Goddess

Short version: My computer crashed in the middle of this post and then I kind of forgot about it. I didn't get to explain that the bottom numbers are REVERSED and include links to individual country's excess deaths that verify the chart. I don't know when I'll get back to this, sorry. My former husband (we were still good friends) recently had a heart attack at work and passed away after 10 days in hospital in Thunder Bay, where he was airlifted. I was with him for that time. He was 48. They could not find a reason for the heart attack - no blockages, no issues with his heart, nothing. The doctor said there was no medical reason why his heart just stopped. I'll be taking a break for a bit longer. He was still my best friend and I had just spoken to him 2 days before it happened.

Goddess stopped spoon-feeding lazy people who aren't interested.

Read the article. Read up on immunology/vaccinology/epidemiology/immunology. If everyone at least tried to have a basic knowledge of these things, we wouldn't get konked over the head by money-grubbing, fear mongerers and loaded onto the Panic Train. Sorry but you have proved to be one who likes to squawk a lot but still remain ignorant. I've lost patience with your ilk. Now you'll have to find answers to your questions on your own. But I think you don't REALLY want answers. Just enjoy squawking. I'm not even sure you have the brain power to understand the above article, which is why you didn't read it and just showed up here to squawk.

Weird. It's the third topic down when I use the search bar.

Ya, I know. You keep saying that. Me - no jabs. No covid. In spite of constant exposure to it from.....vaccinated people.

Not surprised. I read the Cochrane paper encompassing a cohort of 50,000 health care workers, which showed the more jabs you got, the more times you got covid. And all the studies that show they degrade your immune system to the point it's in the negatives by the third shot. I'll wave while you go speeding by on that Panic Train.

This forum is not. Search bar.

Probably true. Look at the "Bring back masks" rally held in Vancouver. They physically attacked counter protesters. Coronamaniacs are not sane.

Not a super Trump fan here, but he was more right on covid than others were: He just didn't want to build or ride a Panic Train.

I dunno. How do you not know how to use a search bar?

This won't be good news for those who love riding the Panic Train and visiting all the Mandate cars, but here is what Dr. Byram Bridle has to say about the new variant: A friend asked for my opinion about a story that was just published. Rather than provide only him with an answer, I figured that others might benefit from the insights of a viral immunologist who specializes in vaccinology, and that has been on the front lines of COVID-19 science since the beginning. Here is my take… The story was given the title “This Fall's Covid Variant Might Really Be Different“. It could just as easily have been entitled “This Fall's Covid Variant Might Not Be Different in Any Meaningful Way“. BA.2.86, also known as ‘pirola’ (named after an asteroid near the planet Venus), is the newest variant of SARS-CoV-2 (the causative agent of the disease we call ‘COVID-19’). This new variant is ‘under monitoring’. This quote from the paper suggests that the virus is not highly transmissible and/or it is not particularly dangerous. A highly transmissible virus that is in 12 people sprinkled around the world would be capable of spreading rapidly. I suspect that it has likely spread much more than what is currently appreciated, but it is not causing substantial disease, so nobody really cares enough to get tested. A dangerous virus would be easily detected and would prompt testing because it would be causing severe disease and death, which could not be missed. This sentence alone alleviates concerns about this variant of SARS-CoV-2. An accumulation of mutations in the spike protein are exactly what we would expect. After all, the COVID-19 shots only target the spike protein. It is one of the poor design features of these shots. The COVID-19 shots do not come anywhere close to conferring immunity against infection with nor transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Applying a non-lethal selective pressure against a single protein from a virus is the perfect recipe for promoting the emergence of naturally occurring variants that have changed the target protein enough to facilitate long-term survival of the virus. Of course new variants will be better able to escape historical immunity. However, the reporter failed to disseminate important information here. Naturally acquired immunity is superior to the sub-par immune responses induced by outdated COVID-19 shots. Importantly, naturally acquired immune responses target multiple components of SARS-CoV-2, not just the spike protein. A person with naturally acquired immunity will have both antibodies and T cells that can kill SARS-CoV-2 by virtue of recognizing things other than the spike protein. So, it will be more difficult for new variants to completely evade naturally acquired immunity. It would be expected that those who only have had immune responses induced by the COVID-19 shots will be more susceptible to getting infected and will be prone to more severe illness than people with naturally acquired immunity. Also, this cycle of ever-emerging new variants of a virus is not new. It occurs with every cold-causing virus. People get infected, mount an effective immune response and then are protected until the virus has changed enough to cause mild disease again. This has been happening our entire lives. With pathogens that are not particularly serious, they key is to not allow your immunity to get outdated by isolating yourself from the microbial world. This is likely a key reason why many people, especially children, got so sick with so many pathogens once they were released from their long-term COVID-19 lockdown prisons. Another point missed in the article is that too many mutations in the protein that is needed for a virus to infect cells can lead to reduced infectivity, making it less transmissible and less dangerous. I can almost guarantee that the new COVID-19 shots that will be released in the Fall will fail at least as badly as their predecessors. They keep targeting versions of the spike protein that are largely extinct. Also, the technology has not come close to fulfilling the definition of an ideal vaccine. The rollout of COVID-19 shots that are outdated and based on a fundamentally flawed technology are almost certainly a key reason why SARS-CoV-2 is mutating far faster than the average coronavirus. This vicious cycle needs to stop before the people pushing these shots are successful at forcing mutations that result in a genuinely dangerous version of SARS-CoV-2. and Being different doesn’t equate with being a substantial problem. Any new variant of any virus has the theoretical potential to cause more severe symptoms, if it even causes disease in the first place. Nobody needs to be concerned about a theoretical issue when the preliminary data already suggest the virus is not particularly dangerous. The people who would likely be at risk of more severe symptoms would be those whose immune responses were induced by COVID-19 shots only, since the can only target the protein that has mutated in this variant. The rest of the virus will not have changed much, meaning that broad-based naturally acquired immunity will keep many people disease-free and blunt the severity of any disease that might develop. The good news is that almost every person on earth will likely have some form of naturally acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2 by now (although data suggest this is likely sub-par for those who got COVID-19 shots before being infected). and All references to ‘cases’ in this story are based on testing. Note that they do not even refer to these as cases of COVID-19; just “cases of BA.2.86”. Some people who get infected with SARS-CoV-2 go on to develop the disease that we call COVID-19, many do not. If these were severe cases involving hospitalization and death, this would have been reported. The fact that the fear mongering that we have come to expect from mainstream media could not be easily infused into this text suggests that infections to date have likely led to only mild disease, if any disease at all. Wastewater testing certainly cannot identify cases of disease. ‘Jetelina’ is an epidemiologist who, with all due respect, lacks sufficient training in immunology, especially the sub-discipline of vaccinology, and virology to be accurately educating the public about this topic. This scientist has provided information that is misleading. A new variant that has dramatically changed its spike protein will not be able to achieve equal escape from antibodies induced by ‘vaccines’ versus previous infections. It will much more easily escape from those induced by the COVID-19 shots because they ONLY target the spike protein. Those with naturally acquired immunity have antibodies targeting other viral proteins that have not changed substantially. Further, T cells don’t only protect against severe disease. T cells are perfectly capable of outright protecting against disease through a form of immunity that we call ‘near-sterilizing immunity’; where infection can occur, but the virus is cleared rapidly enough by T cells to avoid the onset of disease. Finally, if this epidemiologist has dampened concern about the Pirola variant being able to escape from T cells induced by COVID-19 shots, then they should be much less concerned for those with naturally acquired immunity who have T cells against an array of proteins in SARS-CoV-2. ‘Bloom’ is a virologist. The implication here is that the Pirola variant might result in a substantial new wave of infections. I agree. But, what was left out is the fact that Omicron was not dangerous for most people; and Pirola is likely less dangerous, especially for those with naturally acquired immunity. Omicron had the potential to be dangerous in the people who are typically at elevated risk for any infectious pathogen (like the frail elderly and the immunosuppressed), with the exception of very young children that have a unique biology that makes it difficult for SARS-CoV-2 to get into their bodies (other pathogens can be more dangerous in very young kids because they have underdeveloped immune systems). So far, it looks like Pirola might cause a typical wave of the common cold. It might spread to a lot of people like most cold-causing viruses do, and for most, it will cause mild, if any, disease. High risk individuals should take the precautions they normally would in any ‘cold and flu season’ (more aptly dubbed the ‘low vitamin D season’ by many immunologists); stay away from people who are sick and sick people stay at home, with a special emphasis on avoiding the people who are at elevated risk. (As an additional health tip, get your blood tested for vitamin D concentrations and consider supplementing with vitamin D (and some vitamin K) if needed; research suggests that optimal immunological functioning requires vitamin D to be at or above 50 ng/mL.) Wow, it took three years, but more people are recognizing the truth that many of us were shouting from the rooftops; that naturally acquired immunity is a valid form of immunity. And, as we know from a ‘Mount Everest’-sized body of scientific literature, it offers better protection than what COVID-19 shots can confer. It is too bad this wasn’t recognized prior to forcing lots of people out of their jobs; and doing horrific things like denying transplants to people that had proof of robust naturally acquired immunity but lacked certification of a needle being placed into the shoulder, which, at best, could induce sub-optimal immune responses and in some cases, no response at all. This statement in the news article wrongly implies that nobody had any relevant immunity when SARS-CoV-2 burst on the scene. This is a lie that many people have propagated. SARS-CoV-2 is called a coronavirus because of its similarity to other coronaviruses. It is more similar to other coronaviruses than it is different. Many people had pre-existing immunity against historical coronaviruses that cross-reacted to some degree with SARS-CoV-2. For many people, this is why they never experienced COVID-19 after getting infected with SARS-CoV-2, and why many others had substantially blunted disease. Never again should the value of naturally acquired immunity be dismissed. It is fascinating that they want to lay the blame on an immunocompromised person. The concept here is that an immunocompromised person cannot, obviously, respond effectively to any vaccine (or infection). As such, they can never mount more than a sub-optimal immune response; one that usually fails to stop the acquisition of a disease and transmission of the causative agent. What was left out here is that this is precisely what happens in almost every HEALTHY person that received a COVID-19 shot. There is zero evidence that the immunocompromised are to blame for this; it is pure speculation. The reality is that the massive number of healthy people that got COVID-19 shots that could not induce immunity represent a more than adequate population to incubate and spread novel variants of SARS-CoV-2. What this biology indicates is that those with naturally acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2 are the least likely to promote the emergence of new variants. These are the safest people to be around. ‘Gregory’ is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in studying the genomes (genetic blueprints) of animals like insects, spiders, crustaceans, molluscs, echinoderms, and annelids. Why he was interviewed for a story focused on placing a novel virus variant into the broader context of vaccines and naturally acquired immunity is beyond me. He has been active in attacking real experts who have continually spoken proven truths far before he could understand them. The comment about a pathogen potentially being more common than what low surveillance efforts imply is obvious yet practically meaningless. I don’t understand why one would increase surveillance efforts for a variant that is so anemic that the only way to appreciate its presence is through the widespread use of poorly calibrated PCR tests that cannot differentiate infectious versus non-infectious viruses. If people aren’t getting sick from a new variant, then I can guarantee that our medical resources can be put to much better use against serious health problems that are always prevalent (like cancers, autoimmune diseases, the opioid crisis, mental health issues, COVID-19 shot-induced side effects, etc.). Increasing surveillance for a virus that is not showing signs of being dangerous could lead to something that we have seen way too much of; a bunch of data that can be misused by people for fear-mongering purposes. Experts in the relevant disciplines who have integrity and are willing to discuss differences of opinions should be interviewed for these kinds of stories. An overly superficial understanding of immunology too often results in misinterpretations of data and/or failure to place data into a proper context. In turn, this has led to a lot of unnecessary and unjustified fear-mongering over the past couple of years. I’m not sure why there has been such a paucity of interviews with immunologists for these kinds of news stories related to immune responses against SARS-CoV-2. New strains of viruses do not pop out of nowhere. More likely, they are derived from biological systems that are exerting non-lethal selective pressures on them. At the top of this list are those whose immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 were induced only via COVID-19 shots. If you want to slow the emergence of new variants, STOP THE SHOTS! Stop putting those of us who know better at risk of getting exposed to a genuinely very dangerous version of SARS-CoV-2. Similarly, stop manufacturing viruses like SARS-CoV-2 in labs; they have not gone through the same selective pressures that naturally occurring viruses have. I agree. There are much more concerning medical issues to tackle. So many ‘experts’ want to keep their finger near the ‘fear trigger’. An equally valid way of stating this is, “But that doesn’t mean it can’t mutate to be even less capable of spreading at some point“. If we really want to reduce the chance of dangerous mutations occurring in SARS-CoV-2, STOP THE SHOTS! In closing, my expert opinion matches that of Dr. David Dowdy… This kind of logic seems rare these days and is so very welcome. I couldn’t agree more.

There are a multitude of studies that show lockdowns had a neglible benefit - "at best, small" - namely. 0.2%. And the harmful effects far outweighed the neglible benefit. There are 78 studies on masks, including a definitive Cochrane review of over a million people, that show the same for masks - neglible benefit with harmful effects far outweighing any benefit. This is why Eyeball makes statements like "Lockdowns wère great and we need to lockdown harder and longer." with zero proof. There is none. He's repeating CBC talking points from 3 years ago. It's not me who is not following the science. Please read all the studies and datasets I've posted on the Trickle thread. Because they're going to bring it all back. It's starting again. People like Eyeball are DANGEROUS. We all must not comply this time. If you complied in the past but were silently not agreeing, you must stand this time with those of us who have been standing all along. Do not comply. Our lives, our children's lives depend on it. Demand the science. Read the studies. I cant believe the amount of disinformation in this thread.

No it wasn't.

From Dr. Colleen Huber's book: RE: The Spanish Flu Let’s first dispense with a misconception. The so-called Spanish flu was neither Spanish nor the flu. Spain had declined to suppress news stories of the sudden increases in non-combat deaths as World War I drew to a close. This was as other countries had chosen to suppress such news stories, presumably in order to maintain public morale. Unlike other western European countries, Spain remained neutral in World War I. US, British, French and German troops were deployed widely, as far away as Asia and Africa, and it was conceivable to the reasonable mind that the new outbreak of flu was being carried by all this travel, although the media of the combatant countries were reluctant to report such means of contagion. (However, we shall see below that such transmission was more likely bacterial than viral.) In the UK, newspapers were prohibited by the 1914 Defense of the Realm Act from discussing any details of the new contagious pandemic. This article discusses that censorship. Neither did the influenza originate in Spain, nor was it nearly as bad there as in other countries, in terms of morbidity or mortality. Rather, the Spanish were the first to report it, and without motive to censor it, and so that name stuck. That 1918-1919 flu was not nearly so deadly as cholera, a bacteria-borne infectious disease that devastated New York City a number of times in the previous century. 1832 and 1849 saw mass deaths and exodus from Manhattan, as sanitation infrastructure had not yet developed to keep up with a skyrocketing population; the city’s burgeoning sewers were reservoirs of this fecal-carried bacterial disease. The following New York Times graph shows how deadly cholera was. Despite the graph’s caption, the deaths were mostly due to cholera; there was little smallpox in NYC at the time. It was not for another half century that clean water would be brought from the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, and 6,000 miles of sewers were built to carry away waste. Boris Borovoy and I argued in December 2020 that it is always necessary to look at all-cause mortality as necessary to put a pandemic’s alleged lethality into perspective. As the following graph shows, COVID took the death rate in New York City back to about the 1950 to 1990 level, which was strangely enough an era when people were not panicking about the typical 1 in 100 annual death rate, and that time has even been considered the heyday of US prosperity and quality of life. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/nyregion/nyc-covid-deaths.html US mortality data show that clean water, indoor plumbing, effective sewage routing all made the difference to decisively reduce infectious disease deaths to a small fraction of earlier, and that this change occurred before the disease-named vaccines came into common use. The WHO acknowledged this pivotal role of sanitation before they removed that page. Share Nor was the “Spanish flu” primarily an influenza pandemic 20 million to 100 million deaths were blamed on the so-called Spanish flu, depending on who retells the history. The CDC’s official story was that it was thought to be an H1N1 strain of influenza. However, you may already know that in those same years, 1918-1919, the newly invented wonder drug aspirin was often generously dosed at over 1,000 mg, which people learned a bit too late to be a potentially lethal dose, an imminent risk for internal bleeding. Reye’s syndrome, a toxicity cause by excessive aspirin, mainly affecting brain and liver, is a result of dosing aspirin at 25 mg/kg, or about 1500 mg for an adult of that era. At peak pandemic fear, a London doctor “drenched” his patient at 1300 mg per hour for 12 hours, which was similar to widespread dosing given less frequently according to the British Ministry of Health. There are four lines of evidence that support the role of salicylate intoxication in the 1918 flu pandemic. Pharmacokinetics is one. This assesses dosing with respect to clearance of a drug from the body. In the case of zealous dosing of aspirin, a state of toxicity is quickly reached, before much of the drug is eliminated. Of that era’s aspirin enthusiasm, Karen Starko writes, “These recommended doses (1000-1300 mg), with frequencies ranging from hourly to every 3 hours, resulting in daily doses of 8-31.2 grans, are above the maximum safe doses….” Meningococcus vaccine experiment on US soldiers Also, at the time there were experiments with typhoid, paratyphoid and meningococcus vaccines, beginning with the military. The meningococcus vaccine, which had been cultured in horses, was one of a number of previously developed vaccines that were used in US troops at Fort Riley, Kansas in a military vaccination experiment in 1917-1918. The ambitious goal had “the object of producing a serum which would protect against any pathogenic strain that might be encountered,” according to Dr. Frederick Gates in his report of the experiment. As dosing ramped up in the experiment, more and more severe reactions, both local and general, were reported. Within a few months, 100 men per day were showing up at the infirmary. Some of the first to take ill described a “bad cold.” Experiment-stricken soldiers were reported to have flu-like symptoms, coughs, vomiting, diarrhea. Fort Riley soon became the place where the first “Spanish flu” case was reported. Many new vaccines were also deployed on the public during this same 1918-1919 period. Then as now, vaccine naming and manufacture sloppily associated the new products with known diseases, more or less. “Drug manufacturers aggressively promoted their stock vaccines for colds, grippe and flu. These vaccines were of undisclosed composition. As public anxiety and demand swelled, there were complaints of price gouging and kickbacks,” according to John M Eyler, PhD, The State of Science, Microbiology and Vaccines circa 1918, also citing S Haythorn, Studies on epidemic influenza comprising clinical and laboratory investigations… Eyler’s paper is a revealing exposé of the hucksterism and opportunistic re-branding of old vaccines to address new fears that more brazenly characterized vaccine salesmanship in the 1918-1919 “pandemic” than today’s more sophisticated attempts and science veneer polishing, in order to market pandemics and vaccines in recent decades. Dr. Gates, who reported on the Fort Riley experiments, in his paper on that vaccine experiment described soldiers’ symptoms after injections as follows: “Several cases of looseness of the bowels or transient diarrhea were noted. This symptom had not been encountered before. Careful inquiry in individual cases often elicited the information that men who complained of the effects of vaccination were suffering from mild coryza, bronchitis, etc. at the time of injection. Sometimes the reaction was initiated by a chill or chilly sensation, and a number of men complained of fever or feverish sensations during the following night. Next in frequency came nausea (occasionally vomiting), dizziness, and general ‘aches and pains’ in the joints and muscles…. The reactions, therefore, occasionally simulated the onset of epidemic meningitis ….” As World War I wound down, and the injected soldiers returned home about 10 months after the experiment, they carried “colonizing strains of bacteria, particularly pneumococci, hemolytic streptococci, H. influezae and S. aureus.” The Rockefeller Institute had prepared the horse-serum meningitis vaccine that was used on the soldiers, and then distributed the bacterial mixture to England, France Belgium, Italy and other countries. It was promoted urgently, using the pandemic fear zeitgeist, of which we are all now too familiar once again, in order to boost sales and uptake of this highly poisonous vaccine that was both named for and contained contaminants of meningococcus. Secondary bacterial pneumonia drove many COVID-19 deaths, which were found to exceed viral-caused deaths, researchers found, although the two causes were not always easy to sort out. In 2008, Anthony Fauci’s team found this same cause of death, bacterial pneumonia, in every cadaver examined from the 1918 - 1919 “Spanish” flu pandemic, in their evaluation of autopsies of 9,000 subjects’ tissue. Those two periods, 1918-1919 and 2020-2021 had another feature in common. They were the only times in US history that a majority of people wore masks. My research team, an epidemiologist, a microbiologist and I, showed in 2020 that masks have the effect of incubating bacteria to quickly expanding colonies on the inside surface of facemasks and in the warm, moist airspace between a mask and the airways. Welcome, bacteria; here’s your comfortable home. Worse yet, the air hunger resulting from stifled breathing causes more labored and deeper inhalation, which drives bacterial overgrowth deeper into the lungs than an unmasked person would experience. Reuters disagreed Reuters criticized our reporting of this association, by using a sly strawman argument: “Fact check: Fauci did not attribute 1918 Spanish flu deaths to bacterial pneumonia caused by masks,” and showed my tweet on the subject. That’s correct, Reuters. Fauci did not make that connection. It was our research team who made that connection between masks and bacterial pneumonia deaths. Fauci merely reported that “Spanish flu” mortality, which was at the time, and in the century since then, blamed on an H1N1-type influenza, was in fact more likely to be the result of bacterial pneumonia. We took that finding a step farther and indicated the known widespread use of facial bacteria-incubating devices at that time. We opined that this potential contributor to bacterial pneumonia deaths was not only the case in 1918-1919, but likely made at least some contribution to mortality that was blamed on SARS-CoV-2 infection.