Dissecting Leftism

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

‘Irrefutable Proof’ That mRNA Vaccines Cause Vascular and Organ Damage: Study

A recent study claims to have found “irrefutable proof of causality” that the mRNA vaccines cause vascular and organ damage.

The study, conducted by microbiologists Dr. Michael Palmer and Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, was mostly based on the findings of German pathologists Dr. Arne Burkhardt and Dr. Walter Lang.

Here is a summary of the findings:

mRNA vaccines don’t stay at the injection site; they instead travel throughout the body and accumulate in various organs.

mRNA-based COVID vaccines induce long-lasting expression of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in many organs.

Vaccine-induced expression of the spike protein induces autoimmune-like inflammation.

Vaccine-induced inflammation can cause grave organ damage, especially in vessels, sometimes with deadly outcomes.

“This study, by the type of dyes they use, shows irrefutable proof that the spike protein goes everywhere—heart, ovary, liver, spleen—and to a lesser extent, testes.” Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, an expert in vaccine damage, told The Epoch Times.

“This is what leads to multi-organ system failure. This is what leads to infertility in women.”

“There has been a lot of hypothesis about the damage these shots cause. Now, with these pathology slides and the specific types of immunochemistry staining, Bhakti and Palmer show—unequivocally—that the spike protein is quickly disseminated to every organ they examined,” Tenpenny said.

“They are both pathologists; looking at slides of tissue under a microscope and appropriately staining tissue is what they are trained to do!” she added.

“Those of us who warned of the dangers of these COVID shots were widely censored and ridiculed,” Dr. Christiane Northrup, former fellow in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told The Epoch Times.

“I wish we had been wrong. We weren’t. And we finally have irrefutable proof,” Northrup added.

According to toxicologist Janci Lindsay, Ph.D., who has been following the COVID vaccine story since its inception, the most valuable takeaway from this study is that it “corroborates” Markus Aldén et al.’s findings (in-vitro) that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may be transcribed into cellular DNA—in an in-vivo system.

In-vitro, which means “in glass” in Latin, refers to when a test or process is done in a test tube or outside a living organism. In-vivo (within the living) means the studies are done in living organisms.

That the vaccine quickly distributes through the body was a finding present in Pfizer’s own animal experiments.

“The subject was deceased but the examination of their tissue showed that they were expressing the spike protein, nine months after the injection of the genetic vaccine,” Lindsay told The Epoch Times.

The only three possible ways that the abovementioned could happen, she explains, are when:

mod-mRNA is stable in the body for nine months.

The mRNA has been integrated into the genome, such as in the Aldén study.

The person was around somebody who was recently vaccinated and the mRNA was transmitted.

The Palmer and Bhakdi study says that the “limited experimental studies available (2015, 2018)” indicate that the injected modified mRNA should degrade “within days to a few weeks of the injection.”

But, “this is obviously difficult to square with the observed long-lasting expression; in some form or other, the genetic information appears to be perpetuated in-vivo,” the study states.

“Their findings of spike expression nine months out from [taking the vaccine] support either genomic integration of the mRNA coding the spike protein into the genome of the cells shown expressing it, or, that the synthetically modified messenger RNA is remaining stable within these cells months after it was supposed to be degraded,” Lindsay said.

“This constitutive expression of the spike protein would exhaust the immune system and/or eventually possibly make it non-responsive or tolerant to the spike protein, allowing for untold spike-mediated damage,” she added.

Method

The methods used by Dr. Burkhardt are called histopathology and immunohistochemistry.

The technique is explained in the study: “If a vaccine particle—composed of the spike-encoding mRNA, coated with lipids—enters a body cell, this will cause the spike protein to be synthesized within the cell and then taken to the cell surface. There, it can be recognized by a spike-specific antibody.”

“After washing the tissue specimen to remove unbound antibody molecules, the bound ones can be detected with a secondary antibody that is coupled with some enzyme, often horseradish peroxidase,” it reads. “After another washing step, the specimen is incubated with a water-soluble precursor dye that is converted by the enzyme to an insoluble brown pigment. Each enzyme molecule can rapidly convert a large number of dye molecules, which greatly amplifies the signal.”

“Histo” comes from the Greek word for “web, tissue.”

“At the top right of the image, you can see two cells which were exposed to the Pfizer vaccine and then subjected to the protocol outlined above. The intense brown stain indicates that the cells were indeed producing the spike protein,” the study reads, referring to image 3.

“The idea that mRNA from COVID-19 vaccines can remain in our bodies in the long term is a common myth with no scientific basis,” the WHO fact-checking branch states.

“mRNA from vaccines is fragile and gets rapidly degraded by cellular machinery once it has delivered the genetic instructions. The spike protein generated by COVID-19 vaccines is thought to remain in the body for up to a few weeks, like other proteins made by the body,” they add.

Blood Vessel Inflammation

The second biggest discovery, Lindsay believes, would be the observation of endothelial damage—inflammation and denuded endothelial cells inside the blood vessels.

Endothelium is the tissue that lines the blood vessels and other organs, such as the heart.

“Spike protein disease is an endothelial disease—very key to myocarditis, etc.,” Dr. Tenpenny said.

Dr. Wade Hamilton, a cardiologist who has been punished by the medical establishment for giving an exemption to a COVID vaccine, commented on the study.

“The first 13 items in and of themselves are major reason for concern and halting the COVID shot use,” Hamilton told The Epoch Times.

“Item 14 (Aldén study), which concerns the possibility that the shot can alter the DNA of recipients and subsequently the DNA of their offspring, is of great concern,” Hamilton said.

“The paper I have sent (comment on Aldén et al.) raises unanswered questions, the three easiest to understand are:

The dose of mRNA used in this study is higher than mRNA in the COVID shot.

The Alden study is in-vitro (not in-vivo) and the normal human immune and chemical protections are not present.

The liver cells used in the experiment are liver cancer cells and their response to reverse transcriptase may not be typical.

“It is possible as queried in the comment on Aldén et al. paper, that persistent pieces of DNA or mRNA in people with COVID lead to persistent circulating spike protein as a cause of long COVID. Furthermore, the same symptoms could be produced via an analogous mechanism by the COVID shot as well,” he added.

Burkhardt and Lang

The Palmer and Bhakdi paper says that Burkhardt and Lang studied many cases of people who died months or days after getting the COVID vaccine.

In all of these cases, the cause of death was documented as “natural” or “unknown.”

Some members of the families of those deceased had doubts about the verdicts of their causes of death and wanted to double-check.

According to the study, Burkhardt found “the majority of these deaths to be due to vaccination.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/irrefutable-proof-that-mrna-vaccine-causes-vascular-and-organ-damage-study_4720949.html

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Covid-19 Is Still Killing Hundreds of Americans Daily

Mark Pfundheller promptly got his first two Covid-19 shots and a booster, his family said, knowing the disease was a threat related to treatment for an inflammatory disorder that compromised his immune system.

The 66-year-old former aviation consultant for Wisconsin’s Transportation Department caught the virus in April at a family wedding near his home in southern Wisconsin, where many guests were infected. Mr. Pfundheller died in a Madison, Wis., hospital on July 2 after an illness including time on a ventilator.

His was one of nearly 200,000 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. this year, according to death-certificate data. While the virus has become less risky for many thanks in part to immunity from vaccines and prior infections, it is still killing hundreds each day. Most are older people, and many have underlying health conditions and compromised immune systems, doctors said.

“I don’t think people realize that this is still a big deal,” Mr. Pfundheller’s daughter Jamie Pfundheller said.

The U.S. has recently averaged about 320 new Covid-19 deaths each day, and the average was above 400 before the Labor Day holiday weekend, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. The rate is far below pandemic peaks, including levels above 2,500 a day during the Omicron wave early this year. But the country hasn’t matched lows closer to 200 a day reached during a lull last year.

Roughly 85% of people who died from Covid-19 through mid-August this summer were 65 or older, a Wall Street Journal analysis of death-certificate data show. The rate is similar to 2020 peaks, before vaccines were available. Deaths trended younger for much of last year.

Covid-19 is on pace to be the third-leading cause of death for the third straight year, said Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Since 2020, it has trailed only heart disease and cancer, significantly reducing life expectancy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-is-still-killing-hundreds-of-americans-daily-11662888600

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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)

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Monday, September 12, 2022

‘Unethical’ and up to 98 Times Worse Than the Disease: Top Scientists Publish Paradigm-Shifting Study About COVID-19 Vaccines

A team of nine experts from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and other top universities has published paradigm-shifting research about the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines and why mandating vaccines for college students is unethical.

This 50-page study, which was published on The Social Science Research Network at the end of August, analyzed CDC and industry-sponsored data on vaccine adverse events, and concluded that mandates for COVID-19 boosters for young people may cause 18 to 98 actual serious adverse events for each COVID-19 infection-related hospitalization theoretically prevented.

The paper is co-authored by Dr. Stefan Baral, an epidemiology professor at Johns Hopkins University; surgeon Martin Adel Makary, M.D., a professor at Johns Hopkins known for his books exposing medical malfeasance, including “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Heath Care”; and Dr. Vinayak Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist, who is a professor in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, as well as the author of over 350 academic and peer-reviewed articles.

But among this team of high-profile international experts who authored this paper, perhaps the most notable is Salmaan Keshavjee, M.D., Ph.D., current Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Global Health Delivery, and professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Keshavjee has also worked extensively with Partners In Health, a Boston-based non-profit co-founded by the late Dr. Paul Farmer, on treating drug-resistant tuberculosis, according to his online biography.

Risking Disenrollment

As the study pointed out, students at universities in America, Canada, and Mexico are being told they must have a third dose of the vaccines against COVID-19 or be disenrolled. Unvaccinated high school students who are just starting college are also being told the COVID-19 vaccines are “mandatory” for attendance.

These mandates are widespread. There are currently 15 states which continue to honor philosophical (personal belief) exemptions, and 44 states and Washington, D.C. allow religious exemptions to vaccines. But even in these states, private universities are telling parents they will not accept state-recognized vaccine exemptions.

Based on personal interviews with some half a dozen families, The Epoch Times has learned that administrators at some colleges and universities are informing students that they have their own university-employed medical teams to scrutinize the medical exemptions submitted by students and signed by private doctors. These doctors, families are being told, will decide whether the health reasons given are medically valid.

5 Ethical Arguments Against Mandated Boosters
Though rarely reported on in the mainstream media, COVID-19 vaccine boosters have been generating a lot of controversy.

While some countries are quietly compensating people for devastating vaccine injuries, and other countries are limiting COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, the United States is now recommending children 12 and older get Pfizer-BioNTech’s Omicron-specific booster, and young adults over the age of 18 get Moderna’s updated shot.

At the same time, public health authorities in Canada are suggesting Canadians will need COVID-19 vaccines every 90 days.

Against a backdrop of confusing and often changing public health recommendations and booster fatigue, the authors of this new paper argue that university booster mandates are unethical. They give five specific reasons for this bold claim:

1) Lack of policymaking transparency. The scientists pointed out that no formal and scientifically rigorous risk-benefit analysis of whether boosters are helpful in preventing severe infections and hospitalizations exists for young adults.

2) Expected harm. A look at the currently available data shows that mandates will result in what the authors call a “net expected harm” to young people. This expected harm will exceed the potential benefit from the boosters.

3) Lack of efficacy. The vaccines have not effectively prevented transmission of COVID-19. Given how poorly they work—the authors call this “modest and transient effectiveness”—the expected harms caused by the boosters likely outweigh any benefits to public health.

4) No recourse for vaccine-injured young adults. Forcing vaccination as a prerequisite to attend college is especially problematic because young people injured by these vaccines will likely not be able to receive compensation for these injuries.

5) Harm to society. Mandates, the authors insisted, ostracize unvaccinated young adults, excluding them from education and university employment opportunities. Coerced vaccination entails “major infringements to free choice of occupation and freedom of association,” the scientists wrote, especially when “mandates are not supported by compelling public health justification.”

The consequences of non-compliance include being unenrolled, losing internet privileges, losing access to the gym and other athletic facilities, and being kicked out of campus housing, among other things. These punitive approaches, according to the authors, have resulted in unnecessary psychosocial stress, reputation damage, loss of income, and fear of being deported, to name just a few.

22,000 to 30,000 Previously Unaffected Young Adults Must be Vaccinated to Prevent Just 1 Hospitalization
The lack of effectiveness of the vaccines is a major concern to these researchers. Based on their analysis of the public data provided to the CDC, they estimated that between 22,000 and 30,000 previously uninfected young adults would need to be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent just a single hospitalization.

However, this estimate does not take into account the protection conferred by a previous infection. So, the authors insisted, “this should be considered a conservative and optimistic assessment of benefit.”

In other words, the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 are essentially useless.

Mandated Booster Shots Cause More Harm Than Good
But the documented lack of efficacy is only part of the problem. The researchers further found that per every one COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in young adults who had not previously been infected with COVID-19, the data show that 18 to 98 “serious adverse events” will be caused by the vaccinations themselves.

These events include up to three times as many booster-associated myocarditis in young men than hospitalizations prevented, and as many as 3,234 cases of other side effects so serious that they interfere with normal daily activities.

At a regional hospital in South Carolina, the desk clerk sported a button that read: “I’m Vaccinated Against COVID-19” with a big black check mark on it.

“What about the boosters?” a hospital visitor asked. “It’s starting to seem like we need too many shots.”

“It does seem like a lot,” the clerk agreed. “It’s hard to know what to do.” But she did have some advice for the visitor: “Just keep reading and educating yourself, so you can make an informed decision.”

This new paper is essential reading for anyone trying to decide if they need more vaccines. The authors concluded their study with a call to action. Policymakers must stop mandates for young adults immediately, be sure that those who have already been injured by these vaccines are compensated for the suffering caused by mandates, and openly conduct and share the results of risk-benefit analyses of the vaccines for various age groups.

These measures are necessary, the authors argued, to “begin what will be a long process of rebuilding trust in public health.”

May the Force Be With Brave Scientists

The two co-first authors, Dr. Kevin Bardosh and Dr. Allison Krug, both thanked their families for supporting them to “publicly debate Covid-19 vaccine mandates” in the acknowledgments section of the paper.

As we wrote in May, an increasing number of scientists and medical doctors are speaking out about the dubious efficacy and disturbing safety issues surrounding theses fast-tracked COVID-19 vaccines. They do so fully aware of the personal and professional risks involved. They deserve our encouragement and support.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/unethical-and-up-to-98-times-worse-than-the-disease-top-scientists-publish-paradigm-shifting-study-about-covid-19-vaccines_4723122.html

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New Zealand Scraps Nearly All COVID-19 Restrictions, Including Mask and Vaccination Mandates

New Zealand will be retiring its COVID-19 traffic light system and significantly scaling down COVID restrictions from Sept. 13 so Kiwis could “move forward with certainty,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced.

“It’s time to safely turn the page on our COVID-19 management and live without the extraordinary measures we have previously used,” Ardern said, calling it a “milestone.”

With the abolishment of the traffic light COVID protection framework, mask mandates will be lifted in all areas except in healthcare and aged care settings.

Household contacts will no longer need to isolate, while people tested positive to COVID-19 will continue to be required to isolate for seven days.

All government vaccine mandates will end on Sept. 26, and all vaccination requirements for incoming travellers and aircrew will also be removed.

After restrictions are lifted, it will be up to the employer’s discretion whether they will require workers to wear masks or get vaccinated for COVID-19.

“In short, we now move on to a simple two requirements system of masks in healthcare settings and seven days isolation for positive cases only,” Ardern said.

The COVID-19 protection framework, or traffic light system, set out the rules for different traffic light settings, where red was the highest alert setting, and green meant no restrictions. At the time of removal, New Zealand was at orange.

The government also confirmed that COVID leave payments will continue.

COVID-19 Minister Ayesha Verrall also announced the purchase of an additional 40,000 anti-viral medicine courses, expected to arrive in New Zealand within days.

“So now, anyone over the age of 65, and Maori and Pacific people over the age of 50, or anyone who meets Pharmac requirements, can access the treatment in the early stages of contracting the virus.

“This means more than double the number of New Zealanders will be able to access these medicines if they need them than previously,” Verrall said.

Decision Welcomed Across the Board

Retail NZ welcomed the move to return New Zealand to a “sense of normality.”

“After over two years of being at the forefront of COVID-19 rules, alert level changes, low foot traffic, and nonsensical mask rules, retailers across New Zealand will be pleased with today’s revised approach,” Retail NZ Chief Executive Greg Harford said.

“The revision today largely brings New Zealand in line with most of the rest of the world.”

But Harford encouraged the government to further revise the isolation period down to between three to five days.

ACT party agreed with the idea, with ACT Leader David Seymour noting that New Zealand had among the strictest isolation rules in the world.

“Keeping people locked in their houses longer than is necessary imposes real costs to them and the economy without improving our COVID-19 response,” he said.

“New Zealand is holding on to a long COVID hangover. It turns out an ‘abundance of caution’ is an abundance of cost for New Zealanders.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-zealand-scraps-nearly-all-covid-19-restrictions-including-mask-and-vaccination-mandates_4724789.html

Sunday, September 11, 2022

‘Metal-Like Objects’ Found in 94 Percent of Group Who Had Symptoms After Taking mRNA Vaccines: Study

Three Italian surgeons conducted a study analyzing blood from 1,006 people who developed symptoms after they got a Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna mRNA injection and found 94 percent of them to have “aggregation of erythrocytes and the presence of particles of various shapes and sizes of unclear origin,” one month after inoculation.

Erythrocytes are a type of red blood cell that carries oxygen and carbon dioxide.

“What seems plain enough is that metallic particles resembling graphene oxide and possibly other metallic compounds … have been included in the cocktail of whatever the manufacturers have seen fit to put in the so-called mRNA ‘vaccines,'” the authors wrote in the study’s discussion and conclusions.

Franco Giovannini, Riccardo Benzi Cipelli, and Gianpaolo Pisano, are the surgeons who authored the study, which was published on Aug. 12 in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, practice, and Research (IJVTPR).

They said their results are very similar to the findings of Korean doctors Young Mi Lee, Sunyoung Park, and Ki-Yeob Jeon, titled “Foreign Materials in Blood Samples of Recipients of COVID-19 Vaccines,” but that their 1,006 subjects represent “a much larger sample.”

“It could be claimed that, except for our innovative application of dark-field microscopy to mark the foreign metal-like objects in the blood of mRNA injections from Pfizer or Moderna, we have replicated the blood work of the Korean doctors with a much larger sample,” the Italian surgeons wrote.

“Our findings, however, are bolstered by their parallel analysis of the fluids in vials of the mRNA concoctions alongside centrifuged plasma samples from the cases they studied intensively,” they added.

Further studies are needed to define the exact nature of the particles found in the blood and to identify possible solutions to the problems they are evidently causing.

Out of the 1,006 cases, only 58 people showed a completely normal hematological picture via microscopic analysis.

The researchers cited numerous studies to back up their findings, including the “well-known” tendency of fibrin to cluster, vascular toxicity of the spike protein, and other adverse effects.

They picked four cases and analyzed their pre and post-vaccination health status, while showing dark field microscopic images.

“We assert unequivocally that the 4 cases described in this series are representative of the 948 cases in which extraordinarily anomalous structures and substances were found,” the researchers wrote.

“In conclusion, such abrupt changes as we have documented in the peripheral blood profile of 948 patients have never been observed after inoculation by any vaccines in the past according to our clinical experience. The sudden transition, usually at the time of a second mRNA injection, from a state of perfect normalcy to a pathological one, with accompanying hemolysis, visible packing and stacking of red blood cells in conjunction with the formation of gigantic conglomerate foreign structures, some of them appearing as graphene-family super-structures, is unprecedented. Such phenomena have never been seen before after any ‘vaccination’ of the past,” the researchers stated.

“In our experience as clinicians, these mRNA injections are very unlike traditional ‘vaccines’ and their manufacturers need, in our opinions, to come clean about what is in the injections and why it is there.”

“In our collective experience, and in our shared professional opinion, the large quantity of particles in the blood of mRNA injection recipients is incompatible with normal blood flow especially at the level of the capillaries,” the authors wrote. “As far as we know, such self-aggregation phenomena have only been documented after the COVID-19 mRNA injections were first authorized, then, mandated in some countries.”

Graphene?

Sherri Tenpenny, who has been ahead of the curve in vaccine adverse reactions, believes that these structures could be related to the strange clots embalmers have been finding in the corpses they treat since around the pandemic.

“Whatever is actually found to be in the shots, whether the components are graphene, aluminum, crystalline amyloid, disintegrated fibrin, highly charged nanotech particles, or something else, the disruption in the blood demonstrated on these slides is devastating and irrefutable, as are the corresponding histories of the patients involved,” Tenpenny told The Epoch Times.

“The rouleaux formations seen, for example, in figures 8, 16, and 22, represent widespread ‘sticky red blood cells’ which can lead to clots anywhere in the body. Figure 22 is especially frightening as this sample was taken only two days after the second Moderna jab,” she added.

James Thorp, who has been analyzing the adverse effects of COVID vaccines, thinks that this study could answer some questions about the contents in the vaccines, he shared some of his findings and theories with The Epoch Times.

“Graphene oxide is an artificial, highly magnetic substance with widespread utilization. … While first discovered in 1859, graphene oxide has extensive commercial application, especially in the field of pharmacologic nanotech delivery systems in medicine. It has the potential of self-assembly within the blood by a variety of potential energetic mechanisms,” Thorp told The Epoch Times.

But Thorp thinks that the phenomenon involving metallic objects sticking to people’s bodies, apparently magnetically, is not related to the vaccines, as some have claimed.

“Last year many social media posts alleged that the COVID-19 vaccine contained substances that caused attraction to magnets and non-magnetized metals. We conclusively demonstrated that this was a false narrative. The neodymium magnets and non-magnetized paperclips attached to the human body in about 50 percent of testing subjects unrelated to the COVID-19 vaccines,” Thorp said.

“Interestingly no other medical study could be found in the medical literature that describes human magnetism prior to this manuscript. Magnets and paperclips have been around for centuries, and it would be quite peculiar had they stuck to the human body in the past and not be the focus of intense scrutiny and investigation. One might speculate that graphene oxide in our bodies was not present 30 years ago but slowly accumulated over decades of exposure resulting in attachment of magnets and paperclips to the human body. It is speculated the electromagnetic energy possibly even from cell towers and/or WIFI could stimulate the assembly of graphene oxide and interfere with the body’s own energetics fields,” he went on.

Potential Explanation of Abnormal Assemblies

Thorp is also of the opinion that the metallic-like objects could be the cause of the strange clots that embalmers have been finding.

“The basis of most illnesses, including COVID-19, and the basis of the COVID-19 vaccine complications are directly related to energy deficiencies. The vaccine causes disruption and diversion of energy away from the water, molecular and cellular levels, away from basic physiologic processes and toward the pathologic production of spike protein. This potentially explains many of the abnormal assembly of substances within the intravascular space including the substances noted by Cipelli et al. as well as the misfolded proteins resulting in blood clots, prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, amyloidosis, and countless other diseases,” Thorp said.

Felipe Reitz, a biologist from Brazil, also did peripheral live blood analysis on vaccinated vs unvaccinated people’s blood using computerized thermographic imaging.

“I have observed that vaccinated individuals present some particular changes in their blood and in their peripheral circulation with more frequency than non-vaccinated,” Reitz told The Epoch Times.

“I am observing individuals with one jab, two jabs, three jabs, and four jabs. Individuals that were vaccinated 18 months ago, 12 months ago, and 6 months ago. This probability permutation is very important to determine the number of injections per time as I noticed it determines the degree of severity of reaction in the person’s body. That could explain why some researchers using the same tools and techniques are differing in their results. That is because they are not considering the individuality here, time of exposure, and jab content. All these variables only create difficulties for the scientific community to reach a consensus although we are all correct in what we are finding, but our findings alone do not represent the total truth,” Reitz said.

“My comparison is based on signs of compromised immune system, indications of radiation exposure, blood electrostatic changes, size and number of platelets, fibrins, infections, chemicals and crystallization structures in the blood samples, and indications of graphene.”

Official Statements

Pfizer told Reuters in July of 2021 that their COVID vaccines do not contain graphene oxide. “Graphene oxide is not used in the manufacture of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine,” Pfizer’s senior associate of Global Media Relations told the outlet.

James Smith, the former President and Chief Executive Officer of Thomson Reuters is a board member of Pfizer.

According to a fact sheet issued by the FDA, the Moderna vaccine does not contain graphene oxide.

Moderna and Pfizer did not respond to requests for comment.

Update: The headline has been revised to include important context. It was only symptomatic people who were vaccinated that developed the symptoms.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/foreign-metal-like-objects-some-appearing-as-graphene-family-superstructures-found-in-94-percent-of-people-who-took-mrna-vaccines-italian-doctors_4702330.html

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See the SHOCKING NEW Treatment for COVID

The NIH is setting Americans up. So now they are discussing Ivermectin as a potential treatment of COVID.

Before we get to this, understand that I predicted the Left would back away from COVID like it never happened. They recommended masking, as manufacturers posted warnings directly on their products stating: will not stop airborne diseases.

Next, they recommended lockdowns, business closures, and so on. Still people got COVID and overwhelmingly survived.

So what? With so much money to be made during the scam, the Fed plowed on.

Despite massive evidence of the effectiveness of HCL and ivermectin, Fauci the fraud and others pushed vaccines. These snake oil salesmen manipulated data to bolster their diabolical plot, and many people needlessly died. That’s how history will remember this saga.

And now, the National Institute of Health begins backing away from the lies against the use of Ivermectin.
From the NIH website:

Reports from in vitro studies suggest that ivermectin acts by inhibiting host importin alpha/beta-1 nuclear transport proteins, which are part of a key intracellular transport process.3,4 Viruses hijack the process and enhance infection by suppressing the host’s antiviral response. In addition, ivermectin docking may interfere with SARS-CoV-2 spike protein attachment to the human cell membrane.5 Some studies of ivermectin have also reported potential anti-inflammatory properties, which have been postulated to be beneficial in people with COVID-19.6-8

Ivermectin has been shown to inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures.9 However, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies suggest that achieving the plasma concentrations necessary for the antiviral efficacy detected in vitro would require administration of doses up to 100-fold higher than those approved for use in humans.10,11 Although ivermectin appears to accumulate in lung tissue, predicted systemic plasma and lung tissue concentrations are much lower than 2 µM, the half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) observed in vitro for ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2.12-15 Subcutaneous administration of ivermectin 400 µg/kg had no effect on SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in hamsters.16 However, there was a reduction in olfactory deficit (measured using a food-finding test) and a reduction in the interleukin (IL)-6:IL-10 ratio in lung tissues.
While this isn’t the NIH admitting that Ivermectin works, it’s as close as a bureaucracy gets to a confession.

Here’s another little Ivermectin secret. It’s also being used to treat cancer, and there are people in complete remission, thanks to this wonder drug. As research proves, Ivermectin inhibits replication of SARS-CoV-2. That’s clear. The disclaimer afterward is a mere “CYA” statement by the bureaucrats who were paid to lie to the American public for the better part of three years.

So what Ivermectin worked. The “clinical trials” were performed by people actually TAKING IVERMECTIN. But the Leftist medical “experts” ridiculed Ivermectin, calling it a “horse tranquilizer”, and accusing those taking the anti-viral of being idiots.

$6 trillion later, and now the NIH cites studies that indicate what many of us knew.

https://theblacksphere.net/2022/09/see-the-shocking-new-treatment-for-covid/

Friday, September 09, 2022

GOD SAVE THE KING!

That was my immediate and proper response when I was told that Her Majesty the Queen had died. Britain is never without a monarch. When one passes the successor is immediately known and recognized.

Like untold millions worldwide I was upset to hear of her death and shed a tear over it. Australia is a monarchy and I think you have to be a citizen of a monarchy to understand the emotional significance of that.

I also shed a tear when the previous monarch died. I was only nine when King George VI died but even then I felt the significance of the occasion.

Aside from Britain itself there are two other great monarchies where the Queen will be widely mourned: Australia and Canada. Each occupies around 3 million square miles of territory and their collective populations exceed that of all European countries except Russia and Germany. Our courageous English forebears in their little wooden ships did an amazing job of spreading their civilization far and wide across the globe.

I have family members presently living in both Scotland and New Zealand -- two countries that are about as oppositely located on the face of the earth as you can get. Yet both speak every day the English language that they learnt in their Australian childhoods. And they are perfectly understood in both locations. Such is the miracle that our English forebears created.

There were a few uncomprehending people who spoke ill of the Queen after hearing of her death. I wonder how many people will shed a tear over their deaths? If they were wise they might reflect on that

The Queen's loyal public are gathering outside Balmoral Castle, Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace as they pay emotional tributes to the Monarch who has died today aged 96.

Thousands of well-wishers flocked to Buckingham Palace this evening as news broke of the Queen's death.

Tourists and concerned Britons headed to the iconic London landmark, while people also congregated outside the royal castle in Aberdeenshire to mourn for Her Majesty.

Her son Charles, the former Prince of Wales, is now King. The Queen's children and grandchildren travelled to be with her this afternoon after doctors said they were 'concerned' for her health.

Around 100,000 people are expecting to line the streets outside Buckingham Palace this evening. Already crowds now stretch for more than a mile to Trafalgar Square.

At 6.30pm a Union flag atop Buckingham Palace lowered. It drew gasps from the crowd who knew what the symbolic gesture meant.

The sad news of Queen Elizabeth II death was then announced officially. Some people in the crowd wept as others gave an impromptu rendition of God Save The Queen.

Two members of the Queens household emerged and placed a notice of the Queen’s passing on the gates of Buckingham Palace.

The crowd surged to the gates as the notice announcing the death of the only monarch most Britons have ever known was attached to the black iron gates.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11194643/Queen-public-outside-Balmoral-Windsor-castle-Buckingham-Palace.html

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Do you REALLY need another Covid jab? Experts give their verdicts as a major new booster campaign begins - but AstraZeneca's boss says a fourth jab ISN'T necessary

Covid is still officially a pandemic, but many experts would now describe it as endemic (something that’s constantly present in the population).

More than 24,000 people in England tested positive for the virus in the last week of August, but thousands more are likely to have it as many people don’t have symptoms.

While this is much lower than its peak (there were almost 235,000 cases a day on January 4 this year), cases are expected to rise in the coming months as we spend more time indoors. (The virus is mainly spread in close proximity, in tiny droplets when we speak.)

Around half the population — 33.5 million — has now had three doses of Covid vaccine (the two-part initial course, plus a booster), while 42.6 million have had only two doses.

‘For many, Covid is now a relatively mild respiratory disease,’ says Andrew Preston, a professor of microbial pathogenesis at the University of Bath. ‘That’s largely due to most of us being able to mount a robust immune response to the virus, having now been vaccinated, infected or both.

‘Protection against SARS-CoV-2 [which causes Covid] is associated with high levels of antibodies. These levels are greatly boosted by vaccination, but they drop over time, meaning we can become susceptible to infection once the levels drop.’

But I’ve already had the other three jabs?

Professor Preston says: ‘As many people have experienced, three jabs haven’t prevented infection with one of the Omicron strains, but they have kept it to a generally tolerable mild infection.

‘The problem is that we don’t know how long that protection will last, particularly if new variants arise.

‘Vaccines stimulate greater magnitude immune responses than even natural infection, so provide greater levels of protection. Boosters reduce your chances of suffering from any type of disease, at least for a while.

‘And the more people who are protected, the less Covid will circulate. The theory is that this reduces the risk of new strains developing.

‘Boosters are also important for those who’ve never tested positive for Covid. Given the levels of infection over the past year, if you’ve never had Covid, then it’s very likely down to the protection you’ve got from vaccination.’

But others have questioned the benefits of the booster campaign. Last month, Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, said boosting healthy people again was not ‘good use of money’ as vaccines protect healthy people for a ‘long time’. (AstraZeneca’s jab will not be used in the campaign.)

Will Irving, a professor of virology at Nottingham University, told Good Health: ‘Many people have now had three doses of vaccine, as well as two or three bouts of real infection, and you would imagine that would provide them with enough immune memory to protect them for a while.

‘The issue is we don’t know how long the immune memory lasts, so a top-up dose is a good idea for those advised to have one.’

So am I eligible for the new jab?

Around 26 million people in England are eligible. They are: adults aged 50 and over; those aged five to 49 with underlying health problems such as auto- immune conditions that put them at risk; those aged 16 to 49 who are carers or who live with someone who is immuno-suppressed; pregnant women; care home residents; care home workers; social care workers and frontline health workers.These people can have a booster jab three months or more after their last Covid vaccination.

Healthy children and adults under the age of 50 ‘continue to have good protection from their first two vaccinations and their first booster jab,’ says the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

Which vaccines are being used for the booster?

The jabs will be one of the mRNA vaccines: the new bivalent version of the Moderna (Spikevax) and Pfizer jabs, which protect against two strains of Covid, the Delta variant and Omicron; the original single-strain Moderna jab (Spikevax); and the Pfizer vaccine (Comirnaty).

The Novavax (Nuvaxovid) jab, which works differently, will be offered to those for whom the mRNA vaccine is unsuitable.

‘These mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine which deliver the genetic code for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein directly into our cells,’ explains Professor Preston. The spike protein binds the virus to our cells to start infection.

‘The natural protein-making machinery in the cell interprets this [spike protein] code, produces the spike protein and presents it to our immune cells to stimulate the immune response, which will help your body fight off Covid if you come into contact with the virus.’

In very rare circumstances, such as a severe allergy, none of the approved mRNA vaccines will be suitable, says the UKHSA. In these circumstances, the Nuvaxovid vaccine should be offered. For some, such as many immunosuppressed people, vaccination is not possible at all.

Last month, the Government decided not to buy Evusheld, a potentially life-saving treatment for the 500,000 high-risk patients who are not able to have a vaccine because they have weakened immune systems. Evusheld, which costs £1,500 per person a year, is taken as a preventative treatment. Data from Israel shows immunocompromised people who get it are half as likely to become infected with Covid and 92 per cent less likely to be hospitalised and/or die.

Why aren’t we getting the AstraZeneca vaccine?

‘The concern over the very rare clotting disorders observed with the AstraZeneca jab led to the decision to use the Moderna/Pfizer RNA vaccines for boosters,’ Professor Preston says.

The UKHSA points to evidence from a trial of seven different vaccines given as a third dose by University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, which found mRNA vaccines were ‘the most effective’.

How good is the new vaccine?

Vaccines are very effective at preventing people from dying or becoming seriously ill with Covid; a booster of the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines is still more than 85 per cent effective at preventing death three months after being administered, and around 60 per cent effective at preventing hospitalisation.

However, this wanes and by six months, protection against symptomatic infection drops to zero. How long booster protection lasts is as yet unclear.

Last month, Dame Kate Bingham, the architect of Britain’s successful vaccination campaign, accused civil servants of ‘taking their foot off the gas’ in finding new jabs. She said the current jabs are ‘not good enough’ because they ‘don’t block transmission, they don’t protect for very long’.

She is concerned that the Government drive to find new vaccines has fallen away.

Scientists are working on new Covid vaccines, the ultimate goal being a universal version that protects against all variants.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11182371/Do-really-need-Covid-jab-major-new-booster-campaign-begins.html

Thursday, September 08, 2022

How Anti-White Hate Won Open Acceptance among America's Leftist elite

The hate described below is certainly horrible and alarming and sounds quite deranged. It is undoubtedly designed to make most of the population uncomfortable. And that is the clue to it. That is its aim. That is what underlies it. Leftists WANT to make contented people unhappy. To them, contented people are "complacent" and they hate that and want to upset it

Probably the oldest manifestation of Leftism is envy. And envy is destructive and generates hate. The Ten Commandments rightly ordered against it. The haters/enviers decribed below have undoubtedly seen what they regard as complacency among many members of the white population. Large numbers of whites have the audacity to be reasonably happy with their lives. And a Leftist misery-guts hates that.

Even if the Leftist is himself well-off he cannot stand other people doing well for themselves. Tearing down the rich has always been what Leftism is about -- lifting up the poor is just a facade.

Although I am a libertarian conservative, I have some instinctive understanding of that. When I see a tall, well-built young man with blue eyes wearing a private-school blazer, I am conscious that he will probably not have to try hard to have an easy path to and through the best things in life. He is obviously the product of a family that cares enough about him and is economically successful enough to spend a lot of money in giving him a good and pleasant school experience. And that is a great start.

And he will only faintly be aware of the extent of his privilege. He will stroll though life with effortless ease and confidence. Most people will be nice to him and he will be casually nice back.

And that is all in some sense unfair and is felt as unfair and in need of a remedy. Why should one person have so much when others have very little? Should he not be taken down a peg or two?

And society does do a lot to equalize things. He will pay a lot of taxes that other people will live on. But is that enough?

In thinking about that I think of my own son. He is 6' tall, blue-eyed and well built. I sent him to a private school and he later acquired a first class honours degree in mathematics from a highly regarded university. And he has a father who is a distinguished academic and a mother who is very sociable. And he has inherited advantages from both sides.

So he is one of those privileged people that Leftists love to hate. But he has had difficult personal issues that left him unhappy for quite a while. He was betrayed by his flexibility and tendency to trust. He has got past his dark period now but it set him back a lot in various ways.

So we should not assume much about anyone. Even privilege is not an automatic path to happiness and fulfilment. It may even be a hindrance. Well-off men can be targeted by "gold diggers" for instance. And "affirmative action" is deliberately rigged against them.

The plain truth is that the path to happiness is much more influenced by personal relationships than anything else. People both rich and poor can find lasting love in their lives and it is they who are the lucky ones. But that is too deep for Leftists. In their usual way, they just see superficialities

So the hate described below can be understood but no remedy for it is obvious. One can only hope that normal people will eventually kick back against it in some way

In a 2021 lecture at Yale University titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani described her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.”

Around the same time, a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed academic journal described “whiteness” as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility.” The author, Donald Moss, had also presented his paper as a continuing education course for licensed therapists who would presumably treat patients with this condition. The paper advises: “There is not yet a permanent cure.”

This is a sampling of the new racism that is gaining purchase in American society even as its advocates relentlessly punish speech they deem harmful and threatening to people of color. It parallels the acceptance of anti-male rhetoric that casts masculinity as “predatory” and “toxic,” or just casually demeans males as oafish and clueless, which allows the Washington Post to give a megaphone to Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danuta Walters to ask: “Why can’t we hate men?” (Her conclusion: We can and we should.)

The escalation of this inflammatory rhetoric is reaching the highest levels of American society, as when President Biden insinuated in a fiery campaign speech last week that Donald Trump supporters are “white supremacists” and when he maligned conservative mask skeptics last year for “Neanderthal thinking."

What strikes a casual observer is that such language would be instantly denounced if it targeted racial minorities or other protected groups. Just as remarkable is that this new rhetoric is not coming from dropouts and loners at society’s margins; it is being advanced by successful professionals who have scaled the heights of respectability and are given a platform on social media and in prestigious cultural outlets.

And though each of those examples generated a public furor, such inflammatory rhetoric is defended or downplayed by cultural gatekeepers. The incidents have been piling up especially in the past few years, especially since the election of Donald Trump to the White House during the ascent of Black Lives Matter in the age of social media, and even include cases of people calling for the hate of privileged groups and insisting it’s not hate speech.

In its ultimate sign of success, this messaging has taken hold in public schools, corporate workplaces, medical journals, scientific research and even diversity training in federal agencies. It’s not limited to any single race but endorsed by whites, blacks, Asians and others, and disseminated in diversity materials and workplace-recommended readings that characterize white people as flawed, predatory and dangerous to society. Its sudden spread has caused a sense of culture shock and given rise to acrimonious school board meetings and employee lawsuits over hostile work environments as legions of teachers, students and workers have been educated about white privilege, white fragility, white complicity, and the moral imperative to de-center “whiteness” so as not to “normalize white domination.”

This new take on speech produces a moral paradox, particularly among academics and journalists: Those who are most militant about policing what they deem to be hate speech against minorities, women, gays and trans communities are often the most tolerant of demeaning depictions, incendiary rhetoric and violent imagery against whites and men.

To those who see a double standard, such routine disparagement of masculinity and whiteness is a case study in hypocrisy that upends longstanding norms against stereotyping entire social groups. It’s a manifestation of what Columbia University linguist and social commentator John McWhorter dubbed “woke racism” in a 2021 book of the same name that warns of the dangerous spread of “the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.”

But its advocates insist there is no double standard; they argue they are simply speaking truth to power, which should cause discomfort. In this belief system, reverse discrimination can’t exist because social justice demands tipping the scales to favor marginalized groups to correct for centuries of injustice.

They include Rutgers University historian James Livingston who, in a Facebook critique of gentrification, described a Harlem burger joint as being “overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.”

The post concluded: “I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know, it’s about access to my dinner. Fuck you, too.”

In a phone call, Livingston, who is white, said his Facebook post was a joke targeted at white people who are privileged and therefore require less protection than marginalized groups.

“White males have been the norm of our culture and our politics and our society and our economy for so long that unearthing the unstated assumptions that go into that is pretty hard work, and it reveals things that make us uncomfortable,” Livingston said. “So do they need to be protected? I suppose. Everybody needs some protection. But I’m not too worried about people telling me that I have no right to speak on the issue of transgender individuals.”

Although Livingston was initially found in violation of Rutgers’ discrimination and harassment policy, Rutgers later reversed its decision, accepting his claim that his Facebook post was satire protected by academic freedom.

Festering for Decades

It can seem that such putdowns and trash talk have burst out of nowhere in the last few years. But the underlying justifications have been percolating for decades, and they are seen by skeptics as a modern repackaging of ancient us-versus-them tribal reflexes. Telltale signs of role-reversal have been described by serious thinkers, such as 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that “He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.”

More recently, author Douglas Murray has warned of the tendency for social justice movements to “behave – in victory – as its opponents once did” – which is to say: meanly – and which ultimately results in “the normalization of vengefulness.”

The idea that stereotyping and denigrating entire groups has no place in a society that strives for equality is one of the signature achievements of the Civil Rights era. By the 1970s, openly expressing racist slurs and jokes against black people was seen as a distasteful holdover from the Jim Crow era, an Archie Bunker-ism signifying low education and low intelligence.

The prohibition against racist speech rapidly became generalized to all identity groups. Ethnic slurs against Poles, Italians, Asians, and others became verboten as did mockery of gays and the disabled. Many words once commonly used to describe women, such as “dame” and “broad” became unacceptable, while terms that were once seen as neutral or descriptive, such as “colored,” “Oriental,” and “Negro,” suddenly took on negative connotations, and became unutterable in public (creating a replacement term, “people of color”).

But at the same time that these language taboos against expressing prejudice were becoming widely accepted across the political spectrum as a matter of civility, a far-more radical effort to regulate speech was percolating on the left.

This movement sought to limit speech on the rationale that language was a form of social control and therefore the source of oppression and violence. The assumption that hurtful language leads to harmful policies ultimately produced today’s cancel culture phenomenon, where otherwise well-regarded professionals are investigated, suspended, canned, or booted from social media for simply questioning the factual claims of Black Lives Matter, for affirming biological sex differences, for satirizing ritual land acknowledgements, and even for publicly saying the Mandarin word “nei-ge” (because it supposedly resembles a racial epithet in English).

The core proposition of this mindset can be traced to philosophers like Michel Foucault, who developed theories of language as a form of societal power and domination, and Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist scholar whose now-classic 1960s essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” argues that the oppressor class and the oppressed cannot be held to the same standard. Marcuse proposed that the classical liberal doctrine of free speech is a mechanism that benefits capitalists and others who wield power, that the struggle for “a real democracy” paradoxically necessitates “the fight against an ideology of tolerance.”

The subversive intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s passed on the torch to Critical Race Theorists and radical feminists, and in the 1990s the critique of bourgeoisie liberalism was taken up by Stanley Fish, a post-modernist literary critic and critical legal scholar who ridiculed the idea of “free speech” and “reverse racism,” giving wider exposure to these esoteric scholarly arguments.

“By insisting that from now on there shall be no discrimination, they leave in place the effects of the discrimination that had been practiced for generations,” Fish wrote. “What is usually meant by perfect neutrality is a policy that leaves in place the effects of the discrimination you now officially repudiate. Neutrality thus perpetuates discrimination, rather than reversing it, for you can only fight discrimination with discrimination.”

During the Obama era, Fish was a celebrity public intellectual publishing pieces in the New York Times titled “Two Cheers for Double Standards” and “The Harm in Free Speech.”

Thus it came to be accepted that creating a just society will require controlling speech to disempower the historically privileged and empower aggrieved groups, and to undo sex, gender, and racial disparities in society.

More here:

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/09/07/how_blatant_anti-white_racism_won_acceptance_in_elite_america_850879.html

Wednesday, September 07, 2022

Inflammatory mRNA Nanoparticles Inhibit and Alter Immune Response: Pre-Print Study

A recent preprint study has shed light on why adverse events have been observed following a COVID-19 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination.

The study, led by researchers from Thomas Jefferson University, found that the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used to transport mRNA in COVID-19 vaccines could “inhibit” and “alter” immune responses in mice.

LNPs are shells of lipids that envelope mRNA to prevent degradation and detection by our body’s immune system.

LNPs are not mRNA, simply an envelope to transport the mRNA cargo.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines use LNPs to deliver mRNA spike protein sequences into human cells. Once human cells received the mRNA sequences, the cells will then manufacture spike proteins, triggering an immune response.

It was originally intended that the LNPs discreetly deliver mRNA sequences into the cells to produce spike proteins, and in doing so, form immunity against the COVID-19 virus.

However, many studies in mice have since found that the LNPs, claimed to be non-toxic and safe, are actually highly inflammatory.

These nanoparticles are highly durable and can last for 20 to 30 days in the body. While they persist in the body, it is likely they will continue to activate the immune system, leading to immune exhaustion and non-responsiveness.

The Thomas Jefferson study also shared similar findings. The researchers investigated how LNPs affect the immune system by injecting mice with the same LNPs used in Pfizer’s vaccines, and some mice were even double-dosed.

Inflammation and immune responses in mice are not sure signs that the same will happen in humans. Nonetheless, mice have long been used to test for safety and efficacy in drugs for human use; signs of immune problems are an indication of possible health risks in humans.

The authors found that mice that received two doses had a reduced immune response on their second injection as compared to mice that only received one dose.

“The mRNA-LNP (nanoparticle) vaccine platform induces long-term unexpected immunological changes affecting both adaptive immune responses and heterologous protection against infections,” the authors wrote.

Pre-Exposure to mRNA Nanoparticles Reduce Innate Cell Numbers
Mice that were injected with two doses of LNPs had a reduced number of innate immune cells, the first-responder immune cells.

The authors wanted to find how the LNPs, the shell that wraps around mRNA, affected mice by injecting them with different variations LNPs.

The mice were split into three groups, all three groups received two injections, albeit with different contents.

For the first injection, most mice were given an injection of LNP. Half were given LNPs containing mRNA sequences and another half were given empty LNPs with no mRNA inside.

The remaining mice were given an injection of salted water. These mice are used as the baseline for comparison as salted water injections are not supposed to introduce any changes to the body.

Two weeks later, all three groups were given the same LNP injection containing mRNA sequences for an influenza protein (HA). The second injection allowed their cells to make HA proteins, which triggered an immune response. It was intended that this immune response would then make the mice immune against the influenza virus.

The three groups of mice and what they were vaccinated against. The first group was given saline for the first shot, the second group was given a mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccination against a jellyfish protein, the third group was vaccinated with an empty mRNA LNP.

All three groups were given a vaccination of influenza HA protein sequenced in mRNA and packaged in mRNA LNPs. Modified figure of “Pre-exposure to mRNA-LNPs or LNPs significantly inhibits subsequent adaptive immune responses induced by the mRNA-LNP vaccine"

The researchers found that following the second injection, all mice had developed immune defense against the influenza virus.

The authors observed mice that were given two doses of LNPs were more resistant to an influenza infection as they lost less weight. Oddly enough, these same mice also had a lower immune response to the flu vaccine with fewer immune cells activated.

The authors speculated that their “resistance” is likely not from strengthened immunity, but a product from an alternative pathway triggered by LNPs. It is unknown if this “resistance” will apply to other infections and may only be applicable to influenza.

This is because the study found that mice that were more “resistant” to the flu were actually more susceptible to fungal infections.

The researchers infected mice with Candida albicans, the mice that received two doses lost more weight and had poorer control over the infection, indicating an alteration in the innate immune response.

Further investigations showed that these mice had a lower number of neutrophils, which are the most common first responder immune cells.

The job of neutrophils is to patrol the body and attack indiscriminately when encountering something foreign, therefore a reduced number of neutrophils put an individual at a greater risk of infection.

Since an uncontrolled fungal infection, particularly C. albicans, is often a sign of weakened innate or first responder immune response, the authors therefore suspected that reduced neutrophil numbers may have contributed to the fungal outbreak.

LNPs cause inflammation, and certain inflammatory pathways reduce the production of blood cells. The authors speculated that the two doses of LNPs some mice received may have caused greater inflammation leading to a decline in blood cell production and low neutrophil counts.

Though this is speculation and it is uncertain if the effects in mice would apply to humans, there have been reports in vaccinated individuals of the sudden onset of severe aplastic anemia, a condition where the body can no longer make enough blood cells, particularly red blood cells.

There have also been some reports of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals developing rare fungal diseases and others with worsening of pre-existing fungal diseases.

Though serious fungal disease does not automatically mean a weak immune system, nonetheless, serious fungal infections “are most common among people with weak immune systems,” writes the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Antigen Numbers Reduced in Mice with High Nanoparticle Exposure

Within the immune system, there are the first responder (innate immune cells) and the second responders (adaptive immune cells).

The first responders mount an immediate attack upon encountering something foreign. However, their attacks are nonspecific and often cannot fully clear infections.

Therefore the adaptive immune cells, also known as T and B cells serve as our second responders.

They are activated around a week into the infection and clear infections by mounting potent and specific attacks.

To activate adaptive immune cells, T and B cells must be presented with information on the pathogen. In the case of Sars-Cov-2, it can be a section of the spike protein.

APCs (antigen presenting cells), a type of first responding cell bring pieces of the virus, bacteria, or infectious particle to the adaptive T or B cells. This will activate the T or B cell, triggering an adaptive immune response.

The image below shows a dendritic cell (APC), activating a T cell by presenting it with an antigen, a toxic or foreign substance.

However, the authors found that mice that were given two doses of mRNA LNPs had reduced antigen presentation compared to mice that were only given one dose of LNPs.

This implies that fewer adaptive immune cells were made to activate against the influenza proteins.

mRNA Nanoparticles Reduce T and B cell Responses
The authors found the mice that received two injections of LNP had lower T and B cell responses to the flu mRNA vaccine than mice that were only given one dose.

As the final line of immune response, T and B cells are critical in our immune system’s ability to clear out infections.

However, in mice given two doses of LNP, less of their T and B cells were activated.

The double-dosed groups also had lower concentrations of antibodies (B cells make antibodies) against the influenza protein.

The reduced adaptive immune response was systemic, persisting across all organs and regions. Yet this reduction was even greater at the site of injection, especially if the mice were given injections at the same place for both shots, according to the authors.

On the other hand, the group that was only given one injection of LNP had higher T and B cell responses with more antibodies produced.

The authors found that exposure to LNP reduced T progenitor cells. Since T progenitor cells mature into activated T cells, less progenitors mean reduced T cell numbers and response.

The authors found if the T progenitor cells were removed before vaccination and then returned after vaccination, the active T cell numbers would not be reduced. This suggests that the LNP directly reduce the number of T progenitor cells, and in doing so, reduces the T cell response.

“Pre-exposure to mRNA-LNP inhibits T cell responses,” the authors wrote.

This reduced immunity should not be permanent, the authors speculated.

They noted that B cell responses mostly recovered if an interval of 8 weeks was introduced between the first and second doses.

Nevertheless, the authors did not verify the time period needed for a complete recovery, nor did they verify if the B cell response ever recovered in the mice.

However, injecting mice with adjuvants such as aluminum salts or AddaVax removed the suppressive effects the LNP injections had on mice immune cells.

“Inhibition of the adaptive immune responses by pre-exposure to mRNA-LNPs is long-lasting but it is likely to wane with time.”

Immunity Changes from LNPs Can Be Inherited
As aforementioned, mice that were injected with two doses of LNPs were more resistant against an influenza infection than mice that were only given one dose of LNPs.

This was demonstrated through the mice’s superior maintenance of weight during infection, though it is uncertain if the resistance was from an immune response or some other pathway triggered by the LNPs.

Oddly enough, this increased defensiveness could be passed to their offspring. The inheritance of resistance against influenza is stronger if both parents were immunized, and less so when only a single parent, particularly if only the male parent is immunized.

However, the study did not address if the offspring also inherit immune weakness, such as a decline in immunity against C. albicans, a trait also observed in mice that were given two LNPs doses.

Implication of the Study and Pressing Questions
The findings from the mice study suggest that T and B cell functions are reduced temporarily in mice and raises the question if the same occurs in humans.

The adaptive immune response is critical to clearing infections, and preventing chronic conditions such as cancer. The study suggests that after two vaccinations with the mRNA LNPs, there are a few weeks of vulnerability in mice, putting them at a greater risk of infections and cancer.

Similar reports are also observed in humans, though there is yet to be any study establishing a conclusive link.

However, an increased rate of disease being reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after COVID-19 vaccination suggests reduced immunity in people following vaccination.

There have been many reports of cancers emerging following COVID-19 vaccinations.

In the VAERS database, 284 cases of breast cancer were reported after COVID-19 vaccination, while just 350 cases have been reported in the entire history of VAERS.

There were 269 cases of leukemia reported after COVID-19 vaccination as compared to 432 cases in the entire history of VAERS.

Additionally, there have also been concerning reports of new onset and recurrent shingles following COVID-19 vaccinations. VAERS data shows that 7,559 cases of shingles have been reported following COVID-19 vaccination.

Over the entire history of VAERS, 28,180 cases of shingles have been reported following any vaccination, meaning that around a quarter of shingles cases occurred after COVID-19 vaccination.

The CDC has indicated that a new diagnosis or recurrence of shingles primarily occurs in people with compromised immune systems and is a sign of weakened immunity.

Though the study on mice suggests possible health implications in humans, it is unknown whether all the symptoms and effects seen in mice will occur in people.

Nevertheless, growing data of reported adverse health effects in humans following COVID-19 vaccination warrant further research. Examination of the overlaps between health implications for mice and humans is also needed.

“Considering the broad exposure of a large proportion of human populations to vaccines based on this novel (mRNA) technology, more studies are warranted to fully understand its overall immunological and physiological effects. Determining this platform’s short and long-term impact on human health would help optimize it to decrease its potentially harmful effects,” the authors concluded.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/inflammatory-mrna-nanoparticles-inhibits-and-alters-immune-response-pre-print-study_4699417.html

Tuesday, September 06, 2022

The Mysteries of Long COVID-19

When the original strain of COVID-19 arrived in spring 2020, a pandemic soon swept the country.

By far most survived COVID-19. But hundreds of thousands did not. American deaths now number well over 1 million.

Amid the tragedy, there initially was some hope that the pernicious effects of the disease would all disappear upon recovery among the nearly 99% who survived the initial infection.

Vaccinations by late 2020 were promised to end the pandemic for good. But they did not. New mutant strains, while more infectious, were said to be less lethal, thus supposedly resulting in spreading natural immunity while causing fewer deaths from infection.

But that too was not quite so.

Instead, sometimes the original symptoms, sometimes frightening new ones, not only lingered after the acute phase, but were of increased morbidity.

Now two-and-a-half years after the onset of the pandemic, there may be more than 20 million Americans who are still suffering from what is currently known as “long COVID-19″—a less acute version but one ultimately as debilitating.

Some pessimistic analyses suggest well over 4 million once-active Americans are now disabled from this often-ignored pandemic and out of the workforce.

Perhaps 10%-30% of those originally infected with COVID-19 have some lingering symptoms six months to a year after the initial infection. And they are quite physically sick, desperate to get well, and certainly not crazy.

So far, no government Marshall plan exists to cure long COVID.

While we know the nature of the virus well by now, no one fathoms what causes long COVID’s overwhelming fatigue, flu-like symptoms, neuralgic impairment, cardiac and pulmonary damage, and an array of eerie problems from extended loss of taste and smell to vertigo, neuropathy, and “brain fog.”

“Post-viral fatigue” has long been known to doctors. Many who get the flu or other viruses like mononucleosis sometimes take weeks or even months to recover after the initial acute symptoms retire.

But no one knows why long COVID often seems to last far longer and with more disability.

Is its persistence due to one theory that SARS-CoV-2 is a uniquely insidious, engineered virus? Or do vaccines and antivirals only help to curb infection, while possibly encouraging more unpredictable mutations?

Who gets long COVID, and why and how is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

Those who nearly die from acute COVID-19 can descend into long COVID. But then again, so can those with minimal or few initial acute symptoms.

The obese with comorbidities are prone to long COVID, but triathletes and marathon runners are, too.

The elderly, the mature, the middle-aged, adolescents, and children can all get long COVID. Those with down-regulated and impaired immune systems fight long COVID. But then again, so do those with up-regulated and prior robust immunity, as well as people with severe allergies.

Since early 2020, no one has deciphered the cause, although numerous Nobel Prizes await anyone who unlocks its mysteries.

Does a weakened but not vanquished SARS-CoV-2 virus hide out and linger, causing an unending immune response that sickens patients?

Or does COVID-19 so weaken some long-haulers to the degree that old viruses, long in remission, suddenly flare up again, sickening the host with an unending case of, say, mononucleosis?

Or is the problem autoimmunity?

Is there something unique to the nature of COVID-19 that damages the vital on and off buttons of the immune system, causing the body to become stuck in overdrive, as it needlessly sends out its own poisons against itself?

Without knowledge of what explains long COVID, it is hard for researchers to find a cure.

After all, is the answer to slow down the immune system to dampen the immune storm, or to enhance it to root out lingering viruses?

Do more vaccines help or worsen long COVID?

Is the solution some magical new drug, or discovering off-label uses of old, reliable medicines?

Can a good diet, moderate exercise, and patience finally wear out long COVID? Or is its course too unpredictable or near permanent and chronic?

Is long COVID a single phenomenon, or a cluster of maladies, each manifesting according to one’s own genetic makeup, particular history of past illness, and unique reaction to the initial infection?

If we have few answers, we do have an idea about the costs.

Long COVID may be one of many reasons why in a recession, labor paradoxically still remains scarce. Millions likely stay home in utter disbelief that they are still battling long COVID. Others isolate in deadly fear of getting either the acute or chronic form of the illness.

The social costs to America of this hidden pandemic in lost wages and productivity, family and work disruption, and expensive medical care are unknown.

But they are likely enormous, still growing—and mostly ignored.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/09/02/the-mysteries-of-long-covid/

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There Is a Much Larger Problem Than the Great Resignation. No One Wants to Talk About It

The United States likes to talk about problems. Well, ones we have solutions for, anyway. Others we tend to willfully ignore.

This time, though, we’ve really outdone ourselves in terms of mental gymnastics. We’ve been managing to relentlessly cover the “Great Resignation,” wage growth, and employment disruptions from the pandemic while ignoring a larger problem in that field. Our workforce is old. Not “a few years older than it likely should be” old, but dangerously old.

This speaks to certain generational trends (most of them having to do with my delightful cohorts here in Gen Y), but also to a looming catastrophe if we don’t course-correct sometime soon. So how did we get here? Why is it so significant? Let’s look.

The math

I hate to have to bring math into an article (in any form), but it’s necessary here. The median age in the United States is currently 38.1 years old — a number that reflects a consistent rise in recent years, but not too terrible. That number has been moving up about .15 per year as our largest generation, the oft-discussed boomers, age.

When looking at our workforce figures, we need to keep that figure in mind. The population under 16 (not working) and population over 65 (more likely to be retired) are roughly equivalent right now, which means our workforce age should hew pretty close to our overall median age. In other words, for every child not dragging the workforce age down, there should be a retiree not dragging the workforce age up.

In our professions, then, we would expect to see a median age of around 38. Naturally, that’s not the case, specifically when you get into some of the trades or other professions that aren’t necessarily glamourous. Still, these jobs are essential to our everyday lives. We should not ignore them.

So how far off are they? Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we’ve got some wide discrepancies. Looking at just a few:

· Real estate agents: 49.1 years old

· Automotive mechanics: 47.4 years old

· Facilities managers: 50.1 years old

· Bus/Shuttle drivers: 55.6 years old

· Housekeeping/Janitorial: 50.1 years old

· Home health aides: 47.2 years old

· Electrical trades: 46.8 years old

Yikes. There were plenty of professions even older than that, but I picked these for a reason — there’s little barrier to entry. You don’t need a $200,000 piece of paper, and they’re located across the country. You don’t need to live in a growing metropolitan area to have any of these jobs. In other words, based on ease of access, they should be younger. But they’re not.

The least productive generation

That brings us to a natural question: Why? Yes, the whole population is aging, but those professions are still 10+ years older than the median age in the country. Something is up. And it’s generational.

I don’t like to blame millennials universally as many others do. Make no mistake, I loathe my generation, but I think a lot of what they turned out to be was outside of their control. The first years of Gen Y were hit with the dot-com burst as they entered the workforce, the Great Recession in their later 20s, and now a global pandemic when they were finally getting everything together. Not ideal economic events for the entire first half of life.

But that’s not the problem. No, instead, Gen Y was the first generation to be universally told that they would need college to succeed. Even I got that speech frequently, and I was an underperforming (and often absent) student in a mediocre school. I can only imagine how heavy it was indoctrinated in other districts.

Well, even if it wasn’t implicitly stated, adolescents could get the gist of what was being said: No college means no college-required jobs, which means failure. The obvious conclusion is that non-college careers are failures.

This is simultaneously false, condescending, and ridiculous, but it’s also how a lot of this generation was brought up. I remember towards the end of high school, I was kicking around the idea of taking some certificate courses in construction management and exploring those trades a bit. My teachers and classmates looked at me like I just publicly threatened suicide. It was ridiculous. For the record, I’ve gone on to finance and supervise the funding and progress of large construction projects across the U.S.

So, what did we get? A generation that went to college in larger numbers than ever before, regardless of whether it appealed to them, made financial sense, or even made practical sense for the individual. If you were of the means or opportunity to go, you went. Period. A few like myself didn’t, but we were rare.

Now once you’ve blown $100,000 or more on your education, it’s only natural to feel that you shouldn’t have to work a “manual” job. I mean, what was all this for then, right? Especially since grade inflation made everyone a 3.2+ GPA student. So they swarmed the white-collar fields, drove salaries down, and realized that those jobs sucked too. Attached to your phone long after work was over, responding to whatever imaginary crisis needs resolution. What a deal. Meanwhile, the vital jobs went unattended.

Why it matters

Mechanics, electricians, stonemasons, general laborers: these are all trades that allow the world to keep on humming. We can’t rely on the older half of Gen X and the younger half of the boomers to build everything for everyone in perpetuity. Yet we seem content to.

Producing something and making a living wage for yourself or your family used to be an item of pride for many. Now, if our primary careers flame out, we instead look for a permanent side-hustle or join the “creator” economy.

There’s some value there for society, sure, but not everyone can just live the dream forever. This whole trend of “influencing” is a bit ridiculous too, but more a byproduct of how our society is today than anything else. Point is, at the peak of their professional careers, fewer millennials are in the real workforce than any other generation before them.

It may work very well for some individuals, but 1,000 spokes going in opposite directions doesn’t make a wheel. It makes a tangled mess of alloy on the floor. This is sometimes referred to as “the current labor market”.

Funny thing is, I think my generation’s dismal failure at participating in society is going to course-correct this disaster. Or, at least, I hope it will. A lot of my friends went to work in trades. They’re universally doing better than the white-collar college graduates I know. Higher incomes (due to excessive demand) and no debt. The pendulum may be swinging back. It needs to, particularly before the next wave of retirements leaves us in an even greater shortage of skilled labor that will be more difficult to claw out of.

There’s been a good bit of coverage on Gen Z and their increasing disillusionment with college — not seeing it as a good value, as it were. They’ve also been shown to be more financially savvy and involved than any other generation at their age. Considering their financial acumen, I’d be surprised if a few didn’t notice the average salary for an electrician is now higher than the average for a staff accountant.

Our current workforce needs an immediate infusion of young, skilled talent before we face such labor shortages that projects become impossible. Gen Z may be the answer. The ship has sailed on its predecessors.

https://themakingofamillionaire.com/there-is-a-much-larger-problem-than-the-great-resignation-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-it-3922cf8aefd2

Monday, September 05, 2022

Australia: Top doctor Luke McLindon sacked, shunned for divisive Covid research

Gynaecologist and obstetrician Luke McLindon has proved to be a headache, even an embarrassment, to the bosses at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital.

In June, the leading health facility terminated his job as the head of fertility services for not having the Covid-19 vaccine – against Queensland Health’s mandate.

And now the controversial doctor has stirred up a storm over data he says makes a preliminary link between the Covid-19 vaccine and miscarriages.

His unfinished research – which is heavily disputed by the Mater and counter to multiple studies that have found the vaccine is safe for pregnant women – was leaked and promoted by anti-vaxxers online.

Dr McLindon wants his early research to be investigated further, but his personal stance against vaccine mandates is not helping his fight for serious consideration of his findings.

“I’ve been shunned and isolated and in a very difficult place both personally and professionally,” he told The Sunday Mail. “I am not an anti-vaxxer, I’m just against mandates, and as a GP I delivered the scheduled immunisations to patients for years.

“As an obstetrician my patients were mostly all vaccinated. “I have never encouraged anyone not to be vaccinated.”

Dr McLindon, a long-time clinical researcher in infertility and recurrent miscarriage, told peers in a closed meeting that he had discovered a rise in the number of early pregnancies lost to women following the Covid-19 vaccine.

“I told the group that the rates looked too high but needed further investigation and made it clear the findings must not be spread,” he said.

“I was horrified by what I saw online. “It was used as anti-vax fodder and my actual data was not yet complete. “Those numbers were very early and they were worst possible scenario. “They needed to be moderated and adjusted as more time passed.

“News travelled fast in the medical world in Queensland and I have been distanced and frozen out.”

The doctor said at 51 he will likely have to start life again in a different career.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommends all people trying to conceive to have the Covid vaccine. Several studies have found the vaccine to be safe for pregnant women.

As he fights for his reputation, Supreme Court documents show the doctor lost his position at the Mater as he failed to adhere to the vaccine mandate for medical professionals.

Dr McLindon is one of a group of Queensland doctors who launched a legal challenge to the chief health officer’s vaccine mandates for hospital and healthcare workers.

“That is my personal decision due to a heart condition,” he said.

A Mater spokesman confirmed that the doctor no longer practised at the Mater but would not clarify the reason. Dr McLindon said he too was not at liberty to comment on the reason for his termination.

But court documents show that Mater chief executive Dr Peter Steer terminated his employment on June 9 as he had not complied to the vaccine mandate and did not provide an exemption.

“I wish to have peers review my findings before formally releasing,” Dr McLindon said. “The aim is to find a reputable international journal who sees the importance of this work to add to the scientific literature in this space.

“I have an intimate knowledge of these women’s menstrual cycles, time of conception, bloods, ultrasounds, vaccination status and timings.”

Colleagues say the controversial gynaecologist is a respected doctor and a “decent human being”. “Research needs to start somewhere,” one doctor said. “As experts in a field we have an obligation to be intellectually honest. “This includes being absolutely sure of your data and allowing others in the field to crosscheck your findings.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/coronavirus/top-doctor-luke-mclindon-sacked-shunned-for-divisive-research/news-story/5623e5f2575271b589082cf39777771c

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Better COVID-19 vaccines are on the way. What do they do? And what technology might we see in the future?

By Paul Griffin

Regulators in Australia and the United States last week approved Omicron-specific boosters, following approval in the United Kingdom in mid-August.

In Australia, a Moderna Omicron booster has been provisionally approved for use in adults aged 18 and over. Supplies are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, however the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) is yet to advise the government on how the vaccine will be used.

So what's new about the Omicron booster? And what sorts of advances in vaccine technology might we see next?

Why do we need new vaccines?

The current COVID-19 vaccines will go down in history as one of the greatest achievements of medical science. Developed at record pace — without omitting any of the usual steps to ensure safety and efficacy — the vaccines significantly decreased the risk of severe disease and death.

But they're less effective at reducing infection. Frequent boosters have been required to protect against new sub-variants. This is because the spike protein, which the vaccines target, has changed. And over time, our protection has reduced due to waning immunity.

What are the Omicron-specific vaccines?

Most manufacturers of approved COVID-19 vaccines began making boosters targeting previous variants as far back as Alpha. But until Omicron, these variant-specific boosters offered no significant advantage over vaccines targeting the original, or Wuhan, strain.

The new Omicron boosters combine two different targets in the one vaccine, known as a bivalent vaccine. This provides broader cross-protection — against the currently circulating variants but possibly against future variants too.

The first of these boosters, manufactured by Moderna, targets the BA.1 Omicron sub-variant in addition to the original or Wuhan strain. It also provides some protection against BA.4 and BA.5. This is now approved in the UK, Australia and US.

The US has also approved the Pfizer bivalent booster, which targets the spike of BA.4/BA.5 as well as the original strain.

What vaccine technology might we see next?
Scientists are working to develop COVID-19 vaccines that:

offer longer lasting protection

protect against new variants and sub-variants

provide similar levels of protection from a single dose

don't require freezing or refrigeration, and that have an extended shelf life

deliver a strong response from lower doses of active ingredient.

More than 120 potential COVID-19 vaccines are in clinical trials. Here are some of the improvements they're working on.

More robust protection against new variants

Most vaccines approved so far target the entire spike protein. But many vaccines under development specifically target the part of the spike protein that binds to the corresponding receptor on our cells. This is less likely to change than other parts of the spike protein, delivering more robust protection against new variants.

Candidate vaccines using this approach include Icosavax and one from the Serum Institute of India.

Easier storage

DNA-based vaccines are similar to mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) but are more temperature-stable, making them easier to transport and store. One such vaccine, by manufacturer Zydus, has already received an emergency use authorisation in India and is injected into the skin. Another, by Inovio, is undergoing phase three trials.

Greater immune responses from lower doses

With current COVID-19 vaccines, the body is given instructions to make the spike protein, or the spike protein itself is delivered. The vaccines cannot replicate or reproduce themselves. Vaccines that can replicate have the potential to generate stronger immune responses or strong enough responses from lower doses.

Variant-proof vaccines

Finally, many vaccines under development have the ambitious target of protecting against all coronviruses or vaccines that are essentially variant-proof. While this has not so far been achieved for any similar family of viruses, there are many promising candidates.

Many rely on combining antigens from many different parts of the virus or even multiple coronaviruses. Others combine multiple receptor-binding domains (potentially allowing the vaccine to give a broader immune response against a range of variants) with other innovative technologies.

Different routes of administration

Current vaccines rely on administration via a needle and syringe. This is an issue for people with needle phobias, and presents challenges for the disposal of sharps. So many vaccines being developed are given via alternate routes.

One way to deliver vaccines is through the nose, known as intranasal vaccination. Rather than injecting, you breathe it in.

Giving the vaccine via the same route the virus gains entry has the potential to generate a response that's better able to stop the virus entering in the first place.

One of the main limitations of nasal vaccines is getting a strong enough immune response to be effective. However there are many promising candidates, including one I'm working on.

Vaccines given via the skin are also a promising area. In addition to the DNA vaccines injected into the skin, others are being developed using vaccine coated onto patches, essentially made of microscopic needles. This is easier to administer.

It may also have some advantages in terms of immune response and its ability to be stored at room temperature. One such vaccine that looks promising has been developed by a group originally from the University of Queensland.

Finally, oral vaccines you drink are also under development. While potentially the most convenient method of administration, it's also one that poses great challenges in terms of getting a strong enough response for the required effect.

While up to five vaccines in development are exploring this avenue of administration, including one I'm involved in, they are in relatively early phases of clinical trials.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-05/covid-omicron-vaccine-booster-target-omicron/101401478

BACKGROUND

Home (Index page)

A simple definiton: Conservatism is all about preserving traditions and resisting sudden change

Deep down: The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

Leftists use the rest of us as a tool to make themselves feel better

The extreme Right are actually the extreme Left

"Social justice" is inherently tyrannical

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"

When it comes to political incorrectness, I hit the trifecta. I talk about race, IQ and social class. I have an academic background in all three subjects but that wins me no forgiveness

Access past and present backups for all my current blogs

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

My annual picture page

Subject index to my academic journal articles

Consolidated list of links to all my writings

The sidebar entries here had become very extensive. I have therefore divided them into two. The first half is below and the second half is here -- including some comments on Jews

References to "Leftists" below are to preachers of Leftism, not the ordinary Leftist voter

As a good academic, I define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

So an essential feature of Leftism is that they think they have the right to tell other people what to do. They see things in the world that are not ideal and conclude therefore that they have the right to change those things by force. Conservative explanations of why things are not ideal -- and never can be -- fall on deaf ears

That Left and Right are so hostile to one-another is most unfortunate. Broadly, the world needs Leftists to highlight problems and conservatives to solve them. But the Left get angry with conservatives when conservatives point out that there are no good solutions to some problems

Conservatism is as much a respect for reality as a respect for tradition. But tradition summarizes a lot of reality. So conservative thinking must change as reality changes. There is no unchanging body of doctrine in conservatism. Conservatism is an attitude, a realistic attitude. Leftists, by contrast, believe whatever suits them, reality regardless

Giorgia dal Italia -- my favourite politician

What the Left routinely forgets: As Henry Hazlitt pointed out: “The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” -- Voltaire.

Social justice is injustice. What is just about taking money off people who have earned it and giving it to people who have not earned it? You can call it many things but justice it is not

But it is the aim of all Leftist governments to take money off people who have earned it and give it to people who have not earned it

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice.’ - Thomas Sowell

At the most basic (psychological) level, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. Conservatives don't think the world is perfect but they can happily live with it. And both those attitudes are largely dispositional, inborn -- which is why they so rarely change

Revolution is the ultimate desideratum for Leftists

Patriotism is a happy thing. No wonder Leftists have difficulties with it

Leftists' manifest desire is to destroy their country from the inside with division and hatred

The Left Doesn't Like Christmas because Christmas is just too happy for them

Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo switched from Democrat to the Republican Party, saying, “A conservative is a liberal who was mugged the night before.”

Who is this Leftist? Take his description of his political program: A "declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists". You could hardly get a more change-oriented or revolutionary programme than that. So whose programme was it? Marx? Lenin? Stalin? Trotsky? Mao? No. It was how Hitler described his programme towards the end of "Mein Kampf". And the Left pretend that Hitler was some sort of conservative! Perhaps it not labouring the point also to ask who it was that described his movement as having a 'revolutionary creative will' which had 'no fixed aim, _ no permanency, only eternal change'. It could very easily have been Trotsky or Mao but it was in fact Hitler (O'Sullivan, 1983. p. 138). Clearly, Nazism was nothing more nor less than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and to label it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.

A rarely acknowledged aim of Leftist policy in a democracy is to deliver dismay and disruption into the lives other people -- whom they regard as "complacent" -- and they are good at achieving that.

As usual, however, it is actually they who are complacent, with a conviction of the rightness and virtue of their own beliefs that merges into arrogance. They regard anyone who disagrees with them with contempt.

Leftists are wolves in sheep's clothing

Liberals are people who don't believe in liberty

Leftist principles are as solid as foam rubber. When they say that there is no such thing as right and wrong they really mean it.

Leftists FEAR the future

There is no dealing with the Left. Their word is no good. You cannot make a deal with someone who thinks lying and stealing are mere tactics, which the Marxists actually brag about

Montesquieu knew Leftists well: "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."

Because they claim to have all the answers to society's ills, Communists often seem "cool" to young people

German has a word that describes most Leftists well: "Scheinheilig" - A person who appears to be very kind, soft natured, and filled with pure goodness but behind the facade, has a vile nature. He is seemingly holy but is an unscrupulous person on the inside.

The new faith is very oppressive: Leftist orthodoxy is the new dominant religion of the Western world and it is every bit as bigoted and oppressive as Christianity was at its worst

There are two varieties of authoritarian Leftism. Fascists are soft Leftists, preaching one big happy family -- "Better together" in other words. Communists are hard Leftists, preaching class war.

Equality: The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago identified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.

Socialism is the most evil malady ever to afflict the human brain. The death toll in WWII alone tells you that

“Hanlon’s razor”: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

American conservatives have to struggle to hold their country together against Leftist attempts to destroy it. Maduro's Venezuela is a graphic example of how extremely destructive socialism in government can be

The standard response from Marxist apologists for Stalin and other Communist dictators is to say you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. To which Orwell retorted, ‘Where’s the omelette?’

You do still occasionally see some mention of the old idea that Leftist parties represent the worker. In the case of the U.S. Democrats that is long gone. Now they want to REFORM the worker. No wonder most working class Americans these days vote Republican. Democrats are the party of the minorities and the smug

"The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion — mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined." —T.S. Eliot

We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people -- Churchill

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others" -- Cicero. See here

The Left have a lot in common with tortoises. They have a thick mental shell that protects them from the reality of the world about them

Definition of a Socialist: Someone who wants everything you have...except your job.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

One cheer for Jon Burge

Leftist writers usually seem quite reasonable and persuasive at first glance. The problem is not what they say but what they don't say. Leftist beliefs are so counterfactual ("all men are equal", "all men are brothers" etc.) that to be a Leftist you have to have a talent for blotting out from your mind facts that don't suit you. And that is what you see in Leftist writing: A very selective view of reality. Facts that disrupt a Leftist story are simply ignored. Leftist writing is cherrypicking on a grand scale

So if ever you read something written by a Leftist that sounds totally reasonable, you have an urgent need to find out what other people say on that topic. The Leftist will almost certainly have told only half the story

Leftists commonly have the Cyclops syndrome: to see with only one eye, in only one dimension and only half of reality.

We conservatives have the facts on our side, which is why Leftists never want to debate us and do their best to shut us up. It's very revealing the way they go to great lengths to suppress conservative speech at universities. Universities should be where the best and brightest Leftists are to be found but even they cannot stand the intellectual challenge that conservatism poses for them. It is clearly a great threat to them. If what we say were ridiculous or wrong, they would grab every opportunity to let us know it

A conservative does not hanker after the new; He hankers after the good. Leftists hanker after the untested

Just one thing is sufficient to tell all and sundry what an unamerican lamebrain Obama is. He pronounced an army corps as an army "corpse" Link here. Can you imagine any previous American president doing that? Many were men with significant personal experience in the armed forces in their youth.

'Gay Pride' parades: You know you live in a great country when "oppressed" people have big, colorful parades.

A favorite Leftist saying sums up the whole of Leftism: "To make an omelette, you've got to break eggs". They want to change some state of affairs and don't care who or what they destroy or damage in the process. They think their alleged good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds

In practical politics, the art of Leftism is to sound good while proposing something destructive

Leftists are the "we know best" people, meaning that they are intrinsically arrogant. Matthew chapter 6 would not be for them. And arrogance leads directly into authoritarianism

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His clever short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out

Insight: "A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Leftists think of themselves as the new nobility

Many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.

"Those who see hate everywhere think they're looking thru a window when actually they're looking at a mirror"

Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, “We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.” In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

Karl Marx in his own words

If you understand that Leftism is hate, everything falls into place.

The strongest way of influencing people is to convince them that you will do them some good. Leftists and con-men misuse that

Leftists believe only what they want to believe. So presenting evidence contradicting their beliefs simply enrages them. They do not learn from it

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves.

Leftists who think that they can conjure up paradise out of their own limited brains are simply fools -- arrogant and dangerous fools. They essentially know nothing. Conservatives learn from the thousands of years of human brains that have preceded us -- including the Bible, the ancient Greeks and much else. The death of Socrates is, for instance, an amazing prefiguration of the intolerant 21st century. Ask any conservative stranded in academe about his freedom of speech

Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Leftists don't understand that -- which is a major factor behind their simplistic thinking. They just never see the trade-offs. But implementing any Leftist idea will hit us all with the trade-offs

Chesteron's fence -- good conservative thinking

"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"[go oft astray] is a well known line from a famous poem by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. But the next line is even wiser: "And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy". Burns was a Leftist of sorts so he knew how often their theories fail badly.

Mostly, luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.

Most Leftist claims are simply propaganda. Those who utter such claims must know that they are not telling the whole story. Hitler described his Marxist adversaries as "lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams". At the risk of ad hominem shrieks, I think that image is too good to remain disused.

Conservatives adapt to the world they live in. Leftists want to change the world to suit themselves

ABOUT

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect.

I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)

The Australian flag with the Union Jack quartered in it

Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia

Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain

Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.

"Remind me never to get this guy mad at me" -- Instapundit

It seems to be a common view that you cannot talk informatively about a country unless you have been there. I completely reject that view but it is nonetheless likely that some Leftist dimbulb will at some stage aver that any comments I make about politics and events in the USA should not be heeded because I am an Australian who has lived almost all his life in Australia. I am reluctant to pander to such ignorance in the era of the "global village" but for the sake of the argument I might mention that I have visited the USA 3 times -- spending enough time in Los Angeles and NYC to get to know a fair bit about those places at least. I did however get outside those places enough to realize that they are NOT America.

"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation

Some personal background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 80 at the time of writing in 2024. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.

Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide

In my teenage years, however, I was fortunate to be immersed (literally) in a very fundamentalist Christian religion. And the heavy Bible study I did at that time left me with lessons for life that have stood me in good stead ever since

Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals

IQ and ideology: Most academics are Left-leaning. Why? Because very bright people who have balls go into business, while very bright people with no balls go into academe. I did both with considerable success, which makes me a considerable rarity. Although I am a born academic, I have always been good with money too. My share portfolio even survived the GFC in good shape. The academics hate it that bright people with balls make more money than them.

I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak. Some might conclude that I must therefore be a very confused sort of atheist but I can assure everyone that I do not feel the least bit confused. The New Testament is a lighthouse that has illumined the thinking of all sorts of men and women and I am deeply grateful that it has shone on me.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age. Conservatism is in touch with reality. Leftism is not.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

Most teenagers have sporting and movie posters on their bedroom walls. At age 14 I had a map of Taiwan on my wall.

A small personal note: I have always been very self-confident. I inherited it from my mother, along with my skeptical nature. So I don't need to feed my self-esteem by claiming that I am wiser than others -- which is what Leftists do.

As with conservatives generally, it bothers me not a bit to admit to large gaps in my knowledge and understanding. For instance, I don't know if the slight global warming of the 20th century will resume in the 21st, though I suspect not. And I don't know what a "healthy" diet is, if there is one. Constantly-changing official advice on the matter suggests that nobody knows

As well as being an academic, I am an army man and I am pleased and proud to say that I have worn my country's uniform. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

It would be very easy for me to say that I am too much of an individual for the army but I did in fact join the army and enjoy it greatly, as most men do. In my observation, ALL army men are individuals. It is just that they accept discipline in order to be militarily efficient -- which is the whole point of the exercise. But that's too complex for simplistic Leftist thinking, of course

A real army story here

It's amusing that my army service gives me honour among conservatives but contempt from Leftists. I don't weep at all about the latter. I am still in touch with some of the fine people I served with over 50 years ago. The army is like that

This is just a bit of romanticism but I do have permanently located by the head of my bed a genuine century-old British army cavalry sword. It is still a real weapon. I was not in the cavalry but I see that sword as a symbol of many things. I want it to be beside my bed when I die

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and there is JUST ONE saying of Hitler's that I rather like. It may not even be original to him but it is found in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf (published in 1925): "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". The equivalent English saying is "Difficulties exist to be overcome" and that traces back at least to the 1920s -- with attributions to Montessori and others. Hitler's metaphor is however one of smashing barriers rather than of politely hopping over them and I am myself certainly more outspoken than polite. Hitler's colloquial Southern German is notoriously difficult to translate but I think I can manage a reasonable translation of that saying: "Resistance is there not for us to capitulate to but for us to break". I am quite sure that I don't have anything like that degree of determination in my own life but it seems to me to be a good attitude in general anyway

And something that was perceptive comes from the same chapter. Hitler said that the doctrines of the interwar Social Democrats (mainstream leftists) of Vienna were "comprised of egotism and hate". Not much has changed

I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.

COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.

You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR" -- and that preference has NOTHING to do with an American soap opera that featured a character who was referred to in that way

SIDEBAR EXTENSION HERE

DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism"
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
Western Heart

BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
To be continued ....
Coral reef compendium.
Queensland Police
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia

BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
Paralipomena (2)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Some more useful links

Alt archives for "Dissecting Leftism" here or here
Longer Academic Papers
Johnray links
Academic home page
Academic Backup Page
General Backup
General Backup 2
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia

Selected reading

MONOGRAPH ON LEFTISM

CONSERVATISM AS HERESY

A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF NAZISM

Rightism defined
Leftist Churches
Leftist Racism
Fascism is Leftist
Hitler a socialist
Leftism is authoritarian
James on Leftism
Irbe on Leftism
Beltt on Leftism
Lakoff
Van Hiel
Sidanius
Kruglanski
Pyszczynski et al.

Cautionary blogs about big Australian organizations:

TELSTRA
OPTUS
VODAFONE
AGL
Bank of Queensland
Queensland Police
Australian police news
QANTAS, a dying octopus

INTERESTING BLOGS by others
(My frequent reads are starred)

10 o'clock scholar
Agitator*
AMCGLTD
American Thinker
ASTUTE BLOGGERS
Baby Troll
Bad Eagle
Belmont Club*
Betsy's Page
Bill Keezer
Blackfive
Bleeding Brain
BLOGGER NEWS
Blowhards
Bob McCarty
Booker Rising
Brian Leiter scrutinized
Brothers Judd*
Brussels Journal
Bullied and Badgered, Pressured and Purged
Bureaucrash
Candle in dark
Catallarchy*
Classical Values
Clayton Cramer*
Climate audit
Climate science
Colby Cosh
Cold Fury
Common-sense & Wonder*
Community Pride Childcare
(Clearwater, Florida)
Confront the Left
Conservative Grapevine
Conservative Oasis
Conservative Political Forum
Conservatives Anonymous
Critical Mass
Cronaca*
Daily Caller
Danegerus
Dead Cat Bounce
Dean's World
Dhimmi Watch
Discover the networks
Discriminations
Dodge Blog
Dr Helen
Dr Sanity
Drunkablog
Ed Driscoll
Dyspepsia
Eddy Rants
Electric Venom
Endiana
Enter Stage Right
Eugene Undergound
Evangelical Ecologist
Fighting in the Shade
Find the best gun
Fourth Rail
Free Patriot
Gates of Vienna
Gay and Right
Gene Expression*
Ghost of Flea
Global warming & Climate
Gold Dog
Grumpy Old Sod
Hack Wilson
Hall of Record
Heretical Ideas
Hitler's Leftism
Hugh Hewitt
Hummers & Cigarettes
IMAO
Icecap
Inductivist
Instapunk
Intellectual Conservative
Interested Participant
Jihad Watch
Jim Kalb
Junk Food science
Junk Science
Just One Minute
KBJ
Knowledge is Power
Ladybird Deed
La Shawn
Laudator
Libertyphile
Lone Wacko
Lubos Motl
Luskin
MA firearm safety
Main Street Radical
Mangan
Margaret Thatcher Foundation
Maverick Philosopher
Medicine World
Michelle Malkin
Moderate Voice
Moorewatch
National Center
National Scene
Neo Con Blogger
Never Yet Melted
New Zeal
Northeastern Intelligence Network
Not PC
On the Right Side
Orator
Overlawyered
Parable Man
ParaPundit*
Pedestrian Infidel
Poli Pundit
Prof Bainbridge
Promethean Antagonist
Qando
Qohel
Random Observations
Rand Simberg
Random Jottings
Red State
Rhodey
Rhymes with Right
Right Nation
Right Thinking
Right Wing news
Roadkill
Ron Hebron
Rottweiler
Schansberg
SCSU Scholars*
Sharp Blades
Sharp Knife
Should Know
Shrinkwrapped
Silent Running
Smallest Minority
Squander 2
Steve Sailer
Stop the ACLU
Stuart Buck
Talking Head
Tim Worstall
Truth and consequences
Two-Four Net
Urban Conservative
Urgent Agenda
Vdare blog
View from Right
Viking Pundit
Vodka Pundit
Watt's up with that
Western Standard
Bill Whittle
What If
WICKED THOUGHTS*
Wiki Law
Winds of Change
Wizbang
World of Reason
World Terrorism news

Education Blogs

Early Childhood Education
Education Bug
Eduwonk
Joanne Jacobs*
Marc Miyake*

Economics Blogs

Adam Smith
Arnold Kling
Chicago Boyz
Cafe Hayek
Econopundit
Environmental Economics
Jane Galt
S. Karlson
D. Luskin
Marginal Revolution
Mises Inst.

Australian Blogs

A E Brain
Brookes News
Catallaxy
Fortress Australia
Kev Gillett
Hissink File
ICJS*
Oz Conservative
Slattery
Tim Blair
WESTERN HEART*
Cyclone's Sketchblog

England

Anglo Austrian
Burning our Money
Campaign Against Political Correctness
England Project
Norm Geras
House of Dumb
IQ & PC
Limbic Nutrition
Majority Rights*
NHS Doctor
Policeman
Samizdata
Sean Gabb
Sterling Times
Englishman's Castle

Scotland

Freedom & Whisky
A Place to Stand

ISRAEL

IsraPundit
Steven Plaut
Think Israel

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here