Covid-19

[Tracker]

 

Raccoon Dogs Likely Started COVID-19 Pandemic, New Genetic Analysis Shows

A new analysis of samples collected from a Wuhan seafood market has suggested for the first time a concrete link between some of the wild animals being illegally sold there and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Atlantic reported on Thursday. The evidence points to raccoon dogs as the likely culprit, according to the analysis, which found that the animals may have been carrying and shedding the virus near the end of 2019. The research was conducted by an international team of virologists, genomicists, and evolutionary biologists, according to The Atlantic—and though it’s not 100 percent definitive proof, it’s “a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved in the investigation. “There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.” The magazine’s report comes just days after an Economist/YouGov poll showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans favor the lab leak theory over natural occurrence. It was reported last month that the U.S. Energy Department had concluded—albeit with “low confidence”—that the virus likely emerged from a lab. Intelligence agencies and experts elsewhere remain divided.

[blue_gold_84]

https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2023/04/015.html

Quote

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A study led by University at Buffalo researchers has confirmed that contrary to claims by anti-vaccine proponents, COVID-19 vaccines pose only trivial risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE), or blood clots. In addition, the study found that becoming infected with COVID-19 poses a significant risk of blood clots.

The study was launched in order to investigate whether or not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine put one at higher risk for developing VTE, a claim that had circulated widely on social media and in mainstream media.

The study period ran from Jan. 1, 2020 (just prior to the detection in the U.S. of COVID-19) until March 6, 2022, and was based on data from veterans aged 45 years and older from the Department of Veterans Affairs National Surveillance Tool. The data included 855,686 people who had received at least one dose of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and an unvaccinated control group of 321,676 people

The study found that vaccinated individuals had a VTE rate of 1.3755 per 1,000 people, which is 0.1% over the baseline VTE rate of 1.3741 per 1,000 in unvaccinated people.

“Given the fact that the rate of VTE with COVID-19 is several orders of magnitude greater than the trivial risk from vaccination, our study reinforces the safety and importance of staying current with COVID 19 vaccinations.”

[JCon]

4 minutes ago, blue_gold_84 said:

https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2023/04/015.html

Oh, science and evidence! But, I have it on good authority that it was all fake so that drug companies could kill people or something. 

[HardCoreBlue]

41 minutes ago, JCon said:

Oh, science and evidence! But, I have it on good authority that it was all fake so that drug companies could kill people or something. 

Yes, good authority that has given me a voice Dr. Theo Fleury and Dr. Jamie Sale. 

[Tracker]

HEALTH DRUGSTHE LATEST PROMISING LONG COVID TREATMENT? PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS 

After more than a year of being short of breath, tired, and riddled with heart, motor, cognitive, gastrointestinal, and menstrual issues, Ruth was willing to try anything to make her Long COVID go away. So she turned to psychedelic drugs.

Ruth, 31, who asked to be identified by only her first name, had tried psychedelics a few times in the past and was familiar with the research on their therapeutic use. Feeling like she had nothing to lose, she took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in December 2021.

That single trip changed her life. She woke up the next morning with a normal heart rate, breathing more freely than she had in a long time. After that, her period stabilized and her brain fog and motor dysfunction cleared. She got her energy back. She still has a few lingering symptoms, and though it’s impossible to say for sure what happened, Ruth credits psilocybin for her renewed health. “That’s probably difficult for a lot of people to process or believe,” she says. “But it really worked.”

One person’s dramatic recovery does not prove anything, scientifically. But there’s a growing movement to study whether psychedelic drugs could treat Long COVID, an often-debilitating chronic condition for which there is currently no proven cure.

Psychedelics and Long COVID are a somewhat unlikely match. While there’s been a boom in psychedelic research in recent years, much of it has focused on mental-health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance-use disorder. The research on psychedelics and Long COVID, by comparison, is negligible—and there’s a lot standing in its way. Psychedelic drugs are federally illegal, categorized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as substances with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.

But research is growing.

 

[Bigblue204]

The medical use of psychedelics is just getting started. I'm very hopeful for the future, especially when it comes to mental health issues.

[WildPath]

I am fairly suspicious of making conclusions that it will solve the panacea of symptoms associated with long Covid, especially if it is based on one experience. From what I know about psilocybin, it may have tremendous potential for rewiring the brain for cognitive and mental health issues, but I'm unfamiliar with it having significant effects on heart, gastrointestinal and other health benefits.

That being said, having the potential to address cognitive issues alone would be significant for alleviating long Covid.

[Tracker]

COVID pawsitive: A pilot study successfully used dogs to sniff out COVID-19 in schoolchildren

Not only did dogs excel at screening for COVID-19, but researchers saved on medical waste from antigen tests too.  Dogs at the Miami airport are being trained to sniff out COVID-19. Here's how it works
"While modifications are needed before widespread implementation, this study supports use of dogs for efficient and noninvasive COVID-19 screening and could be used for other pathogens," the researchers stated.

In the paper, the researchers explained that their goal was to use dogs to screen for possible COVID-19 cases, and to only use antigen tests on kids whom the dogs screened as positive. The idea came to Dr. Carol A. Glaser, who works for the California Department of Public Health, when she and her colleagues kept bumping up against all the barriers schools faced to do routine COVID-19 antigen testing.

"It took a lot of personnel time to be able to do those tests because we often relied on teachers or their administrative staff to do it," Glaser told Salon. "It would take the children out of school time, and there was a lot of biomedical waste that was generated."

"So we began to think, 'wouldn't this be great if the dogs could do the initial screening of the students and the staff?'"

Meanwhile, they heard about how dogs could potentially detect COVID-19 in people. Indeed, when a person is infected with the COVID-19, or any disease, it causes metabolic changes that result in the production of something called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). VOCs are often associated with man-made chemicals, and are off-gassed from certain drying paints and lacquers. But volatile organic compounds also scent perfumes, and they are emitted by animals and plants as well. Certain VOCs are expelled from a person's breath and sweat when they have COVID-19, and dogs can be trained to detect such scents.

[Noeller]

so many FB memories lately from the early days of the pandemic.....really wild to think back on and how far we've come since then. What a crazy time. 

[Wideleft]

24 minutes ago, Noeller said:

so many FB memories lately from the early days of the pandemic.....really wild to think back on and how far we've come since then. What a crazy time. 

Hang on to your hat!

 

 

[blue_gold_84]

https://apnews.com/article/who-declares-covid-emergency-over-pandemic-8b6445735df5218b5d9d6ec32fa047ca

Quote

GENEVA (AP) — The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people worldwide.

The announcement, made more than three years after WHO declared the coronavirus an international crisis, offers a coda to a pandemic that stirred fear and suspicion, hand-wringing and finger-pointing across the globe.

The U.N. health agency’s officials said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t ended, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

WHO says thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, and millions of others are suffering from debilitating, long-term effects.

When the U.N. health agency first declared the coronavirus to be an international crisis on Jan. 30, 2020, it hadn’t yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks beyond China.

More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.

 

[Tracker]

Long-sought universal flu vaccine: mRNA-based candidate enters clinical trial.  The phase I trial will test safety and efficacy in a small number of people.

An mRNA-based flu vaccine designed to offer long-lasting protection against a broad range of influenza viruses is now in a phase I clinical trial, the National Institutes of Health announced this week.
The trial brings the remarkable success of the mRNA vaccine platform to the long-standing efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine. Currently, health systems around the globe battle the seasonal scourge with shots that have to be reformulated each year to match circulating strains. This reformulation happens months before typical transmission, providing manufacturers time to produce doses at scale but also giving the strain in circulation chances to shift unexpectedly. If the year's shot is a poor match for the strains that circulate in a given season, efficacy against infection can be abysmal. Still, even when the shot is well-matched, people will need another shot next year.
"A universal influenza vaccine would be a major public health achievement and could eliminate the need for both annual development of seasonal influenza vaccines, as well as the need for patients to get a flu shot each year," Hugh Auchincloss, acting director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a news release. "Moreover, some strains of influenza virus have significant pandemic potential. A universal flu vaccine could serve as an important line of defense against the spread of a future flu pandemic."

A successful design has been elusive. Flu vaccines often generate immune responses to fast-evolving bits of proteins on the outside of flu virus particles, hemagglutinin (Ha or H) and neuraminidase (Na or N). These proteins are responsible for helping the virus break into and out of human cells, respectively, during an infection. Both proteins look a little like lollipops stuck to the outside of the virus particle, with their tops evolving and being prime targets for potent antibodies against the virus.

For the universal vaccine design, NIH researchers have targeted not the tops of these proteins but a portion of the Ha protein's stem—a highly conserved part of the protein that doesn't evolve as quickly. Human antibodies that target this conserved region will likely target Ha proteins from a range of different flu strains in the same class. And, because this section doesn't evolve as quickly, the vaccine could induce long-term immunity. With this design, the mRNA-based vaccine will include a snippet of genetic code in the form of mRNA that gives human cells the blueprints for this conserved stem region. From there, the immune system can learn to target it.

There's already data to suggest this target could work. Before NIH researchers used an mRNA-based design, they developed a similar HA-stem targeting vaccine that appeared safe and effective in a phase I trial. The vaccine uses stabilized protein fragments of the Ha stem stuck to a nanoparticle. Last month, NIH researchers published results showing that this nanoparticle vaccine induced cross-reacting neutralizing antibodies against influenza viruses in the same virus group (H1). And those neutralizing antibodies stuck around for more than a year after vaccination. The vaccine candidate has advanced to a second trial. The researchers are hopeful that having multiple platforms in the works will increase their chances of getting a successful vaccine.

For now, the mRNA-based vaccine is starting with a small trial of just 50 people recruited through partners at Duke University. Three groups of 10 volunteers will get different vaccine doses to find the optimal dose. Once that's found, 10 more will be vaccinated, and their responses will be compared to a 10-person control group that will be given a standard annual flu vaccine.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/05/experimental-universal-flu-vaccine-with-an-mrna-based-design-enters-trial/

[Tracker]

Arizona GOP holds QAnon hearings attempting to expose so-called COVID-19 'atrocities': report

Arizona Senate Republicans began a two-day convening of hearings Thursday morning centered around "supposed 'atrocities' committed by public health officials in response to the Covid-19 pandemic," Rolling Stone reports.

Planned by the newly formed Novel Coronavirus South Western Intergovernmental Committee (NCSWIC), "the QAnon-inflected, anti-vaccine circus" according to Rolling Stone, will involve "appearances from a murderers' row of hard-right federal congressmen, including Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Eli Crane."
Additionally, the publication reports "The NCSWIC committee will take testimony from a panel of notorious doctors who have touted unproven and discredited treatments for Covid — including one doc who preaches that Covid public-health restrictions were, in fact, 'Satan's Wholistic Health Care Plan.'"

In 2021, according to AZCentral, Arizona State GOP Senator Ron Johnson tweeted a false claim saying, "in England, more vaccinated than unvaccinated individuals are succumbing to the disease."

Additionally, Arizona Republican Party Chair Dr. Kelli Ward retweeted the claim.

AZCentral reported, "According to the latest studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention individuals who are unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated," adding, "Likewise, vaccinated individuals are five times less likely to get infected and 10 less likely to end up in the hospital if they do."

[FrostyWinnipeg]

We made it to 500 pages. Good times, good times!

[bustamente]

World wide Covid 19 and it's various mutations is still killing 1 person every 4 minutes 

[JCon]

This thread was supposed to last a couple of months.  

[Super Duper Negatron]

3 years to stop the spread!

[FrostyWinnipeg]

Hey a weekly covid report!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/covid-19-icu-admissions-up-slightly-1.6863606

405 deaths this year

 

[Tracker]

2 hours ago, FrostyWinnipeg said:

Hey a weekly covid report!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/covid-19-icu-admissions-up-slightly-1.6863606

405 deaths this year

 

Probably just a statistical blip, but in the Free Press today, the PCs were challenged on their claim that they have substantially improved hiring of medical staff and lowered wait times for surgeries but have no figures to back that up.

[Tracker]

Doc Who Pushed Bogus COVID Cure Accused of Experimenting on Homeless

A French doctor who popularized the now-discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment for COVID-19 is under fire for an alleged pattern of unauthorized experiments on homeless people.

Didier Raoult, a famed microbiologist who led the IHU Mediterranee research hospital until last year, became an internationally renowned figure in alternative medical circles in the Vaxxer world.

Now French authorities and journalists allege a longer pattern of questionable research by Raoult and his associated institutions, beginning with medical tests on homeless people that might have violated French law.

An investigation by French news magazine Le Point this month alleges that Raoult and colleagues violated the nation’s 1988 Huriet Law establishing rights for participants in biomedical research trials. Scientists quoted in the article argued that Raoult’s team had conducted unauthorized studies while collecting blood samples from homeless people in the 1990s.

The study’s authors declined to comment, but argued in a medical journal discussion site that the trials were legal because they were part of routine medical treatment. Medical experts quoted in Le Point disagreed, citing the fact that the study’s subjects were healthy and didn’t need medical care. “As long as there are healthy volunteers, it can't be health care. So it is research,” one told the magazine.

Questions of medical ethics have followed Raoult since he began offering hydroxychloroquine for COVID patients. In April 2022, a French health agency issued a scathing investigation into a hospital Raoult directed, accusing both of “serious breaches and non-compliance with the regulations for research involving the human person.”

The agency found the research institute to have collected biological samples from patients without proper consent. The report also accused the institute of forging a signature from a member of an ethics committee. The investigations led to sanctions against the research hospital in June 2022.

[Tracker]

RFK Jr.: COVID-19 May Have Been ‘Ethnically Targeted’ to Spare Jews and Chinese

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the conspiracy theorist and longshot 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, told a roomful of press this week that COVID-19 may have been deliberately created as an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews, the New York Post reported. At a press dinner Tuesday night in New York City—which was reportedly derailed by an extended bout of flatulence—RFK Jr. said, “There is an argument that [COVID-19] is ethnically targeted,” adding that the coronavirus “attacks certain races disproportionately.” Getting more specific, the anti-vaccine activist insisted, “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” The Post noted that leaders of both right and left-leaning Jewish organizations had denounced Kennedy’s comments, and quoted an infectious disease expert, who said, “I don’t see any evidence that there was any design or bioterrorism that anyone tried to design something to knock off certain groups.”

 

[SpeedFlex27]

On 2023-04-26 at 9:58 AM, Wideleft said:

Hang on to your hat!

 

 

Sorry, I don't care. Some of you here just refuse to move on. Like it's still 2021 discussing a so called "scary" new sub variant. Get your shots every 6 months & still social distance. Also use hand sanitizer when you're out & about. Quit living in fear. What's next? More mask mandates? Work restrictions? Empty stadiums & arenas?? Restricted travelling by air? Border closures again?? Ain't happening. So, use common sense & live your life.

[Wideleft]

3 hours ago, SpeedFlex27 said:

Sorry, I don't care. Some of you here just refuse to move on. Like it's still 2021 discussing a so called "scary" new sub variant. Get your shots every 6 months & still social distance. Also use hand sanitizer when you're out & about. Quit living in fear. What's next? More mask mandates? Work restrictions? Empty stadiums & arenas?? Restricted travelling by air? Border closures again?? Ain't happening. So, use common sense & live your life.

Easy to be a Monday morning quarterback 3 months later.  Check the posting date.

[SpeedFlex27]

14 hours ago, Wideleft said:

Easy to be a Monday morning quarterback 3 months later.  Check the posting date.

 Just use common sense taking precautions & live your life.

Edited July 18, 2023 by SpeedFlex27

[SpeedFlex27]

On 2023-05-25 at 7:23 PM, bustamente said:

World wide Covid 19 and it's various mutations is still killing 1 person every 4 minutes 

Considering we have 8 billion souls on this planet, it's not surprising. Covid 19 is no longer the killing machine it once was like in late 2019, 2020 & 21.