I just can not understand the level of incompetency from our government and our media. Every single day I read articles like - There's a new version of omicron but so far it doesn't appear to be more dangerous..and Vaccinated and had COVID? You have immunity 'superpowers,' experts say.
BA2 is INDEED more dangerous. And it's already split off into version 2.2. Which is what is killing literally everyone in Hong Kong. Team "nothing matters until people die" are going to get their wish. Now, I know Team Minimalist is going to say... mew.. there are tons of old people in Hong Kong. Despite them being spared from every other wave. You know who else has a lot of old people ? America.
Heard immunity IS STILL A LIE. And now they are saying v2.2 is the most killery version they have seen yet. I predict this wave is going to be the worst because literally everyone has dropped their guard. Last Nov. everyone dropped masks too, except in office settings. Oh you didn't hear people were massless last year and literally no on cared? (I'm talk to you Republicans)This year, most people in office setting are not wearing masks. And I get it. I know very fine people who have already had this run through their entire family and think they know what to expect.
Last night someone on twitter someone said - you better hope zero Covid works because if not, that means that let it rip and zero Covid didn't work. People on my feed for a long time have wondered about this being an ELE event. Because literally almost no one can figure out how to wear masks right. Or at all.
Snark - if herd immunity doesn't work and the vaccines don't work, then we are in for a world of hurt. It won't take too many years of this bioweapon clipping the population by 3 - 5 percent per year to collapse everything.
ReplyDeleteIt won't be as fast as events in "The Stand" or "The Year of the Jackpot", but, Sweetie, the end result will be the same.
BunnyGoat
It feels worse when I see it outside of my own head. But... what are we up to now? A million or close dead. I stopped watching. And everyone wonders why we have a worker shortage. I'm sure they were just all olds who didn't contribute to society or anything.
ReplyDeleteHong Kong has no herd immunity. They came probably as close as possible to zero covid for a very long time with very few (comparatively) cases to spread natural immunity, and now they're paying for it. Add in a less than stellar vax rollout (they're not heavily vaxed due to a mixture of politics and a thought process of "hey we kept covid out so we don't need it") and yup, they're through the roof, and experiencing actual hospital overload. Doesn't really matter WHICH variant they have, they're fucked till they can get people to vaccinate. Course, by this time the only vaccines out there are for the original variant and how much thats going to continue to work as it continues to mutate, well, don't hold your breath.
ReplyDeleteimma note though, your two graphs aren't really comparable. The S Korea graph is at a (not) whopping number of 5 per million, yes its climbing, but respiratory viruses spike seasonally, that's normal, 5 per mill isn't really that high. The HK graph is much more painful, but like I said, its the end result of forcibly attempting zero covid AND not vaccinating.
I'm also going to note that living in a state of constant freak out does really really bad things for your immune system and body in general. Making it far more likely that at whatever point you DO get covid (cause you will, now or later it will happen) you're more likely to have trouble with it.
And yes, for the record I had it. I worked straight through '20, face to face with the dirty general public, and never got so much as a sniffle. Finally came up positive for Thanksgiving'21. Wasn't fun, but I've been sicker too.
There is no herd immunity from a virus made in a lab. There is only temporary vaccine immunity that lasts 3-4 months. Even infection doesn't illicit wide spread immunity depending on which virus or how severe you got it.
ReplyDeleteI would say that if people were living anything close to a constant freak out - we wouldn't be in this position right now. Every time someone says - don't panic- I laugh because I have never seen so little of panic in a herd in my life.
Snark - for your review
ReplyDeletehttps://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-covid-vaccine-era-is-ending-already?s=r
BunnyGoat
That article bums me out. I wanted more than anything for the vaxes to work. Even though I am not vaccinated.
ReplyDeleteVaccination is suppose to be exposure without harm. But doctors seem to have taken the position that whatever harm the vaxes do, it doesn't matter because Covid does worse stuff. Which is true - but not good enough.
It's not anti vax to hope and wait for better therapeutics or vaccines. But we are now stuck in 1970's land, and I just don't know how they are going to get people to vaccinate 4 times a year. And even worse, there are suggestions that infection and exposure is causing immune exhaustion.
I haven't blogged about it yet because it's hard to line everything up so it makes sense.
It's just sad. People think they are prepping their immune systems to fight this thing, and honestly to little benefit.
Did my comment go poof? Yay?
ReplyDeleteNatural immunity from infection is absolutely a thing. Charting (lab confirmed) reinfection after (lab confirmed) prior infection shows that people with prior infections are less likely to get sick again, and if they do its more likely to be less severe. Vax or two AND (lab confirmed) prior infection might be just slightly better. But prior infection provides longer lasting immunity than just vax.
And we're not clipping even 2% of the world's population no matter how much they inflate the numbers for the media.
Cdc says there have been 974,550 covid deaths in the USA
USA's total population: 329.5mill
For a total of 0.28%
Worldwide? 6.1 mill deaths
Worldwide population: 7.9billion
For a number of 0.08% of the population.
Now, could the numbers of deaths be off? Sure, especially in the 3rd world countries. But here in the USA they keep discovering the opposite.
MA just "discovered" that they were counting ANY death, where there was a positive covid teast within 60 days, as a covid death, regardless of the actual circumstances. Ooops.
And the CDC? Well, they just reduced the pediatric count by 24% due to a "coding error". They just happened to be counting non-covid deaths as covid deaths. Ooops.
And speaking of immune exhaustion, what do you think repeated vaxing with an out of date strain is going to do? Meanwhile your immune system is MEANT to handle small doses of normally passed along germs, doing so allows it to stay functional and up to date. And failure to let this happens causes problems. We've known this for YEARS. But here we are, relearning it the hard way, as everyone freaks out because they caught the cold from hell as they emerge from seclusion.
Well... I'm happy that you at least think the virus is real now. ~That's real progress.~
ReplyDelete"Natural immunity from infection is absolutely a thing. "
But, no. This is NOT a thing. I'm sorry Baby. It's not. Natural immunity gives you slightly longer protection. But it is ALL still temporary immunity. The US has refused to count reinfections the whole pandemic because they said it couldn't happen. Other countries tell the whole story.
"Vax or two AND (lab confirmed) prior infection might be just slightly better."
No.. and NO.
"And we're not clipping even 2% of the world's population no matter how much they inflate the numbers for the media."
I honestly don't get why people are so invested in saying only a small percentage of people who have died. My Aunt died last year (not from Covid) and I wake up every single day thinking about it. If it's your family it hurts. Every single day. You are never going to get me to say only this amount of people died because we used to be a country that saved people from illnesses that few had. Mostly I hope that people are treated with the same respect they have given others. Which is not much.
Additionally I'm getting super tired of people cherry picking the CDC data. They are the most incompetent agency on the planet. They are wrong so often I don't use ~any~ of their data. It is pretty much all faulty. Good bad or otherwise.
"And speaking of immune exhaustion, what do you think repeated vaxing with an out of date strain is going to do? "
I KNOW! That's what I have been trying to say for more than a year?! I don't know what part about my articles when I say vexed and infected are getting similar problems is not coming across? Both of these thing are causing immune exhaustion.
"as everyone freaks out because they caught the cold from hell as they emerge from seclusion."
I know this is a Republican talking point, but it bothers me so much. You work at a big box store! You know with your OWN EYES, this is not true. But people keep repeating it to try and put others down because they are apparently pussies. Or do you think only the big box stores in republican areas were packed and causing extreme restocking?
This is NOT a normally passed along germ. IT's a LAB created germ. Which does a lot of damage to people bodies.
"But it is ALL still temporary immunity ..."
ReplyDeleteNo, there's temporary immunity caused by surviving exposure, and then there's permanent immunity caused by pre-existing genetic structure.
The latter is relatively rare.
But the survivor population makes me even more certain that C19 was an engineered pathogen with specific intended results.
Note that this kind of different genetic expression of that particular gene is not the same as loss-of-function which is present in some species related to humans.
The gene functions, but it functions differently and in a way where it doesn't present a significant impairment risk.
But it doesn't provide much in the way of protection from a lot of other pathogens.
You'd be surprised what kinds of other immunities exist just because an alternate coding or stop codon exists in a place where a pathogen wouldn't expect it.
In this case, expect that quite a few of the survivors look a bit like Colonel Kilgore in "Apocalypse Now".
An example of the principle I've mentioned above that involves a patient in Berlin cured of HIV.
ReplyDeleteSo this kind of thing happens.
Relatively rare? That is the understatement of the world. I am familiar with that case. My proximity to San Fransisco, and growing up in the Bay Area, the AIDS crisis was omnipresent. I even remember at my first tech job, it was still such a big deal that one of the people on our team "had to come out" to the entire team because of his AIDS status. Three people in the entire world have still only been cured that way.
ReplyDeleteNow I know some Europeans have immunity to certain things because they lived through the plague, but hoisting hope on that is rather like winning the lottery. Not a pandemic plan. Oh... what am I saying.... hope is the only plan.
Interestingly however, said in the most sarcastic way, COVID damages a persons immune system sort of like AIDS. At least this is the rumor starting to bubble up. i.e immune exhaustion.
It's a different gene: the "Berlin patient" in 2008 was cured by manipulating CCR5 with the delta-32 variant.
ReplyDeleteThe people in this other situation have a p46 allele variant of OAS1.
So it's the same principle, mutatis mutandis, with different diseases and different genes.
I didn't expect that you actually read the research paper, and in fact I put it there not so much for your understanding as much as for someone else who is probably thrilled about having the information.
BTW, what was interesting about the first "Berlin patient" was that the means by which he was cured with another gene manipulation weren't clear to the researchers who looked into the matter.
The donor just wasn't screened all that thoroughly for a complete set of supporting or confounding factors.
As for "relatively rare", if you're part of the 1% who can't get something, that's relatively rare compared to the 99% who can.
But don't believe for a second that there were only three people cured of systemic HIV infections by means of gene therapy.
Look hard enough, in the right places, and you will find private clinics specializing in stem cell therapies that can provide highly customized therapies that may or may not be sold as gene therapies.
You won't find a single clinic doing this in the US with its stem cell research ban, naturally.
I'd put the real number cured in the 10^3 to 10^5 range.
Switzerland shot to shit its neutrality, its bank secrecy as well, but one thing it still does well enough is medical secrecy, provided you deal with the right people.
Don't ask, don't tell.
"I didn't expect that you actually read the research paper, and in fact I put it there not so much for your understanding as much as for someone else who is probably thrilled about having the information."
ReplyDeleteI probably wouldn't have, but AIDs was a pretty big deal in these parts. I got so tired of the conspiracy theories about it, that when someone got cured it felt like a relief. Some problems are just extremely hard to solve.
"Look hard enough, in the right places, and you will find private clinics specializing in stem cell therapies that can provide highly customized therapies that may or may not be sold as gene therapies."
It seems to me that if it were that successful, you wouldn't have to look hard at all. Maybe they have. But.. this is 2022. Why is it such a secret?