Runny Nose Coronaviruses–Omicron Update

Posted on by Ron Clutz

OMG OMICRON!

Blessing in disguise: Omicron variant may be ‘very positive’ news for the world if new Covid mutation kills off more lethal Delta coronavirus.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Hospitals and GPs across Southern Africa are increasingly reporting that the symptoms of the aggressive new Covid strain Omicron are “unusual but very mild,” according to various media in South Africa this weekend.

Around 90 per cent of all new infections in the Johannesburg region are now caused by the Omicron strain but, so far, the Covid death rate and even hospital admissions appear not to be increasing significantly, local media report.

Some experts are therefore cautiously optimistic that – if Omicron turns out to be less lethal but more contagious and dominant than the Delta variant – the new mutation may actually be a blessing in disguise.

Hundreds of infected people across Southern Africa reportedly complain of nausea, headaches, fatigue and a high pulse rate, but none seem to suffer from a loss of taste or smell, which has been the case with most other Covid mutations.

Moreover, more and more medics across Southern Africa are confirming that most Omicron-infected patients merely have a severe headache, nausea or dizziness.

Dr Angelique Coetzee told various newspapers in South Africa: “Symptoms are so different and so mild from [non-Omicron] Covid patients I have treated before.”

A GP for over three decades, and chair of the South African Medical Association, she was the first African doctor to suggest to local authorities Covid had mutated into a new strain.

Looking at the first data coming out of Southern Africa, virologist Marc van Ranst said this weekend that “if the omicron variant is less pathogenic but with greater infectivity, allowing Omicron to replace Delta, this would be very positive.”

Background from A brief history of the coronavirus family excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Scientists have known of the human coronavirus since the 1960s. But only rarely has it garnered wider recognition over the past half a century.

One example was in 2003, when the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) caused an outbreak of the disease severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mainland China and Hong Kong. Another was in 2012, when the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) led to an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the Republic of Korea, among other countries.

In both cases, the coronaviruses were new to science. Happily, both outbreaks were contained thanks to a combination of human intervention and still unknown natural circumstances.

Scientists know a great deal about human coronaviruses. But we don’t know it all. And there is a chance that scientists failed to identify a coronavirus pandemic in the 19th century. This brief introduction looks at the growing dynasty, as well as the one that we may have missed which could have a lot to teach scientists about COVID-19 and the human immune response.

The International Committee for the Taxonomy of Viruses has approved the naming of more than 40 coronaviruses. The vast majority of these infect animals. The COVID-19 outbreak has brought the number of identified coronaviruses that infect humans to seven.

Four of these are community acquired and have circulated through the human population continually for a very long time.

The four community-acquired human coronaviruses – meaning that they are acquired or arise in the general population – typically cause mild cold-like symptoms in humans. Two of them, hCoV-OC43 and hCoV-229E, have been responsible for between 10% and 30% of all common colds since about the 1960s.

While the discovery of novel coronaviruses like 229E and OC43 generated great media interest at the time—one article boldly proclaimed that “science has tripled its chance for eventually licking the common cold”—Dr. McIntosh recalls that the scientific community didn’t actively focus on investigating coronaviruses again until the emergence of SARS in 2003. Because 229E and OC43 caused relatively mild illnesses in people, doctors could treat them much like colds caused by other viruses: fever reducers, cough suppressants and the occasional bowl of chicken soup.

Since then, two more coronaviruses that also cause colds—NL63 and HKU1—have been discovered. And it wasn’t until 2012—nearly 50 years after its discovery—that the complete genome of 229E was finally sequenced. In the meantime, a number of case reports were published showing that 229E could potentially cause severe respiratory symptoms in patients with compromised immune symptoms, though for most healthy people its impact is mostly limited to a cold.

DELTA19: The Fifth Runny Nose CV?

Lubos Motl makes the case that the now dominant Delta variant has mutated to a more infectious, less deadly form, and should be managed as we do with the other four, and as Scandinavians are already doing. His article is Most Covid deaths are not due to Covid now.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A simple calculation showing that Covid-delta is far less lethal than flu

One of the points that those of us who opposed the uncontrolled Covid hysteria emphasized from the beginning was the fact that the people who got a positive PCR test were not necessarily ill.

In practice, what matters are the fractions. It is a quantitative question. Some of the Covid-positive people have been ill, some of those were hospitalized or they died. But some of the PCR tests are false positives and many truly infected people with a positive PCR test are asymptomatic (or their illness is so mild that it is not worth mentioning).

A related statement was that In most countries, a Covid death only means a “death with a positive PCR test” which doesn’t mean that the death was fully or mostly caused by the Fauci virus.

Again, that is an important point to have in mind. But a year ago when the Czech daily casualties became substantial, I finally became certain that the distinction didn’t matter in the 2020-2021 winter season. One can look at the total weekly numbers of deaths. In Czechia (10.7 million people), there were numerous weeks in which the normal weekly number of deaths (2100) was doubled (4000+). In fact, the 2020 excess deaths (17k) surpassed the number of Covid deaths by dozens of percent. Some of the other deaths could have been either due to the lockdown and a less inaccessible healthcare; or they could have been deaths that were secretly due to Covid, too.

But this situation (“Covid deaths are mostly real deaths due to Covid” and “the excess of deaths is even higher than the official Covid deaths”) has profoundly changed when delta and derived variants have become the dominant versions of Covid. Four months ago I emphasized that Delta SARS-CoV-2 is strictly a common cold virus because it causes a running nose (this is true for all the derived variants, it is not useful for epidemiological purposes to distinguish them). A running nose is a cosmetic trait that makes the disease more infectious (you shoot droplets on others by your nose) but it also makes the disease far less serious because the nose’s reaction helps you to reduce the dose in your body quickly, perhaps before it becomes substantial in the lungs.

So the virus (overwhelmingly delta and derivatives) may also be PCR-found in 2% of the hospitalized people, 2% of ICU patients, and 2% of the people who died yesterday. For 16 weeks in a row, weeks 21-36, the total number of deaths in Czechia was below the normal (2015-2019 average). You may check that the deaths are below the normal even in a half of Europe right now. At any rate, we get about 300 deaths every day. If you assume that Covid is just spread randomly among these people (Covid doesn’t deliberately avoid the people who have serious cancer or heart attack etc.), it is unavoidable that 2% of 300 i.e. 6 people a day are dying with Covid even if Covid doesn’t contribute to the death at all!

So Covid delta simply is less dangerous than flu!

Right now, despite the growth from the early summer by 1.5 orders of magnitude, the number of active people is still just 150 per 100,000 or so, below the number 1,600-1,800 per 100,000 that normally defines a flu epidemics. So we are one order of magnitude below a flu epidemic’s threshold now; and the flu-like disease, Covid delta, is less dangerous than flu, too! Those are reasons why the non-standard and emergency policies (and the hysteria) are absolutely unjustifiable by the facts. Thank God, at least the 3 Germanic Scandinavian countries have understood that it is silly to “fight against Covid now” and they ended all restrictions. In fact, you don’t even need face masks inside airplanes, during flights inside Scandinavia.

Meanwhile, tons of other countries controlled by hopeless unhinged crackpots who actually believe that Covid delta is an exceptionally serious disease; or evil people who know very well that it is not but who just want to exploit the fabricated fear for their personal benefits are leading their nations into a suicidal, war-like behavior. The situation is most shocking in Australia but countries like Lithuania, Slovenia, and even Italy etc. have gotten close to this Australian insanity. In practice, if whole nations may be brainwashed to believe that the situation deserves a state of emergency now, they may be brainwashed even when the numbers are going to be even smaller than today (even if it is by extra 3 orders of magnitude smaller!). Because the “number of cases” is almost certain not to go to zero in whole affected countries for a year or many years (and reasonably likely, never), these brainwashed nations may expect quite a long, dark future.

 

 

 

No US Legal Precedent for CV19 Vaccine Mandates

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Harvey Risch and Gerard Bradley write at Brownstone Institute Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates Fail the Jacobson Test.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

We are facing, in other words, questions about how best to integrate our perennial commitment to freedom with our equally long-standing concern for public health, in this time of crisis.

Americans are a freedom-loving lot. It is our founding ethos and we have defended it across the world on numerous occasions. At the same time, we have a strong tradition of social altruism and dedication to the common good, especially in times of crisis.

Now that the Covid-19 pandemic has been with us for close to two years and vaccines for almost one, we have learned that the vaccines work to a degree and that they have both known serious risks and theorized potential risks.

Over the last few months, Americans have been increasingly facing demands that they be vaccinated or revaccinated—from governments, schools, employers, shopkeepers, even relatives.

During the pandemic, the courts have rightly relied upon a century-old precedent of the Supreme Court in mandate cases, but they have gravely misunderstood and misapplied that precedent to uphold draconian and unjustified Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

At times of national emergency, government’s overriding goal must be to protect the population while removing the cause of the state of emergency. This means that certain laws, regulations, and policies may be temporarily suspended to accomplish these tasks. For example, if the army needs your car to transport soldiers to the front line, so be it. In particular, during the 1902 smallpox epidemic, the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) ruled that the State of Massachusetts could compel residents to obtain free vaccination or revaccination against the infection, or suffer a penalty of $5 (about $150 today) for noncompliance.

In authoring the majority opinion in Jacobson, Justice John Marshall Harlan argued:

(1) that individual liberty does not allow people to act regardless of harm that could be caused to others;
(2) that the vaccination mandate was not shown to be arbitrary or oppressive;
(3) that vaccination was reasonably required for public safety; and
(4) that the defendant’s view that the smallpox vaccine was not safe or effective constituted a tiny minority medical opinion.

The Supreme Court in Jacobson repeatedly invoked the “common good” of the polity as the principle of sound constitutional thinking about the public health emergency of the day. Just so—then and now. The Court did not, however, equate the “common good” with a reflexive preference for some collective interest over each person’s rights, or with automatic deference to the latest asserted findings of “the science.”

In this context, for the government to assert that its constitutional obligations (as described in Jacobson, for example) are satisfied only “because a government agency says so” would be self-serving and wholly inadequate. Such reasoning would not satisfy the burden of proof; rather, the government would need to demonstrate the relevant, full, non-cherry-picked scientific evidence to make the case.

Now let’s consider the four criteria upon which Jacobson relied in deciding that the smallpox vaccine mandate in 1905 passed constitutional muster, and use them to evaluate today’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

(1) Individual liberty does not allow people to act regardless of harm that could be caused to others.

What seems apparent is that this criterion is addressing the compelling interest in limiting people from acting to spread the infection. In Constitutional law a “compelling interest” is a necessary or crucial action rather than a preferential one; for example, saving the lives of large numbers of people at risk.

In fact, the federal government has already set a de facto threshold for this level. Annually, approximately 500,000 Americans die from tobacco-related diseases. Yet, the federal government has never acted to curtail tobacco use in any meaningful way. This implies that 500,000 deaths per year is not large enough to trigger a compelling government interest.

Thus, it seems that any truly “compelling” interest can only apply to high-risk individuals, who are definable and comprise a small minority of the general population. Furthermore, the lives of such individuals can often be protected by known existing and available pharmacologic and monoclonal antibody interventions (see criterion (3) below), which means that there may be a less-than-compelling interest for universal vaccination even among them.

Additionally, we know now, and both Drs. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky have stated publicly, that fully vaccinated individuals can become infected and transmit the virus to others. A number of such outbreaks have occurred in diverse locales. Thus, there is no apparent compelling interest in mandating vaccination for low-risk individuals specifically in an attempt to reduce infection transmission to high-risk people—just as there is no compelling interest in mandating vaccination to reduce infection transmission to low-risk people.

Just to be clear, government compelling interest inheres in prevention of serious outcomes such as hospitalization and mortality. But we assert that that there is no such compelling interest in Covid-19 case occurrence. The overwhelming majority of cases recover.

Prevention of Covid-19 cases is at most a desirable policy goal and not a compelling interest.

As has become increasingly apparent, natural immunity following Covid-19 infection is stronger in repelling subsequent viral outbreaks than vaccine-based immunity. (Thus, prevention of Covid-19 case occurrence per se is actually counterproductive in ending the pandemic.)

(2) The vaccination mandate is not shown to be arbitrary or oppressive.

Covid-19 vaccine mandates imposed by the federal government and some state governments require vaccination by all adults except those requesting medical exemptions or religious exemptions. Criteria promulgated by the CDC for medical exemptions however are extremely limited, essentially involving only severe life-threatening allergic reactions as demonstrated from taking the first vaccination of the two-dose mRNA series. Religious exemption requests appear to have met variously capricious responses by vaccine mandate reviewers, and some states have prohibited religious exemptions altogether, in violation of (as Justices Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito argued and as we would maintain) constitutional guarantees of religious liberty.

The one quite irrational consideration of all vaccination mandates to date is that the mandates ignore people who have had Covid-19 and thus have natural immunity. There are now more than 130 studies demonstrating the strength, durability and wide spectrum of natural immunity particularly versus vaccine immunity.

Some arguments have been put forward asserting that antibody levels may be higher in vaccinated people than people recovered from Covid-19, but antibody levels per se do not translate into degree of immunity. Antibody levels in vaccinated people decline appreciably starting at four months post-vaccination, whereas antibody levels in Covid-19 recovered stay roughly constant during those months. Other assertions have been that asymptomatic or mild Covid-19 infections may not produce strong natural immunity; however, these claims have been shown to be scientifically unfounded. Empirical population studies on reinfection/breakthrough infection demonstrate that natural immunity is as strong or stronger than vaccine immunity.

Finally, natural immunity can be documented by having ever had a positive Covid-19 PCR, antibody or T cell test, regardless of current status of those tests.

Similarly, Covid-19 vaccine mandates for children are unwarranted because children almost entirely get infected from their parents or other adults in the household, and infrequently transmit the infection to their classmates, teachers or uninfected household adults.

Normal healthy children do not die from Covid-19, and the 33 children aged 5-11 years estimated by the CDC to have died from Covid-19 between October 3, 2020 and October 2, 2021 all had chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, being immunocompromised (e.g., after cancer treatment) that put them at high risk, and even these numbers are much lower than childhood deaths from traffic and pedestrian accidents, or even being hit by lightning. Covid-19 in children is almost entirely an asymptomatic or mild disease typified by fever and tiredness and resolves on its own in 2-3 days of rest. Thus, vaccine mandates for children are unwarranted.

In sum, a policy requiring vaccination of people who are either already immune or of no consequence either for their own health or for spreading the infection is arbitrary. It is oppressive in inflicting a medical procedure on people who do not need it for themselves or for others. Such a policy would even fail the “rational basis” test which so many courts have applied perfunctorily.

(3) Vaccination is reasonably required for public safety.

Vaccination in theory prevents personal infection and disease, as well as transmission of infection to others. The government’s interest is almost entirely in the latter. We now know that the Covid-19 vaccines in the real world don’t prevent transmission all that well.

Further, public safety is enhanced by use of medications for early outpatient treatment that safely allow increase in population natural immunity. An extensive body of studies has accumulated over the last 18 months showing that various approved but off-label medications dramatically reduce risks of Covid-19 hospitalization and mortality when started in ambulatory patients within the first five days or so of symptom onset.

Meta-analyses of hospitalization and mortality risks calculated by the first author are shown in the figures on the next page for two drugs, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Additional thorough discussion of standards of evidence of randomized and nonrandomized drug trials, as well as on a number of small trials that failed in the adequacy of their study designs and executions, is posted here. These analyses show that numerous drugs and monoclonal antibodies are available to treat ambulatory patients with Covid-19 successfully, making vaccination a choice for dealing with the pandemic, but not a necessity.

(4) The vaccine has a long popular, medical, and legal history of being regarded as safe and effective.

This criterion decisively distinguishes Jacobson and the smallpox vaccine mandate from what is happening today. Jacobson did not accept dissenting testimony about vaccine safety or efficacy because the vaccine at that time had been a staple in society for almost 100 years.

The genetic Covid-19 vaccines have no such information, have every indication that they are orders of magnitude more harmful, and even the FDA still classifies all three in use in the US as experimental, which means that their EUA designations have only required showing that they may convey some benefit and need not be harm-free, i.e., have not been established as safe and effective, let alone known as such for decades or longer.

According to the VAERS database, to date some 19,000 deaths have been associated with the Covid-19 vaccines, of which more than one-third occurred within three days of vaccination. In this one year of Covid-19 vaccination, this number is more than double the number of deaths from all other vaccines over more than 30 years combined in the VAERS data. It is also more than 150 times the mortality risk of smallpox vaccination, 0.8 per million vaccines (Aragón et al., 2003).

Graph shows VAERS data up to Nov. 12, 2021. Source: https://vaersanalysis.info/2021/11/19/vaers-summary-for-covid-19-vaccines-through-11-12-2021/

The VAERS database also identifies more than 200,000 serious or life-threatening non-death events to date, and this number is almost certainly at least 10-fold undercounted because of the work, difficulty, impediments and lack of general knowledge involved in filing adverse event reports in the VAERS system. Many of these adverse events portend lifelong serious disabilities. But two million serious or life-threatening events is well more than the damage that would have been caused by even untreated Covid-19 occurrence in the same 200 million vaccinated Americans, especially given that two-thirds of them have strong natural immunity from having had asymptomatic or symptomatic Covid-19.

These numbers indicate that these severe events caused by the vaccines very likely outnumber serious Covid-19 outcomes that would have occurred in the same individuals had they not been vaccinated. As well, those numbers would be dramatically lower with general availability of the suppressed but effective treatment medications for early ambulatory patient use.

With regard to efficacy, the three US Covid-19 vaccines showed great promise in their original randomized trials results. However, as these vaccines have been rolled out in hundreds of millions of doses to the general public in the “real world,” their performance has differed from what was originally described.

Thus, if vaccination were to be the only method of combating the pandemic, it appears that vaccinations repeated indefinitely at 6-month intervals would be required, and even that may not be all that successful in reducing spread substantially. There are no vaccination programs for other general diseases in the US that require such a high frequency of compliance. Even influenza, which has a substantial annual mortality, has an annual revaccination frequency, is only perhaps 50% effective over the flu season, is not mandated.

A careful reading of Jacobson shows that it is not just an automatic consideration allowing the government to do what it wants when a pandemic emergency has been officially declared. In a pandemic, courts look to Jacobson for precedent as an apparent direct fit, but even so must evaluate the evidence for satisfying all of the Jacobson criteria.

As we have shown, Covid-19 vaccine mandates do not satisfy any of the required criteria in Jacobson, let alone all of them.

The question to be addressed then is why a pandemic infection with approximately 1/20th the natural mortality risk of the previous smallpox pandemic would be subject to the grievous penalties of loss of employment, loss of medical care, loss of necessary activities of daily life, and mandate of vaccines that unlike in the previous pandemic have no long-term safety data. Given that none of the Jacobson criteria have been met, the infringements and demands of the government and its public health agencies have not been justified according to law. This is the argument that must be made as to why the proposed vaccine mandate is an unwarranted overreach inconsistent with established public health policy and law.

 

 

Arctic Ice Aplenty Nov. 30, 2021

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The animation shows Arctic ice extents from day 304 (end of October) to day 334, Nov.30, 2021. On the right side are the Euro-Russian seas already frozen over end of October.  At the bottom right Kara Sea fills in to >90%, while Barents (left of Kara) adds nearly 400k km2 to reach 60% of March maximum. Dramatically, at the top center Chukchi freezes over and Bering Sea grows ~300k km2 of ice extent.  On the far left Hudson Bay shows its delayed freezing this year, with some western shore ice appearing only in the last 10 days. Meanwhile, Baffin Bay (lower left) added 480k km2 of ice extent.  The graph below shows November daily ice extents for 2021 compared to 14 year averages, and some years of note.

The black line shows during November on average Arctic ice extents increase ~2.5M km2 from ~8.5M km2 up to ~11M km2.  The 2021 cyan MASIE line started the month 163k km2 above average and on day 334 showed a surplus of  196k km2.  The Sea Ice Index in orange (SII from NOAA) started with the same deficit, then lagged behind through the month, before ending ~200k km2 lower than MASIE. (No SII data yet for day 334). 2019 and 2020 were well below average at this stage of the ice recovery.

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming is documented in a post Adios, Global Warming

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also.  See USCS Warnings of Coastal Flooding

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

post-glacial_sea_levelThe table below shows the distribution of Sea Ice on day 334 across the Arctic Regions, on average, this year and 2020.

Region 2021334 Day 334 Average 2021-Ave. 2020334 2021-2020
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 11171831 10976208 195623 10207244 964587
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1070776 1069252 1524 1070689 87
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 966006 781701 184305 601423 364584
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087085 1082808 4277 1075464 11621
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897827 897818 9 897827 0
 (5) Kara_Sea 874105 789034 85071 470654 403451
 (6) Barents_Sea 445466 252273 193193 56772 388695
 (7) Greenland_Sea 468845 543650 -74805 577314 -108469
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 606454 680452 -73998 608255 -1802
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 854668 853089 1579 854597 71
 (10) Hudson_Bay 307719 615274 -307555 803363 -495644
 (11) Central_Arctic 3208675 3195024 13651 3118738 89936
 (12) Bering_Sea 335645 140327 195318 39284 296361
 (13) Baltic_Sea 6666 3698 2969 0 6666
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 34960 67733 -32773 31397 3563

The overall surplus to average is 196k km2, (2%).  Note the large surpluses of ice in Chukchi and Bering Seas, partly offset by deficits in Greenland Sea and Baffin bay. The largest deficit is Hudson Bay, a shallow basin that should freeze over in coming weeks, adding nearly 1M km2 when it does. Note that 2021 ice extent exceeds that of 2020 by almost a full Wadham, 965k km2, most of the surplus being in Chukchi, Bering, Kara and Barents Seas.

bathymetric_map_arctic_ocean

Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring Arctic ice extents.

Covid/Climate Prigs Are Out to Spoil Your Days

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Christopher Gage writes at Oxford Sour Bay of Prigs.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Enamoured by lockdown, the puritans wish for a perma-pandemic in which no-one, nowhere, will be happy.

Not content with dying their hair green and punching steel through their nostrils, progressives here in Great Britain have proposed something rather more exquisitely demented than their usual fare.

The Independent, a kind of Guardian for actors manqué and Cluster B personalities, those who suffer from fictitious ailments of which ‘the doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong,’ asks, ‘Should Everyone Have a Personal Carbon Quota?’

Helpfully, the newspaper lays out exactly what a Carbon Quota would entail.

It begins: “Your home, sometime in the next decade. You click the heating on and receive an app notification telling you how much of your carbon allowance you’ve used today.

“Outside in the drive, your car’s fuel is linked to the same account. In the fridge, the New Zealand lamb you’ve bought has cost not just pounds and pence but a chunk of this monthly emissions budget too.

“Welcome to the world of personal carbon allowances – a concept that is increasingly gaining traction among experts as a possible response to the climate crisis.”

Curiously, this all sounds like one’s entire life would be recorded and regulated and monitored and meddled with by politicians who’ll punish or praise, all in pursuit of a vague utopia. Sounds familiar.

According to my Carbon Quota, I could live happily and healthily, provided I die next Tuesday at noon.

If I were to stay on this planet and offend Mother Nature with my presence, I’d have to limit myself to half a cigarette per day, a slither of ribeye per week, and one soupçon of red wine per month. Such a paltry regimen would dissolve around 90% of my personality.

Besides, Tuesday is no day to die. Especially before the 4 p.m. happy hour.

Perhaps, I could time it just right. I’ll prop up a stool in my favourite dive bar, and impart everything I’d like to say but avoid saying in fear of social ostracization.

I could say that there is a biological reason why women aren’t funny. I could say that, on balance, the British Empire was a good thing, and that anyone whinging about ‘cultural appropriation’ seldom has any culture worth appropriating. I could say, with conviction, that the Jews obviously don’t secretly run the world because if they did, the world would be far closer to utopia than it is now. I could suggest that those who play music on public transport, indeed—in public—should be hung, drawn, and quartered for the benefit of the gene pool. I could say all this before shuffling off into the light.

(If my girlfriend—whose people have won a fifth of all Nobel Prizes despite being 0.2% of the world population—objects, then I’m sorry… I’m saving the planet, darling.)

You can define the confidence of a culture by the pettiness of its laws.

I’d rather shuffle off than live in a world in which one’s social status is tied to one’s ability to pretend falafel is edible, to one’s withering body. I’d rather that than live in a world in which the prigs and puritans, those weird kids from school with ‘Free Da Weed’ Sharpied on their hemp rucksacks, have won the final victory over everyone else. A world in which every consideration is now suffixed with ‘to save the planet.’

We shouldn’t feign surprise. A stubborn one-third of any population harbours latent authoritarian tendencies. All they need is a little nudge and a wink from someone in a lab coat or a pinstripe suit.

Over the last twenty months, we’ve given them plenty to chew on. We’ve sacralised Crab Mentality—that depressingly human tendency to pull down others into the soup of conformity. For many, this pandemic has been the time of their lives. They’ve enjoyed grassing on neighbours, posting their vaccine statuses, their three-mask chic. Don’t mention that sensible Sweden got it right. Don’t mention that lockdown only delays the inevitable, to great human cost. Don’t mention the fatal link between obesity and Covid deaths.

They’d love life in Austria, where the government has mandated a Western first—forcible vaccination for every citizen.

What a time to be alive. This pandemic has valorised negative personality traits. Back in the Old Normal, high neuroticism combined with high agreeableness meant you’d spend your days siphoning your biography for ‘trauma’ to weaponize against the world. Now, it’s a plus. Like Woke intellectuals, the neurotics mistake their personal problems for societal problems.

I assumed a majority of Britons would, like me, rather chew on a glass vial labelled ‘Wuhan Institute of Virology,’ than consider medical apartheid. Nope.

According to YouGov, six in ten Britons support the introduction of a ‘papers, please’ society—vaccine passports.

That’s despite vaccines blunting Covid’s ability to hospitalise and kill, but not its ability to spread—rendering vaccine passports both pointless and poisonous.

Of course, the usual disclaimer applies just in case anyone of a progressive bent is reading: I’m not saying it’s Nazi Germany, but it’s quite clear how totalitarian regimes slip into power with little resistance.

A recent survey in The Economist made for terrifying reading: forty percent wanted masks forever; a quarter wanted to shut down nightclubs and casinos; another third wanted socially-distanced pubs and clubs and theatres; a hefty rump wanted a 10 p.m. curfew, and one-third said anyone coming into this country should be quarantined, like a dog, for ten days. And they wanted all this lunacy indefinitely, Covid or not.

Perhaps that explains why the eco-loons can air with confidence the drudgery they wish to impose upon everyone else. Not a day goes by without some middle-class Insulate Britain bobo blocking the motorway or making ‘demands’ upon the government to act on the ‘climate crisis’.

What nobody asks is how any of this nonsense would make any difference given that Great Britain contributes less than one percent of global carbon emissions. Those who follow The Science don’t cotton on when last week’s gospel morphs into this week’s heresy.

What happens when we reach Net Zero and the weather doesn’t change? I can only guess… ‘That wasn’t real Net-Zero. Real Net-Zero has never been tried.’

They don’t ask such obvious questions because the answer is obvious: they don’t care about all that. As Mencken wrote, they’re governed by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

That’s the problem with do-gooding. There’s always more good to do.

 

Tokyo Stops Covid With Ivermectin

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Dr, Pierre Kory tweets: Tokyo in particular is kicking COVID’s ass with IVM – fewest hospitalized since before pandemic. Come on world, wake up wake up wake up

Background from  Previous Post 

In February 2021, Dr. Ozaki Chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association declared that Japan’s physicians should get a greenlight to prescribe IVM (Ivermectin) at the first sign of SARS CV infections.

Now in August, Tokyo Medical Association chairman Haruo Ozaki reiterated that ivermectin should be widely used and said that his early recommendations have not been heeded in Japan.  See Lifesite article August 30, 2021 Japanese medical chairman doubles down on ivermectin support after early calls went ignored.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds

In an interview with the The Yomiuri Shimbun on August 5, Ozaki spoke in detail about his opinion that ivermectin should be used in Japan and said that his early calls for usage have seemingly not been heeded.

He stated that there is evidence from multiple countries that ivermectin has proven effective for patients diagnosed with COVID: “I am aware that there are many papers that ivermectin is effective in the prevention and treatment of [coronavirus], mainly in Central and South America and Asia.”

Chairman Ozaki stated that despite evidence suggesting the efficacy of ivermectin, it is difficult to obtain the medication. He added that while ivermectin’s established effectiveness is increasingly clear, the U.S. company that manufactures the drug, Merck & Co., Inc., have currently limited distribution because they claim that the drug is ineffective at treating COVID.

“With the view that it is not effective for the treatment and prevention of sickness, there is an intention that it should not be used for anything other than skin diseases such as psoriasis.”

This has led to a situation where, according to Ozaki, “Even if a doctor writes a prescription for ivermectin, there is no drug in the pharmacy.” He said that this has rendered the drug practically “unusable.”

He contends that the fact that supply has been stopped by Merck & Co. is evidence that it does in fact work at treating COVID: “But (Merck) says that ivermectin doesn’t work, so there shouldn’t be any need to limit supply. If it doesn’t work, there’s no demand. I believe it works, so block supply. It looks like you are.”

He said that he “also told the Japan Olympic Committee that ivermectin should be used effectively when holding the Tokyo Olympics. But the government didn’t do anything.”

He addressed the reluctance on behalf of the medical establishment in using ivermectin to treat COVID. He said “there are problems for researchers in academia and professors in universities. Many do not do anything by themselves, but they are of the opinion of international organizations such as the WHO and large health organizations in the United States and Europe that ‘it is not yet certain whether ivermectin will work for the [coronavirus].’”

“We don’t do it on our own initiative, but only on the opinions of others. Why don’t we try to see for ourselves why ivermectin works? It is deplorable that there are critics, researchers, and scholars who are constantly criticizing without doing anything. I hope that Japanese academics will contribute more actively.”

Evidence that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID has been well attested in developing nations where vaccines are not widely distributed. Another study in France also suggested that ivermectin ought to be used as a remedy for COVID.

On May 25, the Indian Bar Association served a legal notice to Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, a Chief Scientist for the World Health Organization (WHO), relating to the harm she allegedly caused the people of India by campaigning against the use of ivermectin.

In Mexico city, a home-treatment-kit, including ivermectin was created, for its 22 million-strong population on December 28, 2020, following a spike in cases of COVID-19. Also, doctors were encouraged to use Ivermectin and other therapeutic drugs in their practice when dealing with COVID-positive patients. The effort resulted in a 52–76 percent reduction in hospitalizations, according to research by the Mexican Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), Mexico’s Ministry of Health, and the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).

Following that came a public statement by another prominent Japanese physician, Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao, who appeared on Japanese television proposing that COVID-19 should be treated as a Class 5 illness as opposed to its current classification as a Class 2. In Japan, illnesses are categorized by a classification system; approaching COVID as a Class 5 illness would mean that it could be treated like a seasonal flu.

Dr. Nagao said he has used Ivermectin as an early treatment for over 500 COVID patients with practically a 100% success rate, and that it should be used nationwide.

About the effectiveness of Ivermectin in treating COVID patients, he said: “It starts being effective the very next day… My patients can reach me by message 24/7 and they tell me they feel better the next day.”

Nagao was asked by the TV anchor when patients should take Ivermectin if diagnosed with COVID-19. He replied: “The same day, I mean if you are infected today, you take it today… It is a medication that should be given for mildly ill patients. If you give it to hospital patients, it’s too late. This is also the case for the majority of drugs… So you have to give Ivermectin. I am asking our Prime Minister Suga to distribute this drug ‘made in Japan’ on a large scale in the country.”

He added that four pills should be distributed to everyone in the country, so that people can take them “as soon as you are infected.”

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=391434112554080
Footnote: 

As Dr. Ozaki suggests Big Pharma wants to banish any treatments that are cheap and effective. Doing the math:

An Ivermectin course for COVID is less than twenty dollars.

A course of REMDESEVIR is currently right at $8800.00 dollars. (and often doesn’t work)

An outpatient treatment with monoclonal antibodies is right at $23,000.00 – 25,000.00 dollars with all the infusion costs added.

That’s not to mention obscene vaccine profits.

How Voter Fraud Is Revealed in 35 US States

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jay Valentine reports on the behind-the-scenes canvassing organizations documenting widespread fraud in the 2020 elections.  Surprisingly, even in states carried handily by Trump, there were large numbers of illegal ballots counted in state and local races.  His article at American Thinker is Meet the Technology That’s Uncovering 2020’s Voter Fraud.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Were You a Phantom Voter?  Now You Can Find Out.

The search for phantom voters is over. Phantom voters are sitting next to you at the restaurant or standing next to you at the bank. They are your friend and neighbor. You may be a phantom and not know it.

Phantom voters, the definition, is morphing from fake voters hiding in UPS boxes to people who advanced computer models predict will not vote.

Don’t get me wrong — there are thousands of phantom voters living in churches, R.V. parks, cemeteries, homeless shelters, hotels, and virtual mailboxes. It’s just that there are as many, perhaps more, who live active, healthy, honest lives on voter rolls. They just don’t know they voted.

You’ve heard the stories, denied by the mainstream press and almost every secretary of state: “there is no significant voter fraud.” Why not say that? There is no way you can check.

Now there is.

After the 2020 election results stopped in the middle of night and vote trajectories magically changed when they fired up again, thousands of people, just like you, didn’t buy it. They formed armies of canvassers in 35 or more states. They did something that has not been done at scale in the history of the country: they started checking voter rolls.

They did more. They filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests at unprecedented levels. Secretary of state offices, once a murky sinecure, had to answer real questions about what was going on.

Here’s what popped out.

Leftists are different from you and me. Unlike us, they care that every vote is cast, and if you do not cast your vote, they will do it for you. And they did. At scale.

In one midwestern state, voter rolls costing tens of thousands of dollars were bought by a billionaire leftist every month for over a year. Why would someone buy a list that doesn’t change much?

Voter lists show people who move. They show people who never or seldom vote.

The white hat canvassing team built a query for one state: “voters who voted in 2020 who never voted before.” Guess what! 265,000.

In the same state, thousands of people came forward with stories that when they showed up to vote, they were told someone had voted for them. Get the picture?

In a southwestern state, in its second largest city, there was a 21-day daily tabulation of cast ballots. Once a ballot is cast, it should not be changed. Not here.

When the millions of cast votes across over 21 snapshots were compared, thousands of ballots had been altered. Some were minor alterations, like a slight name change. Others were more interesting — like when someone voted in person, but his vote was later changed by an absentee ballot.

It gets better.

Those FOIA requests are mining gold. Our midwestern state has documents showing that the state election organization gave online access to a leftist group for weeks during the voting. Citizens had to pay over $20,000 for one shapshot of the voter roll. Leftists could, and did, access it online throughout the process. For free.

And access it they did. Witness statements are being gathered, lots of them, that in the largest city, election officials were trading cell calls about how many votes were needed, and someone was then providing the phantoms to meet the quota.

They knew the names of the phantoms — they had direct access to who voted, who didn’t, and who was likely to never show up.

This is not exclusively a blue-state phenomenon.

In a deep red state, canvassers found more traditional phantoms.

There were the 21 people at the fraternity house. Nothing to see here — until they sorted them by age. All these kids were active voters, many voted, and their age range was from 115 to 57. Some frat house.

These red-state canvassers went deeper. They showed that the phantoms did not vote en masse in the 2020 presidential election. Phew! Feeling better. But wait. They vote in droves in state, county, municipal elections.

Aha — here was another interesting pattern, never seen before.

This deep red state that voted for Trump by double-digit margins did not call out its phantom army when it could not move the needle. When local, state elections were up, well, those people voted — even the 21 at the county jail and the 41 registered at the Recreation Commission.

In earlier American Thinker articles, we created the phrase “sovereign fraud.” That means your government is in on it.

As more than 35 state citizen organization now are using the most advanced search and big data technology to look into voter rolls, and cross-check them with churches, R.V. parks, fictitious street locations, they are concluding the office of secretary of state is corrupt, incompetent, or often both.

Let’s take incompetent.

In about every state, there are voters old enough to have fought in the Civil War, and they still vote. In one state, there are voters — a bunch of them older than Julius Caesar — the Roman guy.

States have voter rolls with multiple people using the same voter ID. When pressed, they have some screwy excuse that it’s a sequencing anomaly. At least one state adds every new voter to the end of its voter ID sequence, as one would expect. Except when it doesn’t. These people have numbers that skip by two and later ten, and they insert voters there, not at the end.

There are hundreds I have personally seen, thus thousands in every state — examples of 16 people, with different last names, living in that one-bedroom, 876-square-foot house. Really?

Let’s go to corrupt.

Secretaries of state, when pressed to cough up those voter rolls, after the confiscatory price is paid, change the data in such a way that it cannot be searched with traditional technology. Tough luck for them; our canvassing friends have search technology five generations ahead, so it gets done.

Canvassers in 35 or more states are digging, and the more they find, the more relentless they become. We are pleased to provide technology that runs a thousand times faster than anything available to any secretary of state or leftist voter fraud group.

These canvassing organizations are the Minutemen of this generation. They come from every background, organize with no central leadership. They blindly figured out how phantom voting was happening, and they are forcing states to audit their voter rolls.

They aren’t blind anymore. They are organized. They have resources and technology, and things are about to change in a big way for phantoms.

 

 

Economics of Infrastructure Investment

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mathew Kahn discusses the ramifications of the major transportation spending recently passed by the US Congress. Of course, as the pie chart shows, infrastructure as many people think of it—construction or improvement of bridges, highways, roads, rail and subways, ports, waterways, and airports—accounts for only $157 billion, or 7%, of the plan’s estimated cost.  Still that is a lot of money (“A billion here, a billion there, and soon it adds up to real money”–US Senator), and Kahn provides a list of concerns in his article What Insights Does Economics Offer About the Nascent Biden Administration Transport Infrastructure Investment Program?   Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The Washington Post has published a piece stating that the Secretary of Transportation, Peter Buttigieg, is the big winner of the Biden Infrastructure Bill as he will be attending many ribbon cutting ceremonies as grateful local mayors shake his hand.

Economic research offers many insights here about the efficiency and equity effects of this multi-billion dollar investment.

Point #1: This is an irreversible investment. When a city builds a new subway line, this billion dollar project cannot be later sold on Ebay and use the $ to do something else. In contrast to light rail and subway lines, dedicated buses feature more option value because they can be sold off or redeployed on different routes in the same city. Given that we don’t know how cities will develop over time, this real option has value.

Point #2; Past expansions of public transit have not significantly increased ridership with the exception of Washington DC. In the case of Los Angeles, improves in rail service (such as the Light Rail on Exposition that I ride) has taken bus riders away from the bus. See our 2005 paper. If crime rates continue to be a concern in cities then the middle class will be even less likely to use the “shiny new” infrastructure. The poor do rely on public transit to move around cities and an expansion will improve their quality of life. An economist would ask whether they value this benefit more than the cash equivalent?

Point #3: The older infrastructure in the nation is located in older cities, where the population is barely growing (or shrinking) and where the voters are mainly Democrats.

Point #4: The highways tend to be built in the suburbs where the voting base leans Republican. My 2011 Brookings piece with David offers several constructive ideas for how to “build back better” here.

Point #5: If progressive cities gain better infrastructure due to the Biden Investment AND if they don’t build much housing (the progressive city NIMBYism is well documented) , then housing prices will rise and the poor and middle class will be further squeezed by this new investment.

Point #6: There are many economics consulting firms that intentionally offer extremely optimistic ridership estimates ex-ante and this helps ambitious government officials to justify projects (i.e to say that it passes a cost/benefit test) when in reality — ex-post evaluations show low usage of the new infrastructure. See Pickrell 1992.

Point #7: Given that unions are powerful in progressive cities, what is the marginal cost of infrastructure creation in these cities? Is the Department of Transportation seeking to build a new capital stock or to enrich a special interest group that supports the Democrats? How many middle class new construction jobs will be created? Will the expansion of the public capital stock crowd out the expansion of the private capital stock as construction crews work on transport infrastructure rather than building private sector projects? What is the shape of the construction supply curve?

Point #8, once the new infrastructure is completed — will this greatly improve urban quality of life in cities such as Baltimore that have been shrinking? How will the Mayor and local civic leaders and private sector stakeholders change their investments and policy decisions? What positive synergies might emerge? Our 2021 Unlocking Book explores some of these themes of investment co-ordination between the private and the public sector.

IVM Beats Pfizer and Merck One-Trick-Pony Pills

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Hypothetical model illustrating the inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 replication by ivermectin mediated through the blocking of α/β1-importin (imp) as well as 3CLpro enzymatic activity. Mody et al (2021)

John Campbell explains in the video below how the new Pfizer pill copies one trick from Ivermectin, without IVM’s other anti-viral mechanisms, resulting in an inferior and dangerous medicine.  I have transcribed the basic message along with excerpts and links to several papers to which he refers. Excerpts are in italics with my bolds.

Pfizer’s new antiviral drug PAXLOVID™ shows very high levels of efficacy in preventing serious disease hospitalization and people dying.  And that drug works in a particular way, what we call a pharmacodynamic action.

But there’s another generic drug called Ivermectin that you might have heard of that works in exactly the same way as that. Now no one’s saying that information has been deliberately suppressed for years while millions of people have died but what we are going to show on this video is conclusive proof from the literature that this modality of action is the same.

How Coronavirus Infects Its Host

Before we crack into that we need to look at what’s happening so when a virus, in this case coronavirus2 gets into a cell. What happens is it makes lots of proteins. It starts off making  these long proteins, out of hundreds of amino acids sometimes. A few thousand amino acids all strung together.

The problem is they’re too long for the job that’s required. So it’s a bit like a building site and when a big log of wood arrives it needs to be trimmed down into bits that fit in your door frames and your window frames. So these proteins need to be trimmed down and it has to be done in a biochemical way.

In the case of coronavirus two, there’s an enzyme called 3CL protease which breaks
down protein into smaller pieces. it’s what we call proteolytic and it will take these long proteins and it will chop them into shorter proteins it’s what we call an endopeptidase. So now instead of having one long protein we’ve got two short ones and these fit together just nicely for the new virus that we’re we’re trying to make.

These new drugs are what we call protease inhibitors because they stop the protease from working. If the protease is like this scissor, the inhibitor is like this tape stopping the cutting up of long proteins.

When there’s another long protein that needs to be processed the 3CL protease comes along ready to chop this up. But now these drugs have bounded up the active site of the protease and they stop the protease from chopping up the big proteins into smaller strings of amino acids. Since they can’t build the virus, it inhibits viral replication.

This is the new Pfizer drug which is designed to block the activity of the sars coronavirus2 3CL, so that 3CL protease now won’t work. It won’t open so i can’t chop my proteins into the correct length to build a nice new virus.   And of course a 3CL protease inhibitor will stop it from making sars coronavirus2 and is therefore anti-viral.

Everyone in human biology has heard of chymotryptin. It’s an enzyme released by the pancreas to digest protein. It’s a protein chopping up enzyme so this chymotryptin-like protease inside the virus is working in a very similar way to the chimbotryptin that your pancreas produces to digest your proteins.

Evidence from Pfizer News Release

Pfizer’s novel COVID-19 oral antiviral treatment candidate reduced risk of hospitalization or death by 89% in interim analysis of phase 2/3 EPIC-HR study.

  • PAXLOVID™ (PF-07321332; ritonavir) was found to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% compared to placebo in non-hospitalized high-risk adults with COVID-19
  • In the overall study population through Day 28, no deaths were reported in patients who received PAXLOVID™ as compared to 10 deaths in patients who received placebo
  • Pfizer plans to submit the data as part of its ongoing rolling submission to the U.S. FDA for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) as soon as possible.

If approved or authorized, PAXLOVID™, which originated in Pfizer’s laboratories, would be the first oral antiviral of its kind, a specifically designed SARS-CoV-2-3CL protease inhibitor. Upon successful completion of the remainder of the EPIC clinical development program and subject to approval or authorization, it could be prescribed more broadly as an at-home treatment to help reduce illness severity, hospitalizations, and deaths, as well as reduce the probability of infection following exposure, among adults. It has demonstrated potent antiviral in vitro activity against circulating variants of concern, as well as other known coronaviruses, suggesting its potential as a therapeutic for multiple types of coronavirus infections.

Evidence for 3CL protease inhibitors from September 2020

Identification of SARS-CoV-2 3CL Protease Inhibitors by a Quantitative High-Throughput Screening Zhu et al. (Sept 3, 2020)

Viral protease is a valid antiviral drug target for RNA viruses including coronaviruses. (13) In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, great efforts have been made to evaluate the possibility of repurposing approved viral protease inhibitor drugs for the clinical treatment of the disease. Unfortunately, the combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, both approved HIV protease inhibitors, failed in a clinical trial without showing benefit compared to the standard of care. (14) To address this unmet need, several virtual screens and a drug repurposing screen were performed to identify SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro inhibitors.

In conclusion, this study employed an enzymatic assay for qHTS that identified 23 SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro inhibitors from a collection of approved drugs, drug candidates, and bioactive compounds. These 3CLpro inhibitors can be combined with drugs of different targets to evaluate their potential in drug cocktails for the treatment of COVID-19. In addition, they can also serve as starting points for medicinal chemistry optimization to improve potency and drug-like properties.

Ivermectin Emerges as Top Antiviral Candidate for CV2

Identification of 3-chymotrypsin like protease (3CLPro) inhibitors as potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents Mody et al. (2021), source of diagram at top. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Fig. 4: Ivermectin exhibited complete inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro enzymatic activity whereas micafungin partially inhibited the enzyme.

The off-target drugs that are being used to treat non-viral ailments selected by in silico studies were screened for their inhibitory activity against SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro enzyme.

Interestingly, one of the OTD (Off Target Drugs), ivermectin was able to inhibit more than 85% (almost completely) of 3CLpro activity in our in vitro enzymatic assay with an IC50 value of 21 µM. These findings suggest the potential of ivermectin to inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 replication. In support of this, a recent finding suggested that ivermectin (5 µM) inhibited the replication of live SARS-CoV-2 isolated from Australia (VIo1/2020) in Vero/hSLAM cells23. They found that >5000-fold viral counts were reduced in 48 hr in both culture supernatant (release of new virion: 93%) as well as inside the cells (unreleased and unassembled virion: 99.8%) when compared to DMSO treated infected cells.

Earlier studies have demonstrated that the possible anti-viral mechanism of ivermectin was through the blockage of viral-protein transportation to the nucleus by inhibiting the interaction between viral protein and α/β1 importin heterodimer, a known transporter of viral proteins to the nucleus especially for RNA viruses19,20,21,22,23. However, in this study, we have reported that ivermectin inhibits the enzymatic activity of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro and thus may potentially inhibit the replication of RNA viruses including SARS-CoV-2. These studies suggest that ivermectin could be a potential drug candidate to inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 replication and the proposed anti-viral mechanism of ivermectin presented in Fig. 8 and in vivo efficacy of ivermectin towards COVID-19 is currently been evaluated in clinical trials (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04438850).

Ivermectin Strong Against Multiple Targets

Inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 key target proteins in comparison with suggested COVID-19 drugs: designing, docking and molecular dynamics simulation study.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Double-click on image to enlarge.

In conclusion, both ivermectin and remdesivir could be considered potential drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Ivermectin efficiently binds to the viral S protein as well as the human cell surface receptors ACE-2 and TMPRSS2; therefore, it might be involved in inhibiting the entry of the virus into the host cell. It also binds to Mpro and PLpro of SARS-CoV-2; therefore, it might play a role in preventing the post-translational processing of viral polyproteins. The highly efficient binding of ivermectin to the viral N phosphoprotein and nsp14 is suggestive of its role in inhibiting viral replication and assembly. Remdesivir may be involved in inhibiting post-entry mechanisms as it shows high binding affinity to N and M proteins, PLpro, Mpro, RdRp, and nsp14. Although the results of clinical trials for remdesivir are promising (Beigel et al., 2020; Wang Y. et al., 2020), similar clinical trials for ivermectin are recommended. Both these drugs exhibit multidisciplinary inhibitory effects at both viral entry and post-entry stages. Source: Molecular Docking Reveals Ivermectin and Remdesivir as Potential Repurposed Drugs Against SARS-CoV-2

Conclusion from John Campbell

So whereas the Pfizer drug is only working as far as we’ve been told in the proviso press release against one biochemical modality of viral replication, the Ivermectin mechanism is working at many different levels. The fact that the the the Pfizer medicine is only working against one particular biochemical pathway means to me that the virus could learn to avoid that. It could evolve to be drug resistant as indeed the early antiretrovirals did with HIV.

With ivermectin, because it’s working on so many different levels, it is improbable, to put it mildly,that a virus would mutate in a dozen different ways to avoid all those different mechanisms. We’ve talked about six mechanisms today. It’s very unlikely that we get six mutations that could dodge all of those all at the same time.

So I’ve a brief message to world leaders, people that are making the decisions about this. Come on you all, you’re not a horse and you’re not a cow. You’ve got a human intellect. Let’s use it to follow the scientific evidence to save human pain, suffering and death.

Footnote:  This video focused on Pfizer’s pill, but Merck’s Molnupiravir pill is also a one-trick-pony.  See Why Merck Dissed Its Own Invention Ivermectin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If CV Vaccines Work, Why Aren’t They Working?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The issue is discussed by Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. in his American Thinker article If the Vaccines Work, Why Aren’t They Working? Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

In the movie Moneyball, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane queries his team of scouts when discussing a prospective player, “If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?” The scouts all have solid explanations, at least in their minds, of why a prospect might be a good hitter, from the sound of the crack of the bat when they hit the ball to the player’s good looks.

These explain why the player should be a good hitter, but what if the numbers, from batting average to on-base percentage, tell a different story? The question Billy poses is obvious in its simplicity, good hitters should hit good. And if they don’t, then perhaps they are not really good hitters.

What if we ask the same question about COVID vaccines, rephrased as “If the vaccines work, why aren’t they working?”

This is the time when I must add the necessary disclaimer that I am not anti-vaccine, having been personally fully vaccinated almost a year ago. Nor am I offering medical advice, only an analysis of current news of COVID cases rising in many highly vaccinated locales, seemingly against common sense.

Some readers have asked why such a disclaimer is necessary. I am a practicing physician, although I don’t treat COVID patients, administer vaccines, or offer medical advice regarding COVID to my retina patients. But today, just having an opinion can be hazardous to one’s livelihood.

The American Federation of Medical Specialists makes it clear, “Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

Hopefully asking thoughtful questions and observing how the medical authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci have changed their own positions on vaccines is not considered “misinformation.” Or that citing the CDC and major news organizations won’t be considered “disinformation.” In the 1950s, x-raying pregnant women was standard practice, and questioning that harmful procedure, were such a thing to be done in the 1950s with today’s climate now might be considered mis- or disinformation.

If you think such medical censorship is all conspiracy theory, ask Dr. Mary Bowden, a Houston ear, nose, and throat specialist suspended from her Houston hospital for tweeting about vaccine mandates and ivermectin.

Back to COVID vaccines: “Safe, Effective and Free”

The CDC website states, “COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and free.” Those three words are all relative. Let’s quickly unpack them.

CV Vaccine Safety

VAERS is the “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.” From their website, one can compare adverse events from COVID vaccines from the past 11 months they have been available to adverse events from all vaccines for the past 30 years, 1990 and onward.

Graph shows VAERS data up to Nov. 12, 2021. Source: https://vaersanalysis.info/2021/11/19/vaers-summary-for-covid-19-vaccines-through-11-12-2021/

Note this is 11 months versus 30 years of side effects and in most categories, the cumulative cases are similar between the two groups, despite a 30-fold time difference of data recording. Of note, hospitalizations, deaths, permanent disabilities, and birth defects were greater for 11 months of COVID vaccines than they were for 30 years of all other types of vaccines – such as shingles, influenza, measles, mumps, hepatitis, and so on.

VAERS is voluntary reporting. For a variety of reasons, all cases do not make it to the VAERS database. How much is this underreporting? VAERS did their own analysis about ten years ago and found, “Fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.” Their words, not mine.

This means adverse events could be happening far more frequently than what we are being told by the corporate media who don’t even report VAERS’s current data. What if these adverse events are 10 or even 100 times more common than VAERS reports? To paraphrase Billy Beane, “If the vaccines are safe, why aren’t they safe?”

CV Vaccine Effectiveness

Are they effective? The CDC answers an emphatic yes,

COVID-19 study shows mRNA vaccines reduce risk of infection by 91 percent for fully vaccinated people. Vaccination makes illness milder, shorter for the few vaccinated people who do get COVID-19.

Does the real world agree and support the CDC’s optimism? Gibraltar is more than fully vaccinated, they are 118 percent vaccinated, meaning that many fully vaccinated have had booster injections too. Yet this headline doesn’t jive with CDC assertions, “Most vaccinated place on Earth told to cancel holiday plans amid an exponential rise in COVID cases.”

Pick another country: “93% vaccinated Ireland has gone into partial lockdown, including midnight curfew.” This recent headline too, “COVID surge in Singapore despite 80 percent vaccination.” Or from the U.K. where the Spectator reported, “The rates of Covid infection per 100,000 are now higher among the vaxxed than the unvaxxed.”

Closer to home it’s much the same, “Vermont has the highest vaccination rate in the country. So why are cases surging?” My home state of Colorado is singing from the same hymnal, “Colorado’s COVID hospitalizations jump again as virus’ statewide death toll surpasses 9,000.” Colorado’s 12 and up population is over 80 percent partially or fully vaccinated.

If these numbers are misinformation, tell that to big media. I am quoting their headlines. Will their licenses be threatened?

Relationship between cases per 1 million people (last 7 days) and percentage of population fully vaccinated across 68 countries as of September 3, 2021

The CDC on its website claims, “Research provides evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing COVID-19.” Yet cases in highly vaccinated locations are surging, now almost two years into the COVID pandemic. As Billy Beane might say, “If the vaccines work, why aren’t they working?”

CV Vaccines Are Free

Last is the “free” claim. Nothing from the government is “free.” Recipients may not be charged but that is not the same as “free.” The government produces nothing and therefore is not able to offer anything for free. They confiscate money from those they lord over and redistribute it back to those from whom they took it.

The Pfizer vaccine costs the government about $20 per dose, with the other COVID vaccines in the same ballpark. Some 445 million doses of vaccine have been administered in the U.S. to date. That’s $9 billion right there. Spending on research and development has been estimated at $40 billion, pushing the total north of $50 billion, and likely much higher given the many hidden or non-transparent costs.

If these numbers seem off, major vaccine maker Pfizer expects $36 billion in COVID vaccine revenues in 2021, in the same range as the above numbers. While the vaccine may be free to the person getting jabbed, someone is paying the tab for the vaccine, syringe, and time of the person administering the shot. It always works that way – nothing is really “free.” As Billy Beane might say, “If the vaccines are free, why do they cost so much?”

There is nothing wrong with the medical establishment saying, “we don’t know” or “we’re not sure” about COVID prognostications, rather than being cocksure about everything until reality turns their pronouncements upside down. Gaslighting the public, being wrong more than right, doesn’t engender confidence.

Those who preach “follow the science” seem to neither understand nor desire to actually follow the science, instead letting politics replace science with our COVID policies often not following the science.

Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged the new vaccine reality in a New York Times podcast last Nov. 12,

“They are seeing a waning of immunity not only against infection but against hospitalization and to some extent death, which is starting to now involve all age groups. It isn’t just the elderly.”

When others observe and acknowledge this reality, they are ostracized and shamed. How long has Dr. Fauci known this? Last May, the CDC said that once vaccinated, you can return to a normal life. How is that working out?

Instead of transparency, we see this, “FDA wants 55 years to process FOIA request over vaccine data.” Is this, “part of the FDA’s commitment to transparency” as the FDA itself claims? This is the same FDA that took only 108 days to review Pfizer’s clinical trial data, deeming it safe and effective enough for FDA approval. But for the public, the FDA needs 20,000 days to “review” the same data before public release.

The published concept of “imperfect vaccinations enhancing the transmission of highly virulent pathogens,” meaning that vaccinating during a pandemic can create new vaccine-resistant virus strains, is never discussed. Neither are off-label therapeutics that while not a panacea, may save lives. Instead, the government and medical establishment balkanized the world, vaccinated versus unvaccinated, us versus them, the worthy versus the lepers, creating further division in an already divided society.

Despite the shaming and ridicule, here we are, almost two years into the COVID pandemic, with a mostly vaccinated population, and hospitals and ICUs are overrun with COVID cases. This pandemic should be in the rearview mirror, yet in some respects, it is bad as it was last year. Leaving Billy Beane to ask, “If the vaccines work, why aren’t they working?”

Footnote: A Major part of the answer is due to Mucosal Immunity