I had several courses where the discussion turned to experimental design and method vs. causality. Looking at several experiments where the design and method seeded to be very straightforward and yet the results were attributed to causes that were misinterpreted. Looking at an aged population who is already to the point where they need assisted care and trying to link vaccination and death is highly problematic and fraught with peril.

I think they express sufficient caution in the Norway papers on causality. In the extremely frail and terminal, death can be triggered by the smallest upset in the immune system. Vaccines of any sort are designed to have a tailored and narrow immune response.

 

Sounds far too conspiracy theory for me.

This is one time I happen to believe there has been a concerted 'conspiracy' to suppress information. Hanlon's Razor can be ruled out.

"In war, truth is the first casualty" Aeschylus

 

This is one time I happen to believe there has been a concerted 'conspiracy' to suppress information. Hanlon's Razor can be ruled out.

"In war, truth is the first casualty" Aeschylus

Where is the suppression of information? There are tons of scientific studies on the subject.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021801

Despite the promising in vitro results that placed hydroxychloroquine among the leading candidates for Covid-19 treatment and prophylaxis,27-29 there are no compelling data to suggest that hydroxychloroquine is effective. We provide evidence on the lack of efficacy of postexposure prophylaxis therapy with hydroxychloroquine to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection or symptomatic Covid-19.

 

 

This video has already been challenged.

 

This video has already been challenged.

What does that mean?
Is the information in the video wrong?

https://www.healio.com/news/infecti...or-covid19-ends-after-board-finds-no-benefit#

Recruitment for the convalescent plasma arm of the RECOVERY trial was closed after an independent board determined there was no evidence the treatment benefited patients with COVID-19, according to the trial’s chief investigators.

Following a meeting on Thursday, the data monitoring committee (DMC) recommended closing recruitment to the randomized clinical trial that was testing a range of potential treatments for COVID-19 after it found there was “no convincing evidence” that recruiting additional participants would provide “conclusive proof of mortality benefit,” the investigators said.

https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/...tment-for-patients-hospitalised-with-covid-19

The RECOVERY trial was established as a randomised clinical trial to test a range of potential treatments for COVID-19. Since May 2020, the RECOVERY trial has included a randomised comparison of convalescent plasma vs. usual care alone. Convalescent plasma has been widely used as a treatment for COVID-19 but to date there has been no convincing evidence of the effect of convalescent plasma on clinical outcomes in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19.

 

This video has already been challenged.

Do you have a point?

Or are you just trying to score one?

 

https://www.sentinelsource.com/news...cle_4b6ebec6-9480-55ea-8d2b-c69257f6673b.html

A year after the coronavirus pandemic roared into the United States, the therapeutic options for COVID-19 remain limited, reinforcing the vital importance of the new vaccines.
The only fully approved COVID-19 drug, the antiviral remdesivir, has shown modest benefit, at best, in hospitalized patients. Two “monoclonal antibodies” — synthetic versions of the body’s own disease-fighting antibodies — have raised hopes for keeping high-risk patients out of the hospital, but the National Institutes of Health treatment guidelines say there aren’t enough data to recommend them.
Dexamethasone, a venerable corticosteroid, is the only drug that has been shown to improve outcomes for severely ill, hospitalized patients. In those who develop clots, anticoagulants have demonstrated their value.

Meanwhile, two treatments that seemed promising — convalescent plasma and the rheumatoid arthritis drug Actemra — have been underwhelming in the latest rigorous studies.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/switzerland-to-hold-referendum-on-covid-19-lockdown-11610807392

Switzerland’s system of direct democracy will be put to the test again later this year, this time with a referendum on whether to roll back the government’s powers to impose lockdowns and other measures to slow the Covid-19 pandemic.

The landlocked Alpine nation of 8.5 million people is unusual in providing its people a say on important policy moves by offering referendums if enough people sign a petition for a vote. Last year, Swiss voted on increasing the stock of low-cost housing, tax allowances for children and hunting wolves.

The idea is to provide citizens a check on the power of the federal government, and it is a throwback to the fiercely independent patchwork of cantons, or districts, that were meshed in the medieval period.

 

I plan on getting on the VA list when it's ready.

https://www.va.gov/health-care/covid-19-vaccine/#:~:text=When more vaccines become available,help you schedule your appointments.

COVID-19 vaccines at VA

Good idea but I'll likely wait till my wife gets hers.

Ron

 

Good idea but I'll likely wait till my wife gets hers.

Ron

I'd like to get mine early. Before the mutation driven rush I expect to see in about a month or so.

 

https://www.kptv.com/news/its-a-god...icle_272758b2-5956-11eb-946d-ff3681384698.htm

VANCOUVER, WA (KPTV) - Washington's COVID-19 rules now allow for some indoor seating in open-air settings, and breweries in Vancouver are taking full advantage of the change.

"People are maybe able to watch the football game and kinda get some shelter from the outdoors," Jason Bos, one of the owners at Brothers Cascadia Brewing, said.

In addition to their outdoor setup, now with their bay door open, they can seat about 20 more people inside.

"We’re also very appreciative of the state looking at the science, making sure our customers were gonna be safe but also giving us the opportunity to have more customers safely enjoy beer and food," Jason said.

 

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/20/asia/china-shijiazhuang-covid-quarantine-intl-hnk-scli/index.html

China builds massive Covid-19 quarantine camp

 

It is a game of cat and mouse with the virus. What we are collectively doing is exerting selective pressure on it forcing it to evolve faster. We learned well with antibiotic resistant bacteria I suppose.

As of yesterday we have an outbreak in long term care facility. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Last year there was a flu outbreak in same facility, no one cared.

Or for example, there is this: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00386/japan-gripped-by-major-flu-outbreak.html

It is interesting to look back and compare.

 

https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/...-dining-ban-COVID-19-surge-worse-15882565.php

Late last week, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot — typically cautious on COVID-19 policy — raised some eyebrows after calling for restaurants and bars to reopen "as soon as possible."

Her logic: The current COVID-19 surge has been primarily fueled by at-home gatherings and parties, and if people are going to gather regardless of what any stay-at-home order dictates, state and local governments should try to provide spaces where at least some mitigation efforts will be taken.
...
Despite the ban, California has had one of the worst winter COVID-19 surges in the country, which begs the following question: Is it possible that shutting down outdoor dining made the state's surge even worse?


Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, believes it's highly likely.

"We won’t be able to know the exact percentage it drove, but I would say closing outdoor dining certainly did not help and likely hindered efforts to avoid a surge," she said. "It shut down in early December, and things did not get better from there; things actually got worse. Restrictions should be about understanding the human condition and keeping places that are safe open. Those of us who argue for a harm reduction approach have the same goal as the lockdownists: We want to reduce transmission, but we understand the human condition and the need to be with people."

 

https://news.trust.org/item/20210120190612-658f8

Jan 20 (Reuters) - The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

South African variant may resist current antibody treatments

The variant of the new coronavirus identified in South Africa can resist, or "escape," antibodies that neutralize earlier versions of the virus, scientists have found. It "exhibits complete escape" from three classes of monoclonal antibodies manufactured for treating COVID-19 patients, and it shows "substantial or complete" resistance to neutralizing antibodies in blood donated by COVID-19 survivors, the scientists reported on Tuesday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review.

 

https://news.trust.org/item/20210120190612-658f8

Well that’s bad news.

 

Well that’s bad news.

The good news is that the human body is better than monoclonal antibodies.

Immune system will remember how to make COVID-19 antibodies

People who have recovered from COVID-19 can likely mount a fast and effective response to the virus if they encounter it again because their immune system's "B cells" will remember how to make the antibodies needed to fight it, a new study shows. Researchers tracked 87 COVID-19 survivors for six months and found that while levels of antibodies to the virus may decline over time, the number of memory B cells remains unchanged. The antibodies produced by these cells are more potent than the patients' original antibodies and may be more resistant to mutations in the spike protein the virus uses to break into cells, they said. For example, they found, the antibodies could recognize and neutralize at least one of the mutations in the South African variant of the virus that has caused concern among health experts. Even if antibody levels fall, B cells will remember how to make them when necessary, according to study leader Michel Nussenzweig of Rockefeller University, whose findings were reported on Monday in Nature. If this is true at six months, as in this study, it is safe to assume it is probably still true for longer periods, he added. People who have recovered from COVID-19 "may become infected but the immune system will be prepped to fight off the infection," Nussenzweig said. (https://go.nature.com/3nWtwWo)

 

If the current vaccines get blown out by the new mutation, it may usher in a new age of vaccine development. A new vaccine can be designed in a few days. It's all the regulatory hurdles that take a year or more. I can easily imagine a free (black?) market approach that bypasses the timeline for willing volunteers. Government intrusion into this market has come at a high price, literally millions worldwide.

 

If the current vaccines get blown out by the new mutation, it may usher in a new age of vaccine development. A new vaccine can be designed in a few days. It's all the regulatory hurdles that take a year or more. I can easily imagine a free (black?) market approach that bypasses the timeline for willing volunteers. Government intrusion into this market has come at a high price, literally millions worldwide.

A large part of the effort in designing mRNA/viral vector vaccines from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE is mutation resistance beyond the expected mutations of the target virus. They zero in on a critical section of the RNA chain that makes the virus, The Virus. It can mutate around the vaccine but the hope is it won't cause covid-19 when it does and hopefully it will evolve into just another non-infectious virus when it does like SARS. I expect the Chinese-type Whole Virus vaccines to be eventually crushed by mutations unless there is a massive scale application to the entire population to nuke the virus with one blow.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00007-6

An ideal COVID-19 vaccine would elicit long-lasting high titer neutralizing antibody titers and would provide sterilizing immunity to prevent disease and onward transmission. Even if that is not accomplished, a vaccine could still be highly effective at preventing serious COVID-19 disease. If the neutralizing antibody titers are sufficient to blunt the size of the viral inoculum, the presence of memory T cells may control the infection. The working model described above (Figure 2), with severe COVID-19 cases being associated with a failure to make a T cell response fast enough during natural infection with SARS-CoV-2, is good news for vaccines, because vaccines overcome/bypass the speed problem of adaptive immunity and T cell responses. Priming of the immune system by a vaccine happens well in advance of virus exposure. Additionally, the findings that Spike is a good target for CD4+ T cell responses, Tfh cell responses, and CD8+ T cell responses in SARS-CoV-2 infected people is good news for vaccine development (Grifoni et al., 2020; Juno et al., 2020; Moderbacher et al., 2020; Peng et al., 2020), since almost all COVID-19 vaccines target Spike only.

Any virus that can cause disease in humans must have at least one immune evasion mechanism—at
least one immune evasion ‘trick’. Without the ability to evade the immune system, a virus is usually
harmless. Understanding immune evasion by a virus is frequently important for understanding the
pathogenesis of the virus, as well as understanding challenges faced by the adaptive immune system
and any candidate vaccine. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus is clearly unusually effective at
evading the triggering of early innate immune responses, such as type 1 interferons (IFNs) (see below).
It is plausible that much of the nature of COVID-19 as an illness is a consequence of this one big trick of
SARS-CoV-2.