A strange deletion

My site jonjayray.com  has gone down -- apparently because my subscription has run out

The odd thing is that I did not receive the normal warning that my subscription was due.  Why?  I have no real idea but suspect that the "incorrectness" of many of my files may be involved. 

I no longer have details of how to contact them.  I relied on warning emails for that.  The upload address was jonjayray.us.tempcloudsite.com but that no longer seems to lead anywhere.  They had something to do with Linux.  Help on tracing them would be appreciated.

All my files are duplicated on a mirror site: johnjayray.com which is still running fine

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UPDATE: I have found the host for my site. It is https://linux-hosts-inc.com/ I have renewed so hopefully will be up again soon. I eventually found my record of it

9 in 10 COVID Deaths Are in Vaccinated People: Report

Joseph Mercola

A report released by the UK government has confirmed that 9 out of every 10 deaths related to COVID-19 are found in those who are fully vaccinated. Although the virus variant is the same and the UK approved only one different vaccine (AstraZeneca) from the United States, the data in the U.S. are different. This may be due in large part to the CDC definition used to identify who is “vaccinated.”

U.S. data are also likely to become even more sparse in the coming weeks and months. In addition to the CDC hiding data, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) quietly decided in early February to stop recording deaths attributed to COVID-19.

Data Is Essential

Yet, data is the foundation of scientific analysis. Without it, researchers are unable to analyze statistics and draw conclusions, which leaves public health experts unable to make accurate recommendations. Knowledge gives you the power to make informed decisions based on evidence.

Six months into the pandemic, a report revealed that most Americans had significant misconceptions of the COVID-19 risks. Months later, a second survey demonstrated that not much had changed. While analysts blamed “ignorance of fundamental, undisputed facts on who is at risk” for the so-called misconceptions, others said the politicization of the pandemic was also at fault. But there were other factors at play that skewed the data scientists thought they had.

According to a whistleblower who worked on Pfizer’s Phase 3 COVID injection clinical trials, data were falsified, patients were unblinded, the company hired poorly trained people to administer the injections and follow up on reported side effects lagged way behind. Her testimony was published November 2, 2021, in the British Medical Journal by investigative journalist Paul Thacker.

This is yet another indication that the true number of adverse events and deaths from the shots currently identified as COVID vaccines may never be known. The only logical conclusion to draw is that the data don’t support the Warp Speed production and mass vaccination program initiated in early 2020.

In fact, the shot program not only is ineffective, but also has likely damaged and killed far more people than any health agency will ever publicly admit. It is essential to share this information to help prevent more deaths and damaged lives.

UK Government Report: 90 Percent of Deaths Are in Fully Vaccinated

A reporter from The Exposé points out that while the world has been distracted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the UK government quietly released a report that confirmed 9 in every 10 deaths from COVID-19 in England were in people who were fully vaccinated.

The February 2022 report was from the UK Health Security Agency, which publishes weekly surveillance. The report contains several tables of raw data showing that the vast majority of people who were infected, hospitalized or died from COVID-19 were fully vaccinated.

The Exposé, demonstrated step by step how the data, gathered from Jan. 24, 2022, through February 28, 2022, supported this assertion. In the UK, health authorities differentiate between those who have never received a shot and those who received one, two or three doses. All told, there were 1,086,434 cases of COVID in vaccinated individuals that accounted for 73 percent of all cases during that period.

When children were removed from the equation, vaccinated individuals accounted for 91 percent of all cases. The reporter also compared data taken in 2021 when Delta was the dominant variant against the current report when Omicron is the dominant variant in England. It showed a higher number of children hospitalized for Omicron than for Delta.

Since children have never been at high risk for severe disease from any COVID variant, it begs the question if the current number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 may be due to increased PCR testing—known to have a high false-positive rate—in children hospitalized for other reasons, such as a broken leg or appendicitis.

When children were included in the figures for hospitalization, the data showed 75 percent of those hospitalized with COVID in the current period were vaccinated. But, when children were removed from the equation, 85 percent of the hospitalized individuals were vaccinated. Similar results were found when the data were analyzed for COVID deaths.

During the four-week period in the current report, vaccinated individuals accounted for 89 percent of deaths. Most interestingly, not only are the deaths in vaccinated individuals rising precipitously, but the number of deaths in those who are not vaccinated is dropping.

Vaccinated Deaths Rising in California

Headlines in the March 7, 2022, Mercury News read, “COVID-19 Deaths in California Among Vaccinated Rose Sharply With Omicron.” The corresponding story added that 10 deaths recorded in Santa Cruz County, California, and nine of those were vaccinated. On the surface, this is similar to findings reported from the UK. Yet, the raw numbers in the United States are different.

This is likely because U.S. data do not differentiate between individuals who have had one, two or three shots. In fact, the U.S. CDC clearly states that you can only be considered fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving the final dose in the primary two-shot series from Pfizer and Moderna or the one shot from Johnson & Johnson.

Therefore, as the UK analyzes data that identify individuals on the spectrum of having received one of three shots, the United States only counts vaccination if you’re two weeks after your last dose. Since not all patients who are fully vaccinated are identified on admission, analyzing U.S. numbers is difficult, if not impossible. You must ask yourself if this is intentional.

It probably is safe to assume that if a person in the United States is identified as being vaccinated, they are likely fully vaccinated by CDC standards. However, there are also likely individuals lumped into the unvaccinated group who have had one or two shots or may even be fully vaccinated by CDC standards but were not counted as such on admission.

The Mercury News justified the vaccinated deaths, writing: “Of the vaccinated patients who died, one was in his early 100s, three were in their 90s, two were in their 80s, three were in their 70s and most had underlying health problems. The unvaccinated man who died was in his 50s.”

While age is certainly a significant factor in any infectious disease including COVID, the article did not mention any of the other CDC-identified comorbidities that contribute to COVID deaths. To add to the misinformation, the article quoted Dr. Errol Ozdalga, a hospitalist at Stanford, who told the Mercury News that patients admitted during the Delta wave and earlier infections were otherwise healthy.

The implication is that those with comorbidities the CDC identified as increasing the risk of severe illness, such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, chronic kidney disease and immunocompromised, were not hospitalized with COVID before Omicron.

““That went away with Omicron,” Ozdalga said. The variant has afflicted those with weakened immune systems, those who were “predisposed in some way” to severe illness, he said.” Additionally, without supporting information, the news report included a simple statement:

“Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UC-San Francisco, said the raw numbers make the deaths among the vaccinated look worse than they are — their rates of dying remain far less than the unvaccinated.”

Economist Survey Reveals Significant Vaccine Injury Rate

Economist Mark Skidmore executed a critical online survey using the U.S. population to estimate damage from the COVID-19 shots. He presented the most recent and significant data20 from the ongoing study at the Doctors for COVID Ethics Symposium 3.

His paper seeks to understand the number of people who have died from the COVID shots that he estimates based on the survey. He used the survey to triangulate information from the general population and what they are experiencing.

The participants were asked to report on the adverse events of people they knew best in their social circle — in other words, good friends or family members. The surveys were close to representative of the general population in age, income and gender in December 2021.

Skidmore first presented a list of adverse events the FDA acknowledged could be possible and compared it against the documented data of injury and deaths from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) published in OpenVAERS.

Some of the most common events on the list were stroke, heart attack, myocarditis, death, thrombocytopenia and venous thromboembolism (blood clots). According to Skidmore, everyone agrees that adverse events can and do occur — the main difference in opinion is how often and how many.

Skidmore then looked at the ratio between COVID illness fatalities and COVID shot fatalities. The ratio in OpenVAERS is 2.6 percent and in VAERS (the number reported by the CDC that doesn’t contain all data originally substantiated) it’s 0.9 percent.

If these numbers reflect reality, the number of people who report injury or death in the survey should be close to zero since the cohort is small enough that it may not capture such a small percentage. Skidmore then asks, if we assume that the survey is a reflection of the true ratio in the population, what is the true population ratio for injury or death after receiving the COVID-19 shot?

From the data collected the ratio reveals there have been 307,997 deaths from the shot. The method used gives a 95 percent confidence interval between 215,018 and 391,410 deaths. Using the same mathematical approach to identify the number of severe adverse events to the general population, the data show there were roughly 1.1 million severe events and 2.3 million less severe events from the shot.

He acknowledges that much of what people see and report is through the lens of their biases. One of those is political affiliation. He showed that people who identified as Democrats reported far fewer shot-related deaths than did Republicans or independents. This likely also affects the number of deaths and adverse events reported to VAERS.

Using the fatality counts by party affiliation, he found that if the Democrat perception was correct, there were 119,000 fatalities compared to 487,000 fatalities if the Republican perception was correct. This gives a potential range of deaths and illustrates the differences in perceptions of people based on how they see the world. However, no matter which number is used, it is still far more than the number of fatalities reported in the VAERS system.

Unprecedented US Death Toll Keeps Rising

While the data from Skidmore and the UK reflect the death rate from COVID-19, it is also important to track the number of all-cause mortality as it’s one of the most reliable data points we have. This statistic is clear-cut. Either a person is dead or they’re not. It does not rely on the reason for death.

In early 2022, mutual insurance holding company OneAmerica announced an increase in the death rate of working Americans, aged 18 to 64, in the third quarter of 2021. Their data show it was 40 percent higher than prepandemic levels.

Other insurance companies have also cited higher mortality rates, including the Hartford Insurance Group that announced mortality increased 32 percent from 2019 and 20 percent from 2020 before the shots. Lincoln National reported death claims have increased 13.7 percent year over year and 54 percent in quarter four of 2021 compared to 2019.

Funeral homes are also posting an increase in burials and cremations in 2021 over 2020. One large German health insurance company reported their company data were nearly 14 times greater than the number of deaths reported by the German government. This data were gathered directly from doctors applying for payment from a sample of 10.9 million people.

The rising death toll that can be linked to the COVID shots is an inconvenient truth for the health agencies that have promoted mass vaccinations with a genetic therapy experiment. In what appears to be a response to this data, Health and Human Services (HHS) have decided to stop the reporting requirements for hospitals and acute care facilities on COVID-19 deaths.

Although the information is published on the HHS website, fact-checkers have claimed the viral social media posts are “false” by simply changing the headline.29 So, while the HHS publicly announced they would no longer require hospitals to report deaths from COVID-19, fact-checkers erroneously report the U.S. government is not ending daily COVID death reporting.

If it helps to sort all this out, an unnamed federal health official actually acknowledged the move to stop reporting COVID-19 hospital deaths when they spoke with a reporter from WSWS, calling the move “incomprehensible.” The official added, “It is the only consistent, reliable and actionable dataset at the federal level. Ninety-nine percent of hospitals report 100% of the data every day. I don’t know any scientists who want to have less data.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/9-in-10-covid-deaths-are-in-vaccinated-people-report_4339503.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Should I Vaccinate My Child Against Covid?

Yesterday, Florida followed Norway by not recommending the Covid vaccine for children. The CDC recommends them.

What does the data say? As public health scientists, we must be honest both with what we know and what we do not know.

The emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine for children was based on two randomized clinical trials for ages 5-11 and 12-15, respectively, with a total of 4,528 subjects. In both trials, there was a reduction in mild Covid infections during the two months following the second dose, with the vaccine efficacy in the 68% and 98% range for the younger children and somewhere between 75% and 100% for the 12-15-year-olds (95% confidence intervals).

What these numbers mean is that if the true value is, e.g., 90%, and if 100 children would have been infected without vaccination, then 90 of them will avoid the infection if vaccinated, while 10 children will still get infected despite being vaccinated.

A vaccine that only prevents mild disease is of little use, so what about serious disease, hospitalizations and deaths? There were zero such events among those who received the vaccine. There were also zero such events among those who received a placebo.

Hence, from the randomized trials we do not know if the Covid vaccines prevent hospitalizations and death among children. Neither do they tell us whether the protection against mild infection lasts longer than two months, or whether the vaccine reduces transmission.

With limited information from the randomized trials, we must turn to observational studies and we now have one. In New York State, 23% of children ages 5-11 and 62% of children ages 12-17 had been fully vaccinated by the end of January 2022.

These 1.2 million vaccinated children were studied from November 29 to January 30, comparing them to the unvaccinated children in the State. Here is what we learned from that study, with all risk estimates based on 95% confidence intervals.

The New York study confirms the results from the randomized trials. The vaccine reduces short-term infection risk. During the first two weeks after the second dose vaccine efficacy against infection is in the 62%-68% range for 5–11-year-olds and in the 71%-81% range for 12–17-year-old children.

The protection against infection wanes rapidly. In the fifth week after vaccination, the vaccine efficacy against infection is in the 8%-16% range for 5-11-year-old children and in the 48%-63% range for the older ones. In the seventh week after vaccination, vaccine efficacy dropped further, to the 18%-65% range for the 12-17-year-olds.

This is consistent with the rapid waning in protection that we have seen among adults, although the decline seems more rapid for children.

For the 5-11-year-olds, vaccine efficacy is negative during the seventh week after the second dose, with the unvaccinated having a lower risk of infection in the 29% -56% range. How can this be? A likely explanation is that the unvaccinated children got infected earlier than the vaccinated ones, and once the protection has worn off, the vaccinated children are at higher risk than the unvaccinated ones who have now acquired natural immunity.

That is, the vaccine simply postponed infections by a few weeks or months.

How about deaths from Covid? That is what really matters.

Unfortunately, the New York study does not present mortality data. Why? Over the two years of the pandemic, the survival rate for New Yorkers ages 0-19 is 99.999%. Despite over 3 million children, there may not have been enough Covid deaths during the two-month study period to determine vaccine efficacy against mortality. It would still have been useful to tally the numbers, but the study authors did not do so.

For hospitalization, the study reports that vaccine efficacy is higher than for infection, and while that protection also wanes over time, the decline is slower than for infections. The numbers reported mean that by vaccinating 365,502 children ages 5-11, an estimated 90 hospitalizations were prevented. This would mean that in order to prevent one hospitalization, one must vaccinate 4,047 children. The corresponding number is 1,235 for children ages 12-17.

These numbers are difficult to properly interpret for four reasons. (i) They are based on a two-month period, and the vaccines have additional benefits outside that time window. (ii) They compare vaccinated children with unvaccinated children with or without natural immunity from prior Covid infection. This will underestimate the vaccine benefits for children without a prior infection while overestimating the benefits for those with natural immunity. (iii) They include both hospitalizations that are due to Covid and hospitalizations for other causes with a concurrent unrelated mild Covid infection.

Even if the vaccine had zero efficacy at preventing hospitalization due to Covid, the efficacy against mild Covid infection would ensure that the study reported good efficacy against hospitalization. That the reported vaccine efficacy is higher for hospitalization than for infections indicates that there is at least some efficacy for the former, but it is impossible to properly estimate the level of efficacy without data that distinguishes hospitalizations due to and with Covid. (iv) The study was conducted during a large wave of infections, which has since declined. The benefits are less during the lower transmission period that we have now entered.

When deciding whether to vaccinate a child, we must also consider known and potential adverse reactions. From the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink we know that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can cause myocarditis among adolescents and young adults. Current risk estimates are in the range of one myocarditis for every 3,000 or 8,000 vaccinated adolescents and young men. Women have lower risk. There may also be additional still unknown adverse reactions.

The Covid vaccine has been widely used for children without solid information about its efficacy on hospitalizations and deaths, and without the ability to conduct a proper benefit-risk evaluation. The recent observational study from New York State adds a few important pieces to the puzzle, but we still do not know whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

For older people who have not yet had Covid it makes sense to get vaccinated. While there may be unknown low-risk adverse reactions, the large reduction in mortality risk far outweighs any such risks. For children, the mortality risk is very small and the known and any still unknown risks from adverse reactions may outweigh the benefits at reducing hospitalizations and death from Covid, which are unfortunately still unknown.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14072&omhide=true&trk=title

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What Covid health orders have done to the social lives of children

I was disturbed by what I saw happen to our children in late 2021 during lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Our kids have acted unselfishly despite being at little risk of Covid, accepting the mantra that they need to be restricted and not become ‘vectors of transmission’ passing this virus on to their elders.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Professor of Psychiatry and Ethics, offers this in response, ‘Any society that uses children to shield adults from harm has entirely lost its moral bearings.’

I offer some observations.

A group of teenagers bounce through the local mall with a mixture of chat and laughter. They go in to browse the local merchandise when one of them stops. Most of the group proudly show a vaccine passport, enter the store, and continue shopping but one teenager notices that one of the other girls doesn’t. She knows the other girl is not vaccinated and decides to stay outside with her friend. She does not make a scene, but patiently waits for their friends to come back. They seem oblivious to what has happened, and why should they notice? They are doing what teenagers have always done. I am, however, uncomfortable at the ease at which children show private health information and cannot understand the justification for the risk of stress and social anxiety to kids in the prime of their life.

Two younger teenagers enter a shop. They are below the age required by Health Orders for mandatory vaccination. They look around and are approached by a shop assistant who demands to see their proof of vaccination. One girl proudly displays her green tick while the other volunteers that she is under the age required and is not vaccinated. That girl is abruptly escorted from the premises as if she was a criminal. Under normal circumstances, this would result in a sternly worded complaint from the parent to the manager or police. It has never been considered reasonable to treat children in such a way. Disturbingly, the shop assistant is complying with the health order. The girl is not allowed in the store unless she is closely accompanied by a vaccinated parent. The parent was just outside looking at a lengthy list of things to do during a busy and stressful day.

Fast forward to March 2022. I walked through our local shopping centre and observed that around 20 per cent of people were wearing masks. Individual choice is paramount and there can be a variety of reasons for this, but a little surprising was that young people comprised the highest number. Why were they masked? The fatality rate for those under 50 is around 0.0035 per cent, below the 0.0044 per cent risk of dying while on the road. Do the same people mitigate risk when driving by wearing helmets and fire suits? Or do they accept that there is risk in everything they do? If it is not for physical safety, then does it provide psychological safety? If so, why are the young fearful?

NSW Health Minister Hazzard recently rejected the Health Department’s demands to bring back mask mandates and other restrictions and deserves credit for demonstrating leadership. Some may be sceptical at this newfound courage, but I would like to propose a test. Now that the fatality rate is in line with that of Influenza why not simply repeal the Public Health Orders? At a stroke of a pen, it was enacted and at the stroke of a pen, it can be repealed, thus showing consistency with Premier Perrottet’s desire for ‘personal responsibility’ and the Prime Minister’s statement that the public have had a ‘gutful of governments telling them what to do’.

The last two years have demonstrated that the longer governments bypass the usual accountability measures the more the tendency will be to coerce and exhibit influence and power over people’s lives.

Paediatric Neurosurgeon turned politician Ben Carson notes, ‘We’ve been conditioned to think that only politicians can solve our problems. But at some point, maybe we will wake up and recognize that it was the politicians who created our problems.’

Clinical Psychologist and Spectator UK contributor Dr. Gary Sidley recently posed the question, ‘Should a civilised democratic society be deliberately inflicting emotional distress on its people?’

The child who asked his mother if he was going to die had just learned he had contracted Covid. He experienced symptoms one would expect from a seasonal flu and was back bouncing off the walls after a day. The induced fear, however, has had a lasting impact. The severity and duration of which we don’t yet know.

Is this what we really want for us and for our children?

We might do well to remember the words of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.’

https://spectator.com.au/2022/03/the-hazzard-of-government-health/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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New Covid-19 variant is one of the most infectious diseases the earth has EVER seen - as renowned scientist warns EVERYONE is going to get it

A former World Health Organisation scientist says the new BA.2 Omicron subvariant sweeping the world is one of the most infectious diseases the Earth has seen - and almost everyone will be exposed to the virus.

While the now-dominant strain is not as deadly as previous ones, including Delta, it is up to six times more transmissible than the original strain of Covid-19, Professor Adrian Esterman told Daily Mail Australia.

Predictions of a big surge in cases became a reality in New South Wales on Wednesday with 30,402 positive tests returned in the previous 24 hours, almost triple the number reported on Tuesday.

The BA.2 variant is also up to 30 per cent more infectious than the initial BA.1 version of Omicron which forced the reinstitution of lockdowns at Christmas.

'We think [the first] Omicron is very similar to Delta and that BA.2 is then another 25-30 per cent more contagious,' James Wood, a public health mathematician at the University of NSW told Daily Mail Australia.

The higher risk of contagiousness comes from the variant's superior ability to 'evade' immunity - meaning even triple-vaccinated people are susceptible to catching the new strain.

The BA.2 version of Omicron has an ability to 'evade' immunity, which includes vaccination. While vaccination provides a high level of protection from severe disease, it is less effective against preventing someone from catching Omicron at all. That even applies to boosters.

Generally vaccines were more effective at preventing symptomatic infection from Delta than Omicron.

For example, someone who had two shots in 2021 and a booster at the start of January would now have a 50 per cent chance of catching BA.2 if exposed.

Professor Adrian Esterman, an epidemiologist and biostatistician, said it was very likely all Australians would be at risk of catching BA.2 this year - especially given the return of people to schools, offices and public transport.

'(At the moment) you are much more likely to get it; we're already seeing that with the case numbers going up,' he said.

But it is almost impossible to get an accurate reflection of its spread because so many rapid tests are being done at home and are going unreported.

The only objective, verifiable figures are the numbers of people in hospital with Covid. On Tuesday, that figure was 1,801 Australia-wide; a total that has been relatively steady throughout March. On January 25, there were 5,390.

While not everyone exposed to a virus is infected by it, BA.2's high 'basic reproduction number' or 'R0' of 12 - compared to 2.5 for the original Wuhan virus - could mean almost all Australians will come into contact with it in 2022.

The R0 is the average number of secondary infections produced by a typical case; an R0 of 12 means up to 12 people could be infected by each case.

'Everyone's been exposed to Covid-19, full-stop, and unless you're very careful you will be exposed again this year,' Professor Esterman said. 'With face mask mandates being dropped, social distancing being removed, the chances are even higher.

'Those things are put in place to dampen down transmissibility, that's the whole point. When you remove them it's just increasing transmission. 'If you remove all of those protections, then your transmissibility almost gets back to the basic reduction number because we have very little immunity.'

While Omicron is generally less severe than the Delta strain, it is serious enough for some people that Professor Esterman likened wanting to catch Covid to gambling with your health.

'If you say "I don't mind getting infected" it's a bit like Russian roulette because you do have that chance of getting seriously ill or having long-term health problems.'

Mr Esterman, who is 73, admitted his own son argues 'it's no worse than the flu'. 'To a certain extent, he's right: the death rates not worse than seasonal flu,' he said.

'The trouble is it causes more severe disease in vulnerable people than influenza, and it has the capacity to cause real damage to younger people too.

'There have been several cases of young, healthy and fit people dying from Covid. I cannot remember that ever happening with influenza.'

Professor Esterman said while death rates have dropped to now be comparable to the flu, Covid is far more infectious and the spectrum of long-term health impacts is much wider.

'Covid-19 can attack every part of the body, from clotting to the heart and brain. There have even been cases of young children with multi-system inflammatory condition.'

Professor Esterman said it was 'very likely' people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome got it as an immune system response to a previous viral infection. 'These are the balance of risks individuals have to bear in mind.'

He pointed out that with six million reported deaths worldwide and 5,590 in Australia attributed to Covid-19, it was one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

Professor Esterman also issued a warning that the pandemic is 'not over' and it's been 'sheer luck' that we are not in the middle of a wave that is both more infectious and deadlier.

'It is true that pandemics become less infectious over time, but that happens over 100 years, not one year,' he said.

He described it as 'the toss of a coin' as to whether the next variant causes more severe illness. 'While it's true to say it's the beginning of the end, it's not the end yet,' he said.

Professor Esterman is an advocate of introducing a fourth dose for people at risk, who could include people with HIV/AIDs, kidney problems, diabetes, obesity and different cancers.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10613353/Covid-Omicron-BA-2-variant-sweeping-Australia-SIX-times-contagious-Wuhan-virus.html

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Top doctor has rubbished Pfizer's promotion of fourth Covid jab

A leading Australian doctor has slammed Pfizer's call for a fourth Covid jab, saying the company should use its staggering profits to provide vaccines for developing countries.

Dr Nick Coatsworth, who fronted the Government's vaccine rollout campaign, said Pfizer should 'stop doing press releases about how we need a fourth dose' and tackle other more pressing issues.

'How about you really surprise us and provide pneumococcal vaccine at cost to low income nations. Be like Astra,' the former deputy chief medical officer tweeted on Tuesday.

Pfizer raked in a record $US37billion in revenue from its Covid vaccine in 2021 making it one of the most lucrative products ever.

The United States based drug-maker's overall revenue doubled to $81.3billion and is forecasting a even bigger 2022, which will also see the release of its Covid pill Paxlovid.

'The CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, has come out on two occasions talking about how we need a fourth dose of the Covid vaccine, the CEO of Moderna has done it as well,' he told Dr Coatsworth told news.com.

'It’s a problem because you don’t listen to the person who’s responsible for shareholder profits if they tell you to take a drug.'

In stark contrast, vaccine competitor AstraZeneca announced early on in 2020 it would not seek to profit from a Covid vaccine while the pandemic was in effect, only recently moving to a profit-based model.

Covid vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and other manufacturers have saved millions of lives worldwide with Pfizer's CEO claiming the outlook of the company had shifted.

'We are proud to say we have delivered both the first FDA-authorised vaccine against Covid-19 (with our partner, BioNTech) and the first FDA-authorised oral treatment for Covid-19,' Albert Boula said earlier this year.

'These successes have not only made a positive difference in the world, but I believe they have fundamentally changed Pfizer and its culture for ever.'

And yet the company has been criticised for keeping a tight grip on the recipe for its Covid vaccines and not supplying them at reduced cost to developing countries.

'Pfizer is now richer than most countries; it has made more than enough money from this crisis. It's time to suspend intellectual property and break vaccine monopolies,' Tim Bierley, from Global Justice Now told The Guardian last month.

Dr Coatsworth said Covid vaccines weren't the only ones that the pharma giant could provide to needy nations.

'[Pfizer's CEO] has on two occasions talked about how we need a fourth dose, the CEO of Moderna has done it as well... You don't listen to the person who's responsible for shareholder profits if they tell you to take a drug,' Dr Coatsworth said.

He said given Pfizer's massive revenue it could be a 'good corporate citizen' and subsidised its vaccines for low income countries.

'They don't do that and haven't done it for 20 years... It would be a simple and effective action... Pneumococcal disease is a bigger problem than Covid,' he said.

Pneumococcal disease is caused by any infection from Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria, which can cause pneumonia, meningitis, and blood infection.

The World Health Organization estimates 300,000 children under five die from the infection each year - mostly in poor countries - despite a vaccine being developed 20 years ago.

Dr Coatsworth said Pfizer could easily save lives by using some of its Covid profits to subsidise the vaccine for this disease in those countries - where its cost of up to $21 a dose can make it unaffordable.

Competitor Moderna said on Monday it would set up a manufacturing facility in Kenya, its first in Africa, to produce messenger mRNA vaccines.

The company said it expects to invest about $500million in the Kenyan facility and supply as many as 500 million doses to the continent each year.

Moderna's COVID vaccine brought in $17.7 billion in sales in 2021 and has been cleared for use in over 70 countries.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10614861/Dr-Nick-Coatsworth-rubbishes-claims-need-FOURTH-Covid-vaccine-slams-Pfizer.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Another nation has suspended their covid vaccine mandate!

While the Biden regime is still on track with its authoritarian mandates. More and more countries around the world are beginning to ease or suspend the COVID-19 related mandates.

On Wednesday, the Austrian government announced that it will suspend its mandate for all adults to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

This is after new findings were published that the vaccines were not effective against the Omicron variant. Health Minister Johannes Rauch said the decision would be reviewed again in three months and could be reintroduced if a new variant made it necessary.

It was last month when this authoritarian legislation was introduced to the public and become in early February. Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen imposed new Covid restrictions that require all adults in the country to be fully vaccinated and boosted or risk being fined.

The said law will go into effect beginning March 15th which was initially planned to run through January 31st, 2024.

However, everything changed on Wednesday, Karoline Edtstadtler, Austria’s constitutional minister said, “we will suspend the vaccination mandate, in accordance with proportionality.”

http://2020conservative.com/another-nation-has-suspended-their-covid-vaccine-mandate/

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While masks are off everywhere else, biden is forcing airplanes to keep them on!

The Biden regime will extend the federal mask mandate for all transportation networks through April 18, one month after it is set to expire.

Now, Joe Biden and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) faced criticism on Thursday for extending a mask mandate on public transpiration as COVID-19 cases continue to decline.

Florida Republican Representative Carlos A. Gimenez wrote on Twitter:

“What’s the science behind the FAA extending the mask mandate on planes? Biden keeps pushing the deadline over and over and over again. States and local communities have been rolling back these useless mandates for months. It’s time Biden do the same.”

More details of this report from CNN:

The Transportation Security Administration is set to extend the federal public transportation mask mandate for another 30 days, an administration official told CNN, pointing to guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The mandate is one of the last remaining broad requirements that Americans wear masks in public places. It applies to mass transportation including planes, trains, buses and hubs like airports.

The official’s comments came after CNN reported that federal officials began notifying stakeholders in the airline industry of the upcoming announcement. Three sources, including two industry officials and a government official, described the conversations to CNN on the condition of anonymity.

The requirement, which now extends to April 18, was previously set to expire a week from Friday, and the policy will be reviewed over the next month, the official said.

http://2020conservative.com/while-masks-are-off-everywhere-else-biden-is-forcing-airplanes-to-keep-them-on

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The BA.2 subvariant of Ómicron advances in the world

When it was identified, it was described as silent, but experts say that the concept is outdated. Concern over the spike in COVID cases in Asia and Europe
March 15, 2022

The increase in COVID-19 cases caused worldwide by the Ómicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is decreasing, but researchers are keeping an eye on the highly transmissible subvariant known as BA.2.

And while the experts' consensus agrees that it does not seem to have the capacity to drive a large new wave of infections, the variant could potentially slow down the current decline in cases and make treatment more difficult.

In fact, as many countries relax their prevention measures against the disease based on the decline in cases, many believe that this can make it easier for BA.2 to drive a further increase in infections. A March 10 report by British researchers suggests that this may be happening in areas where a rise in new infections is beginning to be reported.

Simultaneously, records from several European countries and China show that infections of COVID-19 escalated again to become a new wave of concern to health authorities.

At first, BA.1 was a thousand times more common than BA.2, since the beginning of 2022, BA.2 began to be found in a greater proportion of new infections (Reuters)

The Ómicron variant and its BA-2 subvariant are responsible for mass contagion. For example, between March 2 and 10, daily coronavirus infections in Germany rose by 19%, in Italy by 17.7% and in Austria by 25.3%. The numbers have grown so much in Germany that they motivated that the country's Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, to openly describe the situation as “critical”.

The Ómicron variant was discovered in November, and it quickly became clear that the viral lineage already existed as three genetically distinct varieties. Each branch of Omicron had its own set of unique mutations. At that time, the most common was BA.1, which spread rapidly around the world. BA.1 was almost entirely responsible for the record increase in cases this winter.

And while BA.1 was initially a thousand times more common than BA.2, since the beginning of 2022, BA.2 began to be found in a greater proportion of new infections, according to The New York Times.

The increase in COVID-19 cases caused worldwide by the Ómicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is decreasing, but researchers are keeping an eye on the highly transmissible subvariant known as BA.2 (3d render)

What is known so far

All versions of Ómicron are highly contagious, so the variant quickly displaced previous forms of the coronavirus, such as Delta. But several studies found that BA.2 is even more transmissible than BA.1.

In Denmark, for example, scientists examined the spread of both subvariants in households, and found that people infected with BA.2 were much more likely to infect people with whom they shared a house than those with BA.1. In England, researchers found that, on average, it took less time for someone with BA.2 to infect another person, which accelerated its spread in communities.

By the beginning of 2022, BA.2 was becoming more common in several countries. By February, it had become dominant worldwide, displacing the once-dominant BA.1. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that BA.2 jumped to 11% in early March from 1% in early February, indicating that it could soon become dominant in this country as well.

But that doesn't mean that Americans are at risk of a new wave of BA.2 that is infecting a lot of new people. As BA.2 became more common in the United States, the total number of new cases fell by approximately 95%. Worldwide, the number of new daily cases had dropped by half what it was at its peak at the end of January.

https://www.infobae.com/en/2022/03/15/the-ba2-subvariant-of-omicron-advances-in-the-world-can-it-become-dominant/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Banned Film Exposes the Real Reason for the COVID Pandemic

Joseph Mercola

Prior to 2020, if you heard the term “lockdown” you might think of something that happens in a prison — not in a free society. This mechanism of control has since become commonplace — not among prisoners but among the free — with repercussions that are only beginning to be understood.

The film "Planet Lockdown" explores this unprecedented time in history, speaking with epidemiologists, scientists, doctors and other experts to uncover the real motives behind the increasing totalitarian control taking over the globe. Already banned by Facebook and YouTube,1 the film starts at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were told lockdowns were necessary to “flatten the curve.”

This was supposed to be a short-term, 15-day event in the U.S., but the narrative soon changed to ongoing restrictions. As Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., a former vice-president and chief scientific adviser of the drug company Pfizer and founder and CEO of the biotech company Ziarco, now owned by Novartis, explained, people have historically quarantined the sick, but quarantining healthy people, as has occurred for the past two years, has no scientific backing or historic precedence.2

“Given this virus represents, at most, a slightly bigger risk to the old and ill than seasonal influenza, and a less risk, a smaller risk, to almost everyone else who’s younger and fit,” Yeadon says, “it was never necessary for us to have done anything. We didn’t need to do anything — lockdowns, masks, testing, vaccines even.”3

The filmmakers of Planet Lockdown are allowing a free viewing of this film (for a limited time). CLICK HERE to learn more about their important mission and see how you can help!

Questionable Practices Urged for COVID-19 Diagnosis

Dr. Scott Jensen, a family doctor and former member of the Minnesota Senate, received an email from the Department of Health that seemed to be coaching him to use COVID-19 as a diagnosis in situations where he wouldn’t have previously used influenza or any other specific viral diagnosis without first testing for it. He said:4

“What struck me right away was I felt like I was being coached to go ahead and use COVID-19 without using the same standards of precision that I would for other things. If I’m going to make a diagnosis, I believe as a physician I have an obligation to use the tools available to me to nail it down with as much certainty as possible.

And it seemed to me that the Department of Health, and the link to this CDC document that said you could diagnose COVID-19 as a cause of death on a death certificate … those two documents, in tandem, went against everything that I had been taught or doing for the last 35 years.”

Even Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Health, is featured in the film stating that even if you died of a clear alternate cause, if you had COVID-19 at the same time, it would still be listed as a COVID death. “Everyone who is listed as a COVID death, doesn’t mean that was the cause of the death,” she says.5

In January 2020, the PCR test for COVID-19 came out, which allowed health officials to define COVID-19 “cases.” If the test was positive, it counted as a case — it didn’t matter if you have symptoms or not. Reiner Fuellmich, global fraud attorney, founder of the Corona Investigative Committee, pointed out, “It’s never, in the history of mankind, in the history of medicine, there’s never been testing of healthy people.”6

Yeadon agrees that mass testing of people with no symptoms has no scientific basis. Rather, he says, “It’s just a way to frighten people.”7 The rising “cases,” based on PCR testing, is what built the crisis. But counting cases was only measuring the activity of testing; the more that testing occurred, the more cases that were found.

‘Fear Everyone’ Became the Message

June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit COVID-19. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the COVID-19 pandemic, made it very clear that people who have COVID-19 without any symptoms “rarely” transmit the disease to others. In a dramatic about-face, WHO then backtracked on the statement just one day later.

In the days that followed, media and health officials ramped up fear by claiming that you could be sickened by virtually anyone, even when they appeared to be healthy. “This idea that … you can be ill even though you have no symptoms and you can be a … virus threat to someone else even though you have no symptoms, that’s also invented in 2020,” Yeadon says.9

Alexandra Henrion-Caude, geneticist, former director of research with the French National Institute of Health, is among those who have noticed something off from the start. “I was very puzzled since the very beginning … I was alert to the fact that what we were living was not quite right.”10

She notes that the notion of asymptomatic spread is terrifying because it turns virtually anyone you meet or encounter on the street into the enemy, because they could be exposing you to SARS-CoV-2. “This is actually terrible because it denies the capacity of a person to be a healthy person. Because if asymptomatic [spread] exists, then who is healthy? No one.”

What’s more, the “proof” of asymptomatic spread is flawed and fraudulent. The New England Journal of Medicine published an article suggesting the transmission of COVID-19 is possible from an asymptomatic carrier in January 2020.11

It was based on a 33-year-old businessman who had met with his business partner from Shanghai, then developed a fever and productive cough. The next evening, he felt better and went back to work January 27.

The writers reported the partner had been “well with no signs or symptoms of infection, but had become ill on her flight back to China, where she tested positive for 2019-nCoV on January 26.” From this case study, they theorized the virus could be transmitted from asymptomatic carriers. An important point was left out, which is that the researchers did not speak with the partner from Shanghai before publication.

However, Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), did speak with the woman on the phone, and she reported she did have symptoms while in Germany.12 So she was not asymptomatic after all.

In a State of Incoherence, People Crave Normalcy

The pandemic has twisted reality, leaving the public in a mental fog. “You’re regularly pledging obedience to things which are not logical,” Catherine Austin-Fitts, assistant secretary, Bush Sr. administration and investment adviser with Solari, Inc., says.13 WHO has changed definitions of herd immunity and pandemic, literally altering reality, and this is just one example.

Censorship and campaigns to discredit those who speak out against the narrative are additional control mechanisms that distort the truth. Bishop Schneider of Kazakhstan says the pandemic measures are very similar to Soviet times where he lived, in that there was only one narrative, and if you said there was another meaning, you were declared an enemy.

“When you had another opinion, they said, ‘You are a conspiracy group. You have a conspiracy theory. You have hate speech. This expression, hate speech, came from the communists.”14 It’s psychological manipulation, based on fear, which makes people act totally irrational. The artificially imposed state of incoherence was even described by Austin-Fitts as a torture tactic, designed to get people to submit to vaccine passports and COVID-19 shots:15

“Human beings crave coherence. And so if you can put them in a state of incoherence they will literally do anything they can to get back to coherence. It’s a typical torture tactic. ‘If you just do what I want, I will allow you to go back to a state of coherence.’ So, if you just accept the [vaccine] passports, you’ll be free. Or if you get the vaccination, you’ll just be free.”

Further, by declaring small businesses as “nonessential” during lockdowns, they get shut down, while Amazon, Walmart and other big box stores can take over their market share. A major transfer of wealth occurred away from small family-owned businesses to very large, publicly owned businesses that benefited from the digital economy. In the meantime, Austin-Fitts explains:16

“The people on Main St. have to keep paying off their credit cards or their mortgage, so they’re in a debt trap and they’re desperate to get cashflow to cover their debts and expenses.

In the meantime, you have the Federal Reserve institute a form of quantitative easing where they’re buying corporate bonds, and the guys who are taking up the market share can basically finance — or their banks can — at 0% to 1%, when everyone on Main St. is paying 16% to 17% to their credit cards, without income.

So basically now you’ve got them over a barrel and you can take away their market share, and generally they can’t afford to do what they say because they’re too busy trying to find money to feed their kids.”

New Control Systems Are Being Engineered

If a few people want to control many, how can you get the sheep into the slaughterhouse without them realizing and resisting? “The perfect thing,” Austin-Fitts says, is invisible enemies, like viruses.17 This ramps up fear so the public believes they need the government to protect them. Another effective tactic is “divide and conquer,” and the media plays an important role in this, dividing people over shots and masks, for instance.

“What COVID-19 is,” Austin-Fitts explains, “is the institution of controls necessary to convert the planet from the democratic process to technocracy. So what we’re watching is a change in control and an engineering of new control systems. So think of this as a coup d’état. It’s much more like a coup d’état than a virus.”18

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a former public health official and member of German parliament, agrees, stating that pandemic responses have “nothing to do with hygiene. It has to do with criminology.”19 The global injection campaign is another form of control, one that’s forcing the public to receive experimental shots.

Many of the experts in the film bring up the Nuremberg Code, which spells out a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation. This set of principles was developed to ensure the medical horrors discovered during the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II would never take place again.

But in the current climate of extreme censorship, people are not being informed about the full risks of the shots — which are only beginning to be uncovered. People are being forced into the shots due to mandates and loss of jobs and personal freedoms, like the ability to travel freely and attend business and social events.

In the End, Truth Will Win

A revolution is occurring, and the experts are hopeful that people will awaken to common sense and resist the totalitarian control that is threatening to take over the globe. Instead, society can be regenerated if people come together and fight back against the encroachment on our liberties.

Civil disobedience, boycotting businesses that are requiring vaccine passports, participating in rallies and fighting illegal mandates in court are ways that everyone can get involved in protecting freedom. “If they want to make us a machine, if they want to make us slaves, we say no,” Wodarg says. “… We don’t need you anymore, we are many … we don’t have to be afraid of any pandemic.”20

https://www.theepochtimes.com/banned-film-exposes-the-real-reason-for-the-covid-pandemic_4333569.html

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Mask Mandates Not Linked to Lower COVID-19 Case Rate or Transmission

Children 6 and older in Catalonia, a region in Spain, were required to wear masks once school reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers compared the incidence of COVID-19 in older children to younger children to try to determine whether the mandates had been effective in the aim of reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in schools. The virus is also known as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

The retrospective study identified a much lower case rate in preschool, where there were no mandates when compared to older groups who were required to wear masks.

Five-year-olds, for instance, had an incidence of 3.1 percent, while 6-year-olds had an incidence of 3.5 percent.

Mask mandates in schools “were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission, suggesting that this intervention was not effective,” researchers wrote in the paper, which was published as a preprint.

“The study shows that there was not a significant decrease in transmission on the courses that were masked (6 to 11 y.o.) when comparing to those that were not (3 to 5),” Clara Prats, one of the authors, told The Epoch Times in an email.

The data analyzed came from Sept. 13, 2021, to Dec. 22, 2021.

Researchers believe that “age-dependency” was the most important factor for the risk of virus transmission in schools. In other words, the older a child gets, the more likely they are to have an adult-like immune response. Adults are more likely than children to contract symptomatic cases of COVID-19, according to previous research. The Spanish researchers also said that because young children are likely to get infected with other coronaviruses, they would have more cross-reactive T cells, a type of cell that protects against COVID-19.

“Age-gradient in SARS-CoV-2 transmission is the key to understanding these results, and this is mainly related to the strong/robust innate immune response at mucosa resp[iratory] cells that younger children have when compared to older kids or adults,” Antoni Soriano-Arandes, another of the authors, told The Epoch Times in an email.

The study adds to a body of research that shows mixed results for masks and mask mandates.

Limitations of the research, which was funded by the Spanish government and other institutions, include not being able to count all asymptomatic cases, which are more likely among younger children.

Dr. Quique Bassat, one of the authors, asserted that the age-gradient means the results showed masks worked well, but Dr. Jonathan Darrow, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who analyzed mask studies in 2021, disagreed.

“This is one more study that fails to provide good evidence that masks substantially reduce transmission, and that suggests that if they do reduce transmission, they don’t reduce it by very much,” Darrow told The Epoch Times in an email. “Of course, it is always possible that in some other context masks might work better (e.g., better masks, better compliance, less facial touching, more frequent replacement of masks, etc).”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mask-mandates-not-linked-to-lower-covid-19-case-rate-or-transmission-study_4327329.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Two years later, coronavirus evolution still surprises experts. Here’s why

Scientists and physicians continue to be amazed by how quickly the virus evolves, what it does to the human body, and how it moves through species.

Raul Andino knows his pathogens. For more than 30 years the University of California, San Francisco researcher has studied RNA viruses, a group that includes the virus that causes COVID-19. And yet he never imagined he’d witness a pandemic of this scale in his lifetime.

“The magnitude of it and the implications of it are still hard to comprehend,” Andino says.

Although experts in his field suspected a pandemic would occur, “it’s hard to know when,” he says. “It’s similar to an earthquake—you know the earthquake will happen, but normally you don’t think about it.”

On March 11, 2020—exactly two years ago—the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. The disease has since infected nearly 500 million people in almost 200 countries and killed more than six million people worldwide, and it’s not over yet.

Along the way, this coronavirus has presented scientists with a bevy of surprises: Many experts are still amazed by how quickly the virus evolves, what it does to the human body, and how it moves in and out of other species.

The original SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly evolved into a string of variants that have hindered a return to pre-pandemic normalcy. Even with the virus’s genetic blueprint in hand and the ability to decode the genomes of new variants within hours, virologists and healthcare professionals struggle to predict how its mutations will alter the virus’s transmissibility and severity.

Millions of people are grappling with symptoms that linger for weeks to several months after they’d been diagnosed with an infection. Scientists are racing to understand the biology of this new and perplexing syndrome called long COVID.

Two years in, there’s still a lot we don’t know about SARS-CoV-2, says David Wohl, an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina. Here’s what scientists have uncovered so far—and the mysteries that continue to tantalize and frustrate coronavirus experts.

Worst-case scenario

Experts had been warning of some kind of looming pandemic for decades. As humans expand settlements into wild areas, they raise the odds of a new pathogen jumping from an animal to a person, giving rise to a deadly zoonotic disease. A study published in Nature showed that emerging infectious diseases originating in wildlife had increased significantly between 1940 and 2004.

But most experts were worried about influenza viruses and would not necessarily have expected a coronavirus to cause such havoc.

That changed with the 2002-04 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, which infected more than 8,000 people in 29 countries and left 774 dead. Then the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak infected more than 2,000 people in 37 countries; that virus has so far killed nearly 900.

Still, people weren’t paying as much attention to coronaviruses compared to the “really bad guys” like influenza, HIV, dengue viruses, Andino says.

Then SARS-CoV-2 arrived with a bang. It was spreading faster than previous coronaviruses, and one reason, scientists suspect, is its ability to move efficiently from one cell to the next. SARS-CoV-2 is also harder to contain because it causes so many asymptomatic cases, people who can then unknowingly spread the virus. “In a way, SARS-CoV-2 has found a way in which it can [rapidly] spread and also cause disease,” Andino says. “It’s the worst-case scenario playing out.”

March of the variants

Adding to the oddities, the SARS-CoV-2 virus acquired genetic mutations much more rapidly than expected.

Coronaviruses usually mutate at lower rates than other RNA viruses, like influenza and HIV. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 accumulate approximately two mutations each month; half to one sixth the rate seen in influenza viruses. That’s because coronaviruses have proofreading proteins that correct errors introduced into the virus’ genetic material as it replicates.

“That’s why we thought [SARS-CoV-2] would not evolve very fast,” says Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge.

But the virus quickly proved Gupta and his colleagues wrong. The emergence of Alpha—the first variant of concern identified in the United Kingdom in November 2020—stunned scientists. It had 23 mutations that set it apart from the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, eight of which were in the spike protein, which is essential for anchoring to human cells and infecting them.

“It became clear that the virus could make these [surprising] evolutionary leaps,” says Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah. With this set of mutations, Alpha was 50 percent more transmissible than the original virus.

The next version, Beta, was first identified in South Africa and was reported as a variant of concern just a month later. It carried eight mutations on the viral spike, some of which helped the virus escape the body’s immune defenses. And when the Gamma variant emerged in January 2021, it had 21 mutations, 10 of which were in the spike protein. Some of these mutations made Gamma highly transmissible and enabled it to reinfect patients who previously had COVID-19.

“It’s surprising to see these variants make pretty significant leaps in transmissibility,” Goldstein says. “I just don’t think we’ve observed a virus do that before, but of course, we have not actually observed any pandemics previously with the amount of genetic sequencing capacity we have now.”

Then came Delta, one of the most dangerous and contagious variants. It was first identified in India and designated a variant of concern in May 2021. By late 2021 this variant dominated in almost every country. Its unique constellation of mutations—13 overall and seven in the spike—made Delta twice as infectious as the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, led to longer lasting infections, and produced 1,000 times more virus in the bodies of infected people.

"It [SARS-CoV-2]’s ability to come up with new solutions and ways to adapt and spread with such ease—it’s incredibly surprising,” Andino says.

However, Omicron, which is two to four times more contagious than Delta, rapidly replaced that variant in many parts of the world. First identified in November 2021, it carries an unusually high number of mutations—more than 50 overall and at least 30 in the spike—some of which help it evade antibodies better than all the earlier virus versions.

“These huge jumps [in mutations] make the pandemic far less predictable,” says Francois Balloux, a computational biologist at the University College London Genetics Institute in the United Kingdom.

Chronic infections

One of the most compelling explanations for the huge leaps in the number of mutations is that that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was able to evolve for long periods of time in the bodies of immunocompromised people.

During the past year, scientists have identified cancer patients and people with advanced HIV disease who were unable to get rid of their COVID-19 infection for months to nearly a year. Their suppressed immune systems enabled the virus to persist, replicate, and mutate for months.

Gupta identified one such mutation (also seen in the Alpha variant) in a sample from a cancer patient who remained infected for 101 days. In an advanced HIV patient in South Africa who was infected for six months, scientists recorded a multitude of mutations that helped the virus escape the body’s immune defenses.

“That the virus is changing its biology this quickly in its evolutionary history is a huge find,” Gupta says. Other viruses like influenza and norovirus also undergo mutation in immunocompromised individuals, but “it is very rare,” Gupta says, and they “infect a narrow range of cells.”

By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 has proven capable of infecting many different areas of the body—creating yet more baffling effects for scientists to untangle.

Not just a respiratory virus

Early in the pandemic medical professionals noticed that the virus wasn’t just causing pneumonia-like illness. Some hospitalized patients also presented heart damage, blood clots, neurologic complications, and kidney and liver defects. Mounting studies within the first few months suggested one reason why.

SARS-CoV-2 uses proteins called ACE2 receptors on the surface of human cells to infect them. But because ACE2 is present in many organs and tissues, the virus was infecting more parts of the body than just the respiratory tract. There were also a few reports of the virus, or parts of it, in blood vessel cells, kidney cells, and small quantities in brain cells.

“I’ve studied a lot of pandemics, and in almost all of them, you look at the brain, you’ll find the virus there,” says Avindra Nath, a neuroimmunologist at the National Institutes of Health. For instance, brain autopsy tissues from 41 hospitalized and dead COVID-19 patients revealed low levels of the virus. But there were also clear signs of damage, including dead neurons and mangled blood vessels.

“That’s the biggest surprise,” Nath says.

It’s likely that the virus triggers the body’s immune system to go into a hyperactive mode called a cytokine storm, which causes inflammation and injury to different organs and tissues. An abnormal immune response can persist even after infection, resulting in lingering symptoms including chronic fatigue, heart palpitations, and brain fog.

“But there are virus reservoirs that can cause chronic inflammation,” says Sonia Villapol, a neuroscientist at the Houston Methodist Research Institute. A recent study that’s not yet been peer-reviewed showed that SARS-CoV-2 genetic material could persist for up to 230 days in the body and brains of COVID-19 patients, even in those who harbored only mild or asymptomatic infections.

Susan Levine is an infectious-disease doctor in New York who specializes in the treatment and diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, which has parallels with long COVID. She now sees 200 patients every week, compared to 60 in pre-pandemic times. Unlike CFS, long COVID “hits you like a ton of bricks,” Levine says. “It’s like a tornado inside your body where you’re going from working 60 hours a week down to being in the bed all day within a week of getting the infection. The action is so compressed.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/two-years-into-the-pandemic-covid-19-still-surprises-experts

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COVID-19 Vaccines May Be Enhancing Disease: Malone

COVID-19 vaccines may be causing enhanced disease because they target an old version of the coronavirus, Dr. Robert Malone says.

“The data are showing that vaccination can actually increase the risk of being infected with the Omicron version of this virus,” Malone told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.

Malone was referring to how in some areas, including Scotland and New Zealand, patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are more likely to have received a COVID-19 vaccine than not.

A recent study, meanwhile, found that one dose of a vaccine boosted protection for people who recovered from COVID-19 but two or three doses seemed to lower protection; the authors said they weren’t sure why this was the case. Another study found higher protection among naturally immune who weren’t vaccinated versus those who were.

Vaccine-associated enhanced diseases (VAED) were identified (pdf) as an “important potential risk” of the COVID-19 vaccines by U.S. drug regulators, as was a similar event known as enhanced respiratory disease following COVID-19 vaccination. Some adverse events recorded following COVID-19 vaccination “could indicate” VAED (pdf), according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) team.

VAED refers to disease “resulting from infection in individuals primed with non-protective immune responses against the respective wild-type viruses,” researchers said last year as they set a case definition for the term. “Given that these enhanced responses are triggered by failed attempts to control the infecting virus, VAED typically presents with symptoms related to the target organ of the infection pathogen,” they added.

“That’s what the data has been showing now for a few months,” Malone, who helped invent the messenger RNA technology that two of the three COVID-19 vaccines cleared for use in the United States is built on, told The Epoch Times.

In a Pfizer document (pdf) released this month, the vaccine manufacturer said there were a potential 138 cases with 317 relevant events of VAED reported from December 2020 to February 2021. Of the 138 cases, 71 were medically significant, 16 required hospitalization, 13 were life-threatening, and there were 38 deaths.

The most frequently reported event out of the 317 potentially relevant events was drug ineffectiveness (135). Other events included COVID-19 pneumonia, diarrhea, respiratory failure, and seizure.

“VAED may present as severe or unusual clinical manifestations of COVID-19,” Pfizer concluded, adding that, “based on the current evidence, VAED/VAERD remains a theoretical risk for the vaccine” and that they will continue to monitor the syndrome.

Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A CDC spokesperson said that the agency, along with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), are monitoring vaccine safety through surveillance systems such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and v-safe.

Monitoring to date “has not established a causal relationship between COVID-19 vaccination and vaccine-associated enhanced disease,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

The CDC says the vaccines are largely safe and effective but also encourages people who experience side effects after getting one of them to report the issues to one of the systems.

The FDA, meanwhile, has not at this time identified an association between enhanced respiratory disease with the three vaccines the agency has cleared, a spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-19-vaccines-may-be-enhancing-disease-malone_4327001.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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