Sep 262021
 
 September 26, 2021  Posted by at 8:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  43 Responses »


Salvador Dali Spain 1936-38

 

A Pandemic of Undertreatment (GlobalCovidSummit)
Why Won’t FDA, CDC Advisory Panel Members Debate COVID Vaccine Safety? (Kirsch)
Meeting of COVID-19 Giants Geert Vanden Bossche and Robert Malone MD (Vejon)
You Think Medical Care Won’t Go Here? (Denninger)
Thousands More Than Usual Are Dying – But Not From COVID (21CW)
England’s Cancer Treatment Backlog Could Take ‘Decades’ To Clear (RT)
Upstate NY Hospital Shuts ORs, Blames Vaccine Mandate For Staff Shortage (S.)
Nurses Are In Short Supply. Vaccine Mandate Could Make It Worse (NPR)
Federal Workers Sue Biden Admin Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates (ET)
Dutch Junior Minister Sacked After Criticizing ‘Illogical’ Vaxx Passports (RT)
Black Lives Matter NYC Leader Promises “Uprising” Against Vaccine Passports (ET)
The True Believers Backing Ivermectin (AFR)
A Daily Pill To Treat Covid Could Be Just Months Away (PBS)
The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier (Atl.)
‘You Can’t Win That One’: Trump Suggests Fauci Was Unfireable (RT)

 

 

 

 

Montagnier

 

 

 

 

Worse than ADE?!

 

 

The best definition.

A Pandemic of Undertreatment (GlobalCovidSummit)

On a balmy night on the outskirts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, a panel of doctors and scientists convened for the first Conversation on Covid, hosted by media startup Roundtable. While the conversation was far-ranging, it often hit on controversial topics around the causes, prevention strategies, and treatments for Covid. “We are in a pandemic of undertreatment,” said intensive care specialist, Pierre Kory, M.D., Former Director of the Center for Trauma and Life Support at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and winner of the British Medical Association’s President’s Choice Award. What drives him and the other doctors and scientists attending is the overarching principle to “first, do no harm”.

“Everything else that we’ve discovered, everything that’s in our protocols is because we have used good clinical sense, lots of experience, and we’ve used trial and error using our best judgments of risks and benefits.” For him, undertreatment and nontreatment is harm. In his view, long-haul Covid and hospitalizations are caused by undertreatment and a lack of an effective prevention strategy. [..] Not one of the doctors downplayed the seriousness and deadly nature of the Covid pandemic. “I’ve never, ever walked into an ICU that’s full of every patient on a ventilator with the same disease,” Kory noted from last year when he responded to the call for help at his old ICU in New York City.

“It was wicked back then,” he recalled. “We’re not in that catastrophic phase. But this is the most complex and most violent disease that I have seen and the most difficult to treat in the ICU.” Kory’s solution is to avoid getting to the ICU in the first place. The notion of early treatment was a common theme among the doctors. “The key to everything is early treatment,” said Dr. Kory. “If you institute systematically early treatment upon first symptoms,” he explained, “the amount of people who would require hospital would go away. The amount of transmissions would go away.” He firmly believes we can control the pandemic through effective early treatment.

The one-size-fits-all approach that everyone get a vaccine doesn’t work at all for Urso. “The Covid-recovered, which is over 30 percent of the population, has no reason to get the vaccine,” he plainly stated. “They have a near zero chance of getting reinfected. And they have a significant risk of harm.” Although many of the doctors on the panel have been censored and criticized on both social media and mainstream media—McDonald noting he was taken down on Twitter ten days earlier simply for summarizing Dr. Kory’s position on early treatment—many have received strong positive recognition in the medical community prior to expressing their views around the pandemic.

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• The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans. I verified this 7 different ways.
• The vaccines kill more people than they save for all age groups

Why Won’t FDA, CDC Advisory Panel Members Debate COVID Vaccine Safety? (Kirsch)

Fast forward to September 17, 2021. I spoke out about the vaccines in the public input section of the FDA advisory meeting. I said that everyone was avoiding the elephant in the room: that the vaccines kill more people than they save. Nobody on the panel was paying attention to my talk. This is pretty typical. I wasn’t offended. But the public was listening and I got millions of impressions on my talk. No one in the mainstream media contacted me to challenge my statement. New results show two stopping conditions were triggered After the meeting, I did some additional research (summarized here) and I discovered that two stopping conditions have been triggered:

• The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans. I verified this 7 different ways.
• The vaccines kill more people than they save for all age groups

The most troubling thing to the panel members is that both stopping conditions are now validated in the peer reviewed scientific literature. I have attempted to point this out to the panel in multiple emails which I’ve posted to my Gab account. I offered to share the original research. No interest. I offered to share the studies published in peer-reviewed medical journals backing up what I found. No interest. Next, I offered to donate to their research if they would debate a team of scientists on the two stopping conditions. They could name any donation amount they wanted to make it worth their time. No interest. I pointed out that 100% of the hundreds of people I surveyed wanted to see an open debate on this as soon as possible (and not see the debate happen in slow motion in the scientific literature). No interest. America wants a debate ASAP. The CDC and FDA committee members refuse to discuss this. They won’t debate my team under any conditions.

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Haven’t had time to watch this yet. Put your review in the comments if you have.

Meeting of COVID-19 Giants Geert Vanden Bossche and Robert Malone MD (Vejon)

Tremendous privilege for me to host the first live discussion between two stalwarts in the COVID-19 pandemic. Both men have taken an ethical stand to focus on science and not be afraid to share their expertise. The world now stands at a crossroads again. Where do we plant our next step?


Geert Vanden Bossche – Expert vaccine developer (Belgium)
Robert Malone MD – Inventor of mRNA vaccines (USA)

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“They don’t have to shoot or gas you anymore. They just kill you in a nursing home or hospital when you get too expensive.”

You Think Medical Care Won’t Go Here? (Denninger)

The number of people calling for unvaxxed folks to be denied medical care, even doctors, is stunning. Do you have any idea where this leads? Let me put this up again for you: The right two columns are the Medicare spend from October 1st, 2019 to date of the report in 2020 (July, I believe). Which, I remind you, included a nasty Covid-19 spike in the spring. The next two columns left are the same spend from October 1st, 2020 to the same date in 2021. Which included the hideous, and much-worse, spike during the winter of 2020. Notice anything about those two sets of numbers?

The government’s policies had one focus, and it was achieved: Saving money. Your Grandmother was expendable, as was anyone else. Yes, most of that accrued to people >65, but don’t kid yourself — that was the goal. May I point out that some four hundred billion, last time I looked (and that was nearly half a decade ago!) was spent by CMS (Medicare and Medicaid) on one disease: Type II diabetes. That was, at the time, roughly one quarter of all Medicare and Medicaid spending. A voluntary disease in virtually every case. Stop eating carbohydrates, it disappears or is greatly attenuated. So is your body mass at the same time. Do you think the government doesn’t know this? Do you think your employer doesn’t know this? That spending can be cut to zero: Deny any benefit payouts if you have a BMI >25.

Oh, they’d never do that, you say? You just advocated for it. If someone won’t take a jab in the arm, no medical care for you! Ok. If someone won’t stop stuffing their face, no medical care for you! Think they won’t do it? Maybe you should think about what you cheer on, and what you tolerate eh? Because not only will the government do it, they already have without a peep out of your mouth. I warned of this more than 10 years ago and have been since. This instance was a “soft” one, “only” $50 billion out of $350 billion — and nobody noticed, did they? They all blame the “unclean” today, just like people blamed the Jews before WWII in Germany. Why, they were “impure” and the source of all the problems. Uh huh. Sure they were.

They don’t have to shoot or gas you anymore. They just kill you in a nursing home or hospital when you get too expensive. What happens if VEI shows up and being vaccinated makes you subject to more-severe disease? Do you think the government, being prodded by you, won’t do the same thing to you they did to Granny when doing so will save them hundreds of billions they don’t have? What if it’s happening right now and they’re trying to hide it? You’re not quite that stupid, are you?

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Health care has become a sideshow.

Thousands More Than Usual Are Dying – But Not From COVID (21CW)

As it turns out, this latest surge in non-COVID deaths is a direct result of the reactionary pandemic policies, driven by mass-panic in the mainstream media and by draconian measures put into place by government and medical institutions. The Telegraph reports… While focus remains firmly fixed on Covid-19, a second health crisis is quietly emerging in Britain. Since the beginning of July, there have been thousands of excess deaths that were not caused by coronavirus. According to health experts, this is highly unusual for the summer. Although excess deaths are expected during the winter months, when cold weather and seasonal infections combine to place pressure on the NHS, summer generally sees a lull. This year is a worrying outlier.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), since July 2 there have been 9,619 excess deaths in England and Wales, of which 48 per cent (4,635) were not caused by Covid-19. So if all these extra people are not dying from coronavirus, what is killing them? Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that during that period there were 2,103 extra death registrations with ischemic heart disease, 1,552 with heart failure, as well as an extra 760 deaths with cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke and aneurysm and 3,915 with other circulatory diseases. Acute and chronic respiratory infections were also up with 3,416 more mentions on death certificates than expected since the start of July, while there have been 1,234 extra urinary system disease deaths, 324 with cirrhosis and liver disease and 1,905 with diabetes.

Alarmingly, many of these conditions saw the biggest drops in diagnosis in 2020, as the NHS struggled to cope with the pandemic. A report released last week by the Government detailing the direct and indirect health impacts of the pandemic reported that there were an estimated 23 million fewer GP consultations – both in-person and online, in 2020 compared with 2019. Diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) fell by 51 per cent, atrial fibrillation 26 per cent, heart failure 20 per cent, diabetes 19 per cent, coronary heart disease, 17 per cent and stroke and transient ischemic attack by 16 per cent.

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“..the funds announced so far were “just about enough to keep the health service afloat..”

England’s Cancer Treatment Backlog Could Take ‘Decades’ To Clear (RT)

The cancer treatment backlog in England could “take decades to address” after the Covid pandemic caused the health service to “collapse rapidly”, according to a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
In the research, released on Friday, the independent progressive think tank warned of the impact of the pandemic on cancer treatment, urging officials to take steps to prevent potentially “severe” consequences that will require “considerable catch-up” work to be done. While the UK government has announced a three-year funding proposal to address issues that have emerged in the NHS during the pandemic, the IPPR said there was “more to be done” if Britain is to “build back better”, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised.

Highlighting how the impact of coronavirus had caused the health service to “collapse rapidly”, the think tank said the crisis had forced the NHS to take “unthinkable steps like cancelling cancer treatments”, leaving an estimated 19,500 people with undiagnosed cancers. Examining the ways to clear the backlog, the study warned that it would take until 2033 before hospitals, already “stretched” to capacity, could clear the backlog, even if treatment interventions were increased by 5%. If they rose by 15%, it could potentially be cleared by next year. However, if the NHS didn’t boost cancer treatments, the backlog “could take decades to address”, the researchers said.

The IPPR’s report urges the government to implement greater funding as a matter of urgency, as the funds announced so far were “just about enough to keep the health service afloat”, it said, given that data showed that, before the pandemic, the cancer survival rate in the UK already lagged “far behind most similar countries”.

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“..will temporarily close 22 of its 35 operating rooms starting Monday..”

Upstate NY Hospital Shuts ORs, Blames Vaccine Mandate For Staff Shortage (S.)

Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse will temporarily close 22 of its 35 operating rooms starting Monday in anticipation of a growing staff shortage due to New York’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate. The hospital had already postponed elective surgeries as a result of chronic staff shortages during the coronavirus pandemic. Now, priority will be given to surgeries that are medically necessary, time sensitive or involve critical-care trauma cases, the hospital announced Friday. Those surgeries will be consolidated into the 13 open operating rooms. Earlier in the day, the hospital warned employees who cannot prove that they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19 by 5 p.m. Monday will not be allowed to work Tuesday. The warning sent in an email to hospital workers said unvaccinated employees will likely be suspended without pay.


Employees had been given a month to comply with the order from New York state that requires all healthcare workers to be vaccinated by Monday, Sept. 27. The vaccine requirement includes staff at hospitals and long-term care facilities like nursing homes, adult care sites and other congregate care settings. Upstate Medical University said in a statement Friday that it hopes to resume its full surgical schedule as soon as possible. “While Upstate University Hospital continues to ensure the best care for our patients, we are proactively taking temporary measures to focus on COVID cases, as well as safely meet the critical care needs of the community,” the statement said.

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“I’d have no one to take care of the patients, and there’s nowhere to send the patients.”

Nurses Are In Short Supply. Vaccine Mandate Could Make It Worse (NPR)

Health care workers had priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine back in December 2020, but nine months later, many are still reluctant to get the shots. Vaccination rates remain low in some states and among some subgroups of health care workers such as nursing assistants. As part of his push to get more Americans vaccinated, Biden has essentially told 17 million health care workers: Get vaccinated or get out. He has not offered them the testing option he’s given workers in most other industries. Details about how the federal vaccine mandate will be enforced have yet to be released, but already protests have become regular events outside hospitals, and employers are warning they could see large numbers of workers quit just when they’re needed the most.

It’s hard to predict how many people will actually quit their jobs over the vaccine mandate. In June, after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by health care workers at Houston Methodist Hospital over its vaccine mandate, more than 150 workers quit or were fired. Lewis County General Hospital in upstate New York said it would stop delivering babies this month after six people in the maternity department quit over New York’s vaccine mandate. In Maine, where the governor announced a vaccine mandate for health care workers in mid-August, hospitals are so far reporting only a handful of resignations, but enforcement of the mandate is still more than a month away.

“I can’t afford to lose anyone,” says Ted LeNeave, CEO of Accura HealthCare, which operates 34 nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota. Because of staffing shortages, they’ve had to limit admissions, turning down patients coming from hospitals. With about 1,000 of his employees — 38% of his workforce — unvaccinated, LeNeave is calling on the federal government to provide a testing option for health care workers. He’s proposed that those who remain unvaccinated would undergo regular testing and wear full PPE, arguing that it’s a safer alternative to losing a lot of workers. “I just don’t see how I can lay off a thousand people,” says LeNeave. “I’d have no one to take care of the patients, and there’s nowhere to send the patients.”

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Freedom.

Federal Workers Sue Biden Admin Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates (ET)

A group of federal workers and contractors filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government over COVID-19 vaccination mandates that were announced earlier this month by President Joe Biden. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Washington district court, is asking a court to declare unlawful Biden’s executive order and a Department of Defense memorandum in August mandating all military members get the vaccine. Lawyers argue that members of the Christian faith are required “to refuse a medical intervention, including a vaccination, if his or her informed conscience comes to this sure judgment,” and it further stipulates that “naturally acquired immunity provides greater protection than vaccines.”

One of the plaintiffs, U.S. Foreign Service Officer Daniel Jackson has a faith that “also instructs him that vaccination is not morally obligatory in principle and therefore must be voluntary” and that there is “a general moral duty to refuse the use of medical products, including certain vaccines, that are produced using human cells lines derived from direct abortions.” Another plaintiff was identified as Secret Service agent Lionel Klein. The lawsuit stipulates that because Klein had already contracted COVID-19 and survived, he has enough antibodies to ward against future infection and doesn’t need the vaccine.

“The human body knows how to develop immunity to new viruses. The adaptive immune system consists of an enormously diverse repertoire of B cells—precursors of antibody-secreting plasma cells—and T cells with a nearly unlimited capacity to recognize and ‘adapt’ to previously unseen pathogens,” the suit reads. The lawsuit also lists federal contractor Zachary Amigone, who works for 3M, as a plaintiff and says he has “a personal and family history of severe vaccine reactions and has been determined to be medically exempt from vaccination by a licensed physician.”

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Herd mentality. Danger ahead.

Dutch Junior Minister Sacked After Criticizing ‘Illogical’ Vaxx Passports (RT)

Junior Economic Affairs Minister Mona Keijzer has been fired by Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Her crime? Suggesting that the country’s vaccine passport scheme is “illogical” and the Netherlands should “go back to the old normal.” As of Sunday, people hoping to visit bars, cafés, restaurants, and other venues will have to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19 or the results of a recent negative test. The pass system was introduced despite recent mass protests in Amsterdam, and demonstrations against the now-compulsory vaccine passports took place again on Sunday.

Criticism of the scheme has come from both the public and workers in the hospitality sector, but also from within the government. In an interview with the Telegraaf newspaper on Saturday, Keijzer had said it was “inexplicable” that the pass was required, even though the wholesale reopening of schools and universities in August had not led to a surge in hospitalizations. “You can participate in the marathon without a [vaccine pass], but if you are going to eat a pastry in the lunchroom you must have it,” she stated, adding that she could “no longer explain it logically.” If we end up in a society where we have to be afraid of each other unless we can show proof, then you really have to scratch your head and ask yourself: ‘Is this the direction we want to go?’

Keijzer’s comments earned her a swift dismissal from Rutte’s cabinet. After consulting with his deputies and senior economy minister, he announced on Saturday that Keijzer would be fired “with immediate effect.” Her comments, he said, were “not compatible with decisions recently taken by the cabinet.” The Algemeen Dagblad (AD) newspaper reported that Rutte and his team had learnt of Keijzer’s interview only late on Friday night, and, being aware of the stance she would take, immediately agreed to fire her. Roughly 82% of eligible adults in the country have now been fully vaccinated, and cases of Covid-19 have been falling steadily since July. In her interview, Keizer pointed to the high vaccination take-up, as well as the rarity of serious symptoms at present, as proof that the vaccine passports should be scrapped. “We have to go back to the old normal,” she said.

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“85 percent of black residents have not received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine”

Black Lives Matter NYC Leader Promises “Uprising” Against Vaccine Passports (ET)

One of the leaders of a Black Lives Matter group in New York City promised an “uprising” against the city’s COVID-19 vaccine passports, decrying the system as racist. According to data provided by New York state, about 85 percent of black residents have not received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Data provided by New York City shows that 64 percent of black people between the ages of 18 and 44 are not fully vaccinated while 56 percent have received one shot. Hawk Newsome, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, told the Washington Examiner that “I think, in a perfect world, [vaccine requirements] should be business by business. But it could be a slippery slope, so the mandate should be removed completely.”

He added: “It’s not gonna be white men in suits on Wall Street who are gonna get stopped. There’s such hypocrisy in this thing.” Newsome said he believes that black Americans “have a natural distrust of the vaccine,” citing the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the 20th century for a reason why. “How dare they remove religious exemptions? It’s the most disrespectful thing I’ve ever seen,” Newsome said, adding that he believes that most vaccine mandates don’t allow religious exemption. “Now the government has decided your God doesn’t matter? I love God.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, argued in a court filing this week that the state has no constitutional obligation to grant religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccines for healthcare workers.

Religious exemptions to the vaccines most commonly center on objections on how aborted fetal cells were used in the manufacturing and testing process. Medical exemptions usually include a doctor’s recommendation that a person not get the vaccine due to an underlying medical condition. Another member of the group promised an “uprising” in New York City over the vaccine mandate. “We’re putting this city on notice that your mandate will not be another racist social distance practice,” Chivona Newsome, a leader of the group, told fellow protesters during a demonstration in Manhattan in front of Carmine’s restaurant on Monday. “Black people are not going to stand by, or you will see another uprising. And that is not a threat. That is a promise.” “The vaccination passport is not a free passport to racism,” she added.

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From the Australian Financial Review, of all places.

The True Believers Backing Ivermectin (AFR)

Anthony Jolly has done his homework and believes the controversial drug ivermectin is the best way to defend the 150 people he employs in Phu Ly, north Vietnam, from COVID-19. The country is in the grip of a fierce wave of delta infections but Jolly’s business, Midway Metals Marine, a specialist company that puts “the bling on boats” all over the world, has barely missed a beat. It’s blessed in its location, away from big cities where the virus is rife. Jolly believes ivermectin will also help keep the illness at bay. The Australian is firmly on one side of an increasingly heated debate around ivermectin, a drug that has long been approved for use in humans to treat infections caused by parasites and is also used by vets to treat animals.

[..] Jolly is not going to stop. He has read and circulated information to his staff on what he describes as “successful protocols involving ivermectin, vitamin D, vitamin C and zinc” to treat early stage COVID-19 and to prevent onset. “I’ve done a lot of independent research, making sure of the data and following the science,” Jolly tells AFR Weekend. He obtained sufficient quantities of the drug to give all of his workforce two doses over the last two weeks and says he’s had 100 per cent buy in. “I’m not a conspiracy guy. I’m just a guy who has a bunch of 150 families I have to protect. I’ve reviewed probably 40 different research papers and this is a protocol that has been used successfully throughout the United States and elsewhere. I am trying to do the best thing for my people,” Jolly says.

[..] Sydney-based Professor Thomas Borody [..] does, however, believe ivermectin-combination therapy can change the course of this pandemic. He and a group of other doctors have treated over 500 COVID-19 patients in Australia with a triple therapy consisting of ivermectin, doxycycline and zinc – without any deaths. The TGA ruling means they can no longer prescribe this combination. They are likely to substitute another off-patent drug, fluvoxamine, developed originally as an antidepressant. “You have to do things in a process that is acceptable. You have to do it right,” says Borody. The group plans to seek a provisional application from the TGA for the ivermectin triple therapy using a literature-based submission with supportive evidence from patients treated. “We are doing it properly.”

He is confident the ivermectin triple therapy will be approved. In the 1980s, Borody discovered a drug cocktail that stopped over 900 people dying yearly from peptic ulcers. “We terminated that pandemic. From seeing three ulcers once a day, I see them once every six months now.” This is an analogous situation, he says, in that a triple therapy is again required. Professor Thomas Borody believes an ivermectin triple therapy could be a game changer. Supplied “Our aim is to prevent hospitalisation from COVID-19 and vaccination alone won’t achieve that.”

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IVM 2.0. 1000x more expensive.

A Daily Pill To Treat Covid Could Be Just Months Away (PBS)

“Oral antivirals have the potential to not only curtail the duration of one’s COVID-19 syndrome, but also have the potential to limit transmission to people in your household if you are sick,” said Timothy Sheahan, a virologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who has helped pioneer these therapies. Antivirals are already essential treatments for other viral infections, including hepatitis C and HIV. One of the best known is Tamiflu, the widely prescribed pill that can shorten the duration of influenza and reduce the risk of hospitalization if given quickly. The medications, developed to treat and prevent viral infections in people and animals, work differently depending on the type. But they can be engineered to boost the immune system to fight infection, block receptors so viruses can’t enter healthy cells, or lower the amount of active virus in the body.

At least three promising antivirals for COVID are being tested in clinical trials, with results expected as soon as late fall or winter, said Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is overseeing antiviral development. “I think that we will have answers as to what these pills are capable of within the next several months,” Dieffenbach said. The top contender is a medication from Merck & Co. and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics called molnupiravir, Dieffenbach said. This is the product being tested in the Kellys’ Seattle trial. Two others include a candidate from Pfizer, known as PF-07321332, and AT-527, an antiviral produced by Roche and Atea Pharmaceuticals.

They work by interfering with the virus’s ability to replicate in human cells. In the case of molnupiravir, the enzyme that copies the viral genetic material is forced to make so many mistakes that the virus can’t reproduce. That, in turn, reduces the patient’s viral load, shortening infection time and preventing the kind of dangerous immune response that can cause serious illness or death. So far, only one antiviral drug, remdesivir, has been approved to treat COVID. But it is given intravenously to patients ill enough to be hospitalized, and is not intended for early, widespread use. By contrast, the top contenders under study can be packaged as pills.

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What? “Even as a natural origin remains the most plausible explanation ..”

The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier (Atl.)

In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said. The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld.

Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government. (These experiments could not have led directly to the pandemic. A spokesperson for the NIH told The Intercept that the agency had reviewed data from the experiments and determined that they were not dangerous.) In June, Bloom, the Seattle computational biologist, discovered that several hundred genetic sequences drawn from very early COVID-19 patients had been mysteriously deleted from a public database. (They’ve since been restored.) Other facts that could be relevant to the origins debate have trickled out from obscure student work and other surprising sources.

Even as a natural origin remains the most plausible explanation, these discoveries, taken as a whole, demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that good-faith investigations of these matters have proceeded in the face of a toxic shroud of secrecy. Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.” “I find it disappointing and disturbing that something like this is coming out in the form of a leak,” Bloom said. “If there’s information that is relevant or informative to this discussion—anything that people could conceivably think is relevant—it needs to be made available.” Until that happens, or unless that happens, the mess will only spread.

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“But Fauci, Trump concluded at one point, “is a better promoter than he is a doctor.”

‘You Can’t Win That One’: Trump Suggests Fauci Was Unfireable (RT)

Former US president Donald Trump has said that, with regard to firing health adviser Anthony Fauci, he couldn’t “win,” though he proudly stated he had done the “opposite” of what the infectious-diseases expert had recommended. Appearing on ‘The Water Cooler’ on Real America’s Voice this week, Trump was asked if he had regretted not firing Fauci – something his supporters had called for numerous times. “Well, you know, David, he was there for like 40 years or something, right?” the former president told host David Brody, referring to Fauci’s long-standing position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “He was a part of the furniture. But if you think about it, I really did pretty much the opposite of whatever he said.”

Though Trump said he “got along” with Fauci, the two publicly disagreed and even feuded, with Trump often criticizing Fauci for his mask policies and pandemic-era restrictions, and Fauci criticizing Trump for not taking Covid-19 seriously enough. As for firing Fauci, Trump said, “you can’t win that one.” “If I would’ve done it, I would’ve taken heat. If I didn’t do it, you know, it’s the same story. But I did what I wanted to do, and I made the correct decisions,” he said. If Fauci continues to serve in his position as health adviser to the White House, he and Trump could find themselves working together once again, should the Republican decide to run in 2024, something he continued to tease during his ‘Water Cooler’ interview. But Fauci, Trump concluded at one point, “is a better promoter than he is a doctor.”

According to Trump, key decisions early in the pandemic were made by him and resisted by Fauci, including closing America’s borders to arrivals from China. “He didn’t want to close our country to China. I did it immediately. I didn’t even hesitate. And he said three months later that I saved thousands of lives by doing it,” Trump said. “He didn’t want to close our country to Europe, and I did it.”He also accused Fauci of having become a “radical masker,” having first actively advised Americans not to mask up – a contradiction the expert’s critics have mentioned in light of his shifting stance on protecting public health. Asked what might prevent him from running again in 2024, Trump replied, “Well… I guess a bad call from a doctor or something, right?”

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Australia has fallen
https://twitter.com/i/status/1441768323532816390

 

 

 

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