Robert Redfield, the former head of the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said mandating Covid-19 vaccine was a “terrible decision” and lockdowns and school closures were a “big mistake”.
Dr Redfield, an esteemed virologist who led the CDC from 2018 to 2021, said the pharmaceutical giants had a “huge influence” over convincing governments that everyone including children should be coerced into being vaccinated and boosted during the pandemic.
“We absolutely never should have mandated vaccines, it was a terrible decision … the rationale for mandating vaccines for healthy firefighters and policemen, those in the military, hospital workers, teachers, was emotional, it shouldn’t have happened,” he said in an interview with Chris Cuomo published on Wednesday (Thursday AEST).
Dr Redfield, 72, said the Covid-19 vaccines, which the Biden administration tried to mandate for all workers in late 2021, worked to prevent serious illness and death for vulnerable, older patients “over 65” but weren’t suitable for healthy young people, didn’t prevent transmission and wore off after six months at most.
“If you came down and visited me and interviewed my patients, you’d interview patient after patient that did not have Covid, but are very sick, long covid patients, and it’s all from the vaccine,” he added, in comments that would have been censored on social media and censured publicly during the pandemic.
A ‘v-safe’ survey by the CDC released in late 2022 found 7.7 per cent of around a million American recipients sought medical attention after their Covid-19 vaccination. Western Australian data published last year found the Covid-19 vaccines, which were lauded as safe and effective, caused injuries at 24 times the rate of other approved vaccines.
“I remember Biden saying, you know, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. … I was saying, wait a minute, two thirds of the people that I’m seeing infected in Maryland have been vaccinated, these vaccines don’t last”.
Dr Redfield, who continues to practise medicine privately in Maryland, was sidelined in 2020 for suggesting SARS-Cov2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than ‘spilt over’ from the animal kingdom naturally, a theory that’s since become more credible.
In a one-hour interview with Mr Cuomo, whose brother Andrew Cuomo as New York governor became the face of tough Covid-19 mandates in 2020, Dr Redfield said countries “made a big mistake and paid a big price” by locking down their societies for months, on and off for up to two years.
“You know, I’m not sure people will accept responsibility, those people that really pushed it, because it was unfortunate, it was emotional,” he said. “There’s no question there was overreach,
Following China’s example, most governments imposed lockdowns from March 2020, lasting well into 2021 in some jurisdictions, unprecedented policies that triggered massive public borrowing, record unemployment, inflation, social unrest and permanent learning loss, in the US at least, for students from low-income families.
“I was very much against closing schools, I thought the kids were probably safer in schools, most kids were getting infected in the community and from the dinner table, not from the school, a lot of that was emotionalism with teachers,” he said.
Dr Redfield’s interview emerged a few days after Dr Anthony Fauci, president Joe Biden’s former top Covid-19 adviser, admitted in widely reported congressional testimony that the ‘lab leak theory’ was no longer a conspiracy theory and pandemic measures should “consider the balance” of costs and benefits next time.
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Top oncologists weigh in on the rise of rare and unusual cancers in young people - and the links to Covid
Scientists studying a rise in rare and unusual cancers in young people are turning their attention to an unlikely culprit: Covid.
Preliminary research on cells has indicated the virus may fuel the growth of tumors and shut down the body's defense against them - but the theory is widely disputed.
There is, however a consensus among doctors: they're seeing more young and relatively healthy people with obscure forms of the disease after the pandemic.
One doctor told DailyMail.com the theory that Covid is driving these cases doesn't hold up because the trend predates the outbreak. Early-onset cancers of all forms have been on the rise, increasing by 79 percent globally from 1990 to 2019, the year before the pandemic.
Other experts found the Covid theory more convincing. They pointed to the fact that already one in four cancer have been linked to other viruses, such as HPV.
Kasra Jahankhani, an Iranian immunologist and lead researcher on a 2023 report on the topic told DailyMail.com: 'It's really controversial and there is a lot of debate around the topic, but we think there are many ways SARs Covid infection could affect cancers.'
His research suggested that the coronavirus can change genes that usually stop tumors from forming and cause widespread inflammation throughout the body.
This inflammation in combination with reduced defenses might lead to the development of cancer cells in various organs, they wrote.
Viral associations with cancers are 'unfortunately common,' said Dr Landau, oncologist and contributor for The Mesothelioma Center at Asbestos.com.
With the human papilloma virus (HPV), for example, it is believed that the virus itself can inject its DNA into the body's cells, which can cause a mutation that leads to growth of cancerous cells.
'Essentially, the virus is trying to take over our body's cells to promote its own growth and survival.
'But mutating cells to continuously grow is, at a simple level, how cancers develop,' Dr Landau told DailyMail.com.
However, not all experts are in agreement. Dr Suneel Kamath, an oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic, ruled out a link between Covid and cancer.
'The trends in rising incidence of cancer in younger people, such as bile duct, colorectal, breast, lung and gastric, have been happening for years, even decades before Covid-19 existed, and they are still happening,' he told DailyMail.com.
Colon cancer diagnoses in particular among under-50s have reached epidemic levels. Nearly 18,000 cases are diagnosed among this age group every year in the US compared to 12,000 a year pre-2000.
Colon cancer deaths among young people are also expected to double by 2030, experts have warned.
Uterine cancer has also risen two percent each year in people under 50 since the mid-1990s.
Early-onset breast cancer has also increased by 3.8 percent annually between 2016-2019, and cancer rates do not appear to have sped up dramatically since Covid.
But experts have said that it might be too early to see that impact, as 'the long term implications of the pandemic will evolve over time,' Dr Landau said.
CDC data shows that more people are being told they have cancer now than they were prior to the pandemic. In 2021, 9.8 percent of adults reported having ever been told by a doctor that they had cancer. In 2019, that proportion of adults was 9.5 percent.
One of the possible links between Covid and cancer is a gene called P53, which suppresses cancerous tumors in the body by stopping cells with mutated or damaged DNA from dividing, Jahankhani explained.
His research team found that the tumor suppressor gene P53 may be 'degraded' by SARS-CoV-2 and effectively blocked.
This means it can no longer stop tumors growing. Other research has found that lower levels of P53 can make people more susceptible to cancer.
Another factor involves the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS), which is a key system that regulates blood pressure in the body.
When the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds to ACE2 receptor, it stops the RAAS from functioning properly.
This in turn causes inflammation and oxidative stress, which are factors in cancer progression and development.
Another way Covid and cancer might be linked is by proteins called cytokines.
When the body gets an infection such as Covid, the immune system will begin to fight it off, including using cytokines as a defense system against the virus.
The proteins tell immune cells what to do and also tell the body to produce more of them to ensure a knockout blow is delivered to the infection.
But sometimes too many cytokines can be released, which puts the immune system into overdrive and creates a heightened inflammatory response.
The release of cytokines is often what makes us feel sick when we have an infection, Dr Landau said.
'But these same cytokines can cause harm to the body, and that harm can increase cancer risk, especially if they remain elevated in the long term,' he said.
This heightened inflammatory response occurs with long Covid, he added.
Too much inflammation can damage tissues and DNA and has been linked to the development of autoimmune conditions, as well as cancer.
Inflammation also causes changes to chromosomes in cells, and repeated changes can cause cells to become cancerous.
This abundance of cytokines can also lead to the emergence of cancer stem cells in organs like the lungs and pancreas, as well as bile ducts.
Because Covid infection occurs directly and indirectly in several organs, including the lungs, brain and kidneys, the researchers believe cancer stem cells can develop in multiple organs.
Stem cells are cells that have the ability the develop into many different cell types in the body.
Cancer stem cells, meanwhile, occur in tumors and have the ability to divide and renew, which grows and spreads the tumor.
They can originate from adult tissue stem cells and initiate a tumor, particularly if there is lots of inflammation from Covid.
And while researchers cannot definitively rule out the Covid vaccines as playing a role, Jahankhani said there is no evidence that this is the case.
His team 'didn't find anything' to support the idea that the Covid shot drove up cancer rates.
The evidence supporting the virus theory appears to be much stronger, he added.
Dr Landau acknowledged that although there have been blood clot issues after the Covid vaccine, 'a clear link with development of cancer is not yet known.'
'We suspect the cancer risk would come from the virus itself, rather than the vaccine, but it will take years of follow up studies to truly understand this,' he said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13506321/cancer-Covid-infection-supercharge-tumors.html
*************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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