Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

some 40 years ago I took a flu shot and got sick as the proverbial dog. I have not taken a shot since and also have not had the flu (just lucky I guess). I have been a bit hesitant about taking any of the vaccines until I learned about the mRNA vaccines. I believe these will work for me, so am waiting patiently for my turn ... of course I may be on the other side of the 140M people who have compromised health conditions, despite my age. I am patient.

I suspect that all the leading vaccines will work about the same, because they are all based on the virus RNA sequence the Chinese published back in January. Moderna, Pfizer, and Oxford vaccines all makes antibodies to exactly the proteins made from the gene they included. Older techniques, like attenuated or killed virus vaccines, seem quite dangerous in retrospect because they can make antibodies against a lot more proteins. Chances are higher that one of those antibodies might act against something that is part of the human body.

The Oxford vaccine can also make antibodies against the carrier: A chimpanzee adenovirus. But that adenovirus has been modified so it can't reproduce beyond the injected amounts, so the body should make a lot less antibodies to it than to the SARS-COV2 spike protein created in the human cells. Still, the mRNA technique seems a bit cleaner to me.

The concern about making antibodies to human proteins is not groundless: Toxic shock victims were immunized against the pathogen during a period. During their next period, they started cranking out antibodies against the pathogen that cross reacted with human proteins. A lot of them ended up with lupus or MS.

I'm thinking I'll get the Moderna vaccine in a few months, after a few million people get it. But my wife and I are in a very safe and comfortable situation, being retired with steady income and a fenced and gated property. We also may be immune from mild cases in March, and are taking or have everything to treat in-home cases. All we have to do is handle deliveries carefully, and we both know sterile technique. I realize most people are not in that situation.

Dr. Pierre Kory testified today before a Senate committee about his fantastic success treating many hundreds of Covid-19 patients with ivermectin. He really lit into the NIH, FDA, and CDC for ignoring mountains of evidence including random clinical trials with incredible results of both prophylaxis and early treatment. He asked they review his own paper on a preprint server that is being peer reviewed now.

He had one example of a study in Argentina where 800 frontline medical workers took ivermectin and a control group of medical workers did not. ZERO of the ivermectin group got sick. 58% of the control group got sick. That's 100% effective! Better than any of the current vaccines.

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This is a link to a Peak Prosperity video where a doctor is talking about his previous day's ivermectin video that got removed by YouTube because it goes against WHO recommendations. He has excerpts of Dr. Kory's testimony.

Re-examined bat tissue collected 10 years ago finds SARS-CoV-2 like virus in Cambodian bats.

Researchers from the Pasteur Institute (yes in France) sampled living bats in Southern China and Laos and sequenced all their corona viruses. Just about every segment of SARS-COV2 RNA was found in one or more of those 15 wild viruses. Recombination happens all the time in these bat corona viruses, and they figured out the five recombinations needed to make SARS-COV2. They have not found one bat with SARS-COV2, but they have found all the parts needed to make it. That's probably because they only sampled a few of the millions of bats living there.

TWIV reviewed an interesting paper investigating the origins of the outbreak. It probably happened when an infected racoon-dog was brought to the live animal market. Then it spilled over into a human and went community-wide. Lots of the first found cases were connected to the market, but since so many cases were asymptomatic, the first hospitalized case noticed in early December was not the real spillover case. Or it might have spilled over into a hunter or animal transporter that got it to the market.

Spillovers happen when a human gets infected with an animal virus, and then a small mutation makes the new variant much better adapted to human-to-human transmission. We know corona viruses mutate often because RNA replication is subject to so many errors. I heard it may require over 500 replications just to get a single unmodified copy! That means SARS-COV2 mutates all the time, but almost all new variants are garbage.

It may be a shame we politicized therapeutics for treatment with this bug. No contact tracing, waste water sampling, addressing hvac at a national level in the year since dealing with this, what now appears to be, endemic.
Now comes omicron variant and it may well put us back to the begenning. No effective vaccine (not that the mRNA were all that effective in stopping the spread). With Dem Corp doubling down on authoritarian mandates while playing fealty to big Pharma we are in a worse position than when the pandemic began.
I hope Omicron is not as deadly and we catch a break but if past performance is indicative of future response, I’m not optimistic. A divide and conquer political strategy by our two rightwing political factions have done a wonderful job of rendering any public institutions impotent with little institutional capacity. That is, any public institutions that haven’t been quasi privatized or captured by private interest. CDC comes to mind here.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst as they say. Stay safe everyone. Wish we had a government that had its peoples interest.

Top 10% is better than nothing, eh? Cue the claim that Dems have America's interests at heart in 3...2...1...

But the Reeps most certainly do not!

We?!? Pretty sure that Trump and his Rightwing cohorts did that.

Commentary regarding this morning's Fox and Friends Weekend:

PIA's post from the Round Table:

Of course, all of that is Fox BS, but so many Republicans refusing vaccinations might just change the demographics by November 2022 to flip a lot of toss-up races. It's rarely discussed in the media, but the last I heard Republicans are dying at about four times the rate of Democrats. They didn't say anything about Independents. I would guess they might be more vaccine-hesitant than anti-vax, but the result is the same. The virus doesn't care.

Several races around the country were decided by a few thousand votes. A few Republicans actually did vote for dead relatives. I assume all the Republican-sponsored voting restrictions will prevent them doing that next time around. That's besides all the stuff Republicans have been doing recently to make sure no People of Color vote for them, or people who believe in democracy, or people who believe in The Rule of Law, or people who are pissed off about huge tax cuts for the rich.

I should stop posting such off-topic stuff, but I think the most lethal contribution to the Covid death rate has now become the insane politicization of vaccination.