Thursday, March 17, 2022



Should I Vaccinate My Child Against Covid?

Yesterday, Florida followed Norway by not recommending the Covid vaccine for children. The CDC recommends them.

What does the data say? As public health scientists, we must be honest both with what we know and what we do not know.

The emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine for children was based on two randomized clinical trials for ages 5-11 and 12-15, respectively, with a total of 4,528 subjects. In both trials, there was a reduction in mild Covid infections during the two months following the second dose, with the vaccine efficacy in the 68% and 98% range for the younger children and somewhere between 75% and 100% for the 12-15-year-olds (95% confidence intervals).

What these numbers mean is that if the true value is, e.g., 90%, and if 100 children would have been infected without vaccination, then 90 of them will avoid the infection if vaccinated, while 10 children will still get infected despite being vaccinated.

A vaccine that only prevents mild disease is of little use, so what about serious disease, hospitalizations and deaths? There were zero such events among those who received the vaccine. There were also zero such events among those who received a placebo.

Hence, from the randomized trials we do not know if the Covid vaccines prevent hospitalizations and death among children. Neither do they tell us whether the protection against mild infection lasts longer than two months, or whether the vaccine reduces transmission.

With limited information from the randomized trials, we must turn to observational studies and we now have one. In New York State, 23% of children ages 5-11 and 62% of children ages 12-17 had been fully vaccinated by the end of January 2022.

These 1.2 million vaccinated children were studied from November 29 to January 30, comparing them to the unvaccinated children in the State. Here is what we learned from that study, with all risk estimates based on 95% confidence intervals.

The New York study confirms the results from the randomized trials. The vaccine reduces short-term infection risk. During the first two weeks after the second dose vaccine efficacy against infection is in the 62%-68% range for 5–11-year-olds and in the 71%-81% range for 12–17-year-old children.

The protection against infection wanes rapidly. In the fifth week after vaccination, the vaccine efficacy against infection is in the 8%-16% range for 5-11-year-old children and in the 48%-63% range for the older ones. In the seventh week after vaccination, vaccine efficacy dropped further, to the 18%-65% range for the 12-17-year-olds.

This is consistent with the rapid waning in protection that we have seen among adults, although the decline seems more rapid for children.

For the 5-11-year-olds, vaccine efficacy is negative during the seventh week after the second dose, with the unvaccinated having a lower risk of infection in the 29% -56% range. How can this be? A likely explanation is that the unvaccinated children got infected earlier than the vaccinated ones, and once the protection has worn off, the vaccinated children are at higher risk than the unvaccinated ones who have now acquired natural immunity.

That is, the vaccine simply postponed infections by a few weeks or months.

How about deaths from Covid? That is what really matters.

Unfortunately, the New York study does not present mortality data. Why? Over the two years of the pandemic, the survival rate for New Yorkers ages 0-19 is 99.999%. Despite over 3 million children, there may not have been enough Covid deaths during the two-month study period to determine vaccine efficacy against mortality. It would still have been useful to tally the numbers, but the study authors did not do so.

For hospitalization, the study reports that vaccine efficacy is higher than for infection, and while that protection also wanes over time, the decline is slower than for infections. The numbers reported mean that by vaccinating 365,502 children ages 5-11, an estimated 90 hospitalizations were prevented. This would mean that in order to prevent one hospitalization, one must vaccinate 4,047 children. The corresponding number is 1,235 for children ages 12-17.

These numbers are difficult to properly interpret for four reasons. (i) They are based on a two-month period, and the vaccines have additional benefits outside that time window. (ii) They compare vaccinated children with unvaccinated children with or without natural immunity from prior Covid infection. This will underestimate the vaccine benefits for children without a prior infection while overestimating the benefits for those with natural immunity. (iii) They include both hospitalizations that are due to Covid and hospitalizations for other causes with a concurrent unrelated mild Covid infection.

Even if the vaccine had zero efficacy at preventing hospitalization due to Covid, the efficacy against mild Covid infection would ensure that the study reported good efficacy against hospitalization. That the reported vaccine efficacy is higher for hospitalization than for infections indicates that there is at least some efficacy for the former, but it is impossible to properly estimate the level of efficacy without data that distinguishes hospitalizations due to and with Covid. (iv) The study was conducted during a large wave of infections, which has since declined. The benefits are less during the lower transmission period that we have now entered.

When deciding whether to vaccinate a child, we must also consider known and potential adverse reactions. From the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink we know that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can cause myocarditis among adolescents and young adults. Current risk estimates are in the range of one myocarditis for every 3,000 or 8,000 vaccinated adolescents and young men. Women have lower risk. There may also be additional still unknown adverse reactions.

The Covid vaccine has been widely used for children without solid information about its efficacy on hospitalizations and deaths, and without the ability to conduct a proper benefit-risk evaluation. The recent observational study from New York State adds a few important pieces to the puzzle, but we still do not know whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

For older people who have not yet had Covid it makes sense to get vaccinated. While there may be unknown low-risk adverse reactions, the large reduction in mortality risk far outweighs any such risks. For children, the mortality risk is very small and the known and any still unknown risks from adverse reactions may outweigh the benefits at reducing hospitalizations and death from Covid, which are unfortunately still unknown.

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What Covid health orders have done to the social lives of children

I was disturbed by what I saw happen to our children in late 2021 during lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Our kids have acted unselfishly despite being at little risk of Covid, accepting the mantra that they need to be restricted and not become ‘vectors of transmission’ passing this virus on to their elders.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Professor of Psychiatry and Ethics, offers this in response, ‘Any society that uses children to shield adults from harm has entirely lost its moral bearings.’

I offer some observations.

A group of teenagers bounce through the local mall with a mixture of chat and laughter. They go in to browse the local merchandise when one of them stops. Most of the group proudly show a vaccine passport, enter the store, and continue shopping but one teenager notices that one of the other girls doesn’t. She knows the other girl is not vaccinated and decides to stay outside with her friend. She does not make a scene, but patiently waits for their friends to come back. They seem oblivious to what has happened, and why should they notice? They are doing what teenagers have always done. I am, however, uncomfortable at the ease at which children show private health information and cannot understand the justification for the risk of stress and social anxiety to kids in the prime of their life.

Two younger teenagers enter a shop. They are below the age required by Health Orders for mandatory vaccination. They look around and are approached by a shop assistant who demands to see their proof of vaccination. One girl proudly displays her green tick while the other volunteers that she is under the age required and is not vaccinated. That girl is abruptly escorted from the premises as if she was a criminal. Under normal circumstances, this would result in a sternly worded complaint from the parent to the manager or police. It has never been considered reasonable to treat children in such a way. Disturbingly, the shop assistant is complying with the health order. The girl is not allowed in the store unless she is closely accompanied by a vaccinated parent. The parent was just outside looking at a lengthy list of things to do during a busy and stressful day.

Fast forward to March 2022. I walked through our local shopping centre and observed that around 20 per cent of people were wearing masks. Individual choice is paramount and there can be a variety of reasons for this, but a little surprising was that young people comprised the highest number. Why were they masked? The fatality rate for those under 50 is around 0.0035 per cent, below the 0.0044 per cent risk of dying while on the road. Do the same people mitigate risk when driving by wearing helmets and fire suits? Or do they accept that there is risk in everything they do? If it is not for physical safety, then does it provide psychological safety? If so, why are the young fearful?

NSW Health Minister Hazzard recently rejected the Health Department’s demands to bring back mask mandates and other restrictions and deserves credit for demonstrating leadership. Some may be sceptical at this newfound courage, but I would like to propose a test. Now that the fatality rate is in line with that of Influenza why not simply repeal the Public Health Orders? At a stroke of a pen, it was enacted and at the stroke of a pen, it can be repealed, thus showing consistency with Premier Perrottet’s desire for ‘personal responsibility’ and the Prime Minister’s statement that the public have had a ‘gutful of governments telling them what to do’.

The last two years have demonstrated that the longer governments bypass the usual accountability measures the more the tendency will be to coerce and exhibit influence and power over people’s lives.

Paediatric Neurosurgeon turned politician Ben Carson notes, ‘We’ve been conditioned to think that only politicians can solve our problems. But at some point, maybe we will wake up and recognize that it was the politicians who created our problems.’

Clinical Psychologist and Spectator UK contributor Dr. Gary Sidley recently posed the question, ‘Should a civilised democratic society be deliberately inflicting emotional distress on its people?’

The child who asked his mother if he was going to die had just learned he had contracted Covid. He experienced symptoms one would expect from a seasonal flu and was back bouncing off the walls after a day. The induced fear, however, has had a lasting impact. The severity and duration of which we don’t yet know.

Is this what we really want for us and for our children?

We might do well to remember the words of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.’

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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)

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Wednesday, March 16, 2022



New Covid-19 variant is one of the most infectious diseases the earth has EVER seen - as renowned scientist warns EVERYONE is going to get it

A former World Health Organisation scientist says the new BA.2 Omicron subvariant sweeping the world is one of the most infectious diseases the Earth has seen - and almost everyone will be exposed to the virus.

While the now-dominant strain is not as deadly as previous ones, including Delta, it is up to six times more transmissible than the original strain of Covid-19, Professor Adrian Esterman told Daily Mail Australia.

Predictions of a big surge in cases became a reality in New South Wales on Wednesday with 30,402 positive tests returned in the previous 24 hours, almost triple the number reported on Tuesday.

The BA.2 variant is also up to 30 per cent more infectious than the initial BA.1 version of Omicron which forced the reinstitution of lockdowns at Christmas.

'We think [the first] Omicron is very similar to Delta and that BA.2 is then another 25-30 per cent more contagious,' James Wood, a public health mathematician at the University of NSW told Daily Mail Australia.

The higher risk of contagiousness comes from the variant's superior ability to 'evade' immunity - meaning even triple-vaccinated people are susceptible to catching the new strain.

The BA.2 version of Omicron has an ability to 'evade' immunity, which includes vaccination. While vaccination provides a high level of protection from severe disease, it is less effective against preventing someone from catching Omicron at all. That even applies to boosters.

Generally vaccines were more effective at preventing symptomatic infection from Delta than Omicron.

For example, someone who had two shots in 2021 and a booster at the start of January would now have a 50 per cent chance of catching BA.2 if exposed.

Professor Adrian Esterman, an epidemiologist and biostatistician, said it was very likely all Australians would be at risk of catching BA.2 this year - especially given the return of people to schools, offices and public transport.

'(At the moment) you are much more likely to get it; we're already seeing that with the case numbers going up,' he said.

But it is almost impossible to get an accurate reflection of its spread because so many rapid tests are being done at home and are going unreported.

The only objective, verifiable figures are the numbers of people in hospital with Covid. On Tuesday, that figure was 1,801 Australia-wide; a total that has been relatively steady throughout March. On January 25, there were 5,390.

While not everyone exposed to a virus is infected by it, BA.2's high 'basic reproduction number' or 'R0' of 12 - compared to 2.5 for the original Wuhan virus - could mean almost all Australians will come into contact with it in 2022.

The R0 is the average number of secondary infections produced by a typical case; an R0 of 12 means up to 12 people could be infected by each case.

'Everyone's been exposed to Covid-19, full-stop, and unless you're very careful you will be exposed again this year,' Professor Esterman said. 'With face mask mandates being dropped, social distancing being removed, the chances are even higher.

'Those things are put in place to dampen down transmissibility, that's the whole point. When you remove them it's just increasing transmission. 'If you remove all of those protections, then your transmissibility almost gets back to the basic reduction number because we have very little immunity.'

While Omicron is generally less severe than the Delta strain, it is serious enough for some people that Professor Esterman likened wanting to catch Covid to gambling with your health.

'If you say "I don't mind getting infected" it's a bit like Russian roulette because you do have that chance of getting seriously ill or having long-term health problems.'

Mr Esterman, who is 73, admitted his own son argues 'it's no worse than the flu'. 'To a certain extent, he's right: the death rates not worse than seasonal flu,' he said.

'The trouble is it causes more severe disease in vulnerable people than influenza, and it has the capacity to cause real damage to younger people too.

'There have been several cases of young, healthy and fit people dying from Covid. I cannot remember that ever happening with influenza.'

Professor Esterman said while death rates have dropped to now be comparable to the flu, Covid is far more infectious and the spectrum of long-term health impacts is much wider.

'Covid-19 can attack every part of the body, from clotting to the heart and brain. There have even been cases of young children with multi-system inflammatory condition.'

Professor Esterman said it was 'very likely' people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome got it as an immune system response to a previous viral infection. 'These are the balance of risks individuals have to bear in mind.'

He pointed out that with six million reported deaths worldwide and 5,590 in Australia attributed to Covid-19, it was one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

Professor Esterman also issued a warning that the pandemic is 'not over' and it's been 'sheer luck' that we are not in the middle of a wave that is both more infectious and deadlier.

'It is true that pandemics become less infectious over time, but that happens over 100 years, not one year,' he said.

He described it as 'the toss of a coin' as to whether the next variant causes more severe illness. 'While it's true to say it's the beginning of the end, it's not the end yet,' he said.

Professor Esterman is an advocate of introducing a fourth dose for people at risk, who could include people with HIV/AIDs, kidney problems, diabetes, obesity and different cancers.

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Top doctor has rubbished Pfizer's promotion of fourth Covid jab

A leading Australian doctor has slammed Pfizer's call for a fourth Covid jab, saying the company should use its staggering profits to provide vaccines for developing countries.

Dr Nick Coatsworth, who fronted the Government's vaccine rollout campaign, said Pfizer should 'stop doing press releases about how we need a fourth dose' and tackle other more pressing issues.

'How about you really surprise us and provide pneumococcal vaccine at cost to low income nations. Be like Astra,' the former deputy chief medical officer tweeted on Tuesday.

Pfizer raked in a record $US37billion in revenue from its Covid vaccine in 2021 making it one of the most lucrative products ever.

The United States based drug-maker's overall revenue doubled to $81.3billion and is forecasting a even bigger 2022, which will also see the release of its Covid pill Paxlovid.

'The CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, has come out on two occasions talking about how we need a fourth dose of the Covid vaccine, the CEO of Moderna has done it as well,' he told Dr Coatsworth told news.com.

'It’s a problem because you don’t listen to the person who’s responsible for shareholder profits if they tell you to take a drug.'

In stark contrast, vaccine competitor AstraZeneca announced early on in 2020 it would not seek to profit from a Covid vaccine while the pandemic was in effect, only recently moving to a profit-based model.

Covid vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and other manufacturers have saved millions of lives worldwide with Pfizer's CEO claiming the outlook of the company had shifted.

'We are proud to say we have delivered both the first FDA-authorised vaccine against Covid-19 (with our partner, BioNTech) and the first FDA-authorised oral treatment for Covid-19,' Albert Boula said earlier this year.

'These successes have not only made a positive difference in the world, but I believe they have fundamentally changed Pfizer and its culture for ever.'

And yet the company has been criticised for keeping a tight grip on the recipe for its Covid vaccines and not supplying them at reduced cost to developing countries.

'Pfizer is now richer than most countries; it has made more than enough money from this crisis. It's time to suspend intellectual property and break vaccine monopolies,' Tim Bierley, from Global Justice Now told The Guardian last month.

Dr Coatsworth said Covid vaccines weren't the only ones that the pharma giant could provide to needy nations.

'[Pfizer's CEO] has on two occasions talked about how we need a fourth dose, the CEO of Moderna has done it as well... You don't listen to the person who's responsible for shareholder profits if they tell you to take a drug,' Dr Coatsworth said.

He said given Pfizer's massive revenue it could be a 'good corporate citizen' and subsidised its vaccines for low income countries.

'They don't do that and haven't done it for 20 years... It would be a simple and effective action... Pneumococcal disease is a bigger problem than Covid,' he said.

Pneumococcal disease is caused by any infection from Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria, which can cause pneumonia, meningitis, and blood infection.

The World Health Organization estimates 300,000 children under five die from the infection each year - mostly in poor countries - despite a vaccine being developed 20 years ago.

Dr Coatsworth said Pfizer could easily save lives by using some of its Covid profits to subsidise the vaccine for this disease in those countries - where its cost of up to $21 a dose can make it unaffordable.

Competitor Moderna said on Monday it would set up a manufacturing facility in Kenya, its first in Africa, to produce messenger mRNA vaccines.

The company said it expects to invest about $500million in the Kenyan facility and supply as many as 500 million doses to the continent each year.

Moderna's COVID vaccine brought in $17.7 billion in sales in 2021 and has been cleared for use in over 70 countries.

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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)

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Tuesday, March 15, 2022


Another nation has suspended their covid vaccine mandate!

While the Biden regime is still on track with its authoritarian mandates. More and more countries around the world are beginning to ease or suspend the COVID-19 related mandates.

On Wednesday, the Austrian government announced that it will suspend its mandate for all adults to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

This is after new findings were published that the vaccines were not effective against the Omicron variant. Health Minister Johannes Rauch said the decision would be reviewed again in three months and could be reintroduced if a new variant made it necessary.

It was last month when this authoritarian legislation was introduced to the public and become in early February. Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen imposed new Covid restrictions that require all adults in the country to be fully vaccinated and boosted or risk being fined.

The said law will go into effect beginning March 15th which was initially planned to run through January 31st, 2024.

However, everything changed on Wednesday, Karoline Edtstadtler, Austria’s constitutional minister said, “we will suspend the vaccination mandate, in accordance with proportionality.”

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While masks are off everywhere else, biden is forcing airplanes to keep them on!

The Biden regime will extend the federal mask mandate for all transportation networks through April 18, one month after it is set to expire.

Now, Joe Biden and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) faced criticism on Thursday for extending a mask mandate on public transpiration as COVID-19 cases continue to decline.

Florida Republican Representative Carlos A. Gimenez wrote on Twitter:

“What’s the science behind the FAA extending the mask mandate on planes? Biden keeps pushing the deadline over and over and over again. States and local communities have been rolling back these useless mandates for months. It’s time Biden do the same.”

More details of this report from CNN:

The Transportation Security Administration is set to extend the federal public transportation mask mandate for another 30 days, an administration official told CNN, pointing to guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The mandate is one of the last remaining broad requirements that Americans wear masks in public places. It applies to mass transportation including planes, trains, buses and hubs like airports.

The official’s comments came after CNN reported that federal officials began notifying stakeholders in the airline industry of the upcoming announcement. Three sources, including two industry officials and a government official, described the conversations to CNN on the condition of anonymity.

The requirement, which now extends to April 18, was previously set to expire a week from Friday, and the policy will be reviewed over the next month, the official said.

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The BA.2 subvariant of Ómicron advances in the world

When it was identified, it was described as silent, but experts say that the concept is outdated. Concern over the spike in COVID cases in Asia and Europe
March 15, 2022

The increase in COVID-19 cases caused worldwide by the Ómicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is decreasing, but researchers are keeping an eye on the highly transmissible subvariant known as BA.2.

And while the experts' consensus agrees that it does not seem to have the capacity to drive a large new wave of infections, the variant could potentially slow down the current decline in cases and make treatment more difficult.

In fact, as many countries relax their prevention measures against the disease based on the decline in cases, many believe that this can make it easier for BA.2 to drive a further increase in infections. A March 10 report by British researchers suggests that this may be happening in areas where a rise in new infections is beginning to be reported.

Simultaneously, records from several European countries and China show that infections of COVID-19 escalated again to become a new wave of concern to health authorities.

At first, BA.1 was a thousand times more common than BA.2, since the beginning of 2022, BA.2 began to be found in a greater proportion of new infections (Reuters)

The Ómicron variant and its BA-2 subvariant are responsible for mass contagion. For example, between March 2 and 10, daily coronavirus infections in Germany rose by 19%, in Italy by 17.7% and in Austria by 25.3%. The numbers have grown so much in Germany that they motivated that the country's Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, to openly describe the situation as “critical”.

The Ómicron variant was discovered in November, and it quickly became clear that the viral lineage already existed as three genetically distinct varieties. Each branch of Omicron had its own set of unique mutations. At that time, the most common was BA.1, which spread rapidly around the world. BA.1 was almost entirely responsible for the record increase in cases this winter.

And while BA.1 was initially a thousand times more common than BA.2, since the beginning of 2022, BA.2 began to be found in a greater proportion of new infections, according to The New York Times.

The increase in COVID-19 cases caused worldwide by the Ómicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is decreasing, but researchers are keeping an eye on the highly transmissible subvariant known as BA.2 (3d render)

What is known so far

All versions of Ómicron are highly contagious, so the variant quickly displaced previous forms of the coronavirus, such as Delta. But several studies found that BA.2 is even more transmissible than BA.1.

In Denmark, for example, scientists examined the spread of both subvariants in households, and found that people infected with BA.2 were much more likely to infect people with whom they shared a house than those with BA.1. In England, researchers found that, on average, it took less time for someone with BA.2 to infect another person, which accelerated its spread in communities.

By the beginning of 2022, BA.2 was becoming more common in several countries. By February, it had become dominant worldwide, displacing the once-dominant BA.1. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that BA.2 jumped to 11% in early March from 1% in early February, indicating that it could soon become dominant in this country as well.

But that doesn't mean that Americans are at risk of a new wave of BA.2 that is infecting a lot of new people. As BA.2 became more common in the United States, the total number of new cases fell by approximately 95%. Worldwide, the number of new daily cases had dropped by half what it was at its peak at the end of January.

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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)

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Monday, March 14, 2022



Banned Film Exposes the Real Reason for the COVID Pandemic

Joseph Mercola

Prior to 2020, if you heard the term “lockdown” you might think of something that happens in a prison — not in a free society. This mechanism of control has since become commonplace — not among prisoners but among the free — with repercussions that are only beginning to be understood.

The film "Planet Lockdown" explores this unprecedented time in history, speaking with epidemiologists, scientists, doctors and other experts to uncover the real motives behind the increasing totalitarian control taking over the globe. Already banned by Facebook and YouTube,1 the film starts at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were told lockdowns were necessary to “flatten the curve.”

This was supposed to be a short-term, 15-day event in the U.S., but the narrative soon changed to ongoing restrictions. As Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., a former vice-president and chief scientific adviser of the drug company Pfizer and founder and CEO of the biotech company Ziarco, now owned by Novartis, explained, people have historically quarantined the sick, but quarantining healthy people, as has occurred for the past two years, has no scientific backing or historic precedence.2

“Given this virus represents, at most, a slightly bigger risk to the old and ill than seasonal influenza, and a less risk, a smaller risk, to almost everyone else who’s younger and fit,” Yeadon says, “it was never necessary for us to have done anything. We didn’t need to do anything — lockdowns, masks, testing, vaccines even.”3

The filmmakers of Planet Lockdown are allowing a free viewing of this film (for a limited time). CLICK HERE to learn more about their important mission and see how you can help!

Questionable Practices Urged for COVID-19 Diagnosis

Dr. Scott Jensen, a family doctor and former member of the Minnesota Senate, received an email from the Department of Health that seemed to be coaching him to use COVID-19 as a diagnosis in situations where he wouldn’t have previously used influenza or any other specific viral diagnosis without first testing for it. He said:4

“What struck me right away was I felt like I was being coached to go ahead and use COVID-19 without using the same standards of precision that I would for other things. If I’m going to make a diagnosis, I believe as a physician I have an obligation to use the tools available to me to nail it down with as much certainty as possible.

And it seemed to me that the Department of Health, and the link to this CDC document that said you could diagnose COVID-19 as a cause of death on a death certificate … those two documents, in tandem, went against everything that I had been taught or doing for the last 35 years.”

Even Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Health, is featured in the film stating that even if you died of a clear alternate cause, if you had COVID-19 at the same time, it would still be listed as a COVID death. “Everyone who is listed as a COVID death, doesn’t mean that was the cause of the death,” she says.5

In January 2020, the PCR test for COVID-19 came out, which allowed health officials to define COVID-19 “cases.” If the test was positive, it counted as a case — it didn’t matter if you have symptoms or not. Reiner Fuellmich, global fraud attorney, founder of the Corona Investigative Committee, pointed out, “It’s never, in the history of mankind, in the history of medicine, there’s never been testing of healthy people.”6

Yeadon agrees that mass testing of people with no symptoms has no scientific basis. Rather, he says, “It’s just a way to frighten people.”7 The rising “cases,” based on PCR testing, is what built the crisis. But counting cases was only measuring the activity of testing; the more that testing occurred, the more cases that were found.

‘Fear Everyone’ Became the Message

June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit COVID-19. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the COVID-19 pandemic, made it very clear that people who have COVID-19 without any symptoms “rarely” transmit the disease to others. In a dramatic about-face, WHO then backtracked on the statement just one day later.

In the days that followed, media and health officials ramped up fear by claiming that you could be sickened by virtually anyone, even when they appeared to be healthy. “This idea that … you can be ill even though you have no symptoms and you can be a … virus threat to someone else even though you have no symptoms, that’s also invented in 2020,” Yeadon says.9

Alexandra Henrion-Caude, geneticist, former director of research with the French National Institute of Health, is among those who have noticed something off from the start. “I was very puzzled since the very beginning … I was alert to the fact that what we were living was not quite right.”10

She notes that the notion of asymptomatic spread is terrifying because it turns virtually anyone you meet or encounter on the street into the enemy, because they could be exposing you to SARS-CoV-2. “This is actually terrible because it denies the capacity of a person to be a healthy person. Because if asymptomatic [spread] exists, then who is healthy? No one.”

What’s more, the “proof” of asymptomatic spread is flawed and fraudulent. The New England Journal of Medicine published an article suggesting the transmission of COVID-19 is possible from an asymptomatic carrier in January 2020.11

It was based on a 33-year-old businessman who had met with his business partner from Shanghai, then developed a fever and productive cough. The next evening, he felt better and went back to work January 27.

The writers reported the partner had been “well with no signs or symptoms of infection, but had become ill on her flight back to China, where she tested positive for 2019-nCoV on January 26.” From this case study, they theorized the virus could be transmitted from asymptomatic carriers. An important point was left out, which is that the researchers did not speak with the partner from Shanghai before publication.

However, Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), did speak with the woman on the phone, and she reported she did have symptoms while in Germany.12 So she was not asymptomatic after all.

In a State of Incoherence, People Crave Normalcy

The pandemic has twisted reality, leaving the public in a mental fog. “You’re regularly pledging obedience to things which are not logical,” Catherine Austin-Fitts, assistant secretary, Bush Sr. administration and investment adviser with Solari, Inc., says.13 WHO has changed definitions of herd immunity and pandemic, literally altering reality, and this is just one example.

Censorship and campaigns to discredit those who speak out against the narrative are additional control mechanisms that distort the truth. Bishop Schneider of Kazakhstan says the pandemic measures are very similar to Soviet times where he lived, in that there was only one narrative, and if you said there was another meaning, you were declared an enemy.

“When you had another opinion, they said, ‘You are a conspiracy group. You have a conspiracy theory. You have hate speech. This expression, hate speech, came from the communists.”14 It’s psychological manipulation, based on fear, which makes people act totally irrational. The artificially imposed state of incoherence was even described by Austin-Fitts as a torture tactic, designed to get people to submit to vaccine passports and COVID-19 shots:15

“Human beings crave coherence. And so if you can put them in a state of incoherence they will literally do anything they can to get back to coherence. It’s a typical torture tactic. ‘If you just do what I want, I will allow you to go back to a state of coherence.’ So, if you just accept the [vaccine] passports, you’ll be free. Or if you get the vaccination, you’ll just be free.”

Further, by declaring small businesses as “nonessential” during lockdowns, they get shut down, while Amazon, Walmart and other big box stores can take over their market share. A major transfer of wealth occurred away from small family-owned businesses to very large, publicly owned businesses that benefited from the digital economy. In the meantime, Austin-Fitts explains:16

“The people on Main St. have to keep paying off their credit cards or their mortgage, so they’re in a debt trap and they’re desperate to get cashflow to cover their debts and expenses.

In the meantime, you have the Federal Reserve institute a form of quantitative easing where they’re buying corporate bonds, and the guys who are taking up the market share can basically finance — or their banks can — at 0% to 1%, when everyone on Main St. is paying 16% to 17% to their credit cards, without income.

So basically now you’ve got them over a barrel and you can take away their market share, and generally they can’t afford to do what they say because they’re too busy trying to find money to feed their kids.”

New Control Systems Are Being Engineered

If a few people want to control many, how can you get the sheep into the slaughterhouse without them realizing and resisting? “The perfect thing,” Austin-Fitts says, is invisible enemies, like viruses.17 This ramps up fear so the public believes they need the government to protect them. Another effective tactic is “divide and conquer,” and the media plays an important role in this, dividing people over shots and masks, for instance.

“What COVID-19 is,” Austin-Fitts explains, “is the institution of controls necessary to convert the planet from the democratic process to technocracy. So what we’re watching is a change in control and an engineering of new control systems. So think of this as a coup d’état. It’s much more like a coup d’état than a virus.”18

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a former public health official and member of German parliament, agrees, stating that pandemic responses have “nothing to do with hygiene. It has to do with criminology.”19 The global injection campaign is another form of control, one that’s forcing the public to receive experimental shots.

Many of the experts in the film bring up the Nuremberg Code, which spells out a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation. This set of principles was developed to ensure the medical horrors discovered during the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II would never take place again.

But in the current climate of extreme censorship, people are not being informed about the full risks of the shots — which are only beginning to be uncovered. People are being forced into the shots due to mandates and loss of jobs and personal freedoms, like the ability to travel freely and attend business and social events.

In the End, Truth Will Win

A revolution is occurring, and the experts are hopeful that people will awaken to common sense and resist the totalitarian control that is threatening to take over the globe. Instead, society can be regenerated if people come together and fight back against the encroachment on our liberties.

Civil disobedience, boycotting businesses that are requiring vaccine passports, participating in rallies and fighting illegal mandates in court are ways that everyone can get involved in protecting freedom. “If they want to make us a machine, if they want to make us slaves, we say no,” Wodarg says. “… We don’t need you anymore, we are many … we don’t have to be afraid of any pandemic.”20

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Mask Mandates Not Linked to Lower COVID-19 Case Rate or Transmission

Children 6 and older in Catalonia, a region in Spain, were required to wear masks once school reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers compared the incidence of COVID-19 in older children to younger children to try to determine whether the mandates had been effective in the aim of reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in schools. The virus is also known as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

The retrospective study identified a much lower case rate in preschool, where there were no mandates when compared to older groups who were required to wear masks.

Five-year-olds, for instance, had an incidence of 3.1 percent, while 6-year-olds had an incidence of 3.5 percent.

Mask mandates in schools “were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission, suggesting that this intervention was not effective,” researchers wrote in the paper, which was published as a preprint.

“The study shows that there was not a significant decrease in transmission on the courses that were masked (6 to 11 y.o.) when comparing to those that were not (3 to 5),” Clara Prats, one of the authors, told The Epoch Times in an email.

The data analyzed came from Sept. 13, 2021, to Dec. 22, 2021.

Researchers believe that “age-dependency” was the most important factor for the risk of virus transmission in schools. In other words, the older a child gets, the more likely they are to have an adult-like immune response. Adults are more likely than children to contract symptomatic cases of COVID-19, according to previous research. The Spanish researchers also said that because young children are likely to get infected with other coronaviruses, they would have more cross-reactive T cells, a type of cell that protects against COVID-19.

“Age-gradient in SARS-CoV-2 transmission is the key to understanding these results, and this is mainly related to the strong/robust innate immune response at mucosa resp[iratory] cells that younger children have when compared to older kids or adults,” Antoni Soriano-Arandes, another of the authors, told The Epoch Times in an email.

The study adds to a body of research that shows mixed results for masks and mask mandates.

Limitations of the research, which was funded by the Spanish government and other institutions, include not being able to count all asymptomatic cases, which are more likely among younger children.

Dr. Quique Bassat, one of the authors, asserted that the age-gradient means the results showed masks worked well, but Dr. Jonathan Darrow, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who analyzed mask studies in 2021, disagreed.

“This is one more study that fails to provide good evidence that masks substantially reduce transmission, and that suggests that if they do reduce transmission, they don’t reduce it by very much,” Darrow told The Epoch Times in an email. “Of course, it is always possible that in some other context masks might work better (e.g., better masks, better compliance, less facial touching, more frequent replacement of masks, etc).”

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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)

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Sunday, March 13, 2022



Two years later, coronavirus evolution still surprises experts. Here’s why

Scientists and physicians continue to be amazed by how quickly the virus evolves, what it does to the human body, and how it moves through species.

Raul Andino knows his pathogens. For more than 30 years the University of California, San Francisco researcher has studied RNA viruses, a group that includes the virus that causes COVID-19. And yet he never imagined he’d witness a pandemic of this scale in his lifetime.

“The magnitude of it and the implications of it are still hard to comprehend,” Andino says.

Although experts in his field suspected a pandemic would occur, “it’s hard to know when,” he says. “It’s similar to an earthquake—you know the earthquake will happen, but normally you don’t think about it.”

On March 11, 2020—exactly two years ago—the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. The disease has since infected nearly 500 million people in almost 200 countries and killed more than six million people worldwide, and it’s not over yet.

Along the way, this coronavirus has presented scientists with a bevy of surprises: Many experts are still amazed by how quickly the virus evolves, what it does to the human body, and how it moves in and out of other species.

The original SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly evolved into a string of variants that have hindered a return to pre-pandemic normalcy. Even with the virus’s genetic blueprint in hand and the ability to decode the genomes of new variants within hours, virologists and healthcare professionals struggle to predict how its mutations will alter the virus’s transmissibility and severity.

Millions of people are grappling with symptoms that linger for weeks to several months after they’d been diagnosed with an infection. Scientists are racing to understand the biology of this new and perplexing syndrome called long COVID.

Two years in, there’s still a lot we don’t know about SARS-CoV-2, says David Wohl, an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina. Here’s what scientists have uncovered so far—and the mysteries that continue to tantalize and frustrate coronavirus experts.

Worst-case scenario

Experts had been warning of some kind of looming pandemic for decades. As humans expand settlements into wild areas, they raise the odds of a new pathogen jumping from an animal to a person, giving rise to a deadly zoonotic disease. A study published in Nature showed that emerging infectious diseases originating in wildlife had increased significantly between 1940 and 2004.

But most experts were worried about influenza viruses and would not necessarily have expected a coronavirus to cause such havoc.

That changed with the 2002-04 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, which infected more than 8,000 people in 29 countries and left 774 dead. Then the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak infected more than 2,000 people in 37 countries; that virus has so far killed nearly 900.

Still, people weren’t paying as much attention to coronaviruses compared to the “really bad guys” like influenza, HIV, dengue viruses, Andino says.

Then SARS-CoV-2 arrived with a bang. It was spreading faster than previous coronaviruses, and one reason, scientists suspect, is its ability to move efficiently from one cell to the next. SARS-CoV-2 is also harder to contain because it causes so many asymptomatic cases, people who can then unknowingly spread the virus. “In a way, SARS-CoV-2 has found a way in which it can [rapidly] spread and also cause disease,” Andino says. “It’s the worst-case scenario playing out.”

March of the variants

Adding to the oddities, the SARS-CoV-2 virus acquired genetic mutations much more rapidly than expected.

Coronaviruses usually mutate at lower rates than other RNA viruses, like influenza and HIV. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 accumulate approximately two mutations each month; half to one sixth the rate seen in influenza viruses. That’s because coronaviruses have proofreading proteins that correct errors introduced into the virus’ genetic material as it replicates.

“That’s why we thought [SARS-CoV-2] would not evolve very fast,” says Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge.

But the virus quickly proved Gupta and his colleagues wrong. The emergence of Alpha—the first variant of concern identified in the United Kingdom in November 2020—stunned scientists. It had 23 mutations that set it apart from the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, eight of which were in the spike protein, which is essential for anchoring to human cells and infecting them.

“It became clear that the virus could make these [surprising] evolutionary leaps,” says Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah. With this set of mutations, Alpha was 50 percent more transmissible than the original virus.

The next version, Beta, was first identified in South Africa and was reported as a variant of concern just a month later. It carried eight mutations on the viral spike, some of which helped the virus escape the body’s immune defenses. And when the Gamma variant emerged in January 2021, it had 21 mutations, 10 of which were in the spike protein. Some of these mutations made Gamma highly transmissible and enabled it to reinfect patients who previously had COVID-19.

“It’s surprising to see these variants make pretty significant leaps in transmissibility,” Goldstein says. “I just don’t think we’ve observed a virus do that before, but of course, we have not actually observed any pandemics previously with the amount of genetic sequencing capacity we have now.”

Then came Delta, one of the most dangerous and contagious variants. It was first identified in India and designated a variant of concern in May 2021. By late 2021 this variant dominated in almost every country. Its unique constellation of mutations—13 overall and seven in the spike—made Delta twice as infectious as the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, led to longer lasting infections, and produced 1,000 times more virus in the bodies of infected people.

"It [SARS-CoV-2]’s ability to come up with new solutions and ways to adapt and spread with such ease—it’s incredibly surprising,” Andino says.

However, Omicron, which is two to four times more contagious than Delta, rapidly replaced that variant in many parts of the world. First identified in November 2021, it carries an unusually high number of mutations—more than 50 overall and at least 30 in the spike—some of which help it evade antibodies better than all the earlier virus versions.

“These huge jumps [in mutations] make the pandemic far less predictable,” says Francois Balloux, a computational biologist at the University College London Genetics Institute in the United Kingdom.

Chronic infections

One of the most compelling explanations for the huge leaps in the number of mutations is that that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was able to evolve for long periods of time in the bodies of immunocompromised people.

During the past year, scientists have identified cancer patients and people with advanced HIV disease who were unable to get rid of their COVID-19 infection for months to nearly a year. Their suppressed immune systems enabled the virus to persist, replicate, and mutate for months.

Gupta identified one such mutation (also seen in the Alpha variant) in a sample from a cancer patient who remained infected for 101 days. In an advanced HIV patient in South Africa who was infected for six months, scientists recorded a multitude of mutations that helped the virus escape the body’s immune defenses.

“That the virus is changing its biology this quickly in its evolutionary history is a huge find,” Gupta says. Other viruses like influenza and norovirus also undergo mutation in immunocompromised individuals, but “it is very rare,” Gupta says, and they “infect a narrow range of cells.”

By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 has proven capable of infecting many different areas of the body—creating yet more baffling effects for scientists to untangle.

Not just a respiratory virus

Early in the pandemic medical professionals noticed that the virus wasn’t just causing pneumonia-like illness. Some hospitalized patients also presented heart damage, blood clots, neurologic complications, and kidney and liver defects. Mounting studies within the first few months suggested one reason why.

SARS-CoV-2 uses proteins called ACE2 receptors on the surface of human cells to infect them. But because ACE2 is present in many organs and tissues, the virus was infecting more parts of the body than just the respiratory tract. There were also a few reports of the virus, or parts of it, in blood vessel cells, kidney cells, and small quantities in brain cells.

“I’ve studied a lot of pandemics, and in almost all of them, you look at the brain, you’ll find the virus there,” says Avindra Nath, a neuroimmunologist at the National Institutes of Health. For instance, brain autopsy tissues from 41 hospitalized and dead COVID-19 patients revealed low levels of the virus. But there were also clear signs of damage, including dead neurons and mangled blood vessels.

“That’s the biggest surprise,” Nath says.

It’s likely that the virus triggers the body’s immune system to go into a hyperactive mode called a cytokine storm, which causes inflammation and injury to different organs and tissues. An abnormal immune response can persist even after infection, resulting in lingering symptoms including chronic fatigue, heart palpitations, and brain fog.

“But there are virus reservoirs that can cause chronic inflammation,” says Sonia Villapol, a neuroscientist at the Houston Methodist Research Institute. A recent study that’s not yet been peer-reviewed showed that SARS-CoV-2 genetic material could persist for up to 230 days in the body and brains of COVID-19 patients, even in those who harbored only mild or asymptomatic infections.

Susan Levine is an infectious-disease doctor in New York who specializes in the treatment and diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, which has parallels with long COVID. She now sees 200 patients every week, compared to 60 in pre-pandemic times. Unlike CFS, long COVID “hits you like a ton of bricks,” Levine says. “It’s like a tornado inside your body where you’re going from working 60 hours a week down to being in the bed all day within a week of getting the infection. The action is so compressed.”

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COVID-19 Vaccines May Be Enhancing Disease: Malone

COVID-19 vaccines may be causing enhanced disease because they target an old version of the coronavirus, Dr. Robert Malone says.

“The data are showing that vaccination can actually increase the risk of being infected with the Omicron version of this virus,” Malone told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.

Malone was referring to how in some areas, including Scotland and New Zealand, patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are more likely to have received a COVID-19 vaccine than not.

A recent study, meanwhile, found that one dose of a vaccine boosted protection for people who recovered from COVID-19 but two or three doses seemed to lower protection; the authors said they weren’t sure why this was the case. Another study found higher protection among naturally immune who weren’t vaccinated versus those who were.

Vaccine-associated enhanced diseases (VAED) were identified (pdf) as an “important potential risk” of the COVID-19 vaccines by U.S. drug regulators, as was a similar event known as enhanced respiratory disease following COVID-19 vaccination. Some adverse events recorded following COVID-19 vaccination “could indicate” VAED (pdf), according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) team.

VAED refers to disease “resulting from infection in individuals primed with non-protective immune responses against the respective wild-type viruses,” researchers said last year as they set a case definition for the term. “Given that these enhanced responses are triggered by failed attempts to control the infecting virus, VAED typically presents with symptoms related to the target organ of the infection pathogen,” they added.

“That’s what the data has been showing now for a few months,” Malone, who helped invent the messenger RNA technology that two of the three COVID-19 vaccines cleared for use in the United States is built on, told The Epoch Times.

In a Pfizer document (pdf) released this month, the vaccine manufacturer said there were a potential 138 cases with 317 relevant events of VAED reported from December 2020 to February 2021. Of the 138 cases, 71 were medically significant, 16 required hospitalization, 13 were life-threatening, and there were 38 deaths.

The most frequently reported event out of the 317 potentially relevant events was drug ineffectiveness (135). Other events included COVID-19 pneumonia, diarrhea, respiratory failure, and seizure.

“VAED may present as severe or unusual clinical manifestations of COVID-19,” Pfizer concluded, adding that, “based on the current evidence, VAED/VAERD remains a theoretical risk for the vaccine” and that they will continue to monitor the syndrome.

Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A CDC spokesperson said that the agency, along with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), are monitoring vaccine safety through surveillance systems such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and v-safe.

Monitoring to date “has not established a causal relationship between COVID-19 vaccination and vaccine-associated enhanced disease,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

The CDC says the vaccines are largely safe and effective but also encourages people who experience side effects after getting one of them to report the issues to one of the systems.

The FDA, meanwhile, has not at this time identified an association between enhanced respiratory disease with the three vaccines the agency has cleared, a spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.

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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)

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Friday, March 11, 2022



Victims vs. Vectors? The Ethics of Giving COVID-19 Vaccines to Children

Alma Golden

Fifty years ago, I began medical school. Through this half-century, I have provided, prescribed, promoted, and supported vaccine use. As a physician in retirement, I am fully vaccinated and boosted for COVID-19, as are my grown sons and three of my young adult grandchildren.

Vaccine development has a proud history that has prevented millions of children and adults from becoming the victims of infectious diseases. But are children’s COVID-19 vaccines now being used to prevent serious illness in children or as a vector control mechanism to protect adults?

I rejoiced as the Hemophilus influenza type b vaccine saved thousands of infants and children from death or serious disease caused by meningitis and sepsis. I followed the public health science that tracked data and research on the risks, costs, and benefits of vaccines to prevent chickenpox, rotavirus, and many other—now preventable—diseases.

The Hemophilus influenza type b, or Hib, vaccine was a classic study in recognizing and responding to a health threat in children. Data were collected on the frequency of hospitalizations, permanent disabilities, sepsis, meningitis, and death associated with Hib infection in infants and toddlers. Risk, benefit, and cost analyses were developed. Immunized children were monitored for efficacy and adverse effects, both short-term and long-term. The success of that vaccine is a win for nations as well as families.

The ethics of child vaccines should reflect the high standards like this, which have been used since the enactment of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986.

I know this well, as I practiced pediatrics through the turbulent era of rare but serious side effects associated with the pertussis vaccine, which a National Institutes of Health study concluded caused severe reactions in children such as seizures, hypotonic-hyporesponsive episodes, high fevers, and persistent crying.

This led to the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which helps promote development of safe vaccines, addressed compensation for injured vaccine recipients, and simultaneously mandated tracking of vaccine distribution and adverse effects, leading to better vaccine programs and fewer preventable infectious diseases.

Twenty-four months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has demonstrated that few healthy children infected with the virus become victims of severe illness and that those most likely to need intensive care already have previously diagnosed significant health conditions. Most children and youth experience a relatively short duration of illness with low rates of hospitalizations and few deaths. Children are a magnificently resilient group. They appear to develop robust natural immunity.

Although children can be asymptomatic spreaders, some studies indicate that transmission rates between children and within families are lower than between adults. School environments, with some precautions and good ventilation, are surprisingly safe places.

Based on how rapidly the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates, it may be difficult to develop effective vaccines to keep pace with new mutations, such as the omicron variant. It is possible that youth have been blessed with the capacity to respond successfully, and much more rapidly, to these variants than the scientists who are manufacturing the vaccines.

Considering the above, what is the ethical framework for promoting widespread or mandated pediatric COVID-19 vaccination?

Recognizing that children make up a minuscule percentage of severe COVID-19 cases, why are so many health, education, pharmaceutical, and political leaders vigorously promoting pediatric vaccination? Where are the data-based risk-cost-benefit analyses to support their recommendations?

Local and systemic vaccine reactions occur in 30% to 60% of children 5 to 11 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, is rare in that age group but increases in teen and early adult years, especially for males, as noted in multiple countries. Only short-term observations inform our understanding of the vaccine in children and youth. Long-term efficacy and side effects need to be monitored.

In the setting of a highly infectious, highly prevalent virus that appears to be approaching an endemic state, much like colds or the flu, are children to assume the ethical burden of vaccination to protect the larger society when the resulting benefit to them may be minimal and the potential long-term risks and benefits are not fully understood?

If we are concerned that children would serve as the distributors of disease, much as a mosquito is for malaria, does that reduce the obligation of researchers, clinicians, and public health experts to analyze—both medically and ethically—the full spectrum of risks, benefits, and potential impacts of this vaccine on children? Are we fulfilling the medical, regulatory, and ethical standards that have developed since the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Program?

Children with chronic or immunocompromised conditions and/or who are living with close family members with such conditions should be vaccinated, but one must ask whether the promotion of universal child vaccination for COVID-19 is driven by the evidence-based risk of severe disease, death, or disability in children, or by fear and expediency to benefit adults.

In another 50 years, I wonder if historians will observe that we treated children as disease vectors rather than potential victims of a viral illness.

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Even Mild Cases of COVID-19 Can Lead to Brain Changes

Mild COVID-19 cases were linked to changes in the brain, in a newly published study.

Approximately 785 people underwent a brain scan and about half later tested positive for COVID-19. All the participants got a second brain scan, including those who had survived the disease.

Researchers from the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford analyzed the scans and found the participants infected with COVID-19 had a reduction in the thickness of gray matter—which helps humans perform various functions such as making decisions—and other negative outcomes.

“Despite the infection being mild for 96% of our participants, we saw a greater loss of grey matter volume, and greater tissue damage in the infected participants, on average 4.5 months after infection,” professor Gwenaëlle Douaud, the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

“They also showed greater decline in their mental abilities to perform complex tasks, and this mental worsening was partly related to these brain abnormalities. All these negative effects were more marked at older ages.”

The paper was published in Nature following peer review.

The scans were taken from the UK Biobank, a large-scale medical database that contains information on approximately 500,000 UK residents.

Those whose scans were analyzed were aged 51 to 81. The reason the study did not include younger people is that all participants in the scanning were 40 or older, Douaud told The Epoch Times in an email.

The scans were taken on average 38 months apart.

Researchers said the two cohorts—people who ended up getting infected and people who did not—were similar in terms of age, sex, and many risk factors.

Participants also engaged in cognitive tests, and the infected group was more likely to experience cognitive decline by the time of the second test.

The brain changes ranged from 0.2 to 2 percent additional change in the infected group.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/even-mild-cases-of-covid-19-can-lead-to-brain-changes-study_4323882.html ?

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Researchers discover drug-resistant Covid in Australian patients

One of the main medicines used to combat severe cases of Covid-19 is causing the virus to mutate and there is a risk it could spread in the community.

If this happens, elderly and immunocompromised patients can’t be treated with the drug Sotrovimab.

Sydney University researcher Dr Rebecca Rockett studied 100 Covid patients in health care facilities in the Western Sydney Local Health District in New South Wales during the Delta outbreak between August and November 2021.

For four of the patients given the drug, the virus in their body mutated within six to 13 days and the treatment was no longer effective at containing the infection.

Samples of the mutated virus taken from these patients were able to be grown in a laboratory dish and this proved the new version of the virus was capable of spreading to others.

“The worrying thing is the fact that the virus was still viable and persisting in these patients after they develop the resistance,” Dr Rockett said.

“What we don’t want to see is that someone in the community develops resistance and they can pass that resistance to other people and that makes the drug ineffective, not just for that individual but for who they transmit the virus to,” she said.

Many of the patients in the study were severely immunocompromised and Dr Rockett said one theory about the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants of the virus was that they developed in such people.

“There are definitely cases in the literature where these patients with really immunocompromised conditions are given a lot of different therapies and could develop a number of mutations that can make the virus less more likely to evade current vaccines and treatment strategies,” she said.

This is a key reason this population of patients should be kept under surveillance, she said.

To keep control of the virus, doctors must undertake active surveillance of severely ill patients and identify treatment-resistant mutations earlier so they can be contained, she said.

The research team has not conducted experiments to determine whether current Covid-19 vaccines could combat the mutated virus that developed in these patients.

Sotrovimab is one of three key Covid-19 treatments called monoclonal antibodies that doctors were using to stop patients from becoming seriously ill.

These types of treatments are laboratory-made proteins that mimic the immune system’s ability to fight off viruses.

In January, the US FDA revealed that two of these treatments no longer worked against Omicron leaving Sotrovimab as the only weapon in the arsenal.

In another worrying development last month a Colombia University study that is yet to be peer reviewed found the cousin of Omicron – BA. 2 – had developed resistance to Sotrovimab.

This leaves recently approved treatments paxlovid, molnupiravir which are in short supply as the mainstay of treatment.

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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)

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Thursday, March 10, 2022



The Alarming Trends in COVID Vaccine Side Effects

In mid-February 2022, the U.K. started rolling out the COVID jab for children aged 5 to 11. In the U.S., the shot has been recommended for this age group since October 2021.

The question raised in a Nick De Bois interview with Jamie Jenkins, former head of health and labor market analysis at the British Office for National Statistics (above), is ‘Why bother injecting kids this young?’ The risk COVID-19 presents to children is minuscule.

What’s more, the British Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) estimates that by the end of January 2022, 85% of children aged 5 to 11 already had natural immunity. Add to that the fact that the prevailing variant, Omicron, is far milder than previous strains, causing only mild cold symptoms in most people, including children.

Together, these three facts ought to make it clear that children don’t need this jab. A cost-benefit analysis by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and researcher Kathy Dopp, also shows the COVID jab actually increases children’s risk of dying from COVID infection. Children under 18 are also 51 times more likely to die from the jab than they are to die from COVID if not vaccinated.

Four Million Doses Required to Prevent a Single ICU Admission
An astounding statistic Jenkins does bring up is that 4 million doses must be administered to children, 5 to 11 years of age, to prevent a single ICU admission in this age group. Assuming two doses per child, that means 2 million children must take their chances with serious and potentially lifelong side effects to prevent a single child from requiring intensive care due to COVID-19. How is this justified? As explained in Jenkins’ website:

“JCVI has said that vaccination of children aged 5 to 11 years who are not in a clinical risk group would prevent a relatively small number of hospitalizations or intensive care admissions. For a variant like Omicron, it would take around four million vaccine doses to two million children to prevent one admission to ICU.

For less severe illnesses, 58,000 child vaccinations would prevent one-child hospitalization. Children admitted recently to hospital with COVID had an average length of stay of 1-2 days. The Omicron wave saw no more children in hospital than before Omicron hit the UK.”

Pfizer Backs Off Shots for Children Under 5

While vaccine makers and health agencies have been pushing forward with COVID jabs for babies as young as 6 months, parents with children under 5 can, for now, draw a sigh of relief, as plans to roll out shots for the under-5 age group have been suspended, at least temporarily.

February 11, 2022, Pfizer withdrew its U.S. Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application for children under 5. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Pfizer, they want to collect more data on the effects of a third dose, as two doses did not produce expected immunity in 2- to 5-year-olds.

Three days later, former FDA Commissioner and current Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb told CNBC the EUA application was pulled because COVID cases are so low among young children that the shot couldn’t be shown to provide much of a benefit.

Considering you have to give the jab to some 2 million children to prevent a single ICU stay, it’s no wonder they can’t show effectiveness in studies that have just a few thousand children. Pfizer’s youth trial on 5- to 11-year-olds had just 2,268 participants, and only two-thirds of those received the real COVID jab.

However, the OpenVAERS team suspects there may be something far more problematic behind Pfizer’s withdrawal. In a February 21, 2022, email notice to subscribers, OpenVAERS stated:

“None of these explanations suffice because all of that information was known prior to Pfizer submitting this EUA to the FDA on February 1 [2022]. It makes one wonder whether adverse events in the treatment group might be the factor that neither Pfizer nor the FDA want to talk about?

So, we decided to look at reports of injury associated with COVID-19 vaccines in children 17 and younger. Remember, these shots have only been on the market for a short while and only children 5 to 17 are eligible. We created a separate page called Child Reports that will update automatically as new reports come in.

We were shocked by what we found — 34,223 VAERS reports in the U.S. in this age range, including infants harmed through transmission from the mother via breast milk, lots of reports of kids receiving shots who were too young (either the parents lied about their age or the doctor/pharmacy made a mistake with screening or dosing), and heartbreaking reports of myocarditis and death.”

Shocking Data From Israel Show Extent of Side Effects

While health agencies and mainstream media still insist that side effects from the COVID jab are “rare,” real-world data show a different story. An English translation of the report can be downloaded from Galileo Is Back on Substack. As noted in the report:

“On December 20, 2020, a vaccination program was launched in Israel using Pfizer’s vaccine for COVID-19. By the end of March 2021, more than half of the population had been vaccinated with two vaccine doses.

The decrease in immunity over time and emergence of new variants led to a renewed increase in morbidity in Israel in the summer of 2021. By the end of July 2021, a third shot of the vaccine (booster shot) was authorized for everyone who had received two shots and at least five months had passed from the second shot.

From data collection by medical teams or self-reporting by the public of side-effects in temporal proximity (passive monitoring), it appears that there is underreporting; therefore, it is important to identify side-effects in temporal proximity to vaccination with the booster in an active manner via a dedicated survey.

General goals: To determine the frequency of side-effects which appeared within 21-30 days from vaccination with the third Pfizer shot (booster) against COVID-19 among citizens above 18 years of age.

Specific goals: Examine the prevalence of side-effects in temporal proximity to the third shot grouped according to age and gender. Examine the time of onset relative to administration of the vaccine and the duration thereof, and to compare it with the side-effects of previous vaccines.”

In all, 2,894 people were contacted and 2,068 agreed to be interviewed (response rate: 71.4%). Of those 2,068 boosted individuals:

0.3% required hospitalization for an adverse event

4.5% experienced one or more neurological problems (2.1% of men and 6.9% of women), such as tingling or itching sensation, Bell’s palsy, vision damage, memory deterioration, hearing damage, convulsions, loss of consciousness and more

9.6% of women under the age of 54 experienced menstrual irregularities. Of those, “39% suffered from similar side-effects after prior COVID-19 vaccinations; however most (67%) indicated that the side-effects waned prior to the third vaccination and returned after receiving it”

26.4% of those with preexisting anxiety disorder or depression experienced a worsening of their symptoms

24.2% of those with preexisting autoimmune disorders experienced exacerbation of disease

Between 6.3% and 9.3% of those with preexisting high blood pressure, lung disease, diabetes and heart disease also reported that their condition was exacerbated after the third booster. A small number of women, but no men, also reported herpes infections (0.4% for herpes simplex infections and 0.3% for herpes zoster). Other key take-home’s from this Israeli report are that:

Side-effects are more common among women and younger people
1 in 10 women suffer menstrual irregularities

Neurological side effects typically don’t appear until about a month after the jab

In the majority of cases, the occurrence of a given side effect was not more severe after the third shot compared to the two previous doses. Put another way, the severity of side effects tends to be the same, regardless of the number of doses, so these finding can perhaps be applied to doses 1 and 2 as well

German Health Insurance Data Show Alarming Side Effect Rates
German health insurance data are also triggering alarms. Andreas Schöfbeck, a board member of a large insurance company called BKK ProVita, shared the data with Die Welt.

They analyzed the medical data of 10.9 million insured individuals, looking for potential COVID jab side effects. To their horror, they found 400,000 doctors’ visits could be realistically attributed to the jab. According to Schöfbeck, extrapolated to the total population of Germany, the total number of doctors’ visits attributable to jab side effects would be 3 million.

“The number that resulted from our analysis are very far away from the publicly announced numbers [by the Ministry of Health]. It would be unethical not to talk about it,” Schöfbeck told Die Welt, adding that the data are “an alarming signal.” As reported by Die Welt (translated from German):

“From January to August 2021 … around 217,000 of just under 11 million BBK policyholders had to be treated for vaccination side effects — while the Paul Ehrlich Institute keeps only 244,576 side effect reports based on 61.4 million vaccinated …

Thus, the number of vaccine side effects would be more than 1,000 percent higher than the PEI reports … With his analysis, Schöfbeck turned to a wide range of institutions — from the German Medical Association and the StiKo to the Paul Ehrlich Institute itself.

He said the figures were a ‘strong alarm signal’ that ‘absolutely must be taken into account in the further use of vaccines.’ His figures could be validated by the same data analyses of other health insurance companies, he says …

Since ‘danger to human life cannot be ruled out,’ he set a deadline of 6 p.m. Tuesday [February 22, 2022] to respond to his letter. As this passed, they turned to the public.”

Getting back to the issue of children and the danger we’re putting them in by giving them this shot, two autopsies of teenage boys who died within days of their COVID jabs revealed the shot caused their deaths. As reported by The Defender:

“The three pathologists, two of whom are medical examiners, published their findings Feb. 14 in an early online release article, ‘Autopsy Histopathologic Cardiac Findings in Two Adolescents Following the Second COVID-19 Vaccine Dose,’ in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

The authors’ findings were conclusive. Two teenage boys were pronounced dead in their homes three and four days after receiving the second Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 dose. There was no evidence of active or previous COVID-19 infection. The teens had negative toxicology screens (i.e., no drugs or poisons were present in their bodies). These boys died from the vaccine.”

Histopathological examination revealed that neither of the boys’ hearts had signs of typical myocarditis. Instead, what they found were changes consistent with catecholamine-mediated stress cardiomyopathy, also known as toxic cardiomyopathy.

This is a temporary kind of heart injury that can develop in response to extreme physical, chemical or emotional stressors. Another common term for this kind of injury is “broken heart syndrome.” Hyperinflammatory states such as severe COVID-19 infection can also cause this kind of injury to the heart.

More details about the medical history of each of the boys and their autopsy findings are reviewed by Pam Popper of Wellness Forum Health in the video above. Curiously, neither of the boys had any symptoms of myocarditis before they died. One had complained of a headache and upset stomach. The other had not mentioned any symptoms. As noted by The Defender:

“This is extremely concerning. These boys had smoldering, catastrophic heart injuries with no symptoms. How many others have insidious cardiac involvement from vaccination that won’t manifest until they get a serious case of COVID-19 or the flu? Or perhaps when they subject themselves to the physical stress of competitive sports?

These findings suggest a significant subset of COVID-19 deaths in the vaccinated could be due to the vaccines themselves. Furthermore, it raises this question: How often does this condition exist in a latent form in vaccinated individuals?”

Myocarditis Risk in Young Men Is Not Rare

U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) data also raise questions about the risk of potentially lethal myocarditis, especially in boys. The following slide was presented during a June 23, 2021, meeting convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), to discuss the risk of myopericarditis.

As you can see, the observed rates of myocarditis and/or pericarditis for several age groups, and especially among males, are significantly higher than the expected background rate.

This is a loud and clear safety signal, yet the ACIP proceeded to recommend the shot to preteens and teens anyway, and in a public statement insisted that myopericarditis is “an extremely rare side effect” that “only an exceedingly small number of people will experience after vaccination.” How can they say that with data like this right in front of their noses?

Based on this VAERS data, the rate of myocarditis is about 6.5 per 100,000 doses in 12- to 17-year-olds. Going back to where we started, 4 million doses are required to prevent a single child, 5 to 11 years of age, from being admitted to the ICU for COVID.

Assuming the rate of myocarditis in 5- to 11-year-olds is identical to that of 12- to 17-year-olds, we could potentially be looking at 260 cases of myocarditis for every ICU admission for COVID that we prevent. On the whole, the COVID jab provides only risk for children under 18, so there’s absolutely no justification for it.

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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)

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Wednesday, March 09, 2022


How Vaccine Fanatics Fueled Vaccine Skepticism

The development of COVID-19 vaccines is one of the few successes during a pandemic that saw major failures in public health strategy and treatments. While the vaccines can’t prevent transmission, they have reduced mortality. Before the pandemic, there was almost universal trust in vaccines, and vaccine skeptics were a small but vocal minority.

With a life-saving vaccine during a major pandemic, one would expect more vaccine enthusiasm, but instead, it collapsed. What happened?

Ironically, the problem is vaccine fanaticism, which has caused vaccine skepticism, with problematic consequences extending beyond COVID-19 to trust in other vaccines. Vaccine fanaticism comes in many forms.

In their drive to increase uptake, the vaccine fanatics denied basic scientific facts, such as immunity provided by COVID recovery. This, despite numerous careful studies that showed that COVID-recovery provides better protection versus both infection and severe disease than the vaccine. Nevertheless, vaccine fanatics insisted that natural immunity shouldn’t “count” in the vaccine mandate schemes. By denying science, the vaccine fanatics created further public skepticism about the vaccines.

“If they’re lying about natural immunity, maybe they’re lying about vaccine efficacy,” many may have reasoned.

Despite lack of evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines could prevent transmission and mounting evidence in spring and summer 2021 that they couldn’t stop the spread of the disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others convinced themselves that COVID-19 could be conquered only if 70 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent, or more of the population was vaccinated. And when the vaccines didn’t live up to scientifically unproven promises, people’s trust in those who over-promised naturally collapsed.

In its pursuit of the impossible goal of COVID suppression by vaccines alone, public health vaccine fanatics induced many people to become skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccine’s benefits.

Public authorities espoused psychological manipulation to induce vaccine uptake. For example, in its April 2021 guidance on mask-wearing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave permission only to the vaccinated to doff the mask. Their reasoning was based on a mistaken belief that vaccinated individuals can’t spread the disease, but also as an inducement to get people vaccinated since mask-wearing is unpleasant.

Encouraged by public health officials, Krispy Kreme offered free donuts to the vaccinated. Some people may have wondered: “If they understood public health, they wouldn’t try to fatten people with donuts. Maybe vaccines are also bad for my health?”

When these tactics failed, the public health establishment embraced vaccine coercion. They instituted vaccine passports to exclude the unvaccinated from participation in civil life, including access to libraries, museums, and restaurants. The federal government went further, using its vast regulatory powers to mandate vaccines as a condition of employment. These coercive actions effectively cast the unvaccinated into second-class citizenship. As they watched the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike contract COVID-19, they undoubtedly began to wonder whether public health truly had their best interests at heart.

Some vaccine fanatics have adopted the repellant tactic of falsely labeling people they disagree with as anti-vaccine. For instance, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a tabloid-style slander that epidemiologists and vaccine experts at Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford are opposed to “mass vaccination.” How might readers interpret that statement? “Well, if Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford professors are against the vaccines, maybe I should be too.”

Such false claims fuel vaccine hesitancy by putting the BMJ imprimatur on the lie that medicine and epidemiology professors are anti-vaxxers, when they aren’t. This damages vaccine confidence.

Vaccine fanatics have politicized the vaccine, using it to paint political opponents as science-denying troglodytes by falsely claiming that they’re against vaccines. If a person trusts a particular politician that’s falsely accused of being against vaccines, that person may only hear the false accusation and therefore reject the vaccine. In a public health crisis, such political gameplay has devastating consequences. What should have been a bipartisan achievement of a vaccine being developed and deployed in record time during a pandemic turned into just another tool for a political food fight, fueling vaccine skepticism.

Like all medical interventions, vaccines have some risks, which must be acknowledged in risk-benefit analyses for different population groups. For example, when there were reports of an increased risk of blood clots in young women receiving the J&J vaccine, it made sense to give them a different vaccine while the reports were investigated. Instead, the CDC “paused” J&J vaccinations in all age groups, including older people, for whom it was clear that there was no excess risk and for whom the benefit of the vaccine was the largest. (The CDC fired one of us for opposing that pause in older people.)

Though the CDC later cleared the vaccine, the J&J vaccine uptake never recovered in the United States, with detrimental effects on less affluent, more rural, and other hard-to-reach populations for whom this one-dose vaccine was ideal and life-saving.

In their bid to boost COVID-19 vaccine uptake, the vaccine fanatics have created a widespread movement of vaccine skepticism that didn’t previously exist. The consequences are dire not just for the COVID-19 vaccine but also for vital childhood vaccines. It may be too late for COVID-19, but regaining public trust is crucial to ensure the public’s confidence in other vaccines that are critical to the well-being of children everywhere.

In public health, it isn’t enough to be trusted by only half the population. Since widespread trust is essential, the only solution is for public health to eschew coercion and embrace its traditional principles. Public health should never again manipulate or deny authentic scientific results to manipulate the public’s behavior. It should dismiss practitioners who use public health as a weapon in a cultural or political war. It should reject slander, censoring, and ad hominem attacks.

Trust in vaccines can only be regained through honest, open dialogue, science-based policies, public education, long-term thinking, a strengthened vaccine safety monitoring system, and voluntary vaccinations. That is, it should return to the traditional principles of public health.

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Alarming Warning About COVID Tests

The National Capital Poison Center reports on its website that many quick home COVID-19 antigen tests included a harmful chemical compound that may be dangerous to your children as well as you.

The chemical sodium azide is reportedly a preservative agent in fast antigen sets, consisting of BinaxNow, BD Veritor, Flowflex, as well as Celltrion DiaTrust.

Sodium azide, if ingested, can cause low blood pressure, dizziness, migraine, and heart palpitations.

Now, Ohio, as well as Texas, issued a warning after seeing a rise in records related to sodium azide poisoning, in the very same 500 million Covid test sets that Biden sent to the American public.

An “increase in accidental exposures to a substance in these kits,” was reported by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Cincinnati.com reported:

The substance is sodium azide, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center’s Drug and Poison Information Center has seen a surge in calls about exposures to the chemical since more people started self-testing for COVID-19 at home.

“We started getting our first exposures to these test kits around early November,” said Sheila Goertemoeller, pharmacist and clinical toxicologist for the center. “It was, really, all ages.” The calls to the local center mirror what’s been happening nationally.

Sodium azide, often used as a preservative, is a liquid reagent in several of the COVID-19 test kits, she said. Ingesting it can cause low blood pressure, which can result in dizziness, headaches or palpitations. Exposure to it can also cause skin, eye or nostril irritation.

The Cincinnati Children’s based Drug and Poison Information Center has logged 38 cases of sodium azide exposure, with cases peaking in January. Adults exposed generally have experienced mild skin irritation, which can get worse if the area isn’t washed thoroughly, she said.

Nationwide Children’s Central Ohio Poison Center in Columbus also reported seeing an “uptick” in cases, as well, a spokeswoman said. The center did not immediately have a number of cases.

Last week, a cautionary notice was released by the West Texas Poisonous substance Center advising the citizens to read the directions prior to using any kind of at-home COVID-19 testing kits.

Local 12 additionally reported:

Sarah Watkins, medical director, for West Texas Region Poison Center, an Emergency Medicine Physician and medical toxicologist reported an increase of reports related to sodium azide poisoning.

“It has a chemical in it called sodium azide, which in large amounts can be really dangerous and even life-threatening,” Watkins said.

She said the majority of the calls made are from people who are not reading the instructions.

“We have gotten some calls here in the state of Texas about this,” Watkins said.

She said some people are putting the test swab in the solution and sticking it up their nose.

She said people are also confusing the substance for eyedrops.

“In-home covid tests, there is a dropper that comes in the test, and it looks a lot like eyedrops so it’s really easy to confuse with things that you’re supposed to put into your body,” Watkins said.

Watkins said sodium azide reacts on the body the same way cyanide does.

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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)

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