Thursday, December 22, 2022
Australian scientists could have found the ‘masterswitch’ to kill cancer
As I have benefited greatly from immunotherapy, I am pleased to hear of another immunotherapy advance. Specific substances are needed to energize attacks on specific types of cancer cell. Keytruda worked like a charm on my SCCs
Queensland medical researchers are on the brink of a staggering breakthrough that sees palpable tumours completely melting away, offering hope to sufferers of two of the deadliest types of cancers.
QIMR Berghofer scientists have potentially found the “masterswitch” that turns on the immune system to target disease in patients with triple-negative breast cancer and the most common form of bowel cancer, Micro Satellite Stable (MSS) bowel cancer.
The remarkable research findings could finally provide hope for a new, effective therapy but funding is desperately needed to progress the exciting preclinical results into clinical trials.
Associate Professor Michelle Wykes, group leader of Molecular Immunology at QIMR Berghofer, discovered the potential “masterswitch” that turns on a key type of immune cell called dendritic cells while researching immune responses to malaria.
Dendritic cells act like the generals of the immune system waking up other immune cells such as T cells and telling them what to attack and the weapons to use. However, cancer cells are very good at hiding from the immune system. In preclinical testing, the “masterswitch” antibodies make the cancers visible again, so the dendritic cells can go back to work and ‘organise’ the T cells to kill the cancer.
Associate Professor Wykes said further testing of the “masterswitch” antibodies on cancer patient blood samples produced similar results to the testing in preclinical lab work.
“We’re seeing palpable tumours that completely disappear and melt away. In our preclinical lab models, 80 per cent of both the triple negative breast cancers and colon cancers were cleared and hadn’t grown back after ten months. We’re seeing similar results from our tests on samples taken from patients with colon cancer,” she said.
“These patients urgently need help and I have something that I think could really help them, but we need funding to bring us together with a treatment. We’re appealing to the generosity of Australians this Christmas to help us advance this vital research and bring hope to patients and their loved ones,” Assoc Prof Wykes said.
Brisbane mum Justine Dillon was at peak physical fitness when she was diagnosed with highly aggressive stage four bowel cancer and given 18 months to live.
The researchers are working with clinicians at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital who collected samples from patients for the researchers to test in the laboratory.
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Scientists say they may have uncovered a new treatment for one of the most common symptoms of Long Covid
Researchers at Yale University managed to lift the “brain fog” of eight patients with the condition who were given a mixture of guanfacine, commonly used for ADHD, and an antioxidant called N-acetylcysteine (NAC), which in the UK is mainly used to treat paracetamol overdose and respiratory illnesses.
So far, the treatment has only been tested on a small number of Long Covid sufferers, who were also mainly women, though researchers said the study looked promising for more extensive clinical trials.
But given the potentially devastating and widespread impact of Long Covid, researchers believe doctors should consider prescribing guanfacine to patients.
“If patients have a physician who can read our paper, we’re hoping that they can access help right now,” neuroscientist Amy Arnsten said.
She and her team believe that the combination of drugs could prove “immediately useful“ to millions of sufferers.
Some 2.3 million people in the UK are estimated to be living with long Covid, official figures show.
According to the NHS, brain fog elicits a similar feeling to the effects of sleep deprivation or stress. It lists common symptoms of brain fog as poor concentration, feeling confused, thinking more slowly than usual, fuzzy thoughts, forgetfulness, lost words and mental fatigue.
It’s not necessarily a symptom of those who were hospitalised with Covid and people usually recover from it.
“There’s a paucity of treatment out there for long Covid brain fog, so when I kept seeing the benefits of this treatment in patients, I felt a sense of urgency to disseminate this information,” neurologist Arman Fesharaki-Zadeh explained.
“You don’t need to wait to be part of a research trial. You can ask your physician – these drugs are affordable and widely available.”
Mr Fesharaki-Zadeh first decided to try the drug combination after considering the inflammatory effects of Covid on the human body.
The team of researchers has since tested the treatment on a dozen other patients suffering from Long Covid. Participants took 600 milligrams of NAC daily and one milligram of guanfacine at bedtime.
After a month, the guanfacine dosage was increased to two milligrams.
All eight participants who finished the trial reported substantial benefits to their memory, organisational skills, and multi-tasking abilities. While some said it cured their brain fog completely, others said they had recovered their sense of self.
The study was published in Neuroimmunology Reports.
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Judge Approves $10 Million Settlement for Health Care Workers Fired Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate
A U.S. judge approved a multimillion-dollar settlement on Dec. 19 for workers who were fired by an Illinois health care system for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
About 500 workers who were terminated or, after seeing their exemption requests denied, got a COVID-19 vaccine, will receive compensation as part of the $10.3 million settlement, a preliminary version of which was first announced in July.
U.S. District Judge John Kness, a Trump appointee overseeing the lawsuit brought by the workers, issued verbal approval for the settlement during a hearing, lawyers for Liberty Counsel and NorthShore University Healthsystem said. Kness plans to release a written judgment in the next week.
In a brief statement emailed to The Epoch Times after Kness’s approval, NorthShore wrote, “We are pleased with the Court’s approval of a supportive resolution to this matter and continue to prioritize the health and safety of our patients and team members.”
Harry Mihet, vice president of legal affairs for Liberty Counsel, said in a statement that the group was “pleased to finally get the court’s final approval of this classwide settlement for these health care workers who were unlawfully discriminated against and denied religious exemptions from the COVID shot mandate.”
“This case should set a precedent for other employers who have violated the law by denying religious exemptions for their employees,” he said.
Liberty Counsel, a legal group that brings cases of alleged religious discrimination, was representing the 13 named plaintiffs in the case. The group successfully won class certification for all workers who were denied religious exemptions, a group that was initially believed to be 499 former and current workers but swelled after the preliminary settlement agreement to at least 519.
As of Dec. 12, 493 class members had submitted claims for a piece of the settlement.
Each worker who was fired stands to receive $24,225. Each worker who remained at the company stands to receive $3,725.
The named plaintiffs are in line to receive an extra $20,000. Those payments, described as service awards, will provide compensation for the plaintiffs helping advise on court filings, gathering documents, and serving as lead plaintiffs “in a sensitive case involving personal health choices and religious beliefs over a matter of intense public debate, even when it was uncertain whether they would have to disclose their identities to the public,” according to a recent filing.
Three workers objected to the settlement, but both parties urged the judge to disregard the objections, which were largely based on pay the trio felt they were owed after being fired.
Marzena Novak, one of the objectors, said her actual losses from being fired and losing pay approached $140,000.
“Although the estimated $25,000 is helpful and will be welcomed, it doesn’t come close to the actual losses suffered by those they treated so poorly,” Novak wrote.
Mandate
Like many health care systems, NorthShore imposed a vaccine mandate on employees in 2021.
NorthShore told workers that they could file a request for a religious exemption using a form that said the worker in question needed to provide “a description of my sincerely held religious principle or practice that guides my objection to receiving the required vaccination.” Northshore explicitly instructed applicants to not fill out lengthy answers.
NorthShore initially approved some of the exemption requests but then reversed the decisions and denied “all or virtually all of them,” according to filings from the plaintiffs. Officials said the employees failed to meet the standard for religious exemptions.
Employees who wanted a second look were told to file an appeal that included their vaccination history since they were 18. NorthShore then said that any religious objections based on “aborted fetal cell lines, stem cells, tissue, or derivative materials” would result in denials because those products were “not in NorthShore administered vaccines.” All of the COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States have links to aborted fetal cell lines.
At one point, one of the plaintiffs said, her manager said that “we are not approving anyone” for exemptions, although at least several were approved.
“Instead of engaging Plaintiffs in good faith, NorthShore denied Plaintiffs’ religious exemption requests en masse, providing nothing more than copy and paste responses, informing them that they lacked ‘evidence-based criteria,’ whatever that means,” one filing reads. “By failing to engage any of the Plaintiffs and its numerous employees with religious objections in good faith, NorthShore had no way to know whether an acceptable accommodation might have been appropriate. The only responses received by Plaintiffs and NorthShore’s employees were one-size-fits-all blanket denials.”
The plaintiffs said the treatment violated the Civil Rights Act, which requires employers to treat workers similarly, and the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act, which forbids discrimination on the basis of “right of conscience.”
NorthShore repeatedly denied that it violated the law.
The system also stated that it was “an undue hardship” to let unvaccinated staff work at NorthShore and that “it initially denied many exemption requests and that on appeal it reconsidered some decisions and chose not to challenge that the requests were made based on sincerely held religious beliefs.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Wednesday, December 21, 2022
Australia: Prominent lesbian doctor reveals ‘devastating’ Covid vaccine injury, says doctors have been ‘censored’
Former federal MP Dr Kerryn Phelps has revealed she and her wife both suffered serious and ongoing injures from Covid vaccines, while suggesting the true rate of adverse events is far higher than acknowledged due to underreporting and “threats” from medical regulators.
In an explosive submission to Parliament’s Long Covid inquiry, the former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president has broken her silence about the “devastating” experience — emerging as the most prominent public health figure in the country to speak up about the taboo subject.
“This is an issue that I have witnessed first-hand with my wife who suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes, including burning face and gums, paraesethesiae, and numb hands and feet, while under observation by myself, another doctor and a registered nurse at the time of immunisation,” the 65-year-old said.
“I continue to observe the devastating effects a year-and-a-half later with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”
Dr Phelps married former primary school teacher Jackie Stricker-Phelps in 1998. “Jackie asked me to include her story to raise awareness for others,” she said.
“We did a lot of homework before having the vaccine, particularly about choice of vaccine at the time. In asking about adverse side effects, we were told that ‘the worst thing that could happen would be anaphylaxis’ and that severe reactions such as myocarditis and pericarditis were ‘rare’.”
Dr Phelps revealed she was also diagnosed with a vaccine injury from her second dose of Pfizer in July 2021, “with the diagnosis and causation confirmed by specialist colleagues”.
“I have had CT pulmonary angiogram, ECG, blood tests, cardiac echogram, transthoracic cardiac stress echo, Holter monitor, blood pressure monitoring and autonomic testing,” she wrote.
“In my case the injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations.”
Dr Phelps said both reactions were reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) “but never followed up”.
She revealed she had spoken with other doctors “who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event” but that “vaccine injury is a subject that few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about”.
“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration,” she wrote.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), which oversees Australia’s 800,000 registered practitioners and 193,800 students, last year warned that anyone who sought to “undermine” the national Covid vaccine rollout could face deregistration or even prosecution.
AHPRA’s position statement said that “any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action”.
Earlier this year, Australian musician Tyson ‘tyDi’ Illingworth said he had been told privately by doctors that they feared being deregistered if they linked his neurological injury to the Moderna vaccine.
Dr Phelps said she had heard stories of vaccine injury from “patients and other members of the community”.
“They have had to search for answers, find GPs and specialists who are interested and able to help them, spend large amounts of money on medical investigations, isolate from friends and family, reduce work hours, lose work if they are required to attend in person and avoid social and cultural events,” she said.
“Within this group of vaccine injured individuals, there is a diminishing cohort of people who have symptoms following immunisation, many of which are similar to Long Covid (such as fatigue and brain fog), but who have not had a Covid infection. These people would be an important subset or control group for studies looking into the pathophysiology, causes of and treatments for Long Covid. It is possible that there is at least some shared pathophysiology between vaccine injury and Long Covid, possibly due to the effects of spike protein.”
She added that “in trying to convince people in positions of influence to pay attention to the risks of Long Covid and reinfection for people with vaccine injury, I have personally been met with obstruction and resistance to openly discuss this issue”.
“There has been a delay in recognition of vaccine injury, partly because of under-reporting, concerns about vaccine hesitancy in the context of managing a global pandemic, and needing to find the balance between risks and benefits on a population level,” she said.
“Reactions were said to be ‘rare’ without data to confirm how common or otherwise these reactions were. In general practice I was seeing cases, which meant other GPs and specialists were seeing cases too. Without diagnostic tests, we have to rely largely on clinical history.”
In July this year, the independent OzSAGE group of which Dr Phelps is a member issued a position statement calling for better systems and management of Covid vaccine adverse events and “recognition of the impact of vaccine injury”.
Dr Phelps, who was heavily involved in crafting the statement, wrote in her submission that the OzSAGE document “outlines the scope but not the scale of the problem because we do not know the scale of the problem”. “This is partly because of under-reporting and under-recognition,” she said.
According to the TGA’s most recent safety update, there have been a total of 137,141 adverse event reports from nearly 64.4 million doses — a rate of 0.2 per cent.
There have been 819 reports “assessed as likely to be myocarditis” from 49.8 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna. Fourteen deaths have officially been linked to vaccination — 13 after AstraZeneca and one after Pfizer.
But Dr Phelps pointed to data from Germany’s pharmacovigilance body, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which has “undertaken ongoing surveys of vaccine recipients … as opposed to the TGA which only accepts passive reports, or AusVaxSafety whose survey stopped at six weeks”.
“They have found that the incidence of serious reactions occurs in 0.3 per 1000 shots (not people),” she said.
“Considering that the majority of Australian adults have now had at least one booster, this suggests that the incidence of serious adverse reactions per vaccinated person could be more than 1-in-1000. PEI admits that under-reporting is a problem, and observers suggest that an order of magnitude of under-reporting is not unreasonable to consider (most estimates put underreporting at much worse than this).”
Dr Phelps said there was concern some adverse events could “cause long-term illness and disability”, but data was limited because the “global focus has been on vaccinating as many people as quickly as possible with a novel vaccine for a novel coronavirus”.
“Because of this, all of the studies that have been published so far are either small, or case studies only,” she said.
“The burden of proof seems to have been placed on the vaccine injured rather than the neutral scientific position of placing suspicion on the vaccine in the absence of any other cause and the temporal correlation with the administration of the vaccine.”
She noted some countries had gathered significant databases of adverse events, ranging from allergy and anaphylaxis to cardiovascular, neurological, haematological and auto-immune reactions.
Despite the recognition of heart inflammation associated with the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, Dr Phelps said “even then, there has been a misconception that myocarditis is ‘mild’, ‘transient’ and ‘mostly in young males’, when there are many cases where myocarditis is manifestly not mild, not transient and not confined to the young male demographic”.
Dr Phelps said until there was acknowledgment and recognition of post-vaccination syndrome or vaccine injury, “there can be no progress in developing protocols for diagnosis and treatment and it is difficult to be included in research projects or treatment programs”.
“It has also meant a long and frustrating search for acknowledgment and an attempt at treatment for many individual patients,” she said.
“People who suffer Covid vaccine injury may present with a range of symptoms, and results of standard medical tests often come back normal. And like patients with Long Covid, they too are also asking the medical profession and public health systems for help.”
Earlier this year, Dr Rado Faletic — who previously spoke out about his battle with the TGA — launched Australian advocacy group Coverse to provide support and collect testimony from those suffering vaccine injuries.
AHPRA said in a statement that the regulator had “been clear in all of our guidance about Covid-19 vaccinations that we expect medical practitioners to use their professional judgement and the best available evidence in their practice”.
“This includes keeping up to date with public health advice from Commonwealth, state and territory authorities,” a spokeswoman said.
“Legitimate discussion and debate, based on science is appropriate and necessary to progress our understanding and knowledge. The [March 9, 2021 position] statement does not prevent practitioners from having these discussions.”
She added that as of June 2022, only 11 practitioners had been suspended “in relation to concerns raised about Covid-19”.
“The concerns raised about the practitioners related to the spreading of misinformation about Covid-19 or vaccination advice, including that the Covid-19 pandemic was fake, that the vaccination program was about government led mind control or in some instances representing that patients would develop cancer by having a vaccination administered,” she said.
Dr Phelps, who remains a practising GP, was elected as the first female president of the AMA in 2000.
She was also a City of Sydney councillor from 2016 to 2021, and Deputy Lord Mayor under Clover Moore from 2016 to 2017.
In 2018, Dr Phelps ran as an independent candidate in the by-election for the eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth following the resignation of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, defeating Liberal Dave Sharma.
She spent less than a year in federal parliament, losing to Mr Sharma in a rematch in the May 2019 election.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Should treatment for blood clots be routine in some Covid patients?
My heading above is a plain English version of the first academic heading below. Blood clots can do a lot of harm so are a serious problem. But they can be treated with considerable success by blood thinners such as Warfarin. But Warfarin has its problems too. It can cause bleeding. So, obviously, you use it only when it is clearly needed.
And the BIG question is whether you should use it for prevention. Should you give it to a patient BEFORE they get any symptoms?
Nobody is saying that you should give thinners to ALL Covid patients so the question is whether you should give it to high-risk patients? If so, how do you identify the patients most likely to suffer from blood clots?
So you can see that there is a real problem there. The study from Oxford University below tries to solve that puzzle
And there are some categories of patient who usually ARE high risk. We can identifty some patients as being at risk. So how great does the risk have to be before you give a patient thinners? The article below tries to answer that and concludes that there are some cases that should get preventive treatment.
But the problem is a difficult one so I reproduce below the Abstract from the original Oxford article plus two further comments on it.
A crude summary of the findings is that fat old guys should be given thinners. I am old and a bit overweight so if ever I get Covid, I should probably be given a low dose of thinners
Clinical and Genetic Risk Factors for Acute Incident Venous Thromboembolism in Ambulatory Patients With COVID-19
JunQing Xie et al.
Key Points
Question What is the 30-day acute risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE) among ambulatory patients with COVID-19, and what are the clinical and genetic risk factors predisposing them to developing post–COVID-19 VTE?
Findings In this retrospective cohort study of 18 818 outpatients with COVID-19 and 93 179 propensity score–matched noninfected participants, a higher VTE incidence was observed in the former (hazard ratio, 21.42); however, this risk was considerably attenuated among the fully vaccinated, after breakthrough infection. Older age, male sex, obesity, no vaccination or partial vaccination, and inherited thrombophilia were independent risk factors for COVID-19–associated VTE.
Meaning The results of this study suggest that ambulatory patients with COVID-19, either vaccinated or not, present a clinically relevant increased risk of incident VTE during the acute phase, with the risk pronounced by factors of older age, male sex, obesity, incomplete vaccination, and factor V Leiden thrombophilia.
Abstract
Importance The risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in ambulatory COVID-19 is controversial. In addition, the association of vaccination with COVID-19–related VTE and relevant clinical and genetic risk factors remain to be elucidated.
Objective To quantify the association between ambulatory COVID-19 and short-term risk of VTE, study the potential protective role of vaccination, and investigate clinical and genetic risk factors for post–COVID-19 VTE.
Design, Setting, and Participants This population-based cohort study of patients with COVID-19 from UK Biobank included participants with SARS-CoV-2 infection that was confirmed by a positive polymerase chain test reaction result between March 1, 2020, and September 3, 2021, who were then propensity score matched to COVID-19–naive people during the same period. Participants with a history of VTE who used antithrombotic drugs (1 year before index dates) or tested positive in hospital were excluded.
Exposures First infection with SARS-CoV-2, age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, obesity, vaccination status, and inherited thrombophilia.
Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was a composite VTE, including deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism, which occurred 30 days after the infection. Hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% CIs were calculated using cause-specific Cox models.
Results In 18 818 outpatients with COVID-19 (10 580 women [56.2%]; mean [SD] age, 64.3 [8.0] years) and 93 179 matched uninfected participants (52 177 women [56.0%]; mean [SD] age, 64.3 [7.9] years), the infection was associated with an increased risk of VTE in 30 days (incidence rate of 50.99 and 2.37 per 1000 person-years for infected and uninfected people, respectively; HR, 21.42; 95% CI, 12.63-36.31). However, risk was substantially attenuated among the fully vaccinated (HR, 5.95; 95% CI, 1.82-19.5; interaction P = .02). In patients with COVID-19, older age, male sex, and obesity were independently associated with higher risk, with adjusted HRs of 1.87 (95% CI, 1.50-2.33) per 10 years, 1.69 (95% CI, 1.30-2.19), and 1.83 (95% CI, 1.28-2.61), respectively. Further, inherited thrombophilia was associated with an HR of 2.05 (95% CI, 1.15-3.66) for post–COVID-19 VTE.
Conclusions and Relevance In this population-based cohort study of patients with COVID-19, ambulatory COVID-19 was associated with a substantially increased risk of incident VTE, but this risk was greatly reduced in fully vaccinated people with breakthrough infection. Older age, male sex, and obesity were clinical risk factors for post–COVID-19 VTE; factor V Leiden thrombophilia was additionally associated with double the risk, comparable with the risk of 10-year aging. These findings may reinforce the need for vaccination, inform VTE risk stratification, and call for targeted VTE prophylaxis strategies for unvaccinated outpatients with COVID-19.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2795466
***************************************************Is There a Role for Thromboprophylaxis in Selected Outpatients With COVID-19?
Anastasios Kollias et al.
Mr Xie and colleagues1 provide important information on an understudied topic: incident venous thromboembolism (VTE) in outpatients with COVID-19. The findings of their study are commendable and provide useful conclusions. First, COVID-19 was associated with increased VTE risk, even in the outpatient setting given that a higher VTE incidence was shown among 18 818 outpatients with COVID-19 compared with 93 179 propensity score matched, noninfected participants. Second, patients with specific characteristics (older age, male sex, obesity, no/partial vaccination, and inherited thrombophilia) had higher VTE risk. Third, the VTE risk was high for up to 30 days after diagnosis. These findings are highly important and may advance case management and treatment for outpatients with COVID-19.
At present, the available data are generally against the routine use of pharmacologic thromboprophylaxis in outpatients with COVID-19.2,3 Moreover, current guidelines do not provide specific recommendations.4 However, it is common sense that selected outpatients with VTE risk factors are therefore at higher risk for disease worsening and would benefit from thromboprophylaxis on an individualized basis and after careful assessment of bleeding risk. Indeed, data show that major adverse events tend to occur early in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who have a high-risk profile; prompt thromboprophylaxis would benefit these patients.5
The study by Mr Xie and colleagues was performed during a period when only 41% of patients with COVID-19 had been fully vaccinated; a percentage that has increased worldwide. Thus, it would be interesting to study VTE risk factors separately among the fully vaccinated group—despite VTE events having been infrequent. Moreover, apart from the patient risk factors, the disease characteristics may play a role. Symptoms that indicate disease activity or severity, ie, the duration of the fever, could be contributing to an increased VTE risk in selected patients. In addition, SARS-CoV-2 variants may exhibit a different risk regarding VTE. If these data are available, they would make for another interesting study.
Although thromboprophylaxis among outpatients with COVID-19 is not generally recommended, the data and findings derived from studies, such as this one by Mr Xie and colleagues,1 show that selected outpatients carry an increased VTE risk. On the other hand, widespread immunization, as well as the availability of the antiviral therapies, may be substantially reducing VTE risk. Whether thromboprophylaxis would benefit high-risk outpatients with COVID-19 is unclear, but it seems reasonable to conclude that an individualized strategy would improve their prognosis.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2799543
****************************************************Is There a Role for Thromboprophylaxis in Selected Outpatients With COVID-19? — Reply
Junqing Xie et al.
In Reply In our recent research article regarding clinical and genetic determinants associated with venous thromboembolism (VTE) among community-dwelling patients with COVID-19,1 we reported a marked increase of 30-day VTE and identified older age, male sex, obesity, no or partial vaccination, and inherited thrombophilia as key risk factors. We appreciate the insightful comments from Prof Kollias and colleagues and their support of our call for targeted VTE thromboprophylaxis for outpatients with COVID-19.
Hospitalization is the recommended indicator for initiating antithrombotic therapy for patients with COVID-19. However, we argue that the likelihood of post−COVID-19 VTE should be conceptually seen as a continuum, with some outpatients treated for COVID-19 at an even higher risk of VTE than some hospitalized patients. Also, given that VTE hazard peaks substantially and shortly after SARS-COV-2 infection,2 individuals with COVID-19 would likely benefit from earlier interventions for primary prophylaxis. Our study1 identified several independent risk factors that can be used to stratify patients with different risk profiles for post−COVID-19 VTE. We should highlight that although existing trials (eg, ETHIC, ACTIV-4B) did not generally support routine pharmacologic thromboprophylaxis for outpatients with COVID-19, the results should be interpreted as inconclusive given the great statistical uncertainty and underrepresentation of older patients, and consequently, the low event rates. Therefore, the results do not preclude the use of thromboprophylaxis in selected outpatient subpopulations, particularly among those with a high baseline risk of VTE.3 Further trials targeting high-risk infected outpatients and more real-world studies with larger sample sizes and longer follow-up are warranted to supplement the existing evidence.4
Admittedly, the net benefits of antithrombotic therapy should always be weighed against potential harms5—eg, for those at high risk of VTE, risk of bleeding should be considered when prescribing antithrombotic therapy.6 Of note, genetic risk owing to monogenic thrombophilia or polygenic risk score, as evidenced in our study,1 was exclusively associated with venous but not arterial thromboembolism, which may be promising for identifying individuals susceptible to VTE but resistant to bleeding. Finally, we agree with the proposal from Prof Kollias and colleagues to investigate whether the risk factors persist in fully vaccinated people and what potential value disease symptoms may have for VTE prediction. However, our available data are insufficient for answering this question given the limited sample size: only 6 VTE events among the breakthrough infection cohort.
As the number of COVID-19 outpatient cases continues to increase, personalized prophylactic anticoagulation in this large population may prevent a substantial number of individuals with COVID-19 from developing severe thrombotic complications that require hospitalization and/or intensive care. The clinical and genetic risk factors identified by our study should inform the identification of participants for new research to bridge the knowledge gaps on the risk vs benefit of pharmacologic thromboprophylaxis.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2799542
**************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Google is increasing their attacks on my Tongue-Tied blog (https://snorphty.blogspot.com/)
On 18th I republished there an article from the NY SUN about the definition of a woman. Google (who own blogspot) have put a notice on that post saying that they have unpublished it because it violates their guidelines. They have instructed me to revise the article according to their guidelines
The odd bit is that as far as I can see, the article is still appearing on my blog unaltered. Maybe I am the only one who can now see it. I would be obliged if readers would tell me what they see there when they log on.
The blog has been for some time behind a scare warning if you access it via a cellphone but remains accessible without interruption if you log onto it via computer
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On 18th I republished there an article from the NY SUN about the definition of a woman. Google (who own blogspot) have put a notice on that post saying that they have unpublished it because it violates their guidelines. They have instructed me to revise the article according to their guidelines
The odd bit is that as far as I can see, the article is still appearing on my blog unaltered. Maybe I am the only one who can now see it. I would be obliged if readers would tell me what they see there when they log on.
The blog has been for some time behind a scare warning if you access it via a cellphone but remains accessible without interruption if you log onto it via computer
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Monday, December 19, 2022
The Bible
I have done a bit more writing about Bible topics. My latest is about Methuselah. See here
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FDA’s Peter Marks Starts Recognizing the Failures of the COVID-19 Vaccines
A controversial figure of late, Peter Marks, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been front and center in the regulatory agency’s aggressive greenlights associated with the COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic.
Among other things, the agency has been criticized for dropping its rigorous standards during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency at least, when applied to the mRNA vaccines targeting SARS-CoV-2.
Interestingly, Dr. Marks has now gone on the record in a piece published in JAMA Network titled “Urgent Need for Next Generation COVID-19 Vaccines” in a clear recognition that the current “version 1.0”, first generation COVID-19 vaccines are no longer viable to protect the American public. This media has labeled the COVID-19 vaccines as novel, version 1.0 since the late spring of 2021, when it became very apparent that vaccine durability challenges coupled with a mutating virus (which was called out by critical scientists from the start) represented a challenge for vaccine durability.
While TrialSite maintains the COVID-19 vaccines partially blunted the sharp edge of the pandemic, initially they did so at a severe cost. The vaccines were bundled in a program precluding any serious embrace of early care with repurposed drugs, orchestrated government censorship of media and social tech, and harassment of doctors that dared question any moves by Washington DC or industry all representing perhaps, one of the greatest public health failures in modern history. More people died in America from SARS-CoV-2 than any other nation despite the vast trillions, sophisticated technologies and supposed state-of-the-art vaccines.
From the start influencers such as the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not to mention academic medicine, big hospital administration, and industry all bought in hook, line, and sinker into the scheme that mass COVID-19 vaccination would control and eradicate SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19.
In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) specifically established the 70% vaccination rate as a target threshold to achieve herd immunity. But from near the start this media, and a minority of independent, critical scientists questioned aloud that logic. Could a dynamic RNA virus that mutates like say, HIV or influenza, be controlled by a novel mass vaccination scheme? Has the flu been controlled out of existence?
This seemed a crap shoot at best, yet the U.S. federal government and its health agencies along with other of the world’s richest most sophisticated economies bet the proverbial farm on novel technology in a way that was guaranteed to not work as intended. Was this a totally desperate move or part of some orchestrated response to advance a biomedical platform?
While the vaccines worked to induce antibodies for short bursts, they did save lives, especially earlier on. But within months (Delta appeared by spring of 2021) of the mass vaccination program it was apparent that they failed to control the spread of the pathogen, exhibited poor durability, and were associated with a disturbing safety signal in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
While by the summer of 2021 the whole program should have been under investigation President Biden ordered mandates across the board by September 2021. Now two years later since they were first released on the market Peter Marks initiates a dialogue paving the way to sunset these products, thinking ahead for a next generation of more effective, safety COVID-19 vaccine. But that’s not enough.
Now on the record, that while issues of “vaccines access and hesitancy present throughout the pandemic are partially responsible,” the relentless, or in his words “ceaseless progression of increasingly transmissible variants, recently including BF.7 and BQ.1.1 presents a major challenge to medical interventions, particularly vaccines.”
TrialSite recently showcased a couple studies that indicate real trouble when it comes to the recently authorized bivalent Omicron BA.4/BA.5 vaccine booster effectiveness against subvariants such as BQ.1.1. Put simply, these vaccines don’t work very well against a continuously evolving virus.
To date, the original primary series (2 dose) regimen (mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) was introduced by December 2020, followed by two additional booster doses due to waning effectiveness. Then by September, the FDA cleared on an emergency basis without clinical data the bivalent Omicron BA.4/BA/5 booster vaccine in a response to mutated subvariants that evade vaccine-induced antibodies with ease. The FDA sought to respond to the ongoing genetic evolution of SARS-CoV-2 seemingly, the best way it could with the latest booster doses from both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
The market demand has been very weak for the bivalent booster products and yet the FDA has continued to evidence questionable behavior, such as ongoing promotional campaigns that attempt to create tension among family members who aren’t yet boosted. See “FDA Uses Little Girl to Market Moderna and Pfizer Bivalent Jabs—Crosses a Line Yet Again.”
With no definitive clinical data, Marks continues to promote the current products, declaring in his piece that the bivalent boosters may not only reduce morbidity and mortality but also “may also reduce the amount of symptomatic disease and associated health care use.” But he conveys throughout the article that the time has come to move on from these current products.
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COVID Report Raises Further Questions About Confidence in Virus Origins, and Intelligence Community
On Wednesday night, as Sarah covered, Fox News revealed a report from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee looking into the origins of the COVID-19 virus. The report was released by minority staff members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In a press call held Thursday afternoon, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, (R-OH), a doctor who is a member of the committee, declared that such a report is "just the beginning."
A particularly memorable finding is that the virus may have origins through a Chinese bio weapons program. It becomes even more memorable in that Rep. Wenstrup mentioned during the call that a report from the intelligence community claims there is supposedly agreement that the virus was not developed as such a weapon.
The congressman is especially interested in knowing who came up to what he referred to as this "broad agreement," and as to what level of confidence there was. The certainty of that level of confidence was not included in the report, though, nor was the basis for why the report indicated as much.
Wenstrup spoke further about this supposed "broad agreement" when taking a question from Townhall, confirming that there is an expectation to just take the report's word for it, though he does hope to get to the bottom of that basis. "Where's the accountability for who's making those comments," the congressman wondered. While he agreed that those putting out such a report should have to answer for it, he confirmed that they haven't done so.
When asked during a follow-up about what such lofty and entitled expectations mean for trust in the intelligence community, the congressman acknowledged trust becomes a problem and "is greatly diminished." This acknowledgment comes from both sides of the aisle, with Democratic members indicating as much as well, the congressman confirmed.
"The way you develop trust and confidence is through transparency," Wenstrup offered. When it comes to entitlement, if anyone is entitled, it ought to be the members of this select committee. "There's nothing they should be keeping from us," the congressman insisted, a point he would make throughout the call, especially when it comes to fulfilling their duties. "It's our job to ask these questions and have that type of understanding," the congressman would say during the call as well. Findings about COVID origins are "something I think we're entitled to understand" he said.
When it comes to that trust, the congressman also shared that they have a responsibility of oversight on the committee. "When we're not getting our questions answered, there is a breakdown of trust," something the committee hopes to dispel.
As to other theories for COVID origins, Wenstrup mentioned that, other than the article hypothesizing as much, he hasn't seen evidence that the virus came from nature. One such theory propagated, to the point that those who dare to mention a lab leak or bio weapon have been ostracized, is that it originated at a wet market. While the congressman noted that the wet market could have been the first super spreader, that doesn't mean that's where the virus came from. While the origin of a virus usually can be found within the animal world, that was not the case when it comes to the animals that were tested for this virus.
Transparency, Wenstrup spoke to, is also crucial when it comes to America being prepared for any future viruses and pandemics. We can do that "by learning what is going on and what our adversaries are doing," especially if it comes to China having a bio weapon and/or developing their own virus along with their own vaccine. This is a matter of national security as well.
The press call was billed to be about sharing bombshells, and the stunning lack of transparency from the intelligence community report was not the only revelation. For instance, China having its own vaccine is not merely a hypothetical, as they looked to have a vaccine patent so quickly after the virus was unleashed, something Wenstrup mentioned was not all too common and "you scratch your head over."
A lack of transparency was, unfortunately, a theme and point of concern throughout the call. On the ever-pressing issue of gain-of-function and taxpayer funding of it through the grants involved, Wenstrup lamented that they "haven't had the right people in front of us" to answer questions.
Other pressing issues and potentially damning revelations lie with China's accountability. In answering a question from a reporter as to if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears to be emboldened by the lack of accountability, Wenstrup believes that they likely have, especially since it appears they can get away with it. A lack of accountability "would embolden anybody who is in this situation," he offered. If China did in fact create the virus, Wenstrup pointed out, they would have something to lose on the world stage.
"If there was negligence, we certainly should hold someone accountable," the congressman offered.
When it comes to the lack of accountability, and how the CCP is indeed feeling emboldened by this, the mainstream media deserves some of the blame too, in insisting on the theory that occurred in nature, for instance. Who can forget how ostracized Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) was for daring to suggest early on that the virus may have been manufactured in a lab? The New York Times in February 2020 declared it to be "a fringe theory," for instance.
"If our own media is saying you can't tell the other story, that's a problem," Wenstrup mentioned. Thus, China becomes further emboldened if "they feel America can't do anything about this."
There may even be issues for President Joe Biden, as brought up by a reporter on the call, especially when it comes to transparency issues and how the president has (or has not been) discussing COVID with Xi Jinping. Despite how much Biden has touted his relationship with the Chinese leader, the president appears to have failed to discuss the virus' origins of the virus, as Katie highlighted at the time about the two leaders meeting last month.
While the congressman wished to stick to how he was looking "into the science of" the virus as a physician, there was an acknowledgment that transparency concerns with Biden "might be part of a bigger picture."
Wenstrup also sought to emphasize that there is a bipartisan quest for truth on this. Even those who want to find out the origins of the virus without getting into the blame game yet, with Wenstrup mentioning being part of those group of people, there is nevertheless "a lot of evidence that raises eyebrows."
The congressman told reporters he hopes for the classified report to ultimately be declassified.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Sunday, December 18, 2022
Harrowing moment parents who refused to give their newborn vaccinated blood ahead of urgent surgery have the baby 'ripped away' from them by authorities
Dramatic video has emerged of the moment parents watched their baby taken from them and placed into a doctor's care after they refused to allow him to receive a transfusion with vaccinated blood ahead of urgent heart surgery.
The six-month-old had been in a New Zealand hospital since November to receive surgery for a congenital heart disease that was delayed by several weeks because of the parents' concerns.
A New Zealand High Court decision ruled the baby would be placed into the care of his pediatric heart surgeon and cardiologist until the completion of the surgery and post-operative recovery.
Harrowing footage of the encounter shows the distressed parents frantically trying to speak with authorities as the baby was taken away by hospital staff.
'You guys will be recorded in the annals of history as criminals who take babies from their mothers,' the baby's father can be heard saying to authorities as an administrator informs the mother she can see the baby after surgery.
After the distressing encounter, the baby's father spoke candidly to the camera: 'I dont know where this goes to around the world, but our baby has been medically kidnapped,' he said.
'Thugs have come in wearing police uniforms, and they've ripped the baby out of his bed.
'Let this be a lesson to the entire rest of humanity, the takeover has already started, and it started in a hospital ward with a baby. 'I call on humanity to rise, because you all know what's happening.'
Footage of the incident has circulated around the internet after originally being posted on Rumble.com on December 8.
The parents are represented by lawyer and prominent anti-vax campaigner, Sue Grey, who said 'because they label my clients as conspiracy theorists, [their position] is that anything my clients say can be ignored'.
The hospital planned for the baby to receive the life-saving surgery last week. The parents will prioritise 'peaceful time with their baby until the operation, and to support him through the operation', Ms Grey said in a December 8 Facebook post.
'We have concluded that the government cannot afford anything to go wrong for Baby W as the world is watching. 'He is likely to get the best possible care with the best safest blood.'
Two more parents have requested only unvaccinated blood for their seriously ill toddler this week, NZ Herald reports.
Parents Croydon Hodge and Doreen Rudolph, who have a toddler with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, have refused permission for the hospital to use vaccinated blood for the boy's urgent surgery.
New Zealand's blood service has presented evidence of a 'significant increase in potential blood recipients asking for blood from unvaccinated donors'.
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Can Vaccines 'Prevent Nearly Every Death From COVID'?
As the winter season brings a sickness surge, the Biden administration is back to blathering about the supposed efficacy of the coronavirus vaccine, with one of its top doctors claiming "nearly every" COVID-19 death is preventable with vaccination.
CLAIM: The White House's COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha claimed at Thursday's press conference, "We know we can prevent nearly every death from COVID if people get their updated vaccines [...] So, we continue to press that message."
FACTS: The White House's "message" is countered by data analysis conducted for the Washington Post's The Health 202, which revealed that 58 percent of COVID-19 fatalities were vaccinated or boosted patients in August. "We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated," Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Cynthia Cox, who conducted the analysis, told The Post.
As Katie covered, the new statistics on COVID-19 deaths debunked the White House's narrative on the vaccine. In late November, when the WaPo report was released, Jha had just made the same claim a day earlier that "if folks get their updated vaccines and they get treated if they have a breakthrough infection, we can prevent essentially every COVID death in America."
Although the findings marked the first time that a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus had received at least the primary series of the vaccine, it continued an eye-opening pattern where we saw the vaxxed population make up 23 percent of 'Rona deaths in September 2021, and then up to 42 percent of the COVID-19 death toll in January and February of this year.
RATING: The claim that keeping up-to-date with coronavirus vaccinations can "prevent nearly every death from COVID" is FALSE. Even though the president has proclaimed we're facing a so-called "pandemic of the unvaccinated" and threatened that unvaxxed Americans alone would suffer "a winter of severe illness and death," Biden's alarmist language isn't backed by real-world numbers.
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Twitter Censorship Contributed to Destructive Pandemic Policies and Is Criminal, Says Former White House COVID Adviser
The recently revealed censorship that has plagued Twitter in recent years is “criminal,” according to former White House COVID adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, as it allowed “lies to be imposed on the public” during a pandemic that wrought untold damage worldwide.
“When correct science policy is blocked, people die, and people died from the censorship,” Atlas, a special coronavirus adviser during the Trump administration and contributor to The Epoch Times, said in an interview.
Atlas was speaking days after Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, released troves of internal files showing how the previous Twitter team built a blacklist to limit disfavored tweets’ visibility without the knowledge of those using the platform. Among those flagged was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, whose tweet criticizing pandemic lockdowns shortly after joining the platform last August got him on the “trends blacklist” preventing the amplification of his tweets.
But such revelations, Atlas said, are “only the tip of the iceberg.”
“There’s a far larger story here that we need to hear,” he said, which he considers “far more nefarious and more systemic than isolated tweets being pulled down.”
“This seems to be criminal behavior, and I think it needs to be investigated in the courts,” he said.
The Censorship of 2020
Atlas wants to direct attention back to 2020, when health officials followed in the Chinese Communist Party’s footsteps to implement blanket COVID-19 lockdowns.
In November of that year, while Atlas was still on the White House’s coronavirus task force, Twitter took down his post that argued mask-wearing was not effective in curbing the spread of the virus—a decision celebrated by some proponents of the measures, including fellow task force member Dr. Deborah Birx.
“One would think that the American public should hear what the adviser to the president is saying during the pandemic of 2020. Yet Twitter decided to simply block that discussion from the public,” he said.
Both Twitter and Facebook that August also removed a video from President Donald Trump in which he said children are “almost immune” to COVID-19. That same month, Facebook said it had deleted 7 million pieces of content it deemed to be COVID-19 misinformation over the second quarter of 2020.
Despite most states having a mask mandate until early this year, a number of studies found children and teenagers to be at a far lower risk of getting or dying from COVID-19, even with the emergence of new variants. But the “censorship of 2020,” be it deleting individual tweets, suspending accounts, or blocking the amplification of posts, had done its damage.
“When decisions were being made in 2020 and imposed upon the public, that’s when censorship counted the most,” Atlas said.
The absence of alternative viewpoints manipulated not only the public, but government officials as well, Atlas said.
“It created this illusion that there was a consensus among science and public health policy experts that lockdowns should be imposed; it created and perpetrated lies that if you were opposed to lockdowns, you were choosing the economy over lives, and that if you were opposed to lockdowns, you were somehow calling for letting the infection spread without any mitigation whatsoever,” he said.
“They absolutely contributed to policies that killed massive numbers of people and destroyed children and low-income people, who are the most vulnerable. That’s why it’s criminal.”
Atlas has been a vocal critic of COVID-19 lockdowns since early on in the pandemic, saying that “targeted protection was the logical, safer, and ethical way to manage the pandemic.” In May 2020, he wrote an article for the Hill warning about the “millions of years of life” such policies would cost Americans.
Learning loss aside, the pandemic restrictions led to an explosion of child abuse, drug overdoses, mental health issues, and obesity among youth, who were deprived of normal social interaction and forced to continue schooling through remote learning.
Collectively, America’s social media and legacy media, “coupled with incompetent bureaucrats running the policy and ignorant university professors have left a sinful legacy of damage,” said Atlas—the reason for the massive loss of trust in public health agencies that people depend for guidance in future crises.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently said his “biggest mistake” while at the company was to “invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves,” a decision he said has “burdened the company with too much power.”
Late last month, Musk announced an end to the COVID-19 “misleading information” policy, which has resulted in 100,000 pieces of content cut from the platform and more than 11,000 account suspensions.
Atlas welcomed the gesture but thought that more individuals need to “rise up”—his term for speaking up, for real change.
“There should be a public outrage that is massive,” he said.
He believes those the American public elected to represent them haven’t done their part. “Where are our elected officials in this, where are they?” he asked. “If they can’t act, simply for ensuring free speech, they should all step down.”
‘Distortion’ Around Vaccine Mandates
A recent study published in Nature of over 15,000 citizens across 21 countries shows that people who have received COVID-19 vaccines are far more likely to be prejudiced against the unvaccinated than the other way around, which Atlas saw as yet another illustration of how social media censorship has shaped public opinion through suppressing critical information.
More than 5.47 billion people worldwide have received at least one dose of one of the COVID-19 vaccines, accounting for roughly 70 percent of the world population, despite lacking a “thorough, detailed understanding of efficacy and side effects from the vaccines,” Atlas noted.
But because of the lockdown mandates, which he called “pseudo-scientific,” throngs of workers in healthcare, education, and the military lost their jobs and hospitals suffered staffing shortages, causing backlogs of patients needing vital treatment for other non-COVID-19 diseases.
In perpetrating a “false narrative,” social media platforms have deviated from their promised role as a digital town hall and a visible source of information, and instead allowed themselves to be a tool for harm, said Atlas.
“We are living in an Orwellian society if this sort of censorship is allowed to keep going.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Friday, December 16, 2022
The Bible
After a gap of about a year, I have just put something up on my scripture blog. It is about love
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Researchers Decry Censorship in COVID Policy During Meeting With Gov. DeSantis
Michelle Utter, a health care worker and single mother of grown sons who are active-duty military, said she was in great physical shape—running, working out, and martial arts—until she took the Pfizer vaccine for COVID.
Utter described the ordeal she’s been through for the last two years—physically, trying to do her job and facing resistance and silencing from the Florida hospital that employs her. She’s not allowed to say, “vaccine injury.” She’s been on IV infusions for 17 months.
Another vaccine victim, Steven Ordonia, a retired law enforcement officer and military veteran, talked about his ordeal, which began when he received the Pfizer booster shot in December 2021.
“And from that day on, my life has been turned upside down,” with numerous trips to the emergency room, joint pain, muscle twitching, and convulsions.
“I was convinced at the time I was having a mental breakdown, and that’s what was causing all the symptoms. I contemplated suicide several times.”
As a reminder to all that public health policy has real consequences, the two spoke at a round table on Dec. 13 led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The governor convened a panel of experts—primarily researchers who had tried to warn about problems with the vaccines—and launched a grand jury investigation into vaccine problems and how they were dealt with or covered up.
The researchers will sit on the state’s new Public Health Integrity Committee.
Researcher after researcher talked about how the public health establishment suppressed information: that the vaccines often don’t pass risk-benefit analysis. How sometimes-fatal myocarditis has emerged as a side effect. How the vaccines’ rates of complications were far higher than those of most approved vaccines. How countries like Denmark, rather than mandating children take the vaccine, now don’t allow them to take it. How lower COVID mortality among vaccine users is often offset by higher mortality from other causes.
They, DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo excoriated a medical establishment that, in DeSantis’ words, “wanted to just cocoon themselves from any criticism, and to try to denigrate anybody that had a different way of thinking.”
‘Largest Blunder in Human History’
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all decision-making surrounding COVID amounts to the largest blunder in human history,” said Bret Weinstein, a former evolutionary biology professor at Evergreen State College.
“I think the major problem has been that … people, regular people, scientists, whoever thinks that there’s something really different than the narrative, you’re gonna get destroyed,” said Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Medical School public health professor. “That’s happened over and over again, even for very prominent scientists,” he said.
“A lot of the censorship that’s happened of scientific discussion comes from the top.”
Bhattacharya and another round table participant, Martin Kulldorff, were two of the three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by over 60,000 doctors and researchers, plus 870,000 others. Made public in October 2020, signers decried the harm of the lockdown.
They urged, until a vaccine became available, a policy of “Focused Protection”: isolating those at greatest risk while allowing others to go about their lives, acquiring natural and herd immunity.
It called for the resumption of everyday life for most people, said basic hygiene like routine handwashing and staying home when sick were sufficient community measures, and described how the vulnerable, such as the elderly, could be best protected at home and in nursing homes.
The declaration was targeted immediately by the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, with “a devastating takedown of the premises of the declaration,” Bhattacharya said.
“The federal officials were working to suppress what they called misinformation, but actually what they suppress is scientific discussion.”
Emergency Room Physician
Joseph Fraiman, an emergency room physician in what he termed “Cajun country” in Louisiana, said that he and six fellow researchers studied “serious adverse events” associated with the vaccines, events the manufacturers themselves defined.
“And what I mean by serious is that you’re either hospitalized, or you were permanently disabled, or dead,” he said.
They wanted to look at them with “a magnifying glass” because the manufacturers “originally reported that there was no harm, there was no serious harm to the vaccines.”
What they found, Fraiman said, “is that there are more of these types of events in the vaccine group than in the non-vaccine, the placebo group.”
“To our surprise, in the Pfizer trial, the first vaccine to go through it was a 37 percent increase in the number of serious adverse events. That was never reported, not by the FDA, not by Pfizer,” he said.
“In fact, Pfizer says—I may get it wrong verbatim—but they said that the incidence of serious adverse events are similar in the vaccine and placebo groups. Thirty-seven percent is not similar. It’s actually statistically significantly different.”
And, “it turns out in both Pfizer and Moderna, we had a one in 800 risk of serious adverse events” from the list.
Other vaccines, Fraiman said, have a one in one million or one in two million risk. “One in 800 is disastrous, if true.”
Most people, if they contract COVID now, don’t have a one in 800 chance of being hospitalized, he said.
pfizer vaccine
A health care worker prepares a dose of Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in a file image. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
Researchers with different areas of specialty talked about their findings, perspectives, and experiences, trying to publicize what they’d found.
Ladapo discussed a small, preliminary study in Florida comparing all-cause mortality with cardiac mortality after COVID vaccination. They found two remarkable things: a markedly increased risk of cardiac death in young men, specifically in that age and group, and a failure by most public health officials to acknowledge it.
Christine Stabell Benn, a Danish doctor and researcher at the University of Southern Denmark who videoconferenced in, said the vaccines appear to have “nonspecific events”—greater risk of infection by other diseases.
“If we’ve only studied its effect against the target disease, we also need to study its effect against other diseases and its effects on overall mortality and morbidity,” she said.
“I was very concerned when we started recommending vaccines for everybody because I simply didn’t think that the vaccines have been investigated thoroughly enough for nonspecific events. In fact, they haven’t been investigated (at all) for nonspecific events,” she said.
“This means that particularly for children and young people who weren’t at a high risk for COVID-19, I was concerned that nonspecific effects might outweigh or exceed … the benefits achieved from the specific protection against COVID-19.”
Danish public health policy now only recommends booster COVID vaccinations to those over 50 except those at severe risk, and immunization of children has stopped altogether.
As of a few weeks ago, she said, COVID is now regarded in Denmark like any other respiratory disease. “It’s really nice to be here (in Denmark),” she said. “Life goes on as it used to do before COVID. Nobody pays attention to COVID-19 anymore.”
‘Disregarded Basic Principles’
Kulldorff, on leave from Harvard and a fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science & Freedom, said, “I agree with Dr. Weinstein that our approach to this pandemic is the biggest public health mistake in history … We basically disregarded basic principles of public health.”
He and others who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration argued for a different approach: better-focused protection for high-risk old people while keeping schools open and not locking down the rest of society.
“I think now, over two years later, we have been proven right. Florida and Sweden were two exceptions to the strategy, and both Sweden and Florida have come out on top when it comes to both COVID mortality and, even more importantly, to all-cause mortality,” Kulldorff said.
Sweden has among the lowest rates in Europe. “I think it’s very tragic what we have gone through by mismanaging this pandemic so thoroughly.”
Weinstein discussed the high personal cost of his dissent from COVID orthodoxy.
YouTube shut down his channel, and two videos—one featuring an inventor of mRNA technology and the other with an expert on treating COVID—were removed. “They knocked out more than half of our family income inside of a single hour,” he said.
“There was a radical inversion of the normal medical order of things in this pandemic,” Weinstein said.
“The relationship between doctor and patient is essentially an intimate, sacred relationship. And what happened here is that there was a coup, in which what was swapped in place of that relationship was public health wisdom from bureaucrats,” he said.
“And the problem is that, had we not done anything coordinated with COVID, we would have learned clinically how to treat it. Doctors would have followed hunches. They would have tried things out. They would have discovered what worked and what didn’t. They would have talked to each other, and we would have gotten good at treating COVID.
“Instead, what happened was the policy came down from on high, instantaneously, and fully formed. And then that policy was protected with these draconian censorship measures. With slander.”
The system wasted the narrow window of time when it might have contained the virus’ spread.
“So, at this point, we have millions needlessly dead. We have trillions of dollars of wealth that have been destroyed, and the vital systems that humanity depends on have been stressed to their very limit. But worse than that, we have now made this virus into a permanent fellow traveler of humanity.”
‘Afraid to Speak Up’
Bhattacharya said he had been accused of being a fringe epidemiologist.
“The illusion is that there was a scientific consensus, that everybody, all the smart people, agreed. But actually, that was never true. The censorship was used to create that illusion of consensus,” he said.
He called out U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who put in place a policy to identify misinformation online and then gave out instructions for suppressing it to media and social media companies.
“You can’t have good public health policy in this kind of environment,” Bhattacharya said.
“People are afraid to speak up … Even qualified people are afraid to say no because they’re afraid that they’ll also get called ‘fringe.’ They’ll lose their ability to make a living, they’ll lose their reputation, and they stay silent as a result. Scientists always disagree with each other.”
Tracey Hoeg, a physician and epidemiologist at UC San Francisco, talked about how the California Medical Board got a bill through the legislature “telling physicians what they are and aren’t allowed to say to their patients, and that’s specifically related to COVID.”
DeSantis said, “The rule of thumb for us in Florida is whatever they do (in California), we do the opposite.”
His administration plans to move through Florida’s upcoming legislature a bill “that actually protects physicians’ First Amendment rights, and it protects their right to dissent from orthodoxy and from the establishment.”
Loss of Trust
“There’s been a tremendous loss of trust in public health,” said Steven Templeton, an immunology and microbiology professor at Indiana University School of Medicine.
“Fewer people are getting traditional vaccines,” he said. “This isn’t just, you know, anti-vax people. This is people who really lost trust in the system.”
Fraiman interjected that parents listening to the round table should not apply what they heard about the COVID vaccines to most other vaccines, which have nearly no side effects.
DeSantis listed various actions Florida had taken against federal lockdown policy and preserving individual rights.
One event highlighting the system’s corruption for him, he said, happened early on, in the spring of 2020. People were being told to stay home, and Florida, which didn’t follow that policy, had people going to the beach and playing golf.
“If you left your house, you’re almost like a bad person,” DeSantis said of the lockdown rules. “Until you started to have the George Floyd protests. And you had massive numbers of people that are meeting to protest.
“And these public health people wrote a letter, which like hundreds, maybe thousands of them signed, saying, ‘yes, we don’t think you should be leaving your house normally, but we endorse the protest,’ and basically said it was important that people went out even in big groups and protested.”
But they wouldn’t endorse other protests such as those against lockdowns, DeSantis said. “If that just didn’t take the mask off and just show, you know, that this is all a huge political farce,” he said.
“They have totally squandered any type of confidence or goodwill that people would have.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Thursday, December 15, 2022
Twitter Files Confirm Censorship of the Great Barrington Declaration
Users have suspected Twitter of engaging in “shadowbanning” and suppressing the visibility of user accounts for years, even though the social media giant has adamantly denied the practice.
Yesterday (Dec 8 2022), using the information provided by Twitter under direction from new Chief Executive Elon Musk, journalist Bari Weiss, released a Twitter thread confirming these suspicions. Twitter secretly suppressed accounts, operated a “search blacklist,” and blocked certain content from trending, Weiss’ thread confirms. In response, Musk tweeted that Twitter plans to release software that will provide users with more clarity regarding shadowbanning.
Victims of Twitter’s practices include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford professor of medicine and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Weiss’s thread and The Twitter Files confirm what we’ve long suspected. Seeking to prop up Anthony Fauci and the lockdown policies he promoted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter (and other Big Tech companies) intentionally blacklisted, censored, suppressed, and targeted the GBD and its signers.
Within Twitter, the Strategic Response Team—Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET, worked on hundreds of cases daily, actively filtering the visibility of select accounts.
For high-profile accounts, the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” team, known as “SIP-PES” would secretly make censorship decisions. The SIP-PES team comprised high-profile executives such as the Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, Global Head of Trust & Safety, Yoel Roth, and former CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.
In addition to Weiss, Twitter’s new leadership granted journalist Matt Taibbi access to its files. Below, Taibbi illustrates how Twitter deleted tweets at the behest of the Biden Presidential campaign.
Still unfolding in this investigation is the role of government officials in pressuring Twitter to engage in censorship over the COVID-19 pandemic. As revealed by a lawsuit earlier this year, internal company Slack messages show that Andy Slavitt, a former official on Joe Biden’s pandemic task force, met with Twitter officials and pressured them to restrict the account of COVID gadfly Alex Berenson. Slavitt also , delivered an ominous warning to executives at Facebook that the company would find itself in the White House’s crosshairs if it did not step up its efforts to restrict what the task force deemed to be “COVID misinformation.”
We now have conclusive evidence that public officials pressure private companies to do the dirty work of censorship. We have yet to discover, and may never know, how far the political involvement in social media censorship went, and which officials were given the power to silence. An ongoing lawsuit by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana is currently seeking to get to the bottom of those questions. Just two weeks ago, they obtained a court-ordered deposition from Anthony Fauci, in which they grilled him over similar suppressive tactics. Fauci proved evasive, invoking the “I don’t recall” line 174 times, but was caught in a lie about his direct personal involvement in the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) efforts to smear and discredit the GBD’s authors as “fringe epidemiologists.”
GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya was slapped with a secret “Trends Blacklist” tag by Twitter executives at some point after his account was created in September 2021, Weiss’s thread confirms. The blacklist tag effectively suppressed Bhattacharya’s tweets by preventing them from going viral or being picked up by Twitter’s trends algorithm. By all appearances, one or more persons on the company’s SIP-PES team made the decision to suppress scientifically grounded dissent against lockdowns.
Given the history surrounding social media giants, government officials, and the GBD, Battacharya’s shadowbanning is not surprising. Unfortunately, neither Weiss nor Taibii’s thread indicates why Twitter took such actions against Dr. Battacharya, a respected Stanford Professor.
What we do know is that Twitter’s actions are consistent with other social media censorship of the declaration, its authors, and supporters. Posts referencing the GBD were removed from popular Reddit threads such as r/COVID-19 and r/Coronavirus, and large online communities with millions of members. Google also played a role. In the week after the GBD’s release in October 2020, Google’s news site search algorithms suppressed mainstream coverage of the document by outlets such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
Instead, it steered news searches for “Great Barrington Declaration” toward anti-GBD hit pieces in fringe venues such as the Byline Times, a blog featuring 9/11 conspiracy theorist Nafeez Ahmed. Google algorithms reportedly prioritized an anti-GBD political editorial in Wired Magazine that Anthony Fauci also mined for his own anti-GBD talking points in the press.
These acts of censorship occurred at a time when government officials were working hard behind the scenes to discredit the GBD and its authors. Most notably, NIAID director Anthony Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins collaborated to wage a “devastating published take down” campaign against the GBD, labeling it “nonsense” or “misinformation.”
Fauci and Collins’ actions are public information in emails first discovered through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry from AIER last winter. The Fauci-Collins emails made national news and became the subject of a Senate hearing in January 2021, where Senator Rand Paul grilled the White House’s COVID advisor over his involvement in the “take down” order.
Last week, Anthony Fauci denied any involvement in coordinating attacks on the GBD under deposition by the Missouri Attorney General. He claims that he was too busy to do so. His emails reveal a different story, though. Fauci expressed his agreement with Collins’ directive, and colluded with Deborah Birx to preempt discussion of the GBD at a White House COVID task force meeting. At some point, Fauci even directed his Chief of Staff Greg Folkers to assemble a list of anti-GBD political editorials, evidently to be parrotted back to the news media during interviews about the GBD. We still don’t know the full extent of Fauci’s efforts, because the NIH heavily redacted several pages of the requested records. But his involvement in the “take down” is undeniable.
Given the nature of Fauci’s smears, lies, and demeanor towards those who question his policy prescriptions, it is time to fully open up the public record at the NIH. It is time to scrutinize the decisions they made during COVID-19, including decisions to politicize science and suppress dissenting viewpoints.
We know that Twitter worked with the Biden campaign to suppress tweets. We know that top Biden administration officials pressured Twitter, Facebook, and presumably other companies to penalize dissenting viewpoints on COVID-19 policy, including lockdowns. We also know that Fauci, former White House Chief Medical Advisor, will leverage the media to undermine his perceived opponents and lie about it under oath. We know.
Private companies are free to censor user speech on their platforms, but when top government officials pressure them to take these actions, that crosses a different line.
Thanks to Musk releasing the Twitter files to Weiss and Taibbi, we have more insight into Twitter’s internal censorship policies. Unfortunately, until the NIH releases more information, the Twitter Files raise more questions than answers.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14366&omhide=true&trk=title
****************************************************With Passenger Mask Mandate Gone, Flight Turbulence Stats Improve Markedly
The friendly skies too often resembled “season’s beatings” shopping brawls during the pandemic, as the number of arguments and even fistfights surged on-board. Viral videos of the flight-and-fight mayhem frequently had a common denominator – the federal government’s mask requirement.
So it may come as little surprise that disruptions on commercial domestic flights have plummeted by 74% since the Biden administration’s mask mandate was overturned by a federal judge in April. The current rate is 1.7 unruly passengers per 10,000 flights, down from 6.4 per 10,000 in February.
But laws and rules created during the pandemic continue to spur federal investigations of passengers, while the federal government has spent untold sums in a legal battle to re-establish its authority, including the power to once again impose mask mandates.
Unions, meanwhile, are seeking stricter measures to give flight attendants more power on the plane.
To date this year, there have been 2,178 reports of unruly passengers, according to the FAA, compared with 87 over roughly the same period in 2019.
Incidents under investigation, which jumped from 183 in 2020 to 1,099 in 2021, have dropped by nearly 40% since a federal judge found the mandate exceeded the rule-making authority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The U.S. Department of Justice, however, continues to challenge the ruling of U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizell, a Trump nominee. A hearing in the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is scheduled for January.
Leslie Manookian, president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, which filed the lawsuit that overturned the CDC’s mask mandate, sees authoritarian impulses driving the continuing litigation.
“Most administrations of the last 10 to 20 years have sought this kind of power,” she said, likening COVID-era measures to the Patriot Act passed after the 9/11 attacks, which vastly increased the ability of government to surveil the public.
“It’s not just the Biden administration,” Manookian said. “It’s about increasing the power of the federal government as well as people who are not elected, and it’s not a partisan issue. They all want more power and are getting it through these emergencies.”
The CDC asked the DOJ, which represents government agencies, to appeal the travel mask decision shortly after it was handed down. The FAA and the DOJ did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations.
The legal struggle proceeds as a new peer-reviewed study adds to skepticism about the effectiveness of mask use in general. (In any case, passenger planes are required to have advanced air filtration.)
In a recent deposition in state-led litigation against alleged federal censorship, Dr. Anthony Fauci, retiring director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, couldn't name any studies showing mask effectiveness, according to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt.
The CDC issued the directive on orders from President Biden on his first day in office in January 2021. The rule was a formal extension of what airlines imposed in 2020 under pressure from flight attendant unions.
Within six months of the federal mask mandate, 85% of all alleged transgressions in the air were related to mask-wearing, with the federal government and a spokesman for the union-backed American Airlines flight attendants declaring that the policy they insisted on had created a situation “out of control.”
The mask ruling on appeal now has 34 amicus filings, or statements from parties who claim an interest in the outcome of the case. Among those filing in support of the federal government are the American Medical Association and a group of 251 public health and legal officials and various professional public health associations, many of whom have been public about the importance of government’s role in controlling the pandemic.
Filing in support of Manookian’s group are the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and a group of 338 flight attendants, pilots, and other airline workers from every major airline and most budget airlines. Several of the pilots in the filing are part of a group that sued the CDC in March, also noting that the mandate overstepped the CDC’s authority.
During the pandemic, the airlines became ground zero for the battle between individuals who sought to determine their own safety measures and the dictating model that was imposed by the government. The result was a series of highly publicized confrontations.
The mandate was so vastly unpopular that many flight attendants again began taking self-defense courses in preparation of doing battle with passengers. Flight attendant unions urged that voluntary training implemented in the wake of 9/11, including measures to thwart a terrorist-style assault, be made compulsory.
In March 2021, the FAA declared a “zero tolerance” policy for alleged disorderly passengers in a threatening announcement. The agency also imposed a new rule beefing up enforcement of alleged in-air infractions, insisting it would pursue legal action against anyone alleged to have violated the agency’s conduct rules.
“The rule was changed and what you have now is a greater percentage of cases that are making it all the way through to being fined that we never saw before,” said William McGee, who spent seven years in flight operations management and is now a senior fellow for aviation for the American Economic Liberties Project.
McGee said that while there is no room for violent behavior by passengers, there are “fundamental rights that include innocent until proven guilty. Some rules now are more like being on the high seas.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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