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Dr Marion Gruber and Dr Phillip Krause were not just at the FDA, they had been there for 30 years and were heading up the teams that decided last week to approve Pfizer for 16 year olds last week.
Two Top FDA Vaccine Regulators Are Set to Depart During a Crucial Period
Noah Weiland and Sharon LaFraniere, New York Times
Gruber and Krause were upset about the Biden administration’s recent announcement that adults should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet, the people said, and both viewed the announcement, amplified by President Joe Biden, as pressure on the FDA to quickly authorize them.
They are worried about that Israeli data showing people vaccinated in January only had 16% protection left in July.
White House officials have stressed that the plan for Americans to start receiving boosters next month was uniformly endorsed by the most senior federal health officials, including Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting FDA commissioner. They have described the need to develop a booster plan as […]
Most of Australia is living with freedom, not the virus. “Living with the virus” means long lockdowns in NSW. Who wants that?
The Australian Federal government wants to “open up the nation” when we reach 70 or 80% vaccinated, like it’s The Sign of Bethlehem, or something, but the No-Covid States are rebelling and it’s no wonder. Being free of Chinese Bioweapons means being free to dance, sing, work and send the kids to school — and the voters rather like that. No virus means no lockdown. The States with zero covid know that if they let the virus in even at 80% “vaxed” they’ll have less freedom. They might get to fly to London but they’ll have to give up Big Weddings, Parties, and possibly Grandpa too.
The key value is and always was hospital beds. The hospitalization rates mean even at the magical 80% double-vaccinated mark hospitals will be overwhelmed, forcing states to flatten the curve for months and stand in the street banging tin pots at 9pm each night to say thanks to strung out health workers. We don’t need modeling to know this, it happened already in places like the UK, Spain and Italy. […]
Google and Youtube are to some extent the Police of our National Conversations. Somehow they are allowed to invest privately and simultaneously put people in jail according to rules they made up themselves. What could possibly go wrong?
Senator Malcolm Roberts asking some very good questions:
Consider the ownership of vaccine makers. Alphabet owns YouTube and Google. Alphabet owns 12 per cent of Vaccitech, which created the AstraZeneca vaccine. YouTube bans videos mentioning ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Aren’t these conflicts of interest? If ivermectin was approved for COVID, what would happen to big pharma’s hundreds of billions of dollars in profits? These profits are a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big pharma.
New business model? What if one hot drug created a market for other drugs:
Consider the vaccine maker Pfizer’s profits. It’s second quarter 2021 revenue was $19 billion, up 89 per cent. In three months, it made $4 billion profit. The European Medicines Agency discovered a definite link between Pfizer’s vaccine causing myocarditis. In September 2020, our TGA approved Pfizer’s Vyndamax drug to treat myocarditis. Our health department confirmed the AstraZeneca vaccine’s links with blood clots. Pfizer’s Eliquis drug treats blood clotting. […]
70, 80, 90 percent vaxed doesn’t look like the ticket to Freedom A cruise ship with only vaccinated people on board gets 27 cases of covid
Is this what “living with the virus” means?
Carnival Vista | Photo by antonio from Trieste, Italy
by J.D.Rucker:
…according to The Liberty Daily, every staff member and every guest on the ship was vaccinated.
“Somewhere near Cozumel in the Caribbean Sea, there’s a cruise ship that had zero unvaccinated people aboard but that still suffered an outbreak of Covid-19,” the report said. “This goes against the narrative that the reason for ‘breakthrough cases’ is due to too many unvaccinated people mingling with those who have taken the experimental injections.” It continued, “The Carnival Vista, which departed from Galveston, Texas, on July 31, has issued strict face mask protocols and ordered infected people aboard into isolation.
One 77 year old passenger who caught Covid on the ship has since died. Another is still in hospital in Belize and is said to be “in bad shape”. The family of the deceased lady is trying to raise $30,000 to cover the costs, which included an emergency flight back […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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