Friday, October 13, 2023
CDC Data Reveals Status of COVID-19 Hospitalizations Across US
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) posted updated data showing that COVID-19 hospital admissions are continuing to decline across the United States after it showed an uptick in cases over the summer.
As of the week ending Sept. 30, hospitalizations are down by 6 percent, emergency department visits are down by 14.5 percent, and cases are down by 1.2 percent, according to the CDC. Deaths are up by 3.8 percent, but health officials have long said that deaths usually lag behind hospitalizations and case numbers.
For several weeks now, hospital admissions have been declining on a weekly basis. In July, COVID-19 hospitalizations, however, had been on the rise—although CDC historical data suggest that they were relatively low compared with previous years.
The EG.5 variant, which has been dubbed Eris, has accounted for about 24.5 percent of all COVID-19 cases, according to the federal health agency's variant tracker. FL.1.5.1, known as Fornax, is estimated to be responsible for about 13.7 percent of infections, the CDC figures show.
During the late summer and during a rise in hospitalizations, some health officials suggested that it doesn’t appear to be as bad as previous increases of the virus.
“Looking at that graph [of] hospitalizations, even though it’s on an upward trend, that’s still lower than it was last year at this time,” Dr. John Segreti, an epidemiologist and the medical director of infection control and prevention at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, told ABC News at the time. “The fact that the numbers are going up fairly slowly, I think is a good sign.”
Dr. Shira Doron, chief infection control officer for Tufts Medicine, said that the recent “upswing is not a surge; it’s not even a wave.” The doctor added: “What we’re seeing is a very gradual and small upward trajectory of cases and hospitalizations, without deaths really going along, which is great news."
'Public Health Threat'
Despite the drop in hospitalizations over multiple consecutive weeks, the CDC issued a report on Oct. 6 saying that COVID-19 remains a "public health threat" for older Americans and called on people again to get the updated COVID-19 booster vaccine. Older adults, it said, make up the majority of hospitalizations across the United States in recent days, although that has been consistent with historical trends.
In mid-July, around seven out of every 100,000 people aged 65 and older were hospitalized with COVID-19, said the CDC. But by mid-August, according to the agency, 16.4 per 100,000 adults aged 65 and older were hospitalized with the viral infection.
Overall, from January to August 2023, adults aged 65 years and older "accounted for 62.9 percent of all COVID-19–associated hospitalizations," it said before suggesting that older people get the "recommended COVID-19 bivalent vaccine."
Other than getting the vaccine, they should also adopt "measures to reduce risk for contracting COVID-19" and receive "prompt outpatient antiviral treatment after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result," it added.
The second highest hospitalization rate was among individuals aged 50 to 64 at around one out of 100,000, it said.
Since the original COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out several years ago, uptake of the booster shots has consistently dropped. After the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signed off on the latest vaccines, data from the Department of Health and Human Services show that just 1 percent of all Americans opted to get the shot in September.
However, six medical journals rejected a key paper on COVID-19 vaccines and heart inflammation, a condition the vaccines cause, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times. The CDC's journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was among those that rejected the paper, which estimated that COVID-19 hospitalizations would be prevented than cases of heart inflammation, or myocarditis, caused.
Another report from The Epoch Times, published Wednesday, revealed the FDA received results from two studies of subclinical heart inflammation following Moderna COVID-19 vaccination, but won't release them to the public—for now.
Some hospitals since August have started implementing mask mandates—at least for staff—claiming a rise in COVID-19 and other respiratory infections like RSV or influenza.
Notably, several Northern California counties issued a rule mandating masks be worn by all health care staff starting Nov. 1 and lasting until April 30, 2024. Contra Costa, Sonoma, Alameda, and San Mateo counties in September mandated masking regardless of vaccination status for hospitals and other care facilities, starting Nov. 1 and ending April 30, 2024.
California's San Luis Obispo County issued a similar mandate several days ago, requiring staffers to either wear a mask or get the vaccine.
Several hospitals in upstate New York, Massachusetts, and California also implemented a mandate in recent weeks, while at least one school in Maryland made masks mandatory for one kindergarten class. As for vaccine mandates, several dozen U.S. universities and colleges still have them intact, according to a recent report.
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The VA Is Rejecting Disability Claims for COVID Vaccine Injuries and Senators Want to Know Why
After forcing U.S. service members to receive the COVID-19 vaccine or be released from the military, the Biden administration is refusing to provide disability status for soldiers injured by the jab. A number of Republican Senators are demanding to know why.
"We write for clarification on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) policy for veterans who have injuries resulting from receiving the COVID-19 vaccine while in service. As you are aware, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) required all service members to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Many service members, despite hesitations against receiving the vaccine, chose to be vaccinated to continue their service to our country," Senators Marco Rubio, Mike Braun, Tom Cotton, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, and Steve Daines wrote in a letter to Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough.
"Thousands of service members were discharged from service as a result of refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Yet, some U.S. service members received the vaccine to maintain their service and have since experienced lasting health impacts as a result," they continued. "If our government is asking service members to receive a vaccine, we must be cognizant that there will be unintended side effects that may cause lifelong impacts on their health. We must keep our promise to support our service members, including ensuring those who come to the VA for help with COVID-19 vaccine injuries are justly compensated and receive the care that they deserve."
The Senators also pointed out that the department has provided disability for injuries from vaccines for years but isn't doing so for the COVID-19 shot.
"For years, the VA has evaluated the health effects of certain vaccinations that veterans received during their service, and have expressed concern with certain health impacts arising from these vaccinations," they wrote. "The agency has also provided several resources to veterans seeking the COVID-19 vaccination, but no clear information about how to support members who are injured as a result of the vaccine. Given the high rate of service members who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 under DoD’s mandate, we request information as to how the VA is considering vaccine-related injuries in determining VA benefits and disability claims."
The Senators are seeking information from McDonough about how the department is handling claims.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Thursday, October 12, 2023
‘We Can't Force the Human Body to Accept Foreign Genetic Code': Dr. McCullough on mRNA Technology
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough warned that messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines inject “foreign genetic code” into human beings, which the body fails to break down or expel for a prolonged period of time.
Research on mRNA “has been going on for decades,” Dr. McCullough said during an Oct. 5 interview. The 2023 Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to two scientists for making “messenger RNA long-lasting in the human body,” he said. “I mean, it has been tested in multiple applications … It's an absolute bust. It was just the worst idea ever to install the genetic code for a lethal protein without being able to shut it off. It wasn't the fact that it was rushed; it's just ill-conceived from the very beginning.”
“We can't force the human body to accept foreign genetic code and produce a foreign protein … Messenger RNA for vaccines is a completely failed concept. It’s a dangerous concept, and the U.S. government wasn't honest. They should have been honest. Trump should have come out and said, ‘Listen, it's on our website; our military's been working on this since 2012.’”
During a testimony at the European Parliament last month, Dr. McCullough said, “There's not a single study showing that the messenger RNA is broken down” in the human body once it is injected. “There's not a study showing it leaves the body.” Since the vaccines are “made synthetically, they cannot be broken down.”
He added that the lethal protein from the [COVID-19] vaccines found in the human body after vaccination was found to be circulating “at least for six months, if not longer.”
In the case of seasonal jabs, that is, taking an injection or booster at the end of six months as recommended by the authorities, “there's another installation in more circulating potentially lethal protein.”
Scientist Drew Weissman, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in developing mRNA technology, warned in a 2018 paper that not only did clinical trials of mRNA vaccines produce “more modest [results] in humans than was expected based on animal models,” but that the “side effects were not trivial.”
Dr. Mccullough’s comments come as the Gates Foundation is spending $40 million on countries in Africa and other economically backward nations to produce new mRNA vaccines in efforts to prevent diseases like tuberculosis and malaria.
Concealing a ‘Global Security Threat’
In the Steve Deace interview, Dr. McCullough said that the ineffectiveness of the technology was not unknown to the government since they’ve been testing it for nearly 40 years.
He referred to a February 2023 paper published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which cited that the U.S. government has been investing billions of dollars in developing messenger RNA technology since 1985.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began investing in mRNA tech in 2011. DARPA then launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program in 2016 that sought to produce “relevant numbers of doses” against infections within 60 days of identifying them.
The ADEPT P3 was a program by the U.S. military “to end pandemics in 60 days.” There is no other technology “that our government has invested more in,” Dr. McCullough said.
Dr. McCullough cited another paper that stated there were “over 9,000 patents on messenger RNA. And all the patent assignees are big entities. At the top is Sanofi, then Cervavac, BioNTech, Moderna, and the U.S. government. No single person invented messenger RNA. Someone who comes up in 2021 and says, ‘You know I invented it’. That's impossible. This has been going on for decades.”
Dr. McCullough pointed out that the United States and China have been in “collaboration for years” in their research on infectious and lethal coronavirus.
However, officials like Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and “a whole cadre of scientists, they collaborated to conceal this global security threat.”
“They actually intentionally lied to the world and said the virus came out of nature. They knew it came out of the Wuhan lab,” he said, citing a research paper by Ralph Baric and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi that was published in the Nature journal in 2015.
Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi is affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while Mr. Baric is from the Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“They said they created SARS-CoV-2 virus. They called it the Wuhan Institute of Virology 1 virus. That was the prototype SARS-CoV-2. So, that's in 2015. Instead of bringing Ralph Baric out [and asking] ‘Dr. Baric, how do we get ourselves out of this disaster,’ you masterminded this virus funded by the US.”
‘Pull All COVID-19 Vaccines Off the Market’
In his interview, Dr. McCullough made three recommendations. “I say number one, I've called in the US Senate [and] now the European Parliament [to] pull all COVID-19 vaccines off the market before anyone else is harmed.”
“Number two, US, EU and all westernized Nations [should] pull out of the WHO. They're not trustable. And number three, I'm following the World Council for Health. I am recommending a halt on all childhood vaccines, the entire vaccine schedule until this is clarified since messenger RNA is now on the schedule without any concerns for safety.
While some studies related to the safety of COVID-19 vaccines have shown the jabs to be safe, others have raised concerns about the safety of the shots.
A December 2022 study analyzed trials comparing vaccine recipients with individuals who did not receive a vaccine or were given a placebo.
It concluded that “compared to placebo, most vaccines reduce, or likely reduce, the proportion of participants with confirmed symptomatic COVID-19, and for some, there is high-certainty evidence that they reduce severe or critical disease.”
However, a June 2022 study that looked at mRNA vaccinations found that “Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of special interest (AESI).”
“The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials.”
‘Shedding’ the Infection
During the interview, Mr. Deace asked about hearing issues that he and his colleague suffered and whether they had any ties with the vaccines. While he did not take a COVID-19 shot, the colleague was vaccinated. Mr. Deace asked if this was “further proof that basically the last few years Peter everybody was a lab rat whether you took the vaccine or not.”
“It's true, nearly all of us have been exposed to the Wuhan spike protein,” Dr. McCullough replied. “When I see patients in the office, we check antibodies against the spike protein. Invariably, they're elevated. Rarely, I'll find somebody who hasn't been exposed.”
Dr. McCullough pointed out that there are “clear-cut papers” showing individuals suffering hearing loss after taking COVID-19 jabs. “It's all related to the spike protein,” he said. mRNA vaccines work by instructing cells in the body to produce the spike protein found on the surface of the COVID-19 virus.
Once vaccinated, an individual’s muscle cells begin producing spike protein pieces, displaying them on cell surfaces, which end up triggering the immune system to create antibodies. When such an individual gets infected with the COVID-19 virus, these antibodies will then fight the virus.
Dr. McCullough warned that even people who have not received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can eventually get affected by messenger RNA through a vaccinated individual via “shedding.”
“Shedding means that one has been exposed to the spike protein or to the messenger RNA from close contact with another individual. We know both of them can travel via exosomes which are small phospholipid packets that can be exhaled [via] breath, through sweat, [and] various forms of body fluid, typically you know very close contact.”
“There was a big project called the Eva project in the UK showing 78 percent of women who take a vaccine—they actually have menstrual abnormalities. And those who even didn't take a vaccine, they end up having menstrual abnormalities. There's been plenty of these reports that have occurred.”
Dr. McCullough cited an interview he did with scientist Helene Banoun, an expert on shedding, who believes such things “clearly happens, for sure, in people who've taken the vaccine within 30 days, close contact.”
“Now, two studies—one in the United States, one in Japan—[show] the messenger RNA comes through breast milk. The spike protein may be shedded potentially for a much longer duration of time. It's been shown in the human body now for months, maybe even years afterward. And that's the rationale for what our recent proposal to actually undergo spike protein detoxification.”
The cardiologist pointed out that “every signal” related to cardiovascular disease, neurologic disease, blood clots, immune disease, and cancer “is up.”
“There can be debates on why all these chronic diseases are up, all-cause mortality up in every single area of the world,” he said. “The two big exposures we've had are COVID-19 infection and now COVID-19 vaccines, and I think both mechanisms have led to this wave of disease.”
“I think more powerfully with the vaccines since the vaccines are largely genetic, they're given every six months, and they install the genetic code for the disease-promoting and lethal Wuhan spike protein.”
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FDA Has Results of Subclinical Myocarditis Studies, but Won't Release Them Yet
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received results from two studies of subclinical heart inflammation following Moderna COVID-19 vaccination, but is refusing to release them to the public—at least for now.
FDA officials in January 2022 directed Moderna to run three prospective studies on subclinical myocarditis, or heart inflammation without symptoms, after COVID-19 booster vaccination. One study, mRNA-1273-P204, would examine the incidence of subclinical myocarditis in children aged 6 months through 11 years. Another, mRNA-1273-P203, would examine the incidence in adolescents aged 12 years through 17 years. The third, mRNA-1273-P301, would examine the incidence in adults.
Moderna has shared the results of the P203 study with the FDA, an FDA spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in an email. But she declined to provide them. To obtain the results, she said, The Epoch Times would need to request them under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
"The FDA doesn’t post PMR/PMC study reports," she said, using acronyms for postmarketing requirements and postmarketing commitments, or requirements and commitments pharmaceutical companies make when receiving FDA clearance for their products. "They may be requested under FOIA."
The spokeswoman did not disclose why the FDA doesn't release the results absent a FOIA request.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Wednesday, October 11, 2023
SSRN and medRxiv Censor Counter-Narrative Science
Huge blockages to getting skeptical science about Covid published
Jay Bhattacharya1 and Steve H. Hanke
Chapter XI of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is titled “The End of Truth.” Hayek develops the idea that to function and maintain power, totalitarian regimes must use propaganda to establish an official doctrine:
The need for such official doctrines as an instrument of directing and rallying the efforts of the people has been clearly foreseen by the various theoreticians of the totalitarian system. Plato’s “noble lies” and Sorel’s “myths” serve the same purpose as the racial doctrine of the Nazis or the theory of the cooperative state of Mussolini. They are all necessarily based on particular views about facts which are then elaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion. (Hayek 1965, 157)
To be effective, propaganda must exhibit monopoly power, with no dissent allowed and “all information that might cause doubt or hesitation…withheld” (Hayek 1965, 160). Hayek grew up in Vienna and lived there until 1931. He had first-hand experience with totalitarianism and studied its operations. He dedicated much of his professional life to understanding the causes of bad government and combatting its brutalities.
So, we may ask: has covid brought an end to truth? We answer by accounting our covid research experiences, as well as those of others. Before doing so, we reflect on how matters of public health, such as covid, fit into Hayek’s “The End of Truth.”
There is perhaps nothing that opens the door to censorship wider than the fear of disease and the prospect of an early death. Indeed, there is nothing that matches a looming pandemic to generate fear. And there is nothing like fear to grease the skids of censorship.
In the present article, we use the word censorship in the sense of the first definition of the transitive verb censor given at Wiktionary (link): “To review for, and if necessary to remove or suppress, content from books, films, correspondence, and other media which is regarded as objectionable (for example, obscene, likely to incite violence, or sensitive).”
This definition does not confine censorship to activity undertaken by governmental players. We believe that a line that is connoted by censorship, a line that distinguishes censorship from plain and honest content curation, has been crossed by SSRN and medRxiv. That line has to do with violating terms and conditions, even if those are only tacitly understood and are derived from established convention, and with the violations deriving from motives like those that drive government censorship. Indeed, we would not rule out the possibility governmental pressures are playing a role in the censorship perpetrated by SSRN and medRxiv.
So, how does covid fit into this picture? A signal event in the timeline of Western covid lockdowns occurred on March 16, 2020, with the publication of the Imperial College London covid report (Ferguson et al. 2020). Its frightening predictions sent shock waves around the world. The next day, the government threw the United Kingdom into lockdown.
The impact of the report was amplified by the United Kingdom’s soft-power machine, the BBC. Its reach has no equal: broadcasting in 42 languages, reaching 468 million people worldwide each week, and efficiently disseminating its message (Barber 2022). With the BBC in full cry and the public genuinely alarmed, there was little room or tolerance for dissent. In the United Kingdom, the government put its recently established Counter Disinformation Unit on full covid alert, to stamp out dissent (Investigations Team 2023).
A copycat cascade then took hold, with the United States and other countries embracing the UK government’s messaging and policies. The result was a policy based on a defective model (see Herby et al. 2023a, 28–29) that originated at Imperial College London under the leadership of Professor Neil Ferguson, who is the director of Imperial College’s School of Public Health.
UK policymakers should have been aware that Professor Ferguson’s Imperial College team had a history of defective modeling and a track record littered with what are little more than fantasy numbers. To put the blunders of the Imperial College London’s epidemiological fear machine into context, consider the numbers generated by the modelers in 2005, when Professor Ferguson suggested that “up to around 200 million” could die from bird flu globally. He justified this claim by comparing the lethality of bird flu to that of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which killed 40 million (Sturcke 2005). By 2021, bird flu had only killed 456 people worldwide (WHO 2021). And, there were other huge misses by the Imperial College London’s modelers: foot and mouth in 2001, mad cow in 2002, and swine flu in 2009 (Hanke and Dowd 2022).
SSRN censors Herby, Jonung, and Hanke
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN), operated by Netherlandsbased publishing house Elsevier, is an enormous platform in academia. SSRN is extremely important to professors for disseminating their research results and for advancing within the academic community. Indeed, as of September 25, 2023, the SSRN provided 1,271,271 research papers from 1,381,280 researchers in 70 disciplines, per its homepage (link). SSRN is the leading site for academic working papers. It platforms research irrespective of whether the research has been submitted, accepted, or published in journals. Such platforming of research is vital for giving space to all voices, to make scholarship contestable and challengeable, and without delay or stonewalling.
The gatekeeping role of the journals is also a vital facet of the common enterprise of scholarship—but it is separate from the realm of the working paper, and it should continue to be kept separate. If SSRN wishes to play the role of scholarly gatekeeper, it is obliged to assume that role responsibly, which includes clarifying its gatekeeping procedures and living up to the procedures it purports to follow, avoiding double-standards.
Here is what SSRN says (as of September 25, 2023) about its policies regarding “Contributed Content” (link):
Contributed content should be relevant to the subject scope of SSRN. Content may not be illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights, invasive of privacy or otherwise injurious or objectionable. Elsevier does not pre-screen or regularly review any contributed content, but Elsevier has the right (though not the obligation) to monitor submissions to determine compliance with these Terms and any operating rules to satisfy any law, regulation, or authorized government request.
Needless to say, none of the SSRN-censored research products mentioned in the present article runs afoul of the guidelines against material that is “illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights,” or “invasive of privacy.” As for “otherwise injurious or objectionable,” if that is the grounds for SSRN’s censorship, it is something they should declare and defend. Thus far, SSRN has failed to do so.
More here:
https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1276/BhattacharyaHankeSept2023.pdf
************************************************Hydroxychloroquine Reduces COVID-19 Mortality, Study Finds
People who took hydroxychloroquine in combination with another drug while hospitalized with COVID-19 were less likely to die than those who didn't, according to a new study.
Hydroxychloroquine, which is widely used against malaria and arthritis, was given to hundreds of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Belgium. Thousands of others didn't receive the drug.
Researchers examined records from 352 adults hospitalized in AZ Groeninge Hospital in Kortrijk, Belgium. All patients tested positive for COVID-19 or had results from CT scans that suggested COVID-19 was present. Patients received hydroxychloroquine alone or with azithromycin, an antibiotic. They were scanned before and after treatment.
Researchers compared the results of the record analysis with a control group of 3,533 people hospitalized across Belgium with COVID-19 from March 14, 2020, to May 24, 2020. The people didn't receive hydroxychloroquine but did receive standard of care.
Twenty-eight days following the diagnosis of COVID-19, 59 people treated with hydroxychloroquine had died. The mortality percentage, or 16.7 percent, was lower than the 25.9 percentage in the control group.
Researchers found patients who received hydroxychloroquine were more likely to survive even after adjusting for age and other factors.
"Our study suggests that, despite the controversy surrounding its use, treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin remains a viable option," Dr. Gert Meeus, a nephrologist with AZ Groeninge Hospital, and other researchers wrote.
The study was published by the journal New Microbes and New Infections. Limitations include the retrospective nature of the study and differences between the treatment and control groups, including the former being younger on average. Authors declared no conflicts of interest or funding.
The research adds to a mixed dataset on hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19.
Some other studies have found that hydroxychloroquine recipients were less likely to die, including a study that analyzed records from a health system in Michigan. Many of the positive findings concerned hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin.
Others have found little or no evidence that hydroxychloroquine affects COVID-19, including a U.S.-government funded study across 34 hospitals.
Multiple studies on hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19 have been retracted.
Hydroxychloroquine is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration but the agency has warned since mid-2020 against using it for COVID-19. Belgian regulators rescinded authorization for hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 in June 2020.
Dosage Issue?
Hydroxychloroquine proponents say that the amount of the drug, and when it's given, is key to properly studying how it affects COVID-19.
Dr. Meeus and the other Belgian researchers acknowledged clinical trials that did not find a benefit for hydroxychloroquine, as well as some observational studies. Other observational papers have suggested hydroxychloroquine is effective.
"A potential explanation for the discrepancy between the results in the observational trials and the large randomized trials may be the use of a different dose of hydroxychloroquine," they said.
The researchers started with 400 milligrams, two times a day, on day one. That was followed by 200 milligrams a day for five days, in line with national guidelines.
In the clinical trials that found no benefit, patients received four times as much hydroxychloroquine.
"Our treatment was lower and also used the antibiotic azithromycin. This double treatment is a possible explanation for why we found positive effects, but other studies did not," Dr. Meeus told Doorbraak.
Peter Horby, a spokesman for one of the trials, told The Epoch Times previously that the dosage amounts were "carefully selected" and "designed to achieve the concentrations needed to inhibit the virus as quickly and safely as possible."
Dr. Meeus told Doorbraak that further research needs to be done on the drug, or HCQ, but that it very well could be beneficial.
"HCQ is not a panacea, and of course, further research needs to be done. After all, you can't just conclude from an observational study like ours whether something works or not," he said. "But look, we have followed the protocol as it was originally prescribed in Belgium. A study ... also showed in early 2020 that HCQ did lead to lower mortality. If the results of our study confirm this again, we think it is very plausible that the drug has helped quite a few patients."
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Tuesday, October 10, 2023
You’re Getting The COVID19 Vaccine – Whether You Want It Or Not
At this point, everyone knows: the health perils of the COVID-19 vaccines are huge. According to our own government’s data reported in the CDC’s “V-Safe” vaccine safety reporting system:
Out of the approximately 10 million v-safe users, 782,913 individuals, or over 7.7% of v-safe users, had a health event requiring medical attention, emergency room intervention, and/or hospitalization. Another 25% of V-safe users had an event that required them to miss school or work and/or prevent normal activities.
In fact, this data was so bad, that the CDC shut down the V-safe website on June 30, 2023, with no explanation. Dr. Peter McCullough, COVID-19 expert and Chief Scientific Officer at The Wellness Company, expresses his dismay on his Substack:
“...my interpretation is that the CDC has now openly turned a blind eye to vaccine safety. The public should be outraged in this overt US government capitulation indicating it simply does not care what happens to people as they take more novel shots.”
A Shocking Next Chapter in COVID-19 Vaccine Development
Despite the overwhelming safety issues, The National Institute of Health (NIH) continues to fund programs seeking to develop novel ways to deliver mRNA vaccines. Science Translational Medicine recently published an NIH study celebrating the accomplishment of effectively delivering the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in an inhalable vapor form. From the authors:
“An inhalable platform for messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics would enable minimally invasive and lung-targeted delivery for a host of pulmonary diseases... Here, we report an inhalable polymer-based vehicle for delivery of therapeutic mRNAs to the lung. We optimized biodegradable poly(amine-co-ester) (PACE) polyplexes for mRNA delivery... We applied this technology to develop a mucosal vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and found that intranasal vaccination with spike protein–encoding mRNA polyplexes induced potent cellular and humoral adaptive immunity and protected susceptible mice from lethal viral challenge...”
The government and Big Pharma are showing their hand.
“The ability to efficiently deliver mRNA to the lung would have applications for vaccine development, gene therapy, and more,” casually remarks the editor of Science.
Chief of Epidemiology at The Wellness Company and vaccine critic Dr. Harvey Risch recently warned in an interview with The Epoch Times:
“We know that the COVID vaccines have done various degrees of damage to the immune system in a fraction of people who’ve taken them. And that damage could be anywhere from getting COVID more often, getting other infectious diseases, and perhaps it may also be cancer in the longer term.”
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COVID Vaccine Mandates Begin in Red State
The implementation of vaccine mandates at one of the largest institutions in the red state of Texas has raised concerns over the diminishing state of health freedom while a law that would provide Texans with vaccine choice remains stalled by lawmakers.
The Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), a medical school and research center in Houston, Texas, announced last week that it will mandate the latest COVID booster shot for its students, faculty, and employees.
“An updated Covid vaccine has been approved by the FDA and is now available," the Sept. 28 statement from the school reads. "A single dose is recommended for individuals 6 months and older. Because protection from prior vaccination fades over time and this updated vaccine better matches the currently circulating strains the updated dose is recommended. Baylor faculty, staff, and students must get the COVID vaccine, or request a medical, religious, or personal exemption by Nov. 30.”
“Because of the concern in case numbers, some entities have reinstated mask mandates. BCM does not have a mask mandate, but if you are at high risk you may consider making a personal choice to wear a mask in enclosed indoor areas,” the statement adds.
In 2022, the number of employees listed at BCM was 11,288. The institution is within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has publicly declared that his state “should be leading the fight against the COVID tyranny.” However, large publicly funded institutions are still allowed to impose vaccine mandates.
In September Mr. Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 29, which prohibits local governments from requiring COVID-related masks, vaccines, or business shutdowns. However, a separate bill, “The Texas COVID-19 Vaccine Freedom Act,” intended to block any Texas entity, including hospitals and private businesses, from mandating COVID vaccines for employees, remains stalled.
Texas State Rep. Brian Harrison, who has pushed for a statewide ban on vaccine mandates, told The Epoch Times that he is calling for Mr. Abbott to convene a special session of the legislature to protect patient rights.
“This is Texas. We should not tolerate this here,” said Rep. Harrison. “The governor should demand we pass the Covid Vaccine Freedom Act in a special session. This makes no sense that people aren’t protected. The Senate has passed it, the governor has called for it, and members of the House overwhelmingly support it. Now we need to do it.”
Despite support for the bill, it has been blocked from getting to the floor by Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, who is in charge of the Calendar Committee, according to Mr. Harrison.
“The chairman waited until the very last day when a bill could be heard then he put it on page nine or 10 knowing that mathematically there would be no chance for the bill to be heard in time,” said Mr. Harrison.
“If not for his act, 30 million Texans would have freedom from COVID vaccine mandates and because of his actions Texans still have to choose between their health and their livelihood,” he added.
Mr. Burrows didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a practitioner in Texas and founder of Coalition of Health Freedom, told The Epoch Times that the return of mandates, especially in red state Texas, is catching a lot of people off-guard.
“Too many people have fallen into this mindset that COVID is behind us and that we don’t have to worry about mandates anymore,” said Dr. Bowden. “Well, COVID mandates are alive and well in Texas and this could just be the beginning.”
“Texas is not as red as many people would think,” she added.
Dr. Bowden noted that controversial vaccine advocate Dr. Peter Jay Hotez works at the BCM where he is the founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. Dr. Hotez has made statements comparing those hesitant to take vaccines to “the anti-intellectualism promoted during the Nazi and Stalin periods of the 20th century.”
Dr. Bowden says that lawmakers in Texas who are looking to reform the current system are up against a powerful and well-funded machine in the medical industry, but that the stakes are too high to back down.
“Unfortunately, a lot of Texan politicians who people believe are on their side have been captured by the medical establishment,” said Dr. Bowden. “We need to keep the pressure on because if they can mandate their shot at Baylor College of Medicine, and get away with it, it will embolden others. The question Texans should be asking themselves now is, what are they going to mandate next?”
Mr. Harrison, who represents Ellis County, Texas—which in September became the first Texas city to ban all COVID vaccine mandates—called the move to block patient protections “disgusting.”
“Texas should be leading the fight against COVID tyranny. Instead what we are experiencing is shameful and a disgrace.”
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Taiwan VICP Awards Another 12 COVID-19 Vax Injured—Including $93.1K to Young Man Permanently Injured by AstraZeneca Vax
A 20-something-year-old man from Kaohsiung in the southern coastal area of the disputed island nation will receive NT$3 million (US$93,147) due to the severe disabilities he has struggled with after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
The recent information about the award to the man identified as Lin, was released by the Taiwan Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). It turns out that Lin, after getting jabbed with the vaccine, experienced a case of immune thrombocytopenia purpura and became severely disabled two weeks after receiving a shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Tseng Shu-huai.
The mainstream Taipei Times covered this vaccine injury award. TrialSite has found that Taiwan, an independent nation that was established in 1949, during the revolution in China, mainstream media reports more transparently on COVID-19 vaccine injuries than in the West.
The VICP decided to compensate Lin even though he is a young man. This decision was based on the fact that his condition proved incurable even after he sought treatment several times and was hospitalized for two months.
The decision to award NT$3 million was reached during a VICP meeting on Sept. 7, which examined reports about health problems recorded after people received COVID-19 vaccines.
The Last VICP Meeting’s Metrics
The Taipei Times reports that during the last VICP meeting, 151 vaccine injury cases were discussed, with compensation of NT$5,000 to NT$3 million eventually awarded to 12 people.
Importantly, unlike the compensation schemes in the UK or America, Taiwan’s VICP meetings are conducted as part of a process to evaluate if individuals should receive compensation for serious side effects associated with vaccines, including COVID-19 shots. This is the case even if no direct link can be conclusively established.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Monday, October 09, 2023
Four Million People Have Received One of the New COVID-19 Vaccines: CDC
Some four million Americans have received one of the new COVID-19 vaccines, U.S. officials say.
"Already four million Americans have rolled up their sleeves," Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters during a briefing this week.
More than 10 million vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have been shipped to various locations, including pharmacies, according to CDC officials.
About 56.5 million people, or 17 percent of the population, received one of the bivalent vaccines, which were available from the fall of 2022 until recently, according to CDC data. The shots mostly went to people aged 65 and older.
Some people have reported struggling to find doses of the new vaccines at their local pharmacies and doctors.
Jen Kates, a senior vice president at KFF, said on X in late September that her vaccine appointment was canceled because the pharmacy at which it was scheduled did not have enough vaccines.
Others were able to find a shot but were charged more than $100. Insurers and government insurance were supposed to cover shots for the insured, while people without insurance can still receive one without paying under the CDC's Bridge Access Program.
"The Biden-Harris Administration, through HHS, has been working directly with manufacturers and distributors to ensure that the vaccines are getting to pharmacies, hospitals, clinics, and other vaccination sites, including long-term care facilities as quickly as possible," a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the CDC, told Reuters.
Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC's deputy director, said the agency is aware that people have gone to receive a vaccine, or taken their child to receive one, and that there were not any available.
"My message for folks who have had that experience is twofold. The first is, please don't give up on the vaccine. Please know that vaccine is available," he said. "And ... more and more vaccine is getting out there every single day, every single week. And so please check back in with your provider with your pharmacist, because it's likely if they didn't have vaccine two weeks ago, they will have it."
CDC officials said they tried to cut down on barriers in the supply chain to quicken the delivery of doses. Distribution has shifted to businesses instead of the government, which helmed the network for prior versions of the vaccines.
Recommendations
The CDC recommends at least one dose of the new vaccines, which were authorized and approved on Sept. 11 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration with virtually no clinical trial data, for Americans 6 months of age and older regardless of prior vaccination or infection.
The widespread recommendations are in contrast to many other countries and Florida, which has advised against vaccinating many younger, healthy people due to how many have previously been vaccinated, contracted COVID-19, or both.
Observational data for the bivalent vaccines, or the previous versions, found weak initial effectiveness that quickly waned.
CDC officials made unsupported claims during the briefing, part of a trend for the agency. "These vaccines will prevent severe disease for COVID-19," Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, told reporters. There's no evidence that's true.
The only clinical study data for the new shots is from a study Moderna ran that included injecting 50 humans with the company's updated formation. The result was a higher level of neutralizing antibodies. Officials believe antibodies protect against COVID-19.
Moderna did not provide any clinical efficacy estimates for infection, severe disease, or death.
Pfizer said it was running a trial but has not reported any results.
Novavax's vaccine was authorized later without any new trial data. CDC officials said the agency also recommends that shot.
"This is a great vaccine for anybody, but particularly for individuals who didn't want to take one of the mRNA vaccines," Dr. Shah said.
Cost
Manufacturers are charging the federal government more than ever for the new vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna charged around $20 per dose for the original vaccines. They are charging around $85 per dose for the new vaccines for people aged 12 and older, and up to $97 for the new vaccines for younger children.
The companies were charging the private sector up to $128 a dose. Pfizer's shot was lower priced for adults, while Moderna's came in higher for most children.
Novavax charged $16 for its initial vaccine but is now charging the government $58 a dose for adults and children.
Novavax is charging the private sector $130 a dose.
"You don't have to pay out of pocket for your vaccine, but it is not cost free. There are costs to making a vaccine available," Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said while getting a shot in Washington in September.
Officials have said they expect the vaccines to be updated annually, similar to the framework for influenza vaccines. There's also some work on so-called next-generation vaccines or shots that work better. That includes a trivalent vaccine that targets measles, mumps, and COVID-19.
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California scraps 2022 law punishing doctors who dissent from COVID consensus
California quietly repealed a law making a doctor spreading state-determined COVID-19 misinformation guilty of unprofessional conduct that could cost a doctor his or her medical license.
AB 2098, signed into law in 2022, allows the Medical Board of California to revoke the license of doctors who share any information with a patient that is contrary to the state-defined “contemporary scientific consensus” on COVID-19. The law focused on "false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines."
AB 2098 remains into effect until January 1, 2024, when a new law, SB 815, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, invalidates action against doctors for sharing COVID-19 information.
The Liberty Justice Center, which engaged in litigation to prevent the law from taking effect, claimed that the organization's oral arguments drove the state legislature to amend SB 815, an existing bill reauthorizing the Medical Board of California, and argued that AB 2098 violated the First Amendment.
In oral arguments in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, attorney Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center, made the case that AB 2098 would harm patients, doctors and free speech alike.
"A medical professional can have a good faith disagreement with the government about appropriate medical treatments. It's very dangerous for the government to prescribe one appropriate view, and particularly for the government to do so in the name of regulating conduct," Huebert said. "AB 2098 imposes strict liability for speech and punishes advice even if the patient doesn't follow the advice, or follows the advice and has a good result."
An injunction was granted in January of 2023, when AB 2098 took effect, to block punishment under the law until a trial could be held. Even the American Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus brief against the law, calling it a “blunt instrument.”
“It took a federal lawsuit for California legislators to reverse course and repeal an unconstitutional attack on free speech and the doctor-patient relationship,” said plaintiff Dr. Mark McDonald in Liberty Justice Center’s case against California, in a public statement celebrating the measure’s repeal. “We need real accountability, or this will happen again.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Sunday, October 08, 2023
A mistaken Nobel
This week, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ‘for their discoveries… that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19’. The ‘efficacy’ of their vaccines was illustrated by a photograph of the pair at a prize-giving event wearing large face masks, a medieval method of reducing viral transmission in the absence of any protection from their award-winning vaccine.
The Nobel Foundation wrote that ‘The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.’
This is false on two counts. First, a vaccine was developed in the US in only four months in response to the 1957 Asian flu whereas the mRNA vaccines took almost a year. Second, the notion that Covid poses one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times is absurd. The virus poses a threat to the elderly and the ill and the vaccines have done little to mitigate that reality. Sweden, home of the Nobel, had no lockdowns in 2020 and didn’t use repurposed drugs to treat Covid yet still had only half the excess mortality (7.7 per cent) of fully vaccinated Australia in 2022 (15.3 per cent).
The Nobel comes with prize money of more than a million dollars but Karikó at least shouldn’t be hard up since she was senior vice-president until 2022 at BioNTech which generated 36 billion euros in vaccine sales in 2022 and 2021. The timing of her departure was fortuitous. Demand for vaccines is down and BioNTech faces hundreds of claims for compensation for vaccine injuries in its home country, Germany.
The long-term safety of the vaccines was raised at the announcement by a Chinese journalist. The committee members looked gob-smacked but they shouldn’t have been. BioNTech’s Chinese partner was never allowed to sell the Pfizer vaccine in China presumably due to safety concerns.Professor Richard Sandberg said 13 billion people had got the virus before correcting himself and saying the vaccine. It was not so much a Freudian slip as a statement of fact since virtually everyone who has got the vaccine has got the virus. He then said there had been very few adverse events so he didn’t think safety was a major concern. In reality, there have been more serious adverse events and deaths reported after mRNA COVID-19 vaccines than for all non-Covid vaccines combined.
Professor Olle Kampe followed Sandberg saying the mRNA ‘can’t be integrated into the nucleus, into the DNA, and that’s a safety precaution’. Worryingly, this may not to be true.
Thanks to Kevin McKernan, who previously worked on the Human Genome Project at MIT, we know that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are both contaminated with DNA plasmids, tiny fragments of DNA that were produced as part of manufacturing process. Six independent laboratories around the world have confirmed this.
The DNA may be transported, along with the vaccine, into any cell in a vaccinated person. From there, at least five features of Covid mRNA vaccines may facilitate the transport of the DNA into the nucleus of the cell and its integration into a vaccinated person’s DNA. (An excellent substack by the pseudonymous Dr Ah Kahn Syed titled ‘5 ways to skin a (genetically modified) cat’ sets out the details.)
DNA contamination is very serious. It may be responsible for a range of serious adverse events including death as well as potentially harming the descendants of vaccinated people.
Professor Philip Buckhaults, a cancer geneticist who was one of those who independently confirmed the presence of the DNA, has called for vaccinations to stop until the DNA has been removed.
Others, such as Dr Janci Lindsay, a toxicologist who, together with Buckhaults, testified in a South Carolina Senate hearing on the vaccines, have joined McKernan and a throng of doctors and scientists calling for the complete withdrawal of the Covid vaccines while a full safety audit is conducted.
But it gets worse. Professor Retsef Levi of MIT Sloan and Dr Josh Guetzkow of the Hebrew University wrote to the British Medical Journal in May warning that the vaccine used in the Pfizer clinical trials was not the same as the vaccine given to the public. The DNA contamination was introduced in the process of mass production and only 252 people in the trial were injected with the mass-produced version of the vaccine. Pfizer has so far not released any details about the adverse events in people who received the mass-produced vaccine but the adverse event rate for those in the placebo group, who were vaccinated after the trial ended, was 2.5 times higher than for the rest of the trial participants. Did they get the mass-produced vaccine?
In a final response to the Chinese journalist about long-term safety, Professor Kampe said that adverse events are ‘mostly myocarditis and pericarditis, mainly affecting young males, but that normally resolves without any long-term effects’.
This is an outrageous claim because it is impossible to know the long-term effects of mRNA vaccine-induced myocarditis after only 2.5 years but there is no reason to think there will be no long-term effects. A Danish study published in 2021 found that even in younger healthy patients who were free of adverse events and medication one year after discharge, myocarditis was associated with a long-term excess risk of heart failure, hospitalisation, and death.
A paper published in Nature on 27 September shows that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA spike protein routinely persists up to 30 days after vaccination. In autopsies of people who died after mRNA vaccination, the mRNA-generated spike proteins are present in the heart surrounded by immune cells trying vainly to kill them. Commenting on the recent revelations, Dr Bluemke Professor of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine said they show that ‘mild asymptomatic myocardial inflammation could be more common than we ever expected’ and patients who present with myocarditis may have more severe systemic inflammation related to mRNA vaccination.
None of this should be a surprise. In a 2018 paper, Drew Weissman warned that mRNA vaccines could provoke autoimmunity, blood coagulation, and pathological thrombus formation.
This year’s Nobel for Medicine isn’t the only one riven with controversy. In 1949, António Egas Moniz won the Nobel for inventing the lobotomy. The butchery of the prefrontal cortex was intended to treat mental illness but as Soviet psychiatrist Vasily Gilyarovsky said it simply turned the insane into idiots. To his credit he got the procedure banned in the Soviet Union in 1950. In the West, however, the Nobel added cachet and thousands of lobotomies were performed, particularly on women, gay men, even on children, despite side effects which included severe brain damage, seizures, suicide, and death. Lobotomies eventually fell out of favour in the West but the Nobel Foundation still defends the award.
The scientist who invented mRNA vaccine technology (and holds the patents, with others) is Dr Robert Malone. He was asked this week if he should also have been given the Nobel. His reply? ‘Probably not because the technology has not been proven safe’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/not-nobel/
******************************************************Would Australians have consented to vaccinations if they knew the potential risks?
Julie Sladden
The bombshell discovery of DNA contamination in mRNA Covid shots has shocked and alarmed scientists around the globe. They are calling on regulators to urgently stop the injections and conduct a full safety evaluation.
Following Kevin McKernan’s initial discovery earlier in 2023, his findings have been independently verified by several internationally recognised labs around the world including Dr Philip Buckhaults and Dr Sin Lee. These results were again confirmed most recently in Germany when biologist Dr Jurgen Kirchner tested various batches of the Pfizer product (Comirnaty) at his laboratory in Magdeburg and discovered DNA contamination that he claims exceeds regulatory levels by a factor of 200-350. Dr Kirchner followed up with a letter to Health Minister Karl Lauterbach on 20 August 2023, attaching the results of the findings. The official reply from the ministerial office was unimpressive, to say the least:
’(…) the Federal Ministry of Health has no evidence of possible DNA contamination in the Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty (BioNTech/Pfizer) that has been marketed in Europe and Germany (…) From a local perspective, there is therefore no need for further action.’
This lack of alarm has frustrated members of the scientific community who ask, ‘Under what regulatory system doesn’t this lead to immediate withdrawal from market?’
In the US, testimonies from Dr McKernan to the FDA, Dr Phillip Buckhaults, and Dr Janci Lindsay to the South Carolina Senate seem to raise alarm from all except the therapeutic regulator, the FDA.
You might think ‘well this is all overseas’ and therefore not relevant to Australia. Well, dear reader, you may change your mind when you learn that the Covid mRNA injections are manufactured in just a handful of facilities around the world, and none of them in Australia. This concerns us too.
Many worry that DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines could bring with it a truckload of serious risks and potential adverse outcomes, including the possibility of genomic integration. That is, the DNA in the injection becomes a part of the DNA of a person’s cells.
The repeated and verified finding of DNA contamination has alarmed scientists from different disciplines and, as McKernan notes, ‘It is important for readers to see where various divergent voices agree.’ Despite being a proponent for the mRNA platform, Buckhaults describes his alarm at the finding, ‘…and the possible consequences of this both in terms of human health and biology.’ In testifying to the Senate he adds, ‘But you should be alarmed at the regulatory process that allowed it to get there.’
World-renowned Professor Wafik El-Deiry, Director of the Cancer Centre at Brown University and known for his work in identifying genes associated with cancer, added his voice to the conversation stating Buckhaults’ testimony was ‘good science raising concerns about contamination of Covid mRNA vaccines with DNA’. He adds:
‘[Buckhaults] explains how pieces of naked DNA allowed in protein vaccines at a certain threshold was not so problematic in a different era but that with encapsulation in liposomes they can now easily get into cells. If they get into cells they can integrate into the genome which is permanent, heritable, and has a theoretical risk of causing cancer depending on where in the genome they integrate. There is a need for more research into what happens in stem cells and I would add germ-line, heart, (and) brain. I am also concerned about prolonged production of spike for months with the pseudouridine in the more stable RNA.’
‘Blood clots, myocarditis, cardiac arrests, and other adverse effects are documented,’ adds El-Deiry. Many believe there’s an urgent need to quantify this problem as DNA is itself prothrombotic and could be the cause of some of the rare but serious side effects like sudden death from cardiac arrest.
Dr Janci Lindsay, a biochemist and molecular biologist, agrees with these concerns and has spent months calling for the shots to be suspended. Alongside the identified risks of genomic integration, autoimmunity, and cancer, Lindsay says other possibilities include gut bacteria (E. coli) taking up DNA plasmids and becoming ‘perpetual spike factories’ or incorporating the antibiotic resistance gene. There is another potential issue Lindsay highlights, ‘If there’s that much (DNA) plasmid in the shots, there’s a very good chance that there’s bacterial endotoxin in the shots… bacterial proteins which can cause anaphylaxis and even death.’
You may wonder, how the DNA and other potential contaminants got into some of these products. Well, it all comes down to the manufacturing process, as discussed in a recent BMJ article. The clinical trials involving around 40,000 people were conducted using injections manufactured via ‘Process 1’ which involved in vitro transcription of synthetic DNA. This is essentially a ‘clean’ process. However, this process is not viable for mass production, so the manufacturers switched to ‘Process 2’ which involves using E. coli bacteria to replicate the plasmids. Getting the plasmids out of the E. coli. can be challenging and may result in residual plasmids, and possibly bacterial endotoxin, in the vaccines. Australian Professor Geoff Pain provides extensive details on these endotoxins.
With the highest rates of adverse events and injuries we’ve ever seen for a ’provisionally approved’ product, you would think any regulator worth their salt would be jumping in to ensure that what has been discovered overseas isn’t so in Australia. But it seems the burden of proof is falling on everyone but the regulator.
From the very start, countless medical and legal professionals have called out the ethical disaster of ‘un-informed’ consent and these experimental injections. Informed consent requires a full discussion of the known and potentially unknown risks of any medication or treatment. This, and the coercion, manipulation, and mandates applied to the Australian people, made informed consent impossible.
How many Australians, I wonder, would have agreed to receive an injection that potentially contained DNA with all the inherent risks described?
None, is my guess.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/what-the-shot/
********************************************************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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Friday, October 06, 2023
Thursday, October 05, 2023
Covid guru Sir Patrick Vallance claims experts were used as 'human shields' for British Government and officials 'cherry-picked' science to justify decisions
Experts were used as 'human shields' for the Government, whose officials 'cherry-picked' science to justify Covid decision-making, Sir Patrick Vallance's pandemic diaries claimed.
The Chief Scientific Adviser, who regularly addressed the nation alongside ministers during press conferences, wrote that Downing Street sought to justify its actions by claiming they were 'following the science'.
And he accused an unnamed official of 'completely rewriting' scientific advice on social distancing, the Covid-19 Inquiry in London heard today.
Sir Patrick's previously undisclosed contemporaneous notes described the intervention as 'extraordinary'.
And he described No 10 as being 'at war with itself', leaving then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson 'caught in the middle'.
Others accused Mr Johnson, who was admitted to intensive care after falling ill with Covid in April 2020, of 'flip-flopping', and of poor and delayed decision-making.
Meanwhile Dominic Cummings, the former Downing Street senior adviser, is said to sent a message to one colleague saying the Cabinet Office was 'terrifyingly shit' as the Government pondered introducing the first, unprecedented lockdown measures in March 2020.
Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the Inquiry, told the first day of the probe's second module into Government action that 'the WhatsApp messages between ... Johnson, Cummings and others betray a depressing picture of a toxic atmosphere, factional infighting and internecine attacks on colleagues'.
And he said Mr Cummings claimed Cabinet was 'not the place for serious discussion or decisions'.
Mr Keith said: 'It was a rubber stamp, the main function of which was to function as political theatre.
'Perhaps more importantly, he says Cabinet committees were scripted – ministers were given scripts to read out, and conclusions were drafted in advance, so problems were simply not grappled with.'
Mr Keith suggested Mr Cummings, who left No 10 in November 2020 after a series of internal rows, was 'himself a source of instability'.
Mr Keith also referred to several entries in Sir Patrick's daily notebooks, revealing frictions at the heart of Government.
In one, Sir Patrick said: 'Morning PM meeting, (Mr Johnson) wants everything normal by September... he is now completely bullish.'
In another, from May 2020, he wrote: 'Ministers tried to make the science give the answers, rather than them making decisions.'
Sir Patrick, a member of Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), added: 'I am worried that a "Sage is trouble" vibe is appearing in Number 10.
'There is a paper from No 10 Cabinet Office for one metre, two metre review (into Government's social distancing measures).
'Some person has completely rewritten the science advice as though it's the definitive version. They've just cherry picked – quite extraordinary.'
Mr Keith said the diaries 'speak of Sage, of the CMO (Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty) and the CSA being positioned as human shields'.
He added: 'Sage was a scientific advisory body, it produced the science.
'It couldn't integrate economic and societal considerations. So who did? The Government of course.'
And he said then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak's 'eat out to help out' scheme designed to support the hospitality sector went ahead without the approval of the most senior scientific advisers, nor was it informed by evidence on the impact it would be likely to have on infection transmission.
Mr Keith said inquiry chairman Baroness Heather Hallett would have to determine the extent to which the Government may have dawdled while Covid cases began ramping up internationally in the start of 2020.
He said: 'Some argue that had the Government reacted with greater urgency and to greater effect in January and February, it might not have been forced into making the extraordinary, far-reaching decisions that it later found itself obliged to take.'
He said: 'Never again can a virus be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.'
The hearing opened with a 20-minute film featuring testimonies from those bereaved and affected by Covid.
One widower, Alan Handley, whose wife Susan died with Covid, hit out at government officials for flouting restrictions on the day less than a dozen people were permitted to gather for her funeral.
He said: 'To compound the grief of my wife's passing, on the day of her funeral — only eight people were allowed to attend — and then to find out the day of my wife's funeral, under those draconian restrictions, that government officials were holding parties on the very same day... My wife deserved better.'
Baroness Hallett appeared moved by the footage, and said she needed to reach conclusions and make recommendations to reduce suffering in the future 'when the next pandemic hits the UK is pressing'.
She said: 'I say "when" the next pandemic hits the UK because the evidence in module one suggested it is not if another pandemic will hit us but when.'
More than 230,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the UK.
The inquiry, which has already cost in excess of £40million, is set to conclude in 2026.
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Facing the Highly Mutated Variant BA.2.86
Vaccinations may not help
Following EG.5, the latest highly mutated COVID-19 variant, BA.2.86 (also known as Pirola), is spreading in multiple countries. BA.2.86 is a subvariant of omicron, with over 35 genetic mutations on its spike protein, making it more capable of immune escape. Medical experts recommend increasing the intake of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients to boost immunity.
BA.2.86 was first discovered in Denmark in July, and it has since been detected in human or wastewater samples from the United States, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Thailand.
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated at the end of August, approximately 97 percent of Americans have developed SARS-CoV-2 antibodies due to prior infection, vaccination, or a combination. However, the significant number of mutations in BA.2.86 raises concerns about whether the immunity acquired from vaccines and previous infections is adequate to combat it.
According to the CDC, it is currently unclear whether the BA.2.86 variant will lead to more severe illness, but these highly diverged lineages may arise in immunocompromised individuals with prolonged infections.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has experienced multiple waves of pandemic peaks caused by virus strains like alpha, delta, and omicron. The various variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that have evolved continue to alter the virus' transmissibility and pathogenicity, presenting challenges to medical treatment and prevention measures.
In August, the CDC stated that the existing tests used for COVID-19 detection and the medications used to treat the disease appear effective against BA.2.86. Updated COVID-19 vaccines are set to be released before the end of September, with the expectation of significantly reducing the risk of severe illness and hospitalization.
However, will that be the case? A recent study analyzed the impact of vaccination and natural immunity on COVID-19 infection rates. The research team conducted this study with 96,201 male inmates across 33 California state prisons, analyzing their data from January to July 2023.
The research findings showed that the infection rate in the bivalent-vaccinated group was 3.24 percent, whereas the infection rate in the entirely unvaccinated group was 2.72 percent. When the data were filtered for individuals aged 50 and above, infection rates were 4.07 and 3.1 percent, respectively. Among individuals aged 65 and above, the bivalent-vaccinated group had an infection rate of 6.45 percent, higher than the 4.5 percent rate observed in the entirely unvaccinated group.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Wednesday, October 04, 2023
Australian Medical Doctors May Need to Arm Themselves with a Law Degree
Australian doctors have expressed displeasure with medical regulatory bodies like Ahpra and the TGA, stating that doctors with different views are being targeted and suspended. TrialSite interviewed some doctors who served in the system and who were suspended unfairly for expressing differing opinions. They emphasized that to be fully protected in the Australian health system, doctors may need to be well-versed in the law before they start practicing.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) regulates medical practice in Australia. Some doctors fear that people anonymously use Ahpra as a weapon against them. There are also concerns that external bodies in the United States like the Federation of State Medical Board (FSMB) may influence the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA). The IAMRA is responsible for effective medical regulation worldwide. They achieve this by providing guidance to the medical profession and bolstering scientific, educational and collaborative activities in the field.
What does the FSMB do?
Founded in 1912, the FSMB is a body or association representing state medical licensing in the U.S. Its CEO, Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, is regarded as one of the most influential physicians in the U.S. He released healthcare policies that were approved by the American Medical Association and authored research papers on how to boost vaccine usage. In April 2022, the FSMB adopted a misinformation policy and released a manifesto to be heavy-handed with doctors spreading misinformation. This raised suspicions, especially among vaccine-hesitant doctors, as there appeared to be a seeming connection between Dr. Chaudhry's effort to influence the vaccine-hesitant and “boost vaccine usage” and his strict approach towards doctors expressing hesitancy or spreading opposing information about the vaccines.
Pressured by regulatory bodies
Interestingly, medical authorities from different countries, including Australia, formed an international arm in September 2000, IAMRA. The IAMRA– a non-profit–supports medical regulatory bodies globally. In June 2004, the IAMRA said that it was separate from the FSMB. However, Chaudhry was IAMRA secretary and FSMB CEO at the same time in 2020.
Before the FSMB's adoption of the misinformation policy, the IAMRA had hosted webinars in 2020, to address ethical concerns among doctors and educate them on ways to combat COVID-19 misinformation. An Australian doctor, who would prefer to stay anonymous, said, "... in 2021, as I said, their agenda was to be heavy-handed with all doctors who spread misinformation."
Ahpra wields a strong authority in Australia. As such, a few doctors were concerned that the FSMB may have influenced decisions at Ahpra because its current CEO, Martin Fletcher, was a director at the IAMRA until the end of 2022. He was one of the panelists in a global webinar educating regulators on how to respond to the challenge of vaccine-hesitant doctors.
Were these concerns justified?
The Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) and Ahpra are at the forefront of fighting COVID-19 misinformation, and they continually advocate for the dissemination of the right information on vaccine safety.
In 2023, Ahpra released a 2021 survey result reflecting the distrust among doctors of its regulatory services. Doctors in Australia had the most negative views compared with other health practitioners, and only 35% of doctors had positive reviews of Ahpra.
Part of the result said, "Distrust was undercut by practitioners’ personal views of how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, but also related to perceived unfairness and injustice of Ahpra and the Boards’ processes."
In October 2021, the TGA suspended a medical doctor for using ivermectin on a patient with severe COVID-19 symptoms. The patient had initially sought treatment at another hospital but had only been told to wear a mask and isolate, without receiving any early treatment. As the patient’s condition had worsened after returning home, they had sought treatment from the doctor instead of going back home due to concerns about being unable to say goodbye to their family if they were to pass away.
A junior doctor in that hospital then made a complaint, stating that there was a case of polypharmacy and encephalopathy.
Speaking with TrialSite, she said, "I wanted to find out what happened to my patient, so I called this doctor up… She basically said to me that she didn't know why she made a complaint against me and that her boss was the one who actually told her to make the complaint."
The junior doctor’s supervisor was Associate Professor Naren Gunja, a toxicologist at the Westmead Hospital. She mentioned that she’d tried speaking to him, but he didn’t listen to her.
"So, I did a bit of research and discovered that he actually went to the media and spoke about a case of ivermectin overdose in a patient that he had treated at casualty," she continued.
“I couldn’t understand why Dr. Gunja, a toxicologist, chose to warn the public about the risk of ivermectin. It is well known that taking ivermectin in combination with other medications can effectively treat COVID-19, and the occurrence of ivermectin overdose is rare.”
The ivermectin overdose case went viral from September 1 to September 3, 2021, after Gunja had spoken to the media, advising the public to ignore online claims that ivermectin was a cure for COVID-19. And on September 10, 2021, the TGA banned ivermectin as an off-label treatment for COVID-19.
According to our source, a second complaint came from an anonymous source with the pseudonym – John Smith. Eventually, the evidence presented in the complaint was traced back to Ahpra. All these contributed to her suspension in October 2021.
Additionally, in February 2021, the COVID Medical Network came under intense scrutiny from the TGA for endorsing the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 infection.
The COVID Medical Network (CMN) is a group of doctors in Australia who have reservations about COVID-19 vaccines and have voiced their dissatisfaction with the government's pandemic response. Instead of recommending vaccines, they prescribe alternative medications like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to address and curb the effects of COVID-19 infection.
This may explain why a doctor had to publicly renounce and dis-endorse the group within seven days to regain medical registration after being urgently suspended for having a link on her website to the CMN website.
A case of corruption among regulatory bodies
In October 2022, the Australian government made over 30 changes to the national law guiding the regulation and registration of doctors. This also included disciplinary action against doctors who had broken the law. It was called the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2022.
This law gave Ahpra the power to release a public statement regarding a practitioner who is under assessment or investigation if there was a "reasonable belief" that the practitioner's behavior, performance or health could seriously endanger public safety. Some doctors fear that Ahpra or the TGA could use this law as a means of bullying.
According to our first anonymous source, Ahpra weaponized the reasonable belief concept to take down medical doctors with different beliefs.
She implied that Ahpra could influence the subjective state of mind of the medical board by making statements about a doctor with no medical basis. "It has so much power. They can target any doctor they like. All it needs to do is to have an anonymous complaint against a particular doctor, and that doctor could be urgently suspended without verification of the facts."
People have complained that Ahpra bullies and has numerous scandals. After three Senate, a state inquiry into Ahpra’s conduct and according to recent polls, many doctors, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) and the Australian Medical Association (AMA) remain unhappy with Ahpra’s framework. Ahpra is an agency with a five-year contract with the National Board to carry out administrative duties like notifications and collection of subscriptions.
The regulatory power lies with the Board, not Ahpra, and one anonymous doctor said that the Board was negligent in renewing its contract with Ahpra, knowing the level of incompetence of Ahpra officials. She added that perhaps the Board liked this arrangement, as most complaints are deflected away from the Board and directed against Ahpra.
The TGA was also accused of hiding vaccine side effects like myocarditis from the public, making people doubt its authenticity. They also allegedly concealed the death of several previously healthy children from vaccine side effects, as they were afraid it would promote vaccine hesitancy.
To curb corruption among regulatory bodies like the TGA, the Australian government introduced the National Anti-corruption Commission (NACC) in July 2023. Ahpra and the Medical Board are not answerable to either the state, federal parliament or the NACC. Many doctors believe they should be accountable.
Do doctors need a law degree for protection?
During TrialSite's conversation with the sources, they hinted that the insurance company lawyers meant to protect doctors were actually supporting the medical council and Ahpra. If this is true, doctors may need to become experts in law to make the right choices when getting advice from lawyers, especially if they end up in such a situation.
When TrialSite inquired if the medical board's actions would make doctors anxious about reporting adverse effects and other related matters, they firmly responded that the board's actions had caused underreporting. Apparently, doctors were afraid of saying or doing anything that would earn them a suspension.
Even so, some doctors have challenged the system and are legally smart about it. An example is Dr. William Bay, an Australian doctor in Queensland and the leader of the Queensland People’s Protest (QPP). TrialSite has previously reported on Dr. Bay's protests against the COVID-19 vaccines in Australia. He had previously received a suspension for disrupting an Australian Medical Association conference. He then took legal action against the medical board and Ahpra, aiming to have the suspension revoked. At the time of authoring this article, Dr. Bay was still waiting for the final verdict from the Court.
Dr. Gary Fettke, an orthopedic surgeon, also faced a four-and-a-half-year legal case initiated by Ahpra starting in 2014 for giving nutritional and weight loss advice to his patients. The case was challenged along legal and procedural grounds, and then, using the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman’s Intervention (NHPO), was reviewed independently.
Speaking to TrialSite, Fettke said, “Nonetheless, we had to become 'expert' in the National Law, as the Indemnifiers are not supportive of preserving your practicing rights, nor reputation.” Additionally, he added that because these insurance company lawyers were mainly responsible for financial liability, they found it safer and cheaper to side with Ahpra.
These are examples of people who may have understood their legal rights as doctors.
Final thoughts
To treat patients in the best way possible, doctors in Australia may need to learn to navigate the legal system strategically. While this may not apply universally, Ahpra's survey indicates decreased confidence in the system among practitioners. So, beyond relying solely on medical defense insurance providers in Australia, doctors may require additional safeguards to function effectively within the healthcare system. Of course, from another perspective—the top down, government and medical establishment’s point of view doctors should simply line up and follow the guidance.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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