavirus task force. Instead, the vaccine announcement came six days after the election as votes are still being counted in some parts of the country.
Come Nov 10, Markets rocketed with the Pfizer vaccine news.
Truth was, Pfizer was never going to announce potentially game changing vaccine news until after the election. That’s because they changed the original deadline for […]
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 […]
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