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The last time tony fauci was pushing masks for disease mitigation he was making up his facts and scare mongering too

el gato malo – bad cattitude – december 6, 2021

many of you are probably too young to remember the AIDS panic of the 80’s.

but when it came out, the NIH, with tony fauci leading the charge, was getting literally everything wrong.

they pushed a narrative of fear, vilified the infected, interfered with the development and adoption of effective treatments, and completely misrepresented spread and mitigation.

it’s how we wound up with absolute garbage like this ad:

it’s probably pretty jarring to see, but this is because you now have perspective. at the time, A LOT of people believed this. fear of getting AIDS from public toilet seats was a very real thing. fear of getting AIDS from casual contact or sharing dining or cooking facilities was a very real thing. people worried they might be sitting near a gay person on a bus. the “moral majority” of dingbat tele-evangelists thundered about it daily.

and then, as now, one jumped up bureaucrat with no idea what he was talking about was running around like chicken little screaming of falling skies and grandstanding about non-existent risks to children.

the fact that it was literally the same guy who is still at it should deeply embarrass us all.

i urge you to watch the video and hear him, in his own words. because this is who tony fauci was, and he has not gotten better. he’s just become more powerful and more nastily manipulative and narcissistic.

the appalling inaccuracy and vicious othering of the AIDS campaign is still his bread and butter play. it’s what tony does. only the scale and scope of power has changed.

one day, 20 years from now, people will look back on these rushed and slipshod vaccine approvals and mandates for products that are not at all suited to task and claims about masks and lockdowns and feel sick to their stomachs.

they will not be able to believe how such pseudoscience and rapacious world wrecking doctrine not only got foisted upon the world, but accepted and cheer led by it.

they will, in the light of perspective, marvel that the same man who convinced us that our kids would get AIDS from being near a gay teacher was allowed to generate pretext to close the schools to “protect” children from a disease that poses them almost no risk, a disease they do not contract nor spread serious cases of.

they will be appalled by the suggestion that a non-sterilizing vaccine was forced on them even after the fact that the vaccine does not mitigate spread was known and despite a towering and dangerous adverse events profile that rendered it a clearly of negative benefit to cost proposition to the young and healthy.

in short, they’ll feel just like you probably did looking at that AIDS ad.

think very carefully about just who you are choosing to trust here.

these “experts” do not have track records of being correct or even of being honest.

check the date on this:

they told you not only that these vaccines would stop spread, but that they literally changed the definition of “herd immunity” so that it could ONLY be achieved by vaccines.

then the vaccines failed to stop spread, likely made it worse, and they doubled down on “you need to get vaxxed” in spite of this, pivoting to this bizarre new take of “you need to get vaxxed to save hospital space” which, of course, is ALSO not working. now they want boosters. soon it will be “variant boosters.” if you don’t think annual covid shots are coming, you probably fell for the “did you know the word gullible is not in the dictionary?” trick. twice.

this is not “changing your views when new facts arise” this is “finding new justifications for doing the same thing despite the facts being 180 degrees opposite to what you claimed.”

this is not science, it’s scientology.

it’s the same people making the same mess.

isn’t it about time we broke this cycle?

food for thought.

December 6, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Nobody can explain why the vaccinated are more likely to get COVID and die

By Steve Kirsch | December 5, 2021

ICYMI, here’s a chart from a recent post by my good friend Mathew Crawford. It basically shows, the more you vaccinate, the more cases and deaths you get.

Critics would argue, “it’s confounded! more elderly are vaccinated.” But the same critics cannot show us this is false. They can only do “hand-waving” arguments that it must be wrong. Not very convincing.

Governments won’t release the data to show vaccinations are safe. I wonder why?

However, we actually agree with the critics that it is confounded but here’s why: governments don’t release the breakdowns publicly so we can’t do any better than this. If the vaccines are so safe, why don’t they release the data to the public to show this?

Is this just a fluke? I don’t think so. Watch this video starting at 7:00. The line goes the wrong way. The more you vaccinate, the worse it gets.

The health authorities are never going to figure this out because it would discredit them. So they have to keep on singing the same tune: “Safe and effective.”

December 5, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Biden’s Throat Frog Hints at the Coming Normalcy

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | DECEMBER 5, 2021

What happened to Joe Biden could have happened to anyone. In fact, it happens all the time. Throughout human history. He (presumably) caught a cold from his one-and-half-year-old grandson. His theory is that his grandson “likes to kiss his pop.” As a result, he got a “frog in his throat.”

It’s just a cold! No reason to freak out!

Biden’s spokesperson says that he has taken recourse to therapeutics. He “is taking some over-the-counter medication and probably some cough drops and some tea, but otherwise he’s proceeding with his schedule,” said Jen Psaki.

It’s all so normal. So much part of life. There is no way to know if Biden is correct in his casual contact tracing. He might not have gotten the cold from his grandson but he could have. Any parent will tell you that the first child comes with a full year of household sniffles and sickness. The second one is not so bad because the parents have built up immunity. And so on.

But maybe Biden should not have been letting his grandson kiss on him? That’s absurd. He would gladly risk infection in exchange for which he obtains and grants affection. It’s part of the deal we have all made with pathogens: we do a dangerous dance with them in order to experience love, freedom, choice, and human rights.

So far there is nothing I’ve written above that is unusual. It’s the way we’ve always lived. No one thinks the grandson should be punished for passing on a cold – which by the way can be a Rhinovirus or a Coronavirus. No one thinks that Biden should have avoided all contact with his family. There is no moral panic here. No one accuses anyone of aggression. It’s just life as we’ve always known it. Our immune systems have evolved to make it all possible.

So too with Deborah Birx’s desire to see her mother and take a trip, during the exact time last year when she was demanding that everyone cease all travel. The problem here is not the normal desire to see family. The problem is the hypocritical compulsion imposed on everyone else.

Biden’s behavior here is a beautiful illustration of the implicit and endogenous social contract under which we have all agreed to live. We live in the presence of pathogens, regrettable to be sure, but just what we’ve come to deal with. The payoff from the normal exposure to disease that we experience in the course of life is that we get stronger and more resistant to disease – plus we get to live normal lives.

When we do get sick, we reach for the things that make us better. We take cough drops. We sleep more. We have chicken soup. We starve a cold and feed a fever – or maybe it is the reverse, I forget. Whatever, we try to get well so that we can go on with life.

My apologies that this article is dreadfully boring so far. But boring is striking because, for some reason, we decided to forget all of this for the last two years in dealing with a new virus that is associated with a 99.8% survival rate, the victims of which tend to die at an age at which people normally die.

In short, we decided to panic ourselves into abolishing rights and liberties, while throwing out all inherited wisdom about infection, immunity, therapeutics, and viruses in general, not to mention all rights and traditional law. Talk of therapeutics for Covid was all-but banned. In short, we went utterly crazy, causing tremendous harm to public health, and the social and cultural fabric.

What strikes me about Biden and the frog in his throat is how casually and quickly he and his administration take recourse to traditional wisdom about viruses, even as the same administration is promoting the upending of life as we’ve known it all for a virus that is a near cousin of the very thing he caught from his grandson. And yet his spokesperson draws on what we’ve always known in order to calm people down.

I don’t blame Biden or his defenders for their common sense regarding infection. I blame them for not applying this traditional wisdom consistently for other viruses.

Still, the response to Biden’s infection should give us all hope that we can get back to normal, stop stigmatizing the sick, stop calling people who recover from Covid “survivors,” stop avoiding each other as if the human person is nothing but a vector of disease spread, and stop with this incredible cruel demand that every person separate from everyone else in the name of controlling a virus.

How many children have been forcibly kept from seeing grandma and grandpa over the last two years? How many lovers have been prevented from being together because they live in different disease jurisdictions? How many families have been shattered by Deborah Birx’s preposterous demand that we all live in separation from everyone else? How many people have been arrested for violating curfew? How many writers have been censored merely for saying that this Coronavirus should be treated like a normal pathogen?

Millions. Tens of millions. Billions across the world. We’ve paid a ghastly price for freaking out in all the ways in which Biden himself has not during his bout with a cold.

Nonetheless, this should give us hope that the old wisdom is not entirely extinguished. Some things are more important than disease avoidance, even for old people. We all need connection, and with that comes some risk. Our biology has evolved to deal with it. Indeed, the more exposure we experience (whether that means slobbering kids or mixing with people from all over the world in the commercial marketplace), the stronger we get and the longer the lives we live.

Freedom and human choice – plus affection, love, family, and normal life, even art, play, sports, and crowds – are all possible in the presence of infectious disease. Indeed, all these things are essential, else life is not worth living. That’s the real lesson here. May Biden’s throat frog – likely contracted through exposure – teach us at least this much.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. 

December 5, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

LIFE INSIDE AN AUSTRALIAN COVID PRISON CAMP (CENTRE OF NATIONAL RESILIENCE)

CLOSE CONTACT SUSPECT HAYLEY HODGSON DESCRIBES 14 DAY INCARCERATION

See also:

Camp Australia: The brochure vs reality

December 5, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Vitamin D: Government Should Have Promoted to Combat Pandemic

Medical evidence strongly justifies a proactive approach for using vitamin D

By Joel S Hirschhorn | December 4, 2021

There seems to be an endless refusal by the public health establishment to fight the pandemic with the best science-based tools. Instead, they keep pushing vaccines.

Great German research provides unequivocal medical evidence that the government should be strongly advocating two actions: 1. Take vitamin D supplements and 2. Have your blood tested for vitamin D.

The title for this October 2021 journal article says it all: “COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status, and a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3: Results of a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” [25(OH)D3 refers to metabolite of the vitamin in blood]

In other words, there is clear evidence that the lower your vitamin D level the greater your risk of dying from COVID infection. Moreover, the data clearly show that you need a blood level of at least 50 ng/mL.

Odds are, however, that very, very few people have been tested for their vitamin D level. This is a situation where waiting for testing is not the prudent approach. Vitamin D pills are pretty cheap and it is perfectly safe to take a healthy daily dose to maintain a good immune system. I take 4,000 IUs twice daily.

Here are a number of highlights from this research and other sources; the discussion is aimed at informing people with information not provided by Big Media, Big Government and Big Pharma.

Vitamin D is an accurate predictor of COVID infection. Its deficiency is just as significant, and perhaps more so, than more commonly discussed underlying medical conditions, including obesity.

To be clear, there is a level of vitamin D for an effective strategy at the personal and population level to prevent or mitigate new surges and outbreaks of COVID that are related to reduced vaccine effectiveness and new variants.

In the German study, fifteen other studies were cited that showed low vitamin D levels were related to cases of severe COVID infection, and seven studies that found positive results from treating ill patients with the vitamin.

The German study noted: “The finding that most SARS-CoV-2 patients admitted to hospitals have vitamin D3 blood levels that are too low is unquestioned even by opponents of vitamin D supplementation.” The German study “followed 1,601 hospitalized patients, 784 who had their vitamin D levels measured within a day after admission and 817 whose vitamin D levels were known before infection. And the researchers also analyzed the long-term average vitamin D3 levels documented for 19 countries. The observed median vitamin D value over all collected study cohorts was 23.2 ng/mL, which is clearly too low to work effectively against COVID.”

Why does this vitamin work so well? The German study explained: A main cause of a severe reaction from COVID results from a “cytokine storm.” This refers to the body’s immune system releasing too many toxic cytokines as part of the inflammatory response to the virus. Vitamin D is a main regulator of those cells. A low level of the vitamin means a greater risk for a cytokine storm. This is especially pertinent for lung problems from COVID.

Other studies

On a par with the German study was an important US medical article from May 2021: Vitamin D and Its Potential Benefit for the COVID-19 Pandemic. It noted: “Experimental studies have shown that vitamin D exerts several actions that are thought to be protective against coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infectivity and severity.  … There are a growing number of data connecting COVID-19 infectivity and severity with vitamin D status, suggesting a potential benefit of vitamin D supplementation for primary prevention or as an adjunctive treatment of COVID-19. … there is no downside to increasing vitamin D intake and having sensible sunlight exposure to maintain serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at a level of least 30 ng/mL and preferably 40 to 60 ng/mL to minimize the risk of COVID-19 infection and its severity.” This confirms the German study and its finding of a critical vitamin level of 50 ng/mL.

Daniel Horowitz has made this correct observation about vitamin D supplementation: “An endless stream of academic research demonstrates that not only would such an approach have worked much better than the vaccines, but rather than coming with sundry known and unknown negative side effects.“

There are now 142 studies vouching for the near-perfect correlation between higher vitamin D levels and better outcomes in COVID patients.

From Israel came work that showed 25% of hospitalized COVID patients with vitamin D deficiency died compared to just 3% among those without a deficiency. And those with a deficiency were 14 times more likely to end up with a severe or critical condition.

Also from Israel, data on 1,176 patients with COVID infection admitted to the Galilee Medical Center, 253 had vitamin D levels on record and half were vitamin D-deficient. This was the conclusion: “Among hospitalized COVID-19 patients, pre-infection deficiency of vitamin D was associated with increased disease severity and mortality.”

Several studies have come from the University of Chicago. One found that a vitamin D deficiency (less than 20 ng/ml) may raise the risk of testing positive for COVID-19, actually a 7.2% chance of testing positive for the virus. And that more than 80% of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient. And Black individuals who had levels of 30 to 40 ng/ml had a 2.64 times higher risk of testing positive for COVID-19 than people with levels of 40 ng/ml or greater.

On the good news side is a new study from Turkish researchers. They focused on getting people’s levels over 30 ng/mL with supplements. At that level there was success compared to people without supplementation. This was true even if they had comorbidities. They were able to achieve that blood level within two weeks. Those with no comorbidities and no vitamin D treatment had 1.9-fold increased risk of having hospitalization longer than 8 days compared with cases with both comorbidities and vitamin D treatment.

Another option

Some people may have absorption problems.  The solution is to use the active form of D – either calcifediol or calcitriol – to raise their levels more quickly. This bypasses the liver’s metabolic process very effectively. Studies have shown that people hospitalized with low levels but given the active form of D did not progress to the ICU. Places that sell vitamin D often sell the concentrated active form.

I have a supply of cholecalciferol pills that provide 50,000 IUs, compared to ordinary D pills typically with 2,000 IUs. A reasonable use of the high concentration pills is in the event of coming down with a serious COVID infection. This may be a sensible strategy for those who do not know what their level is or have not taken the normal pills for some period.  It can take months to raise a very low level to above the critical level the German study found necessary for the best protection.

Deficiency

Aside from dealing with COVID, two pertinent questions are: Is there an optimal level of vitamin D and are Americans deficient in it? For the first, this has been said: “While blood levels of 30 ng/mL or higher are considered normal, the optimal blood level of vitamin D has not yet been established.” From the Cleveland Clinic is this: “Normal vitamin D levels are usually between 20-80 NG/ML. If supplementation is recommended, remember to take it with a meal and on a full stomach to help absorption. Unfortunately, about 42% of the US population is vitamin D deficient with some populations having even higher levels of deficiency.”

A Mayo Clinic study said this: “Vitamin D deficiency is more common than previously thought. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that the percentage of adults achieving vitamin D sufficiency as defined by 25(OH)D of at least 30 ng/mL has declined from about 60% in 1988-1994 to approximately 30% in 2001-2004 in whites and from about 10% to approximately 5% in African Americans during this same time. Furthermore, more people have been found to be severely deficient in vitamin D [ <10 ng/mL]. Even when using a conservative definition of vitamin D deficiency, many patients routinely encountered in clinical practice will be deficient in vitamin D.”

Clearly, personal deficiency can only be determined by a blood test that prudent people will request their doctors to order for a lab test.

Conclusions

Seeing vitamin D as crucial to surviving COVID is supported by solid medical research. There is good data to support a desired level of 50 ng/mL. Whether a person has this level requires a blood test for the vitamin, not something that most physicians normally call for when ordering blood tests for other reasons.

As the US approaches 800,000 COVID related deaths it is reasonable to believe that perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved if the government had strongly supported vitamin D blood testing and supplementation if needed. But in the absence of such a COVID policy, people have good reasons to use D supplements if they are not routinely exposed to sunlight without using sunscreen products.

Many physicians have issued protocols for preventing and treating COVID that include vitamin D supplements. For example, the esteemed Dr. Zelenko uses the following: 5,000 IU 1 time a day for 7 days for low risk patients, and for high risk patients: 10,000 IU once a day for 7 days or 50,000 IU once a day for 1-2 days.

However, continuing its stupidity, NIH maintains that “There is insufficient evidence to recommend either for or against the use of vitamin D for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19.” This too was said: “Vitamin D deficiency (defined as vitamin D ≤20 ng/mL) is common in the United States, particularly among persons of Hispanic ethnicity and Black race.  These groups are also overrepresented among cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Vitamin D deficiency is also more common in older patients and patients with obesity and hypertension; these factors have been associated with worse outcomes in patients with COVID-19.” Sounds smart to fight deficiency for avoiding COVID health impacts.

Sadly, we cannot count on the public health establishment to take a science-based, aggressive policy on using vitamin D supplements as an alternative to COVID vaccines or expensive medicines. Its up to individuals to protect their own lives by being well informed and proactive.

December 4, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Why hide what happens in the first two weeks after vaccination?

Hiding part of the data leads to wrong conclusions

Health Advisory and Recovery Team | December 1, 2021

There have been numerous papers published showing how well the vaccines protect people after the second dose. Some of this effect is an illusion. The effect happens as a result of inaccurate measuring and a phenomenon called survivorship bias.

Survivorship bias happens when a group is compared at two time points, but the members of the group change between the time points. It would be like assessing the quality of a swimming school which favours the technique of throwing people into the middle of the ocean, leaving them for a couple of hours and claiming credit for how well the remaining students can swim. After two hours, the only people left would be the ones who could already swim and possibly a few who learnt to swim the hard way! The poor souls who drowned in the interim don’t even make the count. Attributing the remaining people’s swimming ability to the coach who turned up 2 hours later would obviously give a very misleading picture. Pointing out that no-one drowned in later lessons would be equally misleading in determining the success of the ‘teaching technique’.

With covid vaccination there is a two week period after vaccination that is not included in the data. The rationale given for this is that vaccines take a while to induce antibodies and therefore the first two weeks’ data are not relevant. Obviously this is flawed. What if the vaccines have deleterious effects that are visible straightaway, that have nothing to do with antibody production? An example is the high rate of shingles seen after covid vaccination, suggesting there is a problem with viral reactivation. This may explain why Sars-CoV-2 infection rates are actually higher in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated in the first two weeks after vaccination.

The effect of eliminating the first two weeks is a misleading data bias. If people become infected and are dying during that period, this needs to be included. The possibility that the vaccine itself may exert an effect on infection rate cannot be overlooked and the entire dataset needs to be included in order to accurately assess effectiveness. By only measuring the period after the higher risk of infection (0-14 days) it is possible to be deceived. Any signal would be missed.

Aside from it being nonsensical in terms of individual risk to remove this period of time, there will also be an impact on the wider community. If the vaccine in fact causes a spike in infections during the first two weeks, this will inevitably increase spread and will lead to an increased number of infections in that community during that time. Therefore, the assessment of the impact of the vaccination programme must include not only the effect on the individual, but the impact on the wider community.

This point is of particular relevance for close-knit communities where many are being vaccinated at the same time, such as schools and in particular communities with a high number of vulnerable people such as care homes and hospitals. What we are effectively doing is ‘speeding up’ the wave of infections (and deaths). Ultimately at the end of the viral season, the same number of people died. Because of excluding the earlier deaths (1-14 days), we are misled into thinking that the vaccines were more effective than they actually were. By only looking at the later period and seeing fewer deaths during that time, the illusion was created that lives were saved. This is evident in data from many countries following vaccine roll-out. The graph below showing the UK versus Europe illustrates this point, as the UK was the fastest to roll out the vaccine. The total number of deaths, represented by the area under the curve, was similar to other countries, but is just compressed into a shorter time period.

Figure 1: Covid Deaths in winter in UK and the European Union

Let’s now examine some specific examples, e.g. this study of nursing home residents in the United States. The results show that over the course of the study 6.8% of the vaccinated population were infected and 6.8% of the unvaccinated population were infected. However, by deciding that the first 14 days after vaccination should be excluded, the grey area for the vaccinated group is compared to the black and grey area combined for the unvaccinated. Doing so could lead to the claim of 66% vaccine efficacy against infection. The authors of this study were honest enough to share the raw data and did not claim 66% efficacy.

Figure 2: Data from US paper showing the percentage of the nursing home population to be infected by time after the clinic came to their home and by vaccination status

However, numerous studies have relied on this trick to make claims of vaccine efficacy. The most obvious examples of this are the original Pfizer trial study and the AstraZeneca trial.

Figure 3: Graph from AstraZeneca trial showing censorship of early period (‘Exclusion Period’)

To take a second example, a Danish paper measured infection numbers in healthcare workers and care home residents. Prior to the beginning of the vaccination programme 4.8% of the healthcare workers had been infected and 3.8% of the care home residents had been. The study ended at the end of the Danish winter wave after 95% of the care home residents had been vaccinated and 28% of the healthcare workers had been. Given the worse position at the start and the lower vaccination rate in healthcare workers you might expect that they were worse off overall. However, the percentage infected by the end of the wave was 7.0% among healthcare workers but 7.7% among care home residents.

Figure 4: Data from Danish paper showing percentage of population infected among care home residents and healthcare workers

How much of the vaccine efficacy reported in covid research is really a measure of survivorship bias coupled with naturally acquired immunity? This is a critical question. No claim of vaccine efficacy should be made without first addressing this.

December 4, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

UK surgeon remains suspended a year after saying governments are using Covid to control people

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 4, 2021

Last year, the UK medical register suspended a consultant surgeon for 12 months pending an investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC) for posting on social media that Covid-19 was being used by elites to control the world.

Colleagues wrote to the organization arguing he should not have been suspended for his personal opinion.

Mohammad Iqbal Adil, a Pakistan-born British doctor, has worked in the NHS for almost three decades. An interim orders tribunal suspended him for a year because of videos he posted on social media.

The doctor expressed “his point of view on the Covid-19 pandemic and the far-reaching effects of the lockdown on the economy, public health and wellbeing,” his campaign page states.

A spokesperson for the GMC at the time said: “The interim orders tribunal imposed an interim suspension on Dr Adil’s registration, following our referral, to protect patients and public confidence. This interim suspension remains in place while we consider concerns about Dr Adil’s fitness to practice.”

Some of his colleagues launched a petition on Change.org calling on the GMC to reinstate Dr. Adil. The petition argues that the GMC should have given him a chance to reflect on the videos “when the entire world is confused about the novel virus.”

The petition also noted that he had a family to support, adding, “UK needs doctors to work. It would not be in the best interest of the public and health system to lose [an] experienced and highly qualified surgeon like him.

“We, the doctors community within [the] UK and across the world, feel that it’s injustice to suspend Mr Adil on his personal point of view on the covid-19 without giving him [a] chance to reflect upon his video before enforcing suspension.

“We request to the GMC to revoke his unfair 12 months suspension . . . and allow him fair chance to work in this country [for the benefit of] the health system, communities, and medical graduates.”

“Dr Adil has been making a stand for freedom of speech for all doctors and nurses to speak their truth without fear of recrimination or persecution,” his campaign page states.

December 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Researchers Acknowledge SARS-CoV-2 Is Gaining Vaccine Resistance

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | December 3, 2021

Looking at the viral evolution of SARS-CoV-2, researchers from the prestigious universities Harvard and MIT have found that the virus not only will continue to mutate and create new variants in the future, but will become resistant to the vaccines as it adapts to humans.

Their study, published December 2, 2021, in the journal Science, shows that the mutations serve as bridges to conferring resistance to neutralizing antibodies. “The severity of the phenotypes we observed in vitro suggest that further evolved variants will more adeptly escape therapeutic antibody neutralization than currently circulating variants of concern, with potential resistance to two-component antibody cocktails,” the study authors wrote.

The scientists urged that “proactively examining the consequences of further viral evolution before the next highly antibody resistant strain emerges is of utmost importance.”

December 4, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

A brief reminder: Health agencies were not always deranged

a trip down memory lane

el gato malo – bad cattitude – december 4, 2021

it was february of 2020, a kinder time. a gentler time.

and the WHO was putting out guidelines to avoid stigmatizing people who got covid…

never forget this.

they knew before 2020 than none of these interventions worked, that their prices were insanely high, and that they should never be undertaken.

they knew the dangers of vilification and polarization.

standing pandemic guidelines vehemently warned against any of this and especially against making pariahs of the infected and cultivating exaggerated fear to drive compliance.

this has NOT been “following the science” is has been the abrogation of a century of evidence based epidemiology and social mores in order to take a devastating and self-serving joy ride with the world’s populace like it was some sort of video game.

and all the health agencies were aware of that.

these were choices.

this was done to you, not for you.

and it was done by people who damn well knew better.

if you learn one thing from this, learn that, because these malefactors and agencies are still around and they are not done with you…

December 4, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Covid-19: a new look at vitamin D

By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | December 3, 2021

I’ve written about vitamin D as a potential treatment for covid-19 a couple of times before. In September of 2020 I wrote about a Spanish randomized trial that showed a massive reduction in ICU admissions in hospitalized patients treated with 25-hydroxyvitamin D (a part-activated form of vitamin D). However, that study had some major weaknesses – it was completely unblinded and it was small. In other words, although the results were promising, they hardly constituted conclusive proof of a benefit.

Then, in January, I wrote about a much larger double-blind Brazilian trial that failed to show any benefit when hospitalized patients were treated with vitamin D. For many in the mainstream medical community, this study constituted conclusive proof that vitamin D is ineffective as a treatment for covid-19. However, participants in the trial weren’t given vitamin D until late in the disease course, and unlike in the previous Spanish study, they were given regular vitamin D, not the part-activated form used in the Spanish study. Since it takes several days for regular vitamin D to become activated and usable by the body, the study was more or less designed to fail from the start – whether intentionally or unintentionally. There was no realistic chance that it was ever going to show a benefit, even if one exists.

So, when I last wrote about vitamin D, in January, it was still unclear whether it had any role in the treatment of covid-19 or not. Well, has anything changed since then?

Let’s start by taking a look at the observational data. Although the randomized trials of vitamin D have been few and far between, there has been a massive amount of observational data produced. In recent months, two meta-analyses of cohort studies have been published that look at the relationship between vitamin D levels and death, one in the journal Nutrients, and another in the Nutrition Journal. For those who are unaware, a meta-analysis is a pooled study, where you take lots of different studies and pool their results together in to one, in order to get more statistically significant results. And a cohort study is a type of observational study in which you take two or more groups that vary in some specific way, such as in their vitamin D levels, and then follow them over time to see if they have different outcomes.

Interestingly, the two meta-analyses reach the exact opposite conclusions, with one claiming that if we can just get everyone up to 50 ng/ml of vitamin D in the blood stream, then we can literally prevent all covid deaths, while the other says that there is no correlation whatsoever between vitamin D levels and covid mortality.

How is this possible?

Well, the first thing to note is that the two meta-analyses vary in terms of which particular studies they include. The Nutrients study performed its data search in March, while the Nutrition Journal study performed its data search in June. This means that the Nutrition Journal meta-analysis had access to a few extra studies, which weren’t available when the first data search was conducted in March.

But that isn’t the whole explanation. The researchers have also used somewhat different search strategies, which means that each includes some studies that the other lacks. In fact, there is amazingly little overlap between the two meta-analyses in terms of which studies are included. Only two of the seven studies in the Nutrients meta-analysis are included in the Nutrition Journal meta-analysis, and only two of the eleven studies in the Nutrition Journal meta-analysis are included in the Nutrients meta-analysis. No wonder they’re able to reach such divergent results!

This really showcases how easy it is to manipulate meta-analyses so that they show what you want them to show, just by choosing the date on which you extract data and by choosing which specific search terms to use. It’s easy to keep modifying search terms slightly until you get a list that includes the studies you want in, and excludes the studies you want out. Which is why we should always be skeptical of meta-analyses, just as we are with other types of studies.

This explains why we saw a similar phenomenon earlier this year, when half the meta-analyses of ivermectin seemed to show massive benefit and the other half seemed to show no benefit whatsoever.

Meta-analyses are often considered to be the pinnacle of evidence based medicine, but considering how easy they are to game, I think that is wrong. I’d rather have a single large, well done study than a meta-analysis that consists of lots of little studies, even if that meta-analysis includes more participants overall. If all scientists were honest, then meta-analyses would be an excellent tool for determining the truth. But since we know that many scientists aren’t honest, their use is far more limited. At the end of the day we all have to do our own due diligence. The only meta-analyses that I trust fully are the ones I do myself, such as one I did earlier this year on ivermectin.

It is interesting to note though, that the Nutrition Journal study, which came to the conclusion that vitamin D had no effect, actually had results that did suggest benefit. All the included studies showed fewer deaths in the group with a higher vitamin D level, although the results were not able to reach statistical significance overall.

So we have one meta-analysis which shows a large benefit, and one which shows a trend towards benefit. Which is encouraging. Of course, these are observational studies, and so can’t really say anything about cause and effect. People with low vitamin D levels probably spend less time outdoors, which means they’re probably less physically active. And they probably consume a different diet from people with high vitamin D levels. Correlation is not causation, and even if a correlation is seen between vitamin D and death from covid in observational studies, that doesn’t mean it’s the vitamin D that’s preventing the deaths.

So, what we need is good data from randomized trials. As mentioned, the data from randomized trials that existed last time I wrote about vitamin D was limited and mixed, with the Spanish study that gave 25-hydroxyvitamin D showing massive benefit, while the Brazilian study that gave regular inactivated vitamin D showed no benefit whatsoever.

Since then, three new randomized trials have been published, one from India, one from Mexico, and one from Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, all three were small, with the largest of the three only including 87 patients. Additionally, all three gave regular inactivated vitamin D, not the part-activated form that was found to have an effect in the earlier Spanish study. In other words, the new studies don’t add anything on top of the store of knowledge that we already had in January.

So, we’re actually more or less in the same situation that we were in regarding vitamin D back in January. The observational data suggests that there is a benefit to supplementing with regular vitamin D for prophylaxis, which is in line with a systematic review that was published in the British Medical Journal in the pre-covid era, which found that people with low vitamin D levels who supplement daily with vitamin D reduce the frequency of respiratory infections by half. And the limited randomized trial data that exists suggests that the part-activated 25-hydroxyvitamin D formulation can reduce the risk of bad outcomes if given on admission to hospital. But the evidence is still too weak to draw any firm conclusions.

It’s quite shocking that more data isn’t available to answer this question conclusively at this late stage in the pandemic. I do personally think though, based on the evidence that is available, that it makes sense to take a daily vitamin D supplement. 4,000 IU (100 mcg) is a reasonable dose. It’s safe, it’s cheap, it might well help, and it can’t hurt.

December 3, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Huge new study shows ZERO Covid deaths of healthy German kids over 4 or adolescents

By Alex Berenson | December 2, 2021

German physician-scientists reported Monday that not a single healthy child between the ages of 5 and 18 died of Covid in Germany in the first 15 months of the epidemic.

Not one.

Even including children and adolescents with preexisting conditions, only six in that age range died, the researchers found. Germany is Europe’s largest country, with more than 80 million people, including about 10 million school-age children and adolescents.

Serious illness was also extremely rare. The odds that a healthy child aged 5-11 would require intensive care for Covid were about 1 in 50,000, the researchers found. For older and younger children, the odds were somewhat higher, about 1 in 8,000.

Another eight infants and toddlers died, including five with preexisting conditions. In all, 14 Germans under 18 died of Covid, about one per month. About 1.5 million German children or adolescents were infected with Sars-Cov-2 between March 2020 and May 2021, the researchers found.

“Overall, the SARS-CoV-2-associated burden of a severe disease course or death in children and adolescents is low,” the researchers reported. “This seems particularly the case for 5-11-year-old children without comorbidities.”

The researchers reported their findings in an 18-page paper published to the medrxiv preprint server on Monday.

The data came from a registry Germany established in March 2020 intended to capture all hospitalizations of people under 18 with Covid. All German children’s hospitals, pediatric infectious disease specialists, and pediatric societies were invited to participate.

(SOURCE: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v1.full.pdf)

British researchers have posted similar findings, reporting that only six healthy children (including those under 18) out of 12 million died of Covid.

Given the known risks of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men, the fact that Pfizer tested its mRNA vaccines on barely 3,000 children 5-11 and followed most of them for only weeks after the second dose, the German data again raises the question of how health authorities can possibly justify encouraging children or teenagers to be vaccinated.

But they have.

So parents will have to decide what’s best for their children (at least in those states that bar vaccine fanatics from trying to vaccinate teenagers without parental consent).

December 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Should employers require vaccination without any other option? Comments to OSHA close on Dec 6.

By Steve Kirsch | December 3, 2021

ICYMI, here’s the URL to file your comments before the comment period closes on December 6, 2021.

In a nutshell, OSHA believes that:

  1. Face coverings work and should be used.
  2. COVID recovered people who have not been fully vaccinated still face a grave danger from workplace exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
  3. They should impose a strict vaccination mandate ( i.e., all employers required to implement mandatory vaccination policies as defined in this ETS) with no alternative compliance option.

I believe:

  1. The scientific evidence (Danish mask study, Bangladesh mask study) shows that face coverings are completely ineffective.
  2. COVID recovered people should be exempt from all rules. If COVID recovered people are re-infected, they don’t get hospitalized, don’t die, and don’t spread the virus to others. The CDC has no counter-examples.
  3. The vaccines kill more people than they save for all age groups according to the VAERS data. And even in Pfizer’s own study, there were significantly more deaths in the vaccine group than then in the placebo group. There is ZERO scientific evidence the vaccines save lives when you are looking for a reduction in all cause mortality. Businesses should BE PROHIBITED from requiring vaccination.

One of us is wrong. If you agree with me, please consider taking a few minutes to file a comment.

December 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | Leave a comment

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