If you are a breadwinner and/or have dependants whom you are financially responsible for, check out this checklist before you get the latest vaccine. A very thorough document. Be a Boy or Girl Scout and be prepared.
Archive for category covid-19
Covid-19 smorgasbord
Feb 24
A sample of quotes, comments, food-for-thought articles, vids, etc. I’ve picked up in the past week or 2.
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”– Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
https://lockdownsceptics.org/
At least 181 people have died in the US according to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), after taking experimental vaccines meant to combat a 99.4% to 99.8% survival rate virus, the death toll for which a team of researchers in one state found may be inflated by as much as 40%.
181 People Die After COVID Vaccine in US “Adverse Events”, Nurses Refuse to Give Vaccines for Ethical Reasons | Hubpages 24 Jan 2021
There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic. I’ve never heard such nonsense talked about vaccines. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects. This much I know after 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry. Yet there are such moves afoot.
What SAGE got wrong | Lockdown sceptics (quote from Dr. Michael Yeadon, former VP and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer)
This inspires confidence in the NHS, doesn’t it?
A few days before Christmas, I received an email from the NHS stating: ‘We are writing to let you know about government advice for people considered to be at highest risk of becoming very unwell if they catch Covid-19. This is because your medical records tell us you are someone with Down’s syndrome.’ My first reaction was to laugh. This was ridiculous. I don’t have Down’s syndrome.
Daily Mail | How your health records could be filled with mistakes
despite decades of trying there has never been a successful, durable vaccine for a coronavirus either….Coronaviruses not only infect people they infect animals. We have tried to create vaccines for animal husbandry and pet purposes on multiple occasions, and have failed every time to obtain permanent immunity. We have also wound up creating amplification effects by accident too; the poster child for this one was a feline “vaccine” that actually wound up amplifying the effects of the virus instead of attenuating or preventing infections! This is why, by the way, that there is no reason whatsoever to believe we will ever have a permanent vaccine; despite attempts in both animals and humans we’ve never succeeded before with this particular type of virus. Now is it entirely possible — even probable — that this specific virus was an accidental release? Yep. In fact I’d say it’s more likely than not. That’s the “civil standard of proof”, and it’s present. Why? Because this virus behaves like an attenuated live virus, but not attenuated enough. For those who think that sort of idea is crazy I remind you that we’ve used that exact concept for decades with oral polio, and it works. So the theory that this was an accidental release from Wuhan’s lab and they were working on a vaccine for SARS, for example, is not crazy. The only crazy part is that their odds of success were near zero in the first instance, but scientists try to find breakthroughs in things that appear to have a near-zero probability of success all the time. But a bioweapon? Nope. There are plenty of candidate virus families to use for that sort of thing, if you’re into attempting it. Coronavirus isn’t one of them.
Debunking the bioweapon stupidity | Karl Denninger, “The Market Ticker” 15 April 2020
Even if you locked down the nation for 30 days it would do nothing. As soon as you drop the restrictions the virus comes roaring back. You think it won’t? Yes it will. Exponential math..Your premise is that you lock down and then maintain the “social distancing”. But that, if you do it, still wrecks every restaurant, every bar, and every small business. It is exactly as destructive. Every hotel still goes bust. Every bar. Every restaurant. And it doesn’t matter to the outcome because as soon as you drop the constraints the virus will come roaring back. The fact is that you can’t kill the virus. The virus only dies when immunity reaches the point that R0 is suppressed below 1.0. That is mathematics and there’s not a darned thing you or I can do about it.
The Market Ticker | Karl Denninger 20 March, 2020
Threlkeld added, Williams also had been vaccinated for COVID about a month ago and that testing found the two types of antibodies in his system – one type of antibody that results from a natural COVID infection, and a second type of antibody from the vaccine. Threlkeld also said Williams tested negative for COVID-19 while in the hospital.
Memphis doctor believed to have died of rare Covid related syndrome | Localmemphis.com 11 Feb 2021
Coronaviruses are notorious for ADE reactions, where antibody presence potentiates the infection instead of protecting against it. …The poster child for ADE in coronaviruses was an attempted vaccine for a feline coronavirus that often made cats very sick. The vaccine killed every one of them in the test when they were later exposed, wildly potentiating the infection. Read that again folks: NOT ONE VACCINATED CAT SURVIVED A CHALLENGE WITH THE ACTUAL VIRUS.
Ordinary vaccines we have lots of experience with, such as measles, the flu shot, mumps and similar do not carry a risk beyond that of natural infection and cannot be weaponized because they produce the exact same antibody response as a natural infection. If you have had either the measles or the shot you will have antibodies but an antibody test will not tell you which since they’re not distinguishable. I suspected from the start that due to the way these mRNA shots work — they are not actually a vaccine at all in that they do not “mimic” natural infection but rather cause your cells to produce the spike protein that the virus has and that elicits an immune response — that the antibodies produced by those jabs would be distinct and distinguishable from natural infection.
The West’s Obituary | The Market-Ticker 13 Feb 2021
The Wild Geese Howard says:February 20, 2021 at 6:51 pm GMT • Pfizer suddenly announces their vaccine no longer needs to be stored at ultra-low temperatures: https://nypost.com/2021/02/19/pfizer-covid-vaccine-doesnt-need-to-be-stored-at-freezing-temps-anymore/ This is ridiculous…
One of the current tropes peddled by the government and its rag, tag and bobtail of scientific advisers is ‘don’t kill Granny’. This has led to some beliefs circulating which are that: 1. If Granny is exposed to COVID-19 she will catch it 2. If Granny catches COVID-19 she will automatically die as a matter of course 3. If Granny isolates herself and keeps away from her family and everyone else, she will not only escape COVID-19 but also apparently death itself since the consolation for missing Granny at Xmas is that she is guaranteed to be available for a hug in a year’s time. I thought I’d look into this. … This recent Imperial College article (October 2020) explains that that an IFR for COVID-19 of about 0.1% for under-40s rises to over 5% for the over-80s (it doubles for about every 8 years of life over 40). In other words, of 100 people aged over 80 who catch COVID-19 up to about 6 will die. That’s another way of saying that 94 will survive Covid. That’s both sexes and we know women do slightly better.
The Risk to Granny | Lockdown sceptic 16 Dec 2020
When the pandemic crisis broke, we were all instantly bombarded with figures by scientists and journalists, and almost invariably out of context. They included data that had been measured, and figures that were predicted, most notoriously in the UK the 510,000 prospective deaths put about by Imperial College that played such a large part in the first lockdown. This has carried on remorselessly ever since. It struck me almost immediately right back in March that I had no idea at all what the normal rate of death was in the United Kingdom. Therefore, any statement about deaths from Covid, real or predicted, whether made by a member of SAGE, the Government or a wittering TV journalist, was meaningless to me. Way back then I looked it up on the Office of National Statistics (ONS) website. It’s in the high 1,600s per day which translates into over 600,000 per annum in a normal year (if any year is normal).
Just how high are excess deaths in 2020? | Lockdown sceptics 3 Dec 2020
Speaking of which, a rather unprepared professor who said he did not watch the British Prime Minister’s daily covid briefings because none of the figures presented were given any context, suddenly lost his internet connection:
And for a change of air:
From The Spectator:
While some studies claim to have quantified a beneficial effect from lockdown measures during the first wave of Covid-19, a study at Stanford University questions this…. Dr Eran Bendavid and Professor John Ioannidis studied the imposition of ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ (NPIs) in ten countries and have reached the conclusion that while less-restrictive NPIs (which include social distancing and appeals to the public to reduce their social activities) had a clear effect, more-restrictive NPIs (which include business closures and stay at home orders) produced no clear additional benefits….Their paper, published in the European Journal of Clinical Observation, argues that previous studies on NPIs tended to assume that all beneficial effects were the result of the last measures that happen to have been imposed (i.e. the most severe measures), or failed to take into account the dynamic nature of an epidemic curve, assuming that the epidemic would have continued growing at the same rate it was rising before the measures were imposed…. Their conclusion? That all the apparent benefits were derived from less-restrictive NPIs and from changes in public behaviour following the imposition of the lighter restrictions. Ordering businesses to close and telling people to stay at home did not appear to reduce rates of infection further.
Measuring the impact of stay-at-home lockdown measures 13 Jan 2021
London in lockdown
May 2
Some pictures and questions for my EFL students.
What famous buildings can you see in this picture? Which city is it in? When was the picture taken? Why are there no people?
What are these buildings? Why are they lit in blue? What is the NHS? Visit this page: how many of the 19 famous places in UK do you know?
Who is this man? Why was he on TV saying “thank you” on May 1, 2020?
This short April 27th post by Karl Denninger is a good summary of the facts as known so far. My summary (with comments):
- What was demonstrated by the Diamond Princess cases (that despite being very close proximity not everyone became infected and at least 50% of infections show no symptoms).
- What was demonstrated from early March by the Kirkland, Washington, nursing home debacle (Kirkland now facing at least one “wrongful death” lawsuit) was that nursing homes and hospitals were a major vector and therefore inaction by the owners of those institutions and by the governors of those States is tantamount to negligent homicide. (If elected President, Denninger promises to hold those folk criminally and civilly liable, and deny Medicaid funds to institutions that continue to refuse to obey the law. He does not seriously expect to be drafted, I might add.)
- Testing has proved that mitigation policies do not, cannot and have not stopped transmission.
- Lockdowns are a waste of time and probably indirectly harm and kill people, as shown by serologic surveys.
- The data out of Wuhan showed that vents were mostly ineffective, and therefore trying to “flatten the curve” which means making vents available, “driving people into hospitals and encouraging invasive procedures” was and is counter-productive and even dangerous. Adding financial incentives to do that is manslaughter and should be dealt with accordingly. I don’t agree with this entirely: while it is now clear that vents kill more people than they save and why, hospitals may still be the best places for seriously ill people to get the prophylactic treatment they need.
- Data now proves (what was fairly obvious from early on, especially when considering historical examples such as the 1918-19 “Spanish” flu (which started in the US and was spread to Europe by US soldiers, and the 1950s Canadian polio epidemic ) that the sanatorium model is the most rational way to deal with the seriously ill or compromised patients. (“Her day would end 12 hours later by carefully removing the awkward gown, gloves and mask she wore, ensuring as she did that none of her clothes became contaminated. She would return to the former army barracks where she and other nursing students lived in isolation, their food delivered from the hospital cafeteria.”)
- Since a huge percentage of those infected are not harmed at all or only have minimal symptoms you want to encourage that event since it is the only means to build immunity in the population. (But there is some doubt as to whether immunity is acquired and how long it lasts for: see especially 1.10 of this report by Belgian specialist Marc Wathelet.)
A colleague of mine is Australian and just got back to Japan from there before they locked the gates, so Australian news about Covid-19 catches my eye. Here’s one by Steve Sailer:
Australia is a country of 25 million with a couple of big cities and it had a lot of travel back and forth with China. But its coronavirus stats are remarkably non-alarming:
What is Australia doing right?
The comments are also intelligent (mostly) and illuminating (not everyone agrees with Steve’s hopeful outlook), and sometimes humorous, like Sailer’s blog posts. Here’s one I liked, in response to Steve’s question of “what happens to old people in Australia?”
https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-australia-doing-right/#comment-3842404
Here’s Steve speculating on whether BCG vaccinations might have an effect on susceptibility to Covid-19, quoting a medical article: How to Use Immigrants to Study Whether BCG Vaccine is Advantageous.
And speaking of ventilators, here’s a comment on ventilators (Sailer’s post is in response to article claiming old white men are hogging all the ventilators in NY): “Anyway, the good news is that ventilators aren’t in short supply most places. The bad news is that in part that is because they don’t work as well as expected at saving lives. But in turn, the good news is that doctors seems to have discovered some low cost work-arounds, like laying on your stomach, that seem to work at least as well.”
Anyone know what “low cost work-arounds” he’s referring to?
A friend passed on this article (slightly technical but layman-friendly) on the mechanics of what COVID-19 does in the lungs. Here’s the key part:
When the red blood cell gets to the alveoli, or the little sacs in your lungs where all the gas exchange happens, that special little iron ion can flip between FE2+ and FE3+ states with electron exchange and bond to some oxygen, then it goes off on its little merry way to deliver o2 elsewhere.
Here’s where COVID-19 comes in. Its glycoproteins bond to the heme, and in doing so that special and toxic oxidative iron ion is “disassociated” (released). It’s basically let out of the cage and now freely roaming around on its own. This is bad for two reasons:
1) Without the iron ion, hemoglobin can no longer bind to oxygen. Once all the hemoglobin is impaired, the red blood cell is essentially turned into a Freightliner truck cab with no trailer and no ability to store its cargo.. it is useless and just running around with COVID-19 virus attached to its porphyrin. All these useless trucks running around not delivering oxygen is what starts to lead to desaturation, or watching the patient’s spo2 levels drop. It is INCORRECT to assume traditional ARDS and in doing so, you’re treating the WRONG DISEASE. Think of it a lot like carbon monoxide poisoning, in which CO is bound to the hemoglobin, making it unable to carry oxygen. In those cases, ventilators aren’t treating the root cause; the patient’s lungs aren’t ‘tiring out’, they’re pumping just fine. The red blood cells just can’t carry o2, end of story. Only in this case, unlike CO poisoning in which eventually the CO can break off, the affected hemoglobin is permanently stripped of its ability to carry o2 because it has lost its iron ion. The body compensates for this lack of o2 carrying capacity and deliveries by having your kidneys release hormones like erythropoietin, which tell your bone marrow factories to ramp up production on new red blood cells with freshly made and fully functioning hemoglobin. This is the reason you find elevated hemoglobin and decreased blood oxygen saturation as one of the 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.
2) That little iron ion, along with millions of its friends released from other hemes, are now floating through your blood freely. As I mentioned before, this type of iron ion is highly reactive and causes oxidative damage. …
The core point being, treating patients with the iron ions stripped from their hemoglobin (rendering it abnormally nonfunctional) with ventilator intubation is futile, unless you’re just hoping the patient’s immune system will work its magic in time. The root of the illness needs to be addressed.
Best case scenario? Treatment regimen early, before symptoms progress too far. Hydroxychloroquine with Azithromicin has shown fantastic … promise and I’ll explain why it does so well next.
Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret.
To see why chloroquine, a malaria drug, works with a virus, read the rest of the article. It’s too technical to summarize here, but it has to do with the exchange of iron and hemaglobin in the lungs, and that’s why it’s relevant.
Some perspective
Apr 4
The number of infected cases keeps rising in Japan, and people are starting to freak out, but can we keep some perspective? The numbers of infected are only the ones they are testing, and that means only the ones sick enough to ask for it (tho perhaps they are testing medical staff for antibodies, at least I damn well hope so, like Germany is).
The graphic below is a couple of weeks old, but still should bring some perspective. The number of deaths in Spain, UK and NY city are highly regrettable of course, that goes without saying.
In 2018 in the United States, there were over 2.8 million deaths. That gives some perspective to President Trump terrifying claim of over 2 million deaths if nothing was done, but Dr. Fauci later (March 29) backtracked from that prediction.
USA unemployment figures went sky-high in March with 3.3 million (4.4%), over 4x the previous record of 695,000 in October 1982. That’s right, nearly 40 years ago! “US Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin has predicted unemployment in the US – close to record lows only last month – could reach 20%.” Unemployment during the Great Depression in the US did not go over 25%.
If the economy collapses, who will pay for the medical equipment and personnel? The police, the firefighters? The Market-Ticker(not a man to make claims not based on data) claims 30% of US small businesses have gone under already, and is urging an end to the lockdowns and to let people go back to work.
“The biggest mistake we made was to admit patients infected with COVID-19 into hospitals throughout the region,” said Carlo Borghetti, the vice-premier of Lombardy, an economically crucial region with a population of 10 million… We should have immediately set up separate structures exclusively for people sick with coronavirus. I recommend the rest of the world do this, to not send COVID patients into health-care facilities that are still uninfected….
However, the virus was not only spread to “clean” — i.e. infection-free — hospitals by admitting positive patients. In early March, as the number of infected was doubling every few days, authorities allowed overwhelmed hospitals to transfer those who tested positive but weren’t gravely ill into assisted-living facilities for the elderly.”
The lessons Italy has learned about its COVID-19 outbreak could help the rest of the world
Read that last paragraph again. Why did Italy not learn the lessons from South Korea? Or even from earlier epidemics? Such as the polio outbreak in Canada in the 1950s. I quote (my emphasis):
Her day would end 12 hours later by carefully removing the awkward gown, gloves and mask she wore, ensuring as she did that none of her clothes became contaminated. She would return to the former army barracks where she and other nursing students lived in isolation, their food delivered from the hospital cafeteria.
In the 1950s, Canada faced a terrifying epidemic. Here’s how it was conquered.
Is Spain making the same mistakes (102136 cases as of writing)? How about NYC?
This is worth reading. The writer is not a medical expert but understands exponents and is watching the data.
This virus is not being spread the way we’re told. Social distancing is close to worthless. NY’s data makes this quite clear. So does Florida’s. It’s being spread in the medical environment — specifically, in the hospitals — not, in the main, on the beach or in the bar. When Singapore and South Korea figured out that if as a medical provider you wash your damn hands before and after, without exception, every potential contact with an infected person or surface even if you didn’t have a mask on for 30 minutes during casual conversations with others … transmission to and between their medical providers stopped. … And guess what immediately happened after that? Their national case rate stabilized and fell. The hypothesis that fits the facts is that a material part of transmission is actually happening in the hospital with the medical providers spreading it through the community both directly and indirectly.
Hypothesis: Hospitals ARE the Vector @RealDonaldTrump
The step functions in the data here in the United States cannot be explained by ordinary community transmission but they are completely explained if the transmission is happening not among ordinary casual contact — that is, not “social distancing”, but rather through the medical system itself. That explains the step functions that are seen in places like Florida since it takes several days before you seek medical attention after infection and it also explains why NY, despite locking down the city and more than one viral generation time passing — in fact two — has seen no material decrease at all in their transmission rate.
In addition it further is supported by the fact that what we’ve seen here, in Italy, in Wuhan — indeed everywhere is not an exponential curve. It’s a step-function flat acceleration graph. Broad community transmission doesn’t happen this way (you instead get a straight and continual exponential expansion until you start to obtain suppression via herd immunity) but if the spread happens as each “generation” gets driven to hospitals for testing and medical attention and the spread is largely happening there what we see here and in other nations in the case rate data is exactly the function you produce in terms of exposure rates. In other words there should be no straight-line sections in the case rate graphs — but there are.
Hypothesis: Hospitals ARE the Vector @RealDonaldTrump
In other words, the “lockdowns” are not doing anything much in terms of suppression, but they are ruining small businesses, many of them irreversibly.
