Has India already beaten the super-infectious new Covid variant?

India may have already beaten the Arcturus wave, according to data that destroys fears surrounding the super-infectious Covid variant.

A huge explosion in cases across the country over the past month left hospitals braced for a surge of infected patients. Some of the worst-affected states even brought back mandatory face masks out of precaution. It sparked concerns that Britain could be hit by a similar fate.

Yet India's once-spiralling curve may have petered out before it ever had a chance to overwhelm the nation. Cases now appear to be in decline, experts on the ground have claimed.

Paediatrician Dr Vipin Vashishtha, based in the north of the country, who was one of the first to raise the alarm about Arcturus when he warned it may trigger conjunctivitis in kids, said data suggests the resurgence has already 'peaked'.

Prominent Covid experts today told MailOnline the U-turn in cases was proof that concerns over XBB.1.16, as it is scientifically known, were overblown.

They also insist there's no proof the strain is any more severe than others circulating.

Professor Robert Dingwall, who advised the Government on the virus during the pandemic, also told MailOnline: 'We have to stop jumping at every new Covid variant that comes along unless there is solid evidence that we have poor immunity to it. 'We need to be treating Covid like any other influenza-like illness.'

Despite Covid cases having spiked in recent weeks, hospitals are not yet seeing huge crowds. Most patients in New Delhi — which was the epicenter during previous peaks — are elderly or battling underlying conditions.

Fearing a repeat of last year's carnage, hospitals around India conducted drills to check Covid readiness in the face of spiralling Arcturus figures.

More than 30,000 hospitals across India took part in the Covid mock drill, which involved checking availability of beds, ventilators and oxygen cylinders in the event they were overwhelmed.

In an anticipation of chaos, many provincial governments have made masks mandatory again. That includes in Mumbai, where all patients, visitors and employees at hospitals must don coverings.

Professor Francois Balloux, a vocal Covid commentator throughout the pandemic, from University College London, also told MailOnline he was 'not worried' about the variant.

'I don’t think anyone should be panicking over it, wherever they may live in the world,' he said.

'As long as we’re facing related Omicron variant lineages, replacing each other over time, we should be fine, whatever fancy name they may be given. Summer is coming. 'There’s no ugly variant raising its head and Covid should rank low among peoples’ concerns right now.

'As long as the Omicron lineage predominates - whatever variant - there will be cases, but no big nasty wave.

'If and when, the World Health Organization (WHO) decides that an emerging SARS-CoV-2 lineage should be given a new Greek letter name, things will become more serious.'

He added: 'That said, we’ll never be back to early pandemic ‘square one’, as protection against severe symptoms and deaths, provided by vaccination and prior infections will remain, long-term, whatever variant SARS-CoV-2 may throw at us in the future.'

The strain, which was first identified by the WHO in January, saw cases in India explode 90-fold within weeks.

India was logging over 10,500 Covid cases earlier this week, according to Oxford University-run platform Our World in Data.

This is up from the 160 in late February, when the variant began to gather pace. But as of April 28, this had dropped to 10,100.

Data also suggested Arcturus it made up two thirds of all cases in the country.

Dr Vipin Vashishtha, consultant paediatrician at the Mangla Hospital and Research Centre, and former official at the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, also tweeted: 'Is the peak of Indian Covid surge led by XBB.1.16 Arcturus already over? Yes the data suggests so.'

He added: 'The outbreak probably peaked around week 13/14. Therefore it's slowing down.'

India's drills and masks were a grim reminder of how the country was devastated by the Delta wave in 2021, with a total of 4.7million excess deaths, according to WHO estimates.

The nation's health system was overwhelmed by a surge of cases triggered by that Covid variant, with some hospitals even running out of oxygen.

Nowadays the illness caused by the Covid more closely resembles that of the flu, unlike during the earliest days of the pandemic.

But XBB.1.16 does have three extra mutations on its spike protein, which may help it dodge the body's natural defences.

And doctors on the front line in India have also claimed they've seen a rise in infected children with conjunctivitis, suggesting Arcturus may be causing different symptoms to other variants.

A study published on Friday also revealed the variant has been shown to increase the risk of the eye condition among children under one-year-old.

Led by Dr Vashishtha, the research found young infants were disproportionately affected than older children.

'One interesting finding was the presence of itchy, non-purulent conjunctivitis with mucoid discharge and stickiness of eyelids in 42.8 per cent of positive infants,' Dr Vipin, who also sits on the WHO's vaccine safety net, said.

The study of 25 children seen between April 4 and April 16 found the youngest case was a 13-year-old newborn baby.

But none of the children required hospitalisation.

Professor Paul Hunter, an expert in infectious diseases from the University of East Anglia, also told MailOnline today: 'Covid has previously been reported as causing conjunctivitis even back in 2020.

'Also many other respiratory viruses, especially adenoviruses, can cause conjunctivitis so not that surprising. Most cases of viral conjunctivitis are mild and recover of their own.

'The issue is excluding another cause of the conjunctivitis that has to be treated more aggressively.'

He also warned that while infections 'may have peaked in the last few days in India', it remains 'too early to be confident that this a not a temporary glitch'.

He added: 'I prefer more than just three days of falling numbers before I am content it is a trend.

'It is possible that the proportion of infections that are due to XBB.1.16 has also started falling but again it's too early for me to be confident. 'It looks like the percentage is falling but the confidence intervals are very wide.'

Scientists at the University of Tokyo comparing the Kraken and Arcturus sub-variants have suggested that the newer strain spreads about 1.17 to 1.27 times more efficiently than its relative.

They warned it 'will spread worldwide in the near future' aided by the fact that it seems 'robustly resistant' to antibodies lingering in the body from previous Covid infections.

In a briefing on April 20, the WHO confirmed XBB.1.16 'may spread globally and contribute to an increase' in cases.

The strain, while identified in January, has been monitored by the WHO since the end of March.

It has now been seen in 42 countries, including the US, Singapore, Australia, and Canada.

Other Omicron sub-variants include Kraken (XBB.1.5) and Orthrus (CH.1.1).

Currently Kraken remains dominant in the UK, causing 44 per cent of all cases, while Omicron accounts for 8 per cent.

Like similar new Covid variants, virus trackers online decided to call XBB.1.16 'Arcturus' following a pattern of naming new strains after mythological entities.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12007467/Has-India-beaten-super-infectious-new-Covid-variant.html

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Judge Rules Chicago Must Reinstate Employees Fired Over Vaccine Mandate, Rescind Requirement

A state administrative law judge ruled on Wednesday that Chicago must reinstate city employees who were fired for refusing to comply with Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and rescind the requirement.

The decision came in a case before the Illinois Labor Relations Board, involving over 20 unions representing city employees, which filed an unfair labor practices charge with the state panel after Lightfoot imposed the policy in the fall of 2021.

A separate but similar case involving the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Lodge 7, the city’s largest police union, remains pending.

In a 78-page decision in combined cases brought by the Coalition of Unionized Public Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, Administrative Law Judge Anna Hamburg-Gal found that although the city had the right to implement a vaccine requirement for its employees, it was obligated to negotiate with the union over the effects of that policy.

The judge ruled that the city should have negotiated with the unions over the consequences of the policy, such as placing non-compliant employees on “no-pay status” and later terminating their employment.

Hamburg-Gal wrote that docking pay “is not an inevitable consequence of the vaccine mandate or reporting requirement because no-pay status is not the sole means by which the (city) could have enforced its policy.”

The city also unilaterally changed the status quo in August 2021 when it began terminating employees who had not complied with the policy, choosing “to pursue a far harsher approach than it had taken before against violators of its vaccination policy.”

The judge ordered the city to reinstate the affected employees, with their personnel records expunged, and to compensate workers for any lost pay or benefits that resulted, with 7% interest.

The unions should be allowed to negotiate to keep any parts of the policy they like, the judge said.

A spokesperson for AFSCME Council 31 applauded the ruling as a “strong decision (that) will bolster workers’ rights going forward.”

Anders Lindall, AFSCME spokesman, stated, “The ruling affirms that when an employer contemplates significant changes to terms of employment, it has a duty to bargain in good faith with the union. In this case, the city did not do that.”

This deadline falls just days after Lori Lightfoot will leave office and far left Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson will take over.

While the FOP’s matter is still pending and tied up in court, the police union’s president, John Catanzara, celebrated the decision as “a great day for labor in Chicago and the state of Illinois.”

https://thefederalistpapers.org/opinion/judge-rules-chicago-must-reinstate-employees-fired-vaccine-mandate-rescind-requirement

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Ringing in the ears after Covid shot

Thousands of Covid vaccine recipients have reported persistent ringing in their ears after getting the shots and scientists are still investigating the connection.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains that data does not support a link between the vaccines and the condition known as tinnitus, but the problem has become persistent and widespread enough to merit more attention.

Over 16,000 vaccine takers in the US have reported some form of tinnitus after getting the shots, while a Facebook support group called ‘Tinnitus and Hearing Loss/Impairment after COVID vaccination’ has gained 4,000 members.

The risk would be tiny even if there is a connection, given that 675million vaccine doses have been administered in the US, according to the CDC.

Dr Shaowen Bao, a neurophysiologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson’s College of Medicine and a longtime tinnitus sufferer, set out to investigate the association by sampling nearly 400 members of the Facebook tinnitus group.

While on the surface the complaints of ringing in the ears may sound like anti-vaccine propaganda, the Facebook from which Dr Bao gleaned his sample maintains that it is ‘pro-vaccine’ and does not parrot anti-vax sentiments such as claims that the shots cause deafness.

Many of the sufferers reported other symptoms, including dizziness and vertigo after their shots.

This, Dr Bao said, suggests ‘that the vaccine is interacting with pre-existing risk factors for tinnitus. If you have the risk factor, you will probably get it from the first dose.’

Tinnitus after vaccination, most often the first shot, could be caused by inflammation around the brain or spinal cord, Dr Bao said.

Dr Bao has said: ‘Vaccination is an immune response; it could cause inflammation - peripheral inflammation - and peripheral inflammation could affect the brain where the tinnitus is initiated.

Tinnitus is a common condition affecting as many as 25 percent of American adults.

Is Covid to blame for this crackling noise in my ears?

Viruses (including Covid-19) can cause tinnitus — usually as a result of inflammation which damages nerves that carry hearing information to the brain. A study last year found 20 per cent of those affected by Covid developed tinnitus.

Patients report a phantom noise in the ear that can be mild as well as extremely disruptive to daily life.

It can sound like persistent ringing, hissing, roaring, or screeching at low or high volumes.

Dr Bao found that in many cases, the tinnitus was severe, including one man who experienced such persistent ringing that he could no longer hear his radio.

The study, which has not been published, is one of just a few studies looking into the link between vaccinations and tinnitus.

A 2022 study published in the journal Laryngoscope found that the risk of developing tinnitus after the first dose of the Covid vaccine was low - and in fact, the risk was higher after receiving other vaccines such as the flu shot. But just because the risk is low does not mean it is zero.

Dr Gregory Poland, founder and director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minnesota has detailed his ordeal with tinnitus after getting his Covid vaccines, telling NBC News last year that he thought the sudden noise ‘was a dog whistle going off right next to me.’

A lack of CDC-sanctioned research into the little-understood after effect of vaccination has frustrated sufferers like Dr Poland, who said the leading health agency is ‘unconcerned’ about the reports.

The true total number of people with tinnitus linked to a Covid vaccine is murky at best. In addition to the 4,000-person Facebook group, the CDC’s voluntary reporting database shows at least 16,000 entries of people who experienced tinnitus at some point after getting the shot.

Times of onset vary, with some sufferers saying the ringing came on 36 hours after vaccination while others said about a month.

Some sufferers saw tinnitus come on after their second shots, but most after their first.

The effect may also be a product of long-covid, or the lingering symptoms even after recovering from the disease. The most commonly reported among them include fatigue and brain fog, but researchers at Yale University have begun enrolling participants in a study of long covid symptoms that includes tinnitus.

Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale University and clinical long Covid researcher, said the tinnitus could be caused by internal vibrations in the ear.

Researchers have not pinpointed a cause for tinnitus generally, though various theories exist. A team at Stanford University’s Medicine Molecular Neurotology Laboratory suggested that forms of tinnitus reflect some damage in the inner ear.

Dr Konstantina Stankovic, an inner ear expert and head and neck surgeon at Stanford said the brain tries to compensate for the damage in the inner ear ‘and starts to make sound of its own.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12008049/Covid-vaccines-tinnitus-know-far.html

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One final question for Australia's medical regualtors: Will your credibility be restored or slide further?

On 25 July 2021, Scott Morrison said the government will buy another 85 million Pfizer booster doses in 2022 and 2023. That’s more than three boosters for every Australian or more than four for every adult, after their initial two-dose vaccination. Thus the government was already aware of the vaccine’s waning effectiveness against the existing strain and its likely ineffectiveness against new variants. This of course is also the understanding about annual flu vaccines: they are reformulated every year because the pathogen is unstable and keeps mutating, which in turn rules out an eradication strategy. This is why we learnt long ago to live with the flu, focus public health efforts on protecting the most vulnerable through annual vaccines and leave the rest of society to carry on with the normal routine of life. Meanwhile, the ‘safe and effective’ messaging on Covid vaccines looks increasingly suspect. Confidence has diminished in health authorities, parliaments, medical establishments and media for their manifold failures to interrogate the official claims and report on the rising toll of vaccine injuries. As from last month, the AstraZeneca vaccine is no longer available in Australia owing to the ‘rare but serious side effect’ thrombosis. On 31 March, the ABS reported there were 25,235 (15.3 per cent) excess deaths in Australia in 2022. Yet the government and opposition MPs rejected a motion from Senator Ralph Babet to hold an inquiry into this concerning phenomenon. Meanwhile from 1 April Switzerland has withdrawn all vaccine recommendations. Doctors can administer Covid vaccines only in individual cases under specified conditions and bear the risk of liability themselves.

Even if Covid had proven to be as deadly as the Spanish flu and the vaccines 90 per cent effective, coercion and mandates would still have been unethical. Revelations that authorities knew this to be false in early 2021, means there was little medical justification either. This makes the public policy scientifically perverse and ethically immoral. Social media Big Tech made it worse by actively censoring, shadow-banning, downgrading and slapping labels from self-identifying fact-checkers better described as misinformers and disinformers. (India has gone one logical step better. The government will create a fact-check body for regulating online content. Opposition parties have denounced the move as censorship and accused the ruling party of being the biggest purveyor of fake news.) On the one hand, Big Pharma and public regulators meant to oversee them colluded to hide and delay important information. On the other, they ferociously attacked independent researchers who tried various forensic techniques to ‘mine’ the relevant data and offer a counter-narrative, with the goal of discrediting and demonising anyone with the temerity to question the official ‘truth’. The Censorship-Industrial Complex was weaponised into a powerful tool of state power in an evolving system of governance that is a threat to the very survival of free society. I am not impugning doctors and researchers who put their faith in the underlying integrity of the regulatory agencies and medical establishments, even if that faith turned out to have been misplaced and abused. I too feel betrayed by the WHO and disillusioned with its patchy performance, to put it kindly.

On 5 April Maryanne Demasi published an article on Substack, republished by Children’s Health Defense, that the triumphalist 95-per-cent-efficacy narrative of the Pfizer vaccine, which would give us all an exit ramp from the coronavirus pandemic with universal vaccination, had already gone off script by June 2021. Some highly vaccinated countries like Israel were experiencing a fresh wave of infections that was fuelling vaccine hesitancy and slowing take-up. By July Israel was reporting effectiveness of 64 per cent and in August only 39 per cent. Regulatory filings show that Pfizer and the FDA had evidence already in April 2021 on waning effectiveness. This was not publicly disclosed until much later. The press release from Pfizer on 1 April 2021 announcing results of its six-month Phase 3 trial repeated claims of 91.3 per cent efficacy against the Covid disease and up to 100 per cent effectiveness against severe disease. The top authorities continued to downplay the lack of evidence to demonstrate vaccine effectiveness against viral transmission and long-term protection. While acknowledging the possibility of breakthrough infections, Anthony Fauci said on national TV on 16 May 2021, ‘When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community… you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere’. The official report from Public Health Ontario in March shows Covid hospitalisations and deaths in 2022 were 31 and 39 per cent higher respectively than in 2021, despite 76 per cent of Ontarians being double-vaccinated.

Neither the pharmaceutical industry nor public health agencies are releasing all the data nor undertaking the important safety studies and acting on safety signals in a timely fashion to restore trust in their good faith, competence and integrity. Independent researchers are still having to do medical detective work instead. With widely varying and contested definitions and measurements of Covid and vaccine-related deaths, they look instead for clues in all-cause excess deaths. In February, Norwegian scientists published a study which found vaccination rollouts across 31 countries in 2021 were associated with rising all-cause mortality in the first nine months of 2022. A March analysis from the Vaccine Damage Project concluded there were 310,000 vaccine-related US excess deaths in 2021 to 2022 inclusive. Professor Norman Fenton calculates the number of deaths caused directly by vaccines until 23 March 2023 to be 120,000 in the US and 16,000 in the UK. Dr. Ros Jones, a retired consultant paediatrician, examined the lagged temporal correlations in several European countries between vaccine uptakes and falling births nine months later. On 28 March WHO experts published a revised roadmap which prioritises vaccines for the elderly and people with comorbidities, relegates healthy children and adolescents down to low priority because of their low disease burden and recognises natural immunity from prior infections.

In a sign they might be awakening to the risk of cross-vaccine hesitancy because of disillusionment with Covid vaccines, the guidance acknowledges: ‘The public health impact of vaccinating healthy children and adolescents is comparatively much lower than the established benefits of traditional essential vaccines for children’.

My final question is to the public health clerisy. If you become transparent on efficacy, investigate safety signals urgently and fully and publish the findings honestly, in the long run will your credibility worsen or will you begin to regain public trust and confidence?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/one-final-question-for-regualtors/

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Not with a bang but a lawsuit: Is this the way the Covid vaccines end?

Dr Barry Schultz was a highly respected paediatrician, surgeon and obstetrician in Adelaide. He was also a Covid vaccine skeptic. He was not opposed to conventional vaccines. He had immunised thousands of children and was fully vaccinated. He was concerned about the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines, so much so that when he was sent the paperwork to become eligible to administer the novel gene-based injections which were only provisionally approved he knew that if anything went wrong he was the one who could be sued. So he wrote on the back of the form ‘get stuffed’ and told his staff to send it back.

Nonetheless, he had to be vaccinated to be able to be able to treat his patients in hospitals. So on 2 October 2021 he had his first Pfizer jab. Within three days he had blood in his urine. He also suffered nose bleeds. Both are adverse events associated with Covid vaccination. He booked to see a specialist but continued to work 80 hours a week. He never got to that appointment. Two weeks after his first jab he woke at 2:30am on Tuesday 19 October haemorrhaging internally, including in his brain, and vomiting blood profusely. He was taken immediately to hospital where he was eventually pronounced dead.

It is well established in Covid medical literature that it is the spike protein – found in both vaccines and the virus – that damages blood vessels causing haemorrhaging. Given that his death occurred less than three weeks after the jab, the vaccine should be suspected of having contributed to his death. Yet his widow, a registered nurse, had to battle for over a year before the Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Agency finally agreed to submit a report to the TGA which listed the Pfizer vaccine as being suspected of contributing to his death.

This week, his brother Phil was one of over 500 people who have joined a class action lawsuit filed in the federal court of Australia by Brisbane lawyer Natalie Strijland. All have suffered serious or life-threatening events or are the relatives of those who have died following Covid vaccination. Many have have been left with significant disabilities. As the news filters out about the class action, the first of its kind in Australia, more people are joining each day. Dr Melissa McCann, who instigated the action, is crowdfunding to assist with legal and travel costs. Any compensation awarded will be shared entirely by the injured and the bereaved.

The applicants will argue that the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) did not fulfil its duty to properly regulate the vaccines which resulted in considerable harm to Australians. The respondents are the Australian government, the Department of Health and Aged Care Secretary Dr Brendan Murphy, who announced in early April that he will retire in July, and the former head of the TGA Adjunct Professor John Skerritt who just retired from the public service in mid-April.

So far there have been 986 deaths and over 138,000 adverse events that have been reported to the TGA following Covid vaccines. That dwarfs the reports of death for all flu vaccines since records began in 1971 – only 28 deaths and 3,924 adverse events. Even so, the Covid vaccine reports are almost certainly an understatement. A Harvard study commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 showed that reports to the regulator of vaccine injuries may represent only one per cent of those who are injured.

Yet despite the mounting claims of deaths and injuries the TGA insists that only 14 deaths are ‘likely to be related to vaccination’ – 13 following an AstraZeneca (AZ) jab and one following Moderna.

AZ’s vaccine was quietly withdrawn from Australia on 21 March but the TGA maintains this has nothing to do with safety even though it is suspected of contributing to the deaths of 484 Australians – 100 aged 18 to 64, 342 aged 65 and above, and 42 Australians whose age is apparently unknown.

So why has the AZ vaccine been withdrawn? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the pharma giant is being sued in the UK by a group representing the vaccine injured and dead which includes the husband of popular BBC North radio broadcaster Lisa Shaw? She was only 44 when she died a week after her AZ jab of vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, an acknowledged sometimes deadly side effect.

What about Pfizer? It seems highly unlikely that not a single death has been caused by its vaccines in Australia when smaller countries such as New Zealand and Singapore acknowledge that it has caused deaths. There have been over 5,300 reports of myocarditis and/or pericarditis in people following Covid vaccination, both of which can be caused by Covid vaccines. In 23 cases the person died and in 16 of those cases it was following a Pfizer vaccine. These were not elderly people. In seven cases the person was aged between 18 and 64, in six cases they were aged 65 and above and in three cases the age was unknown.

How is it possible not to know someone’s age when they die when the TGA claims it is ‘carefully monitoring and reviewing reports of myocarditis and pericarditis’ and ‘closely reviews all deaths reported in the days and weeks after Covid-19 vaccination’? These facts should be easy to establish. The name, age and type of vaccine administered are recorded on the Australian Immunisation Register for every vaccination in Australia and the age of death is recorded on every death certificate. Yet in 28 deaths the TGA has not identified the type of vaccine and in 92 deaths the TGA says that it doesn’t know the age of the person.

What is surprising is not that the TGA has withdrawn the AZ vaccine but that it is still recommending all other Covid vaccines to anyone aged 5 years or older. Denmark, Sweden and Norway stopped recommending the vaccine for children and healthy adults at different points in 2022. Even the World Health Organisation urged countries this April to treat vaccinating healthy children and adolescents as a ‘low priority’. Switzerland, the global headquarters for many pharmaceutical companies, has said that at present it no longer recommends Covid vaccinations for anyone. Doctors may still administer the jabs but will bear the risk of liability. Is this the way the Covid vaccines will end, not with a bang but a lawsuit?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/not-with-a-bang-but-a-lawsuit/

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More on the Class action lawsuit over Covid vaccine injuries 'There has been a cover-up'

A landmark Covid-19 vaccine injury class action lawsuit has been filed against the Australian government and the medicines regulator.

The nation-wide suit, which reportedly has 500 members including three named applicants, seeks redress for those allegedly left injured or bereaved by the Covid-19 vaccines.

One of the applicants who suffered a severe heart condition after getting the Pfizer jab is even claiming there was 'cover-up' during the vaccine rollout which hid the potential risks.

The federal government, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and the Department of Health - in addition to a number of senior public servants - are all named as parties to the class action, which was filed in the New South Wales Federal Court on Wednesday.

The named parties are accused of negligence in their approval and monitoring of Covid-19 vaccines, breach of statutory duty and misfeasance in public office.

The lawsuit was organised by Queensland GP Dr Melissa McCann who raised over $105,000 through crowd funding. 'These injured and bereaved have suffered immense loss, pain and grief,' Dr McCann tweeted.

'Just as heartbreaking has been the gaslighting and silence, which has left them feeling abandoned. We cannot simply 'move on' from covid and leave them behind.'

Dr McCann has been critical of the existing compensation scheme, claiming it was 'not fit for purpose'.

'Many vaccine-injured Australians who cannot access compensation through the Services Australia scheme now find themselves abandoned, with no support,' Dr McCann said.

The size of the compensation claim being sought is not yet clear.

The TGA has been contacted for comment.

The TGA’s latest health safety report, published on 20 April, reveals that adverse risks are extremely low. here were 138,307 total adverse event reports from nearly 66 million vaccine doses administered - a rate of just 0.2 per cent.

'The protective benefits of vaccination far outweigh the potential risks,' the report states.

The medicines regulator has identified a total of 14 reports where the cause of death was linked to vaccination and said there was no new vaccine-related deaths identified since 2022.

'The TGA closely monitors reports of suspected side effects (also known as adverse events) to the COVID-19 vaccines,' it said.

'This is the most intensive safety monitoring ever conducted of any vaccines in Australia.'

But instructing solicitor Natalie Strijland, of Brisbane law firm NR Barbi, said the action would argue the TGA caused considerable harm and damage by failing to regulate the COVID-19 vaccinations properly.

The class action names three applicants, one of whom is 41-year old father-of-two Gareth O'Gradie.

Mr O'Gradie, a teacher from Melbourne, was left with a 20-centimetre scar down his chest after developing severe pericarditis — inflammation of the lining around the heart — following his first Pfizer vaccination in July 2021.

He did not respond to various medications and therapies and in February 2022 doctors performed open heart surgery to remove his the pericardial sac lining his heart.

The TGA said myocarditis and pericarditis were 'usually temporary conditions, with most people getting better within a few days', noting that the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) 'continues to emphasise that the protective benefits of the vaccines far outweigh the rare risk of these side effects'.

But Mr O'Gradie believes there has been 'misinformation about the safety' of the vaccines from the government. 'I think there has been some cover-up,' he told news.com.au.

'There was a lot of, you know, 'We need to not scare the public as part of the vaccine rollout, so let's not publicise these things.' There was a large, intentional withholding of information — that doesn't give people informed consent.'

He claimed that he was 'totally not or never have been anti-vaccine'. 'I'm pro-science, I'm well educated,' he said.

Mr O'Gradie told The Australian that he was worried about the 'anti-vaccine lobby piggybacking' on the class action.

He is joined by two other lead claimants: Antonio Derose, 66, who developed encephalomyelitis (inflammation in the brain and spinal cord) following his AstraZeneca jab and Anthony Rose, 47, who claims severe cognitive impairment and chronic fatigue following his Moderna vaccination.

The existing compensation scheme, which is open to Australians who 'suffer a moderate to severe impact following an adverse reaction to a TGA-approved COVID-19 vaccine', has been heavily criticised for being difficult to access and too narrowly focused.

As of April 12, Services Australia had received 3501 applications and paid 137 claims totalling more than $7.3 million. Another 2263 claims are still in progress, while 405 have been withdrawn and 696 deemed not payable.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12015497/Australian-government-hit-class-action-lawsuit-Covid-vaccines.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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Very weak study in defence of masks

The journal Plos One on Friday slapped an “expression of concern” on the Burnet Institute’s controversial July 2021 paper, which purported to show that mandating masks was the “single most important control measure” that turned around Victoria’s second Covid wave in 2020 “almost overnight”.

In October 2021, experts told news.com.au that the supposed “world-first” study was riddled with basic errors and should never have been published in a major journal, blasting the paper as “crap”, “extremely lightweight” and “very, very low quality”.

The Burnet Institute – an influential public health body that advised the Victorian government on its Covid response – stood by its findings and described the scientists’ comments to news.com.au as “disappointing and unprofessional”.

But Plos One has now acknowledged flaws in the study with a lengthy notice appended to the paper. An expression of concern – one step above a correction but short of a retraction – is used to “alert readers of serious concerns about published work”.

“After publication of this article, readers raised a number of concerns, including about the methodology, the limitations of the study design, and whether the conclusions are fully supported,” Plos One editors wrote in the notice.

“The Plos One editors consulted with two members of the editorial board and a statistical advisor who advised that the study design is associated with a number of weaknesses that are discussed in the article, and which are unavoidable because of ethical issues that would be associated with a randomised controlled trial in the context of a pandemic, but that there were also additional weaknesses.”

For the study, the Burnet Institute looked at photos from The Age newspaper to conclude that mask usage rose from 43 per cent to 97 per cent after the July mandate came into effect.

Medical researcher Dr Kyle Sheldrick told news.com.au in 2021 that it was “hard to think of a worse methodology to answer this question than just looking at which photos are collected by a metropolitan newspaper”.

“I was staggered to see this was published by a major journal,” he said. “If a student came to me and said, I’m going to compare these two sets of photos and draw some conclusion about whether a policy worked, you would send them away to think about it.”

Another researcher, an eminent Australian clinician and scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity, was equally scathing. “I agree, it’s crap,” he said. “It’s extremely lightweight. I think it’s a totally feeble article. It doesn’t have a rigorous methodology and it is weak in its scientific inference.”

Concerns were also raised about other aspects of the paper, including that it singled out the mask mandate as the key reason for the fall in Covid transmission out of all of Victoria’s sweeping lockdown measures.

Plos One’s editors acknowledged the three main issues raised with the paper – the photographic observation of mask usage, self-reported mask wearing survey data, and unmeasured confounding variables such as curfews, movement restrictions and closures.

On the photos, Plos One’s editors noted it was “unclear whether such images are representative of mask usage in the population”.

They also noted the Survey of Covid-19 Responses to Understand Behaviour (SCRUB) sample size was “small and may not be representative of the population”.

In response, the Burnet Institute’s authors indicated that “the sample sizes were not inappropriately small for the purpose, noting that the high-powered interrupted time series study found a highly statistically significant change in the growth rate of the epidemic that coincided with the mask mandate”.

Plos One’s editors also noted that “the study design could not exclude the possibility of contributions from unmeasured confounding variables, including the implementation of a curfew and movement restrictions on 2nd August 2020 and closure of childcare facilities, schools, and non-essential businesses on 5th August 2020”.

“According to the cumulative expert input received by the Plos One editors, the results of the published study contribute to the field of mask evaluation research, provided results are not overinterpreted and limitations are acknowledged,” they wrote.

“The Plos One editors felt that the conclusions, including those that imply causation, a direct correlation between Covid-19 cases and mask mandates, and the ability of masks for controlling epidemics, were not suitably tempered in light of the limitations of the study design. The Plos One editors issue this expression of concern to inform readers about the above considerations regarding study design and interpretation of the results.”

The Burnet Institute has been contacted for comment.

It comes after a major Cochrane Review – considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine – earlier this year assessed 78 high-quality scientific studies, and found “wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference” when comparing masking with non-masking to prevent Covid.

The bombshell findings proved controversial and sparked a war of words between Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library, and the study’s lead author Tom Jefferson.

“Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Soares-Weiser said in a statement in March.

“[The study’s] wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologise. While scientific evidence is never immune to misinterpretation, we take responsibility for not making the wording clearer from the outset.”

Jefferson subsequently hit back at suggestions the apology from Soares-Weiser meant the study had been retracted.

“It was upsetting,” he told journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Cochrane has thrown its own researchers under the bus again. The apology issued by Cochrane is from Soares-Weiser, not from the authors of the review.”

Jefferson claimed Soares-Weiser, in response to media pressure, had “gone outside the normal channels and made decisions without any consultation with the authors of the review”.

“It is unacceptable,” he said. “We are the copyright holders of the review, so we decide what goes in or out of the review. We do not change our reviews on the basis of what the media wants.”

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/human-body/burnet-institute-mask-study-hit-with-expression-of-concern-notice-by-journal-plos-one/news-story/fb467b8bb49c852803c490f6c1e69152

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Face masks may raise risk of stillbirths, testicular dysfunction and cognitive decline due to build-up of carbon dioxide, study warns

Face masks may raise the risk of stillbirths, testicular dysfunction and cognitive decline in children, 'explosive' new research suggests.

A review of dozens of studies on face coverings suggested they can cause mild carbon dioxide poisoning when worn over long periods.

The German academics who carried out the research believe masks create a pocket of dead space between the mouth and mask, which traps the toxic gas.

They say the build-up of CO2 in pregnant women's bodies could cause complications for the unborn fetus. They point out that CO2 also contributes to oxidative stress, which can affect cognition and cause testicular issues in men.

But independent doctors have questioned the conclusions of the study — which never directly looked at health complications and mask use, describing the link as 'unlikely'.

Alluding to the surge in stillbirths during the pandemic, the German researchers said: 'Circumstantial evidence exists that popular mask use may be related to current observations of a significant rise of 28 percent to 33 percent in stillbirths worldwide.'

'[And] reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance of two full standard deviations in scores in children born during the pandemic,' the researchers wrote in the paper, published in the journal Heliyon.

But the study could not conclusively prove that the masks were directly responsible for any of these complications.

Dr Stuart Fischer, an emergency care physician in New York, questioned whether there was a 'toxic buildup' of CO2.

He said: 'I wouldn’t say this happens, because the body adjusts the pH, the acid/base balance very quickly. Respiratory acidosis due to facemasks is unlikely although short-term side effects might affect people with chronic lung disease.'

The German research team gathered data from 43 previously published studies on exposure to CO2, mask-wearing and pregnancy.

They found that after wearing a mask for more than five minutes, CO2 levels in the inhaled air rose to between 1.4 percent and 3.2 percent.

One mask study conducted in Germany, researchers measured the CO2 concentration of air behind surgical masks worn by 15 healthy men. Within 30 minutes, the CO2 concentration rose to roughly 2.8-3.2 percent.

In another study in Italy, scientists measured the air under surgical masks worn in a lab and found a concentration between 0.22 and 0.29 percent within five minutes.

Masks provide breathing resistance and create a dead space that traps CO2, leading to more inhaled and re-breathed CO2, the reviewers said.

The gas makes up around 0.04 percent of all inhaled air, for comparison, and the Department of Agriculture said safe levels should be below 0.5 percent for eight-hour exposure.

The researchers then looked at studies that focused on the effect of similar CO2 levels on animals such as mice and rats.

Mammals such as mice and rats with prolonged exposed to 0.3 percent carbon dioxide gave birth to offspring which had 'irreversible neuron damage', the review found.

In total, the researchers looked at studies dating back from the start of the scientific databases they searched until November 30, 2021.

The main caveat of the research is that the studies looking at the potential toxic effects of carbon dioxide are animal studies - because these experiments would not be ethical in humans.

The researchers also noted that none of the studies in their review looked directly at mask use and miscarriages, infertility and neurodevelopment disorders.

The researchers also noted that the exact effects of toxic levels of CO2 on unborn life is not known in great detail.

Carbon dioxide is known to contribute to oxidative stress, which the researchers suggested would hinder fetal development.

Dr Kevin Bass, cell and molecular biology PhD student, said on Twitter that the new paper was 'explosive'.

But he said: 'We do not have any good evidence in pregnant women... of the long-term effects of mask-wearing and therefore no evidence that these effects occur in women.'

He added: 'All we have are animal studies and a clear indication that changes in CO2 concentrations do occur in mask-wearing women.'

Stillbirths and pregnancy complications rose during the Covid pandemic, and preeclampsia and other pregnancy complications were blamed on the virus.

Factors other than mask-wearing are likely to be at play, such as hospital closures and delayed care.

It comes after three years of fierce debate about the effectiveness of masks.

Mask mandates on transportation systems in America were backed by penalties of up to $3,000 for repeat offenders.

Former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr Anthony Fauci initially advised people not to wear masks, which he later claimed because he was concerned there would not be enough for healthcare workers.

He went on to advise that everyone should wear a mask.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11982039/Face-masks-raise-risk-stillbirths-testicular-issues-cognitive-decline-study-says.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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Dentists: Unexplained Pain, Tooth Loss and Bone Problems May Be Linked to COVID-19 Vaccine

Before business owner and busy mom Alana Parker experienced severe oral pain and facial swelling after receiving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, she had good dental health with never so much as a cavity.

When her symptoms progressed and an ulcer had grown to the point where the bone was protruding, causing her to lose large fragments of her jawbone, Parker knew she was in serious trouble.

“I was begging them to pull my tooth out but there were no signs of it being decayed,” Parker told The Epoch Times, noting she was passed back and forth between a dentist and endodontist trying to determine what was wrong.

It wasn’t until Parker found Alabama orofacial pain and dental sleep medicine specialist Dr. Amy Hartsfield that she felt she was on the road to recovery.

Hartsfield, a private practice dentist in Homewood, Alabama, obtained her specialization from the American Board of Orofacial Pain and the American Board of Dental Sleep Medicine after practicing 14 years of general dentistry.

Parker isn’t the only patient she’s seen with severe facial pain issues. Since the vaccines were rolled out, Hartsfield has seen an exponential increase in patients with head and facial neurovascular and myofascial pain, including headaches, toothaches not caused by the tooth, osteonecrosis of the jaw, sleep issues, tinnitus, and oral and facial autoimmune conditions.

“I’ve seen patients with no previous history of health issues [who] have perfectly healthy teeth and now have pain syndromes associated with these healthy teeth,” she said. These types of injuries affect both the nerves and blood vessels.

Dental Issues and COVID-19

In her research, Hartsfield discovered an array of health issues the COVID-19 vaccine spike protein can cause, many of which are related to immunity and blood microclots.

She also discovered that this is the first time polyethylene glycol (PEG) has been used in a vaccine. The use of PEG has become increasingly controversial since it can cause a number of serious immunological reactions, including anaphylaxis, which can be life-threatening.

The vaccine has been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier, circulate throughout the bloodstream, and has been found in most organs, all with the potential for serious health consequences.

Since the blood supply is important to all areas of the body including the bones, microclots can have a detrimental effect on bone health.

Microclots and Orofacial Bone Loss

There are tiny capillaries that feed the bone, and with microclots occurring in the orofacial area, you’re going to start losing bone density around it, Hartsfield explained.

Cheryl Alverson, 79, came to Hartsfield after having all of her lower teeth extracted due to a massive recurring infection that caused extensive bone loss.

Hartsfield immediately ordered multiple blood tests, including several specifically related to blood clotting. “They showed I had microclots all through my body,” said Alverson.

Hartsfield explained that microclots can interfere with bone healing after extractions. What happened with Alverson typically only occurs in patients who have been on osteoporosis medication or had radiation therapy, neither of which applied to Alverson.

Alverson had received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines and a subsequent booster shot before her issues began, and she had not been infected with the COVID-19 virus prior to seeing Hartsfield.

She had good teeth but spontaneously had pain in her lower left jaw. Shards—pieces of her mandible—broke off out of her gum tissue, she said.

Parker’s case started only a few months after she had received the COVID-19 vaccine. With Parker, there was a “dying off of the bone,” said Hartsfield.

Parker’s bloodwork showed extreme inflammation across multiple body systems—and with four loose teeth and not enough energy to drive a car, Hartsfield built a team around her of five specialists and put her on a protocol of medications and vitamins to support her recovery. (pdf)

Microclots not only interfere with bone health but can affect the nerves, which also rely on capillaries for survival. Without adequate blood supply to the nerves, they too will develop problems, said Hartsfield.

A Surge in Facial Pain

Birmingham, Alabama-based endodontist Dr. John Collier told The Epoch Times he’s seen an “unbelievable amount of increasing facial pain” in the last couple of years.

He refers his patients to Hartsfield if he determines the pain is not caused by the patient’s tooth.

I had a patient with tremendous facial pain, implants, and an implant allergy, said Collier. Hartsfield is the “detective who goes through all the layers of what’s causing this,” he said.

While Collier can’t say whether or not his patients’ conditions were caused by the COVID-19 vaccine, he’s confident that stress from the pandemic and the country’s toxic political environment are contributing factors.

“There’s a lot of clenching and grinding and a lot of muscular pain,” he said.

Likewise, oral surgeon Dr. Doug Denson from Birmingham, Alabama, who has also sent patients with facial pain to Hartsfield, said it’s impossible to say for sure whether it’s COVID or the vaccine causing the symptoms he’s been seeing.

“In my opinion, correlation does not always equal causation … again, there have been some odd symptoms since the pandemic started. It’s just impossible to tell the exact mechanism or cause,” he said.

Still, Denson noted the uptick of unexplainable pain symptoms in a significant portion of the population affected by COVID immediately after the pandemic started, specifically trigeminal neuralgia, which is sudden, severe facial pain.

Hartsfield has also seen an increase in neuropathy of the trigeminal nerve, as well as major issues related to inflammation and cytokine storms.

Increase in Inflammation and Cytokine Storms

Cytokines themselves are small proteins released by cells in the body, including those of the immune system where they coordinate the body’s response to fight infections and trigger inflammation.

Hartsfield isn’t the only practitioner who has noted an escalation in inflammatory abnormalities and cytokine storms since the onset of COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines.

Denson has also seen an increased number of patients of all different ages with inflammation of the tongue and hyper-inflammatory responses, including osteomyelitis, an infection of the jaw that is very difficult to treat because the blood supply to the jaw is not great.

These maladies would typically be seen in older individuals rather than in a younger, healthy population.

Dr. Liz Kivus, a periodontist practicing in Alabama, told The Epoch Times she has also seen a marked increase in inflammatory symptoms such as gingival inflammation, since COVID-19 and the related vaccines.

Kivus further noted an increase in lichen planus, an inflammatory condition of the skin and mucous membranes that often results in an itchy rash that can affect various areas of the body, including the mouth, arms, legs, trunk, nails, and scalp.

We see this when patients’ immune systems are broken down, said Kivus. Patients have even said, “I’m too uncomfortable to brush my teeth and to eat.”

After seeing so many patients with unexplained issues since the pandemic and when COVID vaccines were released, Hartsfield believes it’s important to consider a patient’s vaccination status.

Consideration of Vaccination Status

“I have to screen these people to see if they’ve been vaccinated, when and how many times, and then I see if I can treat them,” said Hartsfield.

Most practitioners are not asking when the patient had COVID or when the patient had their vaccines, she said.

Hartsfield attributed some of her knowledge as coming from highly publicized critical care doctors who were “canceled” during the pandemic, including the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

She also studied the information released by Department of Defense whistleblower Lt. Col. Theresa Long, M.D., MPH, an aerospace medicine doctor and Army Brigade flight surgeon who reported the unusual diagnoses and alarming trends after the introduction of COVID-19 vaccinations.

“When you ask the whole population to have a mandatory vaccine that has more side effects than any other vaccines in history showing in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, you will definitely see injuries,” said Hartsfield.

She noted that some patients and practitioners do not consider whether the patient’s ailments may have resulted from the COVID vaccine, while others come into her office knowing that their health issues directly relate to taking the vaccine.

It is really sad, she said. I just had a 25-year-old man in my office stating he has been gaslit by a number of practitioners when he mentioned his head and ear pressure had started within days of taking the vaccine, said Hartsfield. He was reluctant to tell me he thought his health issues were from the vaccines because other providers made him feel crazy.

Parker, who to this day still has elevated C-reactive protein and some orofacial pain and swelling, attributed her symptoms to a short-circuiting of the immune system and microclots.

“I’ve been chronically ill for nearly a year and unfortunately my two 12-year-old girls have seen me sick over and over—I think that has been alarming for them,” said Parker. “It’s been a journey—I don’t feel that it’s going to kill me but it was touch and go there for a while.”

“I hate that we haven’t been able to openly talk about it because I had the resources and freedom to receive treatment,” said Parker. “I can’t imagine people that do not have the resources to treat it.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/dentists-unexplained-pain-tooth-loss-and-bone-problems-may-be-linked-to-covid-19-vaccine_5201385.html

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RFK Jr. Says Middle Class Was ‘Systematically’ Wiped Out by COVID-19 Lockdowns

Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said COVID-19 lockdowns across the United States decimated the middle class, suggesting that it has yet to recover.

“The strength of a nation comes from a strong economy and a vibrant middle class,” Kennedy told Fox News over the weekend, “and we have wiped out the middle class in the country systematically.”

The 69-year-old, who is a prominent skeptic of vaccines, stated that COVID-19-related policies benefited the elite ruling class at the cost of the middle class. Those lockdowns, he asserted, shifted $4 trillion in wealth from the middle class to a “new aristocracy of billionaires.”

Those lockdowns “created 500 new billionaires,” Kennedy stated. “The Oxfam report, which came out this week, shows that the billionaires that existed at the beginning of the pandemic, the people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Bezos, Bloomberg, etc., increased their wealth by 30 percent during the pandemic. From the lockdowns. And [Bezos’s] Amazon got to shut down all of its competitors.”

And Kennedy, the son of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, stated that he believes that former President Donald Trump initiated those lockdowns.

Kennedy added, “I’m in a better position to run against Donald Trump than any of the Democrats because I can hold him accountable for the worst thing that he did, which was the lockdowns.”

However, Trump, as president, had little authority to issue lockdowns at the state or local level. And in early 2020, Trump said that keeping the United States shut down would “ultimately inflict more harm than it would prevent.” For those remarks and others, mainstream media outlets frequently criticized Trump and essentially blamed his policies for the rise of COVID-19-related deaths that year.

“It’s important for all Americans to recognize that a permanent lockdown is not a viable path forward producing the result that you want or certainly not a viable path forward,” the president said in April 2020, about two months after the first COVID-19 cases were detected inside the United States after spreading from mainland China.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/rfk-jr-says-middle-class-was-systematically-wiped-out-by-covid-19-lockdowns_5215413.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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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A growing number of scientists are sounding the alarm about the risks of both COVID and its cures

Those raising evidence-based concerns about the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines are often labeled purveyors of misinformation, and derided as anti-scientific conspiracy theorists and paranoid kooks. Or worse. Bill Kristol tweeted in late 2021 that, “there is blood on the hands in 2021 of the unvaccinated and especially their enablers and encouragers who know better.” However, there are a number of prominent scientists, doctors, and independent researchers who are wary of both COVID infection and the vaccines. Many of these figures are worried about one particular piece of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: the spike protein, which allows the virus to enter your cells, and which was chosen to be the featured element used in the Moderna, Pfizer, J&J, and AstraZeneca vaccines. The available evidence shows that COVID, especially in light of new forms of treatment, is not as acutely deadly as once feared, and while mortality attributable to the COVID vaccines has not been definitively characterized, it is likely relatively rare. But some scientists are concerned by the potential effects of repeated exposure to the spike protein, and therefore the advisability of further boosters that contain it, given that we are going to be frequently reexposed to the circulating virus. Those voicing these concerns, however, have been subjected to censorship, ostracization, and damaging attacks on their reputations.

Take, for example, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. On his DarkHorse podcast on June 21, 2021, Weinstein sat down with mRNA pioneer Dr. Robert Malone (COVID-vaccinated) and Silicon Valley inventor turned COVID investigator Steve Kirsch (COVID-vaccinated) to discuss the potential dangers of the vaccines rapidly being distributed around the country and across the world. The focus? The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which is produced when the mRNA from the vaccines enters your cells.

By June 21, 2021, Weinstein felt there was enough evidence to demonstrate that the spike was “cytotoxic” (toxic to cells) and asked for Malone’s take. Malone not only concurred but said he had already warned the FDA about that potential risk “months and months and months ago.” On June 3, 2021, according to an email provided to Tablet, Malone contacted Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, regarding his concerns about “circulating spike protein, and the associated implications.” Malone said on the podcast that his contacts inside the FDA ultimately felt that his evidence wasn’t strong enough to prove that the spike alone was “biologically active.” Dr. Marks has not responded to Tablet’s requests for comment.

Not one week after Weinstein’s podcast, as the concept of a toxic spike protein spread across the internet, the new fact-checking police leapt into action. Reuters wrote, “Posts are sharing the false statement that the spike protein in COVID-19 vaccines is cytotoxic, suggesting that it kills or damages cells. There is no evidence to support this,” and quoted a couple of experts. The fact check deemed Weinstein’s claim “false,” just as it had once done with the assertion that COVID-19 was likely created in a laboratory. As it turns out, the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is now considered extremely toxic to many human systems—a conclusion reached in paper after paper. Evidence to support this has also been found in tissue samples from deceased COVID patients, and those who were suspected to have died due to complications from vaccination, as well as those with post-vaccination myocarditis.

Every virus, like every organism, is made up of proteins, which are in turn made up of complex chains of amino acids. These are the microstructures of life itself. Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are composed of four main types of proteins: envelope, membrane, nucleocapsid, and spike. The spike protein’s primary role is to help the virus attach to cells, gain entry, and propagate itself. To begin with, the ruthless efficiency of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein makes it an extremely dangerous bit of biology. But also, this spike is itself a pathogen. This assessment is not breaking news; researchers who studied past human coronaviruses, especially SARS, noted that the spike protein can cause inflammation and increase disease severity. In fact, a 2005 study in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal proved that the spike protein of SARS, due to its effects on the now-famous ACE2 receptor, can “cause severe and often lethal lung failure.”

But the SARS-CoV-2 version makes those past spikes look simple by comparison. Dr. Paul Marik, the founder and chief scientific officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, and the second-most-published critical care physician in the world, told Tablet that the only substance he’s aware of as toxic as the SARS-CoV-2 spike is cyanide. “Cyanide kills you quickly, spike kills you over a prolonged period of time. It’s truly astonishing the things it does.” Marik thinks that spike is the primary driver of COVID’s virulence, which he saw firsthand while treating severely ill patients during the first wave of the pandemic. “It is the most vicious disease I have ever seen. People have said this is like the flu, and it’s no big deal. Let me tell you … It is an extremely evil disease. It’s difficult to treat. It responds poorly and it kills people slowly over time.”

Veteran viral pathologist Dr. Gerard Nuovo, a retired professor at Ohio State University and an active researcher of COVID-19, was similarly shocked after looking at tissue samples from people who died from the illness. “I said to myself, I have never seen a fatal viral infection with so much viral protein in the target organ, which as you know is the lung.”

Here are some of the things that the spike protein has been found to have the potential to do. In the cardiovascular system: One segment of spike can signal the cells of blood vessels in the lungs to grow, causing “thickened” vessel walls typical of pulmonary hypertension, a condition that makes it harder for the heart to pump blood into the lungs; that same fragment, S1, can damage the cells which line the inside of every blood vessel in the body including the lungs; can damage the cells in your heart which work in concert with those cells; can cause the heart to become fibrotic; and can, says this 2022 paper, even contribute to the development of myocarditis, an inflammatory condition of the heart muscle which weakens it, and can cause sudden death in recovered patients. The Cleveland Clinic estimates that the survival rate for myocarditis is 80% after one year and 50% after five.

In the blood: Spike can deform our clotting cells—or platelets—sometimes irreversibly activating them; it binds to blood clotting proteins and creates clots that are “structurally abnormal”; it can cause microclots from red blood cells clumping together that deplete blood oxygen levels. David Scheim, an independent researcher who co-authored a study published in December 2022 about those microclots with a team from France’s famed Méditerranée Infection Institute in Marseille, told Tablet that their experiment revealed the red blood cell clumping “is actually visible [to the naked eye], it forms a film so you don’t even need a microscope, you just add the spike to a suspension of red blood cells and you see this clumping.”

In the brain: The S1 fragment of spike has been shown to move straight across the blood brain barrier, the all-important gatekeeper of the brain, in humanized mice. Once it’s in, the spike can damage cells that line the walls of blood vessels in the brain, lead to memory loss, or disrupt the mitochondria of similar brain blood vessel cells, potentially triggering “a more severe form of stroke.” Perhaps more ominously, certain sequences on the S1 portion of the spike are able to bind to amyloid proteins that have been known to cause severe neurological disease. The proteins that spike is able to bind are related to the development of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Creutzfeldt-Jacob, an irreversible, and fatal brain disease. Additionally, the spike itself may be considered an amyloid, a misfolded protein that can grow and form fibrous plaques. Think of the 1958 horror classic The Blob, but at a cellular level.

In short, spike can contribute to cardiovascular damage, brain damage, blood clots, autoimmunity, cell deformation, and cell-to-cell fusion. As Walter Chesnut, an independent researcher, has previously written, “It is a Swiss Army Knife of death.” Chesnut co-authored an article in 2021 with a group of scientists, doctors, and journalists that included Luc Montagnier (who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of HIV) outlining what may tie together all of the spike’s nasty effects. They theorized that spike preys on our DNA, and that repeated exposure will prematurely age us, leading to earlier death by natural causes. “Spike is spike. The more the worse,” Chesnut told Tablet.

The Chesnut and Montagnier et al. hypothesis that spike protein can accelerate biological aging is still novel, and not widely accepted. Professor Masfique Mehedi, a microbiologist and virologist who has studied Ebola at the prestigious Rocky Mountain Laboratories, and whose work shows that COVID spike can enter the nucleus of our cells, told Tablet that their hypothesis may be “premature.” There is, however, mounting evidence that the larger idea that vaccine-induced spike could be harming people is worth taking seriously.

The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is not precisely identical to the spike used in the vaccines, though they are very similar. First of all, at any given point in time, the wild-type spike is mutating (e.g., omicron) with unknown consequences, whereas the vaccine spikes are predetermined. But the design of the vaccine spike was deliberately altered from the original in at least two key ways: to increase stability, and to “lock” the protein in its “prefusion” shape, in the hopes that it would teach our immune system to recognize and neutralize the virus’s spike before it has a chance to bind to our cells.

One argument against the spike protein hypothesis of vaccine injury—meaning the notion that exposure to the spike protein is the main cause of the vaccine’s potentially severe side effects—is that due to the changes locking the spike in its prefusion shape, it can’t cause the damage alleged. However, many of the examples provided above of spike-related pathologies don’t require cell-binding, but rather just require exposure.

Because of how dangerous it is, some believe that it’s a secondary question where the spike is coming from, COVID or the treatments for COVID—all that really matters is that it’s coming into contact with your cells. “The more spike, the greater the risk. So if you have COVID and get vaccinated, you have a greater risk, if you are vaccinated and you get COVID, you have a greater risk,” Marik said. In February 2023, a group of researchers from the University of Colorado seemed to affirm Marik’s contention. After assessing a small group of patients with myocarditis, they concluded: “These observations suggest that myocardial injury during COVID-19 or after mRNA vaccination may be produced by the same Spike protein–based mechanism, which may be amenable to preventative or therapeutic strategies.”

A second argument against the hypothesis is that there simply isn’t enough spike released into the blood after vaccination to cause the kinds of issues we’ve seen in COVID patients. “The low doses of the spike protein in the vaccine, in our experiments anyway, didn’t cause any recognizable damage,” Dr. Nuovo told Tablet. Nonetheless, Nuovo abstained from getting his third vaccine dose because “the initial vaccine data showed that people who didn’t get the booster were still very well protected against severe COVID, and the second point was I didn’t see the point of introducing more spike protein into my body if there was no benefit to be coming from it … because the spike protein per se does have some toxicity associated with it.”

There is another way that the vaccines might be causing harm. Due to FOIA requests from Judicial Watch and others, we now know that the vaccine material travels beyond the upper arm muscle throughout the body, in spite of the CDC’s web page maintaining the 2020 narrative that it stays put. Because the vaccines were designed to express the full-length spike protein in our cells, some researchers like professor Mehedi worry that the vaccines could be inducing a major attack of the immune system against healthy cells throughout the body. “An unfortunate & unimaginable detrimental consequence … face[d] by everyone who took it due to a poor and unacceptable design by the low-grade researchers and opportunistic makers.”

That kind of candor is hard to come by when the price for expressing an idea or trying to test a theory can be the destruction of one’s career and social life, as happened to numerous researchers and scientists, including Marik. For his views on COVID treatment in the ICU, like not wanting to use the highly toxic antiviral drug remdesivir, and probably for his stated viewpoint on the spike protein and vaccines, Marik was suspended from his role as ICU director of Sentara General Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, in late 2021. He resigned from his role as professor at East Virginia Medical School shortly after. Marik says his colleagues no longer talk to him. “Not a single one.”

Yet, the data has a way of piling up, even if many in science, media, and government have avoided acknowledging its implications: By October of last year there had been at least 1,250 studies published in medical journals documenting events as disparate as Bell’s palsy, multiple sclerosis, central venous thrombosis, encephalitis, inflammatory bowel disease, myocarditis, etc. after vaccination. For one awful example, take this recent case report from Tokushima University in Japan documenting the “fatal multi organ inflammation” of a 14-year-old girl after her booster. Then there are the adverse event-monitoring systems, the joint-run CDC/FDA VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) being the most notable. As of March 31, 2023, there have been over 1.5 million adverse events reported in the system, with nearly 200,000 involving hospitalization. While VAERS is a very imperfect system, with some critics claiming massive underreporting and others, overreporting, there is a clear signal that injuries are occurring. German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said in a March 2023 interview that the rate of “serious vaccination damage” may be as high as 1 in 10,000.

Defining the ultimate numbers of how many people are being affected by various side effects is a difficult task, but looking at the original trial data does give some context. Last September, a team of researchers, including two from UCLA, one from Stanford, and one editor of the British Medical Journal, published a study in Vaccine titled, “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults,” which reviewed the Pfizer and Moderna trial data. While the investigators note that their study was hampered by their lack of access to the raw data, which the companies have not made available, they concluded that, “The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes.”

It is too early to say definitively if these vaccine injuries are caused by the spike protein (or the proprietary lipid nanoparticles or the fragmented, low-quality mRNA or something else) but there is certainly enough evidence to consider this as a possibility. And yet the doctors and scientists who have been trying to raise significant questions have been often ignored, bullied, or silenced.

Bret Weinstein’s podcast was demonetized on YouTube. Walter Chesnut was removed from Twitter for half of 2022. A peer-reviewed paper, which concluded that the spike protein can actually damage our DNA’s ability to repair itself—not all that distant from what Chesnut is now proposing—was retracted by the journal Viruses, though the explanation seemed at least as political as purely scientific. Indeed, in working on this piece, Microsoft Word even prevented me from opening the link to Chesnut and Montagnier’s France Soir article about the aging hypothesis, stating in its pop-up warning, “conclusions related to vaccine safety are not validated and lacked experimental support.” The state of California passed a law last year that essentially muzzles doctors from offering a dissenting opinion on the “contemporary scientific consensus” on COVID. Professor Mehedi, who is more concerned about the vaccines turning the immune system against our cells than about spike, told Tablet that doubts he’s raised about the vaccine design and the subsequent potential for damage are simply ignored by his fellow scientists. “Nobody listen[s] to me, even,” he said, adding: “We are not critical thinkers.”

The COVID epoch is still very young. SARS-CoV-2 most likely didn’t exist before 2019; mRNA tech has been in the works for 30 years, but it had never been deployed widely in humans until 2021. The Moderna vaccine was designed in two days, with the company’s CEO, Stepháne Bancel, telling The New York Times, “this is not a complicated virus.” The vaccine’s adverse events, meanwhile, have been studied for only about two years now, and have been downplayed by our public health apparatus and media. There are immunologists who believe that repeated exposure to SARS-CoV-2 could be extremely detrimental to our basic immune function over time, and others who believe the vaccine can cause similar devastation to our defenses, both potentially explaining the reemergence of rare latent viral syndromes and fungal infections now emerging around the world. We don’t know what we don’t know. In fact, we’re just starting to find out.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/the-spike

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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) Also here

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

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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The Smoking Gun in the Senate Report on Covid Origins

Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released its full report, detailing the evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology started working on a vaccine for the virus that causes Covid-19 before the rest of the world had even heard about the virus. In this light, it is not surprising that most Americans agree with the FBI and Livermore Labs: The most likely cause of the Covid-19 pandemic was a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

How Could the Wuhan Lab Research a Covid Vaccine before the Outbreak?

By 2019 the Wuhan Institute of Virology had collected, at a minimum, approximately 20,000 bat- and other animal-virus samples from field expeditions conducted all across China.

After going into caves and other locations to collect the samples and, in some cases, live bats, researchers would take the samples back to Wuhan, where they “routinely underwent initial evaluation in Biosafety Level 2 settings where they were first evaluated, usually by graduate students, for the presence of SARS-related beta coronaviruses. If viruses were present, researchers then attempted to isolate and sequence the virus.”

This information is in the full report on the origin of Covid-19 released yesterday by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The report is 300 pages and has 1,570 footnotes.

The information about the Biosafety Level 2 labs comes from a thesis on the “Geographic Evolution of Bat SARS-related Coronaviruses” submitted to the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences by Yu Ping, a graduate student pursuing a degree of Master of Natural Science in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, supervised by Professor Cui Jie and Professor Shi Zheng-Li, which was published in June 2019. You can read that thesis here. You may recognize the name Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species, the one who told Scientific American early in the pandemic that when she first heard about the virus spreading through Wuhan, she initially wondered, “Could they have come from our lab?”

This is significant because the safety standards at Biosafety Level 2 labs are not as extensive and stringent as those at Biosafety Level 4 labs. Level 2 labs handle bacteria and viruses such as Lyme Disease and the standard flu; Level 3 labs handle more dangerous pathogens such as anthrax and HIV; and Level 4 labs handle the most dangerous viruses, such as Ebola.

Last week, the Washington Post published an excellent report examining the safety record of China’s government-run laboratories overall, not just focusing on the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control. The opening anecdote is terrifying:

In the summer of 2019, a mysterious accident occurred inside a government-run biomedical complex in north-central China, a facility that handles a pathogen notorious for its ability to pass easily from animals to humans.

There were no alarms or flashing lights to alert workers to the defect in a sanitation system that was supposed to kill germs in the vaccine plant’s waste. When the system failed in late July that year, millions of airborne microbes began seeping invisibly from exhaust vents and drifting into nearby neighborhoods. Nearly a month passed before the problem was discovered and fixed, and four months before the public was informed. By then, at least 10,000 people had been exposed, with hundreds developing symptomatic illnesses, scientific studies later concluded.

The events occurred not in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus pandemic began, but in another Chinese city, Lanzhou, 800 miles to the northwest. The leaking pathogens were bacteria that cause brucellosis, a common livestock disease that can lead to chronic illness or even death in humans if not treated. As the pandemic enters its fourth year, new details about the little-known Lanzhou incident offer a revealing glimpse into a much larger — and largely hidden — struggle with biosafety across China in late 2019, at the precise moment when both the brucellosis incident and the coronavirus outbreak were coming to light.

Perhaps the most chilling quote in the article comes from biosecurity expert Robert Hawley, “who for years oversaw safety programs at the U.S. Army’s maximum-containment lab at Fort Detrick, Md.” Hawley told the Post he saw “‘imprudent’ lab practices in inspection reports obtained by a congressional oversight committee.”

“It is very, very apparent that their biological safety training is minimal,” Hawley said.

The closest thing to a smoking gun in the full Senate report is the evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology began working on a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, before almost anyone else in the world had heard of the virus:

November 2019 also appears to be the timeframe that PLA researchers began development of at least two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Professor Zhou Yusen, Director of the 5th Institute at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), worked with the WIV, and possibly at the WIV, episodically, for several years prior to the pandemic. Zhou or AMMS researchers may have been working at the WIV no later than the Fall of 2019 conducting research for a paper that he coauthored with two WIV researchers, Shi Zhengli and Chen Jing, on a known adverse effect of SARS-related vaccines and antibody treatments. There is reason to believe Zhou was engaged in SARS-related coronavirus animal vaccine research with WIV researchers beginning no later than the Summer or early Fall of 2019. Zhou submitted one of the first COVID-19 vaccine patents on February 24, 2020.

The patent includes mouse-derived serological data from vaccine-related experiments which experts, consulted with during this investigation, assess could not have been completed unless Zhou’s team began work on vaccine development before the known outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late December 2019. The research required both access to the sequence of and the live SARS-CoV-2 virus. Several experts assessed that Zhou likely would have had to start this vaccine development research no later than November 2019 to achieve the February patent submission date. Zhou later published transgenic mouse infection and vaccine challenge studies in mice, including humanized mice and non-human primates. The location(s) where Zhou’s animal vaccine challenge studies were performed was not disclosed. There is reason to believe that these vaccine experiments were performed at the original WIV’s downtown Wuhan campus and possibly at the Wuhan University Institute of Animal Models located approximately a mile from the WIV.

PLA AMMS Major General Wei Chen led a second, separate, effort to develop another candidate COVID-19 vaccine. Chen collaborated with the China state-owned biopharmaceutical company SinoPharm. Chen’s vaccine experiments with humanized mice, ferrets and non-human primates occurred at the Harbin veterinary research facility BSL-4 laboratory in northern China.124 Human clinical trials began in mid- March 2020. Chen submitted a patent for her vaccine March 18, 2020 Based on this timeline, experts believe Chen would have had to begin her vaccine efforts no later than early December 2019. Chen’s vaccine candidate was also dependent on the availability of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic sequence that would not be published until January 11, 2020. However, unlike Zhou, there is no evidence that Chen’s vaccine efforts were associated geographically or temporally with the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

This is further evidence that the Chinese government knew it was dealing with a contagious virus and deliberately lied to the rest of world that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” up until January 20, 2020.

This is one of the many maddening aspects of this matter. Even if this all traces back to a natural transmission of someone ordering bat soup or grilled pangolin in a seafood market, or as Jon Stewart memorably characterized it, “Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili,” the Chinese government was still lying when the world needed the truth and lives were at stake. We all had years of our lives taken away from us because the Chinese government refused to acknowledge that there was a contagious virus spreading around their country and the world. In the month of January 2020, more than 1,300 flights from China arrived at 17 U.S. airports, carrying roughly 381,000 passengers.

When did the Covid-19 pandemic start? The Senate HELP committee report indicates that people in Wuhan were starting to notice an abnormal rate of viral infections in October and November:

Eyewitness accounts, media reports, epidemiological modeling and additional academic studies further support October 28 to November 10 as the window of emergence. Diplomats stationed at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan have attested to observations of what they believed at the time to be the early onset of a ‘bad flu’ season. The Deputy Consular Chief recalled: “By mid-October 2019, the dedicated team at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan knew that the city had been struck by what was thought to be an unusually vicious flu season. The disease worsened in November.” These observations were reported to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing during this period.

By one measure, the argument about the lab-leak theory, which has gone on for about three years, is effectively over. Those of us who suspect human error is the cause of one of the world’s greatest modern calamities have persuaded an overwhelming majority of the American public of that.

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in March showed 64 percent of Americans think the pandemic was “caused by a laboratory leak” and just 22 percent believe it was “caused by a natural transmission from animals to humans.” Another poll taken a week earlier by Economist/YouGov showed an even stronger split in favor of a lab leak: 66 percent to 16 percent. If I were a meaner person, I would characterize the zoonotic origin as a fringe theory.

That Senate report also acknowledges the potential for a “zoonotic spillover” — after all, either this virus or its evolutionary precursor had to be in a bat at some point — but points out the frustrating lack of conclusive evidence:

To date, China has not acknowledged the infection or positive serological sample(s) of any susceptible animal prior to the recognized outbreak. Genetic analysis of published SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the early outbreak does not show evidence of genetic adaptation reflecting passage through a susceptible animal species such as a palm civet, raccoon dog or mink. To this end, no intermediate host has been identified.

Despite these facts, three data points do present themselves to support the zoonotic origin theory. First, approximately 33 percent of the earliest known human COVID-19 cases (with symptom onset dates in mid- to late-December 2019) were associated with the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. Second, several animal species susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were sold live and in poor animal welfare conditions at the market. Finally, the identification of genetic sequences of raccoon dogs in samples taken from the market in early 2020 confirm that this susceptible intermediate host was at the market at the time of the outbreak. As noted, “there is no data . . . associating SARS-CoV-2 with the presence of any of these animals.” These data themselves, however, do not explain the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Senate committee report was overseen by the now-retired North Carolina GOP senator Richard Burr. Back in November, the Charlotte Observer editorial board thundered that “Richard Burr, who typically keeps a relatively low profile, seems to be playing games on his way out of office.” The board referred to the lab-leak theory as “a Covid conspiracy,” contending that the interim report “fueled the fire of disinformation that has been blazing since the pandemic began. It also gives the COVID conspiracy theorists a new bone to chew on.”

Because Burr is usually “low profile” and isn’t a bomb-thrower, a frothing-at-the-mouth demagogue, or an unhinged conspiracy theorist, shouldn’t the editorial board sit up and take notice when he is putting his name behind a contention like this?

FBI director Christopher Wray is not a wide-eyed conspiracy theorist. The U.S. Department of Energy, and in particular the Livermore Labs’ “Z Division,” is not full of guys who believe lizard people walk among us and who insist they saw Elvis at their local convenience store. Former CDC director Robert Redfield is not some nut who believes in healing crystals and werewolves.

In the face of the biggest and most consequential mystery in modern history, some of us looked at the remarkable coincidence of a novel coronavirus most like those found in bats emerging near not one but two laboratories doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats — going back to April 3, 2020, I remind you. And in response, we’ve gotten name-calling, sneers, and smears.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-smoking-gun-in-the-senate-report-on-covid-origins/

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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) Also here

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

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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