COVID* STANDFORD MASK STUDY---Elsevier journal to retract widely debunked masks study whose author claimed a Stanford affiliation p345

[link to www.yahoo.com (secure)]

New clinical trials raise fears the coronavirus is learning how to resist vaccines

New data showing that two COVID-19 vaccines are far less effective in South Africa than in other places they were tested have heightened fears that the coronavirus is quickly finding ways to elude the world’s most powerful tools to contain it.

The U.S. company Novavax reported this week that although its vaccine was nearly 90% effective in clinical trials conducted in Britain, the figure fell to 49% in South Africa — and that nearly all the infections the company analyzed in South Africa involved the B.1.351 variant that emerged there late last year and has spread to the United States and at least 30 other countries.

Johnson & Johnson announced Friday that its new shot was 72% effective against preventing moderate or severe illness in the United States, compared with 66% in Latin America and 57% in South Africa.

Laboratory tests had suggested that the vaccines authorized in the U.S. — one from Pfizer and BioNTech, the other from Moderna and the National Institutes of Health — trigger a smaller immune response to the South Africa variant.

[link to www.sfgate.com (secure)]

South Africa suspends Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine rollout after researchers report 'minimal' protection against variant

South Africa will suspend use of the coronavirus vaccine being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca after researchers found that it provided "minimal protection" against mild to moderate coronavirus infections caused by the new variant first detected in that country.

Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said Sunday that the rollout will be paused while scientists assess the data and determine a way forward. Officials had been eager to begin vaccinating health-care workers with the shots after 1 million doses arrived last week.

The data, disclosed at a news conference Sunday, showed that once the variant became dominant in the country in November, the vaccine provided no significant protection against illness - though all the cases of disease were mild or moderate. There were 19 cases of covid-19 caused by the variant among people who received the vaccine and 20 cases among people who got a placebo. That suggests that the vaccine was 10% effective, but the difference could have been due to chance.

Thanks for all the info///it looks bleak indeed...Covid is here to stay...like aids we'll have to adapt to live with it.

I don’t read anything behind paywalls. Imagine paying for their lies....

What is the average age of alleged covid death in the uk? 82 I think. Which would mirror the average age of alleged hospital patients. As such an article like this is meaningless and is only designed to deceive people

No you do not
Stop believing their lies

Any news of people getting sick from being in contact with someone who has gotten the Vax?
Just curious as my husband had the shot about 2 weeks ago and I have been sick for the last few days. Headache chest fills full wheezing sound when I breath, off and on dizzy no appetite.
Powering through it, already taking vit c. Have Ivermectin I use here for the 4 legged animals and chickens.
Right now I refuse to go to doctor also refuse to get the shot.
Dear hubby and I are at odds to say the least lol.

Neither the Moderna nor Pfizer shots have actual virus, so I don;t think someone who has been inoculated with one of those can actually produce the virus. So, probably just a coincidence.

Just a fluke, feeling better but I think I had it. Damn and I was so careful.

Glad you are feeling better.

Every will eventually get it. More than once probably.

So, wouldn;'t surprise me if you have had it.

Being careful only goes so far.

Feeling bad again this has to be covid. But not dying feels survivable for my age and having copd from a job not smoking. Exhaustion comes back and hits me hard just when I think I can clean the house.

Feeling bad again this has to be covid. But not dying feels survivable for my age and having copd from a job not smoking. Exhaustion comes back and hits me hard just when I think I can clean the house.



Hang in there!

Scheduled Friday for 1st Pfizer shot.

I got offered the vaccine today to as I have underlying condition and even though I told the wife months ago I wasn’t getting the vaccine. World war 3 erupted when I officially declined it. So for me looks like divorce or give in and I ain’t giving in

Well, obviously a personal choice. I really wanted the J&J 1-dose vax, as it appears to be causing the least severe reactions, and appears to be more effective than the others for the SA and Brazil strains. But, it's not available around here, so Pfizer is the next least worst choice. I would not take Moderna. Period.

The Law of Large Numbers still says that most people will tolerate the shots ok.

Good luck.

1st Pfizer 2 hours ago. Now having a deli sandwich and a couple of beers. So far, so good.

22 hours and nothing amiss. No soreness, no fever, no fatigue. Can't even see where they jabbed me.

This was easy.

Aren't the vast majority of people who go into hospital with serious COVID elderly and/or have underlying health conditions anyway.

So of course they are going back to hospital in large numbers - as they are sick and elderly.

My father went into hospital more times in his last year of life than the previous 80 odd years combined! Cos we was old, frail and had multiple health issues.

Hardly surprising therefore we see these results.

Dump your belief in their germ theory

Indeed.
*hoodwinked*

Been 8 days. Still standing. No issues. But have been drinking a lot of blood thinners this week.

Paranormal investigations in Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Talked to Jesse and Frank James. Good times.

Oh, and since I've got you, I see a lot of people talking about how there are so many deaths of old people. I'm just curious about at what age does it become an issue? It's ok that anyone over 70 dies? Doesn't affect you, so, no big deal? When does it become serious? 60 years old? 50? 30? Just shut the fuck up you selfish pricks. Those are people's parents and grandparent. You are fucking selfish douchbags.

Had my second Pfizer 8 hours ago. I have not, as of yet, grown a third arm, nor sprouted a penis from my forehead.

All is well.

22 hours post shot. Nothing. Mada. Feeling good so far.

Glad to hear, Nawty.

[link to www.cnn.com (secure)]

It's possible to reach herd immunity, then lose it. Repeatedly. Here's what you can do to help prevent that from happening

If you think herd immunity is the finish line to this pandemic, it's time for a reality check.
Herd immunity with Covid-19 could come and go, scientists say. Or we might never reach it at all.
"There's a lot of things that have to go our way to actually get to herd immunity," said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

[link to www.timesofisrael.com (secure)]

Israeli data shows South African variant able to ‘break through’ Pfizer vaccine

The South African variant of the coronavirus is notably more adept at “breaking through” the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine than other variants are, Israeli scientists have found, in a first-of-its-kind real-world study.

Israel has used the Pfizer vaccine almost exclusively to vaccinate millions of citizens, with a version by Moderna, based on similar innovative mRNA technology, used minimally.

A team from Tel Aviv University and the Clalit healthcare organization sequenced the swabs of 150 Israelis who tested positive for COVID-19 despite having been vaccinated.

In their study, the prevalence of the South African strain among vaccinated individuals who were infected despite their inoculation was eight times higher than its prevalence in the unvaccinated infected population. Though the number of such infections among the vaccinated was relatively small, the findings indicated that this variant was far more successful in getting through vaccinated individuals’ defenses than other strains.

“Based on patterns in the general population, we would have expected just one case of the South African variant, but we saw eight,” Prof. Adi Stern, who headed the research, told The Times of Israel. “Obviously, this result didn’t make me happy.”

Hey, NB. We were discussing what might be the likelihood, if any, of vaccine induced virus evolution the other day. I've since found some links that could be of some use to that discussion.




A safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19 would go a long way towards helping society return to its pre-pandemic normal. According to the World Health Organization, at least 198 COVID-19 vaccines are currently in the development pipeline, with 44 currently undergoing clinical evaluation . That evaluation is, rightly so, focused on safety and efficacy. Here, we advocate for moderate additional effort during clinical trials to collect and publish data that can inform the risk of resistance evolution.

Much like antimicrobial drug resistance, vaccine resistance can and does evolve . When it does evolve, vaccine resistance is achieved through mechanisms such as serotype replacement , antigenic change , or increases in disease severity . However, for many vaccines, the evolution of resistance has never occurred . For example, the measles vaccine has been widely used for decades without the virus ever evolving the ability to transmit through vaccinated hosts. Similarly, smallpox was completely eradicated, in large part due to vaccination that viral evolution failed to overcome. In contrast, Streptococcus pneumoniae quickly evolved resistance to the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7), necessitating the development and deployment of a new vaccine, PCV13

[link to journals.plos.org (secure)]



SARS-CoV-2 evolution and vaccines: cause for concern?

....

In principle, these findings suggest that variants of SARS-CoV-2 could evolve with resistance to immunity induced by recombinant spike protein vaccines

[link to www.thelancet.com (secure)]




Yes new booster shots could be created, manufactured and distributed each year in order to keep up with the variants, but my concern is future variants(induced by vaccine resistance) will be more lethal/severe than the current ones. There is a whole load of evidence that has been put forward by scientists that the b117 variant is more severe for example (yes OK not a vaccine induced variant but the same principle applies). I suspect the increased severity could be the case for P1 also, but I haven't seen any publication state this with confidence with regard to that specific variant, yet.

My two cents is if the future variants which circulate trend to being more severe, which I think it's reasonable to expect they could be based on what's happened so far, then it won't matter that the vaccines are effective in say 90%-95% of people, because anything even a bit below 100% like that and there could be significant issues in coping with acute infections in the population due to the severity of a future variant. If the vaccine isn't effective in 5-10% of all people then it would be all of those people who could be at risk from a hypothetical more severe new variant. Neither would it be just the old or those with underlying conditions who make up a part of that 5% who are at risk. I say that because of the anecdotal evidence from doctors in Brazil who explicitly say their new variant P1 is more severe in when it attacks the body for those previously believed to be at lower risk for acute infection from sarscov2.

Fair enough. But, viruses mutate all the time. Some times the get more severe. H1N1 has been around, but in 2012 pH1N1 emerged. We watch things like H5N1 in Asia, and saw that it increased in severity in some cases...and there is no human vax. This increase in severity occurs without vaxes being involved. b117 is a good example. We have boosters for influenza every year. And tetanus every 7-10 years. Some vaxes don't give durable immunity. That said, viruses do get worse on their own. Vaccinating people should reduce cases.

Is it ok to have less cases, but some of them being more severe? Where's the break even point. How do we quantify Cost/benefit?

It could well be that when all things are considered, there is more benefit to the world from people being vaccinated over not being vaccinated, but I didn't mean to frame this a a matter of should we vax or should we not vax.

Really all I'm saying is people around the world shouldn't take it for granted that just because we have this vaccine that the virus is going to be controlled in a way like measles or that the threat level is going to recede to say the level of seasonal flu. That's not how this particular vaccine works, and it's not how this particular virus functions. Even with the vaccine there's a good chance(in my opinion) that the virus threat could conceivably be at a reasonably high level(forever) but the threat could just be expressed differently. Even to the extent that returning to the kind of normal that people would like just won't be feasible for many.

[link to retractionwatch.com (secure)]

Elsevier journal to retract widely debunked masks study whose author claimed a Stanford affiliation

A study that warned of the perils of using face masks as a precaution against contracting Covid-19 appears slated for retraction, Retraction Watch has learned.

The 2020 paper, “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis,” was written by Baruch Vainshelboim, who listed his affiliation as Stanford University and the VA Palo Alto Health System. But the study gained wide circulation earlier this month, thanks in part to some conservative politicians, and became the subject of fact-checks by the Associated Press and Snopes, which pointed out that

The paper was published by an exercise physiologist with no academic connection to Stanford University or the NIH in a journal that accepts “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas.”

[snip]

But Stanford disavowed Vainshelboim and his article in a statement:

Stanford Medicine strongly supports the use of face masks to control the spread of COVID-19.

A study on the efficacy of face masks against COVID-19 published in the November 2020 issue of the journal Medical Hypotheses is not a “Stanford study.” The author’s affiliation is inaccurately attributed to Stanford, and we have requested a correction. The author, Baruch Vainshelboim, had no affiliation with the VA Palo Alto Health System or Stanford at the time of publication and has not had any affiliation since 2016, when his one-year term as a visiting scholar on matters unrelated to this paper ended.




So the study that the anti-maskers have been hanging their hats on is a fraud.