Re: COVID-19 News and Discussions
Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2023 3:00 pm
I wonder if the Pfizer files and articles about it should be posted here or on a separate discussion thread?
A community of futurology enthusiasts
https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/
https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=53
You make a lot of good points here, most of which I agree. Still, there is one point brought up in a Time article I cited earlier:erowind wrote: ↑Wed Jan 04, 2023 2:44 pm It’s really frustrating to me to watch most media outlets and people for that matter go from criticizing China’s “totalitarian” zero covid policy for being incongruent with global policy standards only to turn around and now criticize China for experiencing mass deaths now that the policy has been lifted.
It’s clear that these articles and comments are less about covid and more about ruthlessly criticizing literally anything the Chinese government does. If their policy were truly totalitarian for that matter than vaccine uptake wouldn’t have been so low. It seems people weren’t actually being held at gunpoint by cartoon character soldiers with vaccines in hand.
There’s plenty to criticize the Chinese government for, genocide, imperialism, lack of democracy, etc. But covid policy isn’t it.
One wonders, was it a matter of the loss of face involved in using other vaccines?Although about 90% of the country has been vaccinated against COVID-19, China relied on vaccines with lower efficacy rates than the mRNA-based vaccines that many other countries sought to produce.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chi ... 023-01-04/No new coronavirus variant has been found in China, data released by the World Health Organization showed on Wednesday, easing some concerns about an outbreak that has spread rapidly there since Beijing abruptly reversed its "zero COVID" policy.
The U.N. agency was releasing data provided by the Chinese Center For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a day after WHO officials met Chinese scientists amid global unease about the accuracy of China's reporting of an outbreak that has filled hospitals and overwhelmed some funeral homes.
China's People's Daily, the Communist Party's official newspaper, sought to rally worried citizens for what it calls a "final victory" over COVID-19, rebutting criticism of its policy of strict isolation that triggered rare protests last year.
Meanwhile, health officials abroad have been struggling to work out the scale of the outbreak and how to stop it spreading, with more countries introducing measures such pre-departure COVID tests for arrivals from China, moves that Beijing has criticised.
We need to talk about how COVID hospitalization is surging in Massachusetts- doubling in a month - but cases are flat. But is COVID truly flat? No, not at all if you look at the wastewater levels of SARSCov2 RNA in Boston. Thus we have now lost the reliability of simple case counts. But unlike the good uncoupling of low hospitalization vs rising cases, we now have the opposite bad uncoupling of rising hospitalization vs flat cases. Wastewater seems to be only only good early warning indicator now.
Speaking of water water surveillance — 96% of flights in a study of airplane toilet water in SE Asia region last year found SARS2 virus. We have to use this as a warning indicator that likely most flights have someone with COVID in this pandemic era. If you don’t still mask on flight— you are playing with fire— playing Russian roulette with your health and Long COVID.
Hospitalization 2x surging…
—but cases flat??
What’s going on is testing has crashed and #COVID19 case numbers are unreliable.
Cases and hospitalizations are uncoupling—but in the WRONG WAY… opposite of last year.
Wastewater doesn’t lie. See wastewater data from Massachusetts below.
More wastewater data: SarsCoV-2 was detected in wastewater from 95.7% of flights
Driven by the highly evasive and infectious #XBB15 variant.
Don’t ignore the #Kraken. #MaskUp
Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/pacific-sea ... -19-66993(IFL Science) A team of scientists from 13 institutions tested 373 compounds produced by plants, fungi, and invertebrates seeking those capable of killing or stopping the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s a long way from petri dish to pharmacy, but three performed remarkably well, one of them coming from a marine organism that lives not far from the University of British Columbia (UBC), which led the research.
Billions of years of evolution have created a cornucopia of biologically active molecules that sometimes work well against the diseases that plague humanity. Testing of existing compounds is cheaper and faster than making our own from scratch, and those with biological origins tend to have fewer side effects. Even though the ideal drug often needs a few tweaks from the original discovery, it’s common for a substance taken from an animal, plant, or fungus to provide the inspiration for new medications.
In Antiviral Research, UBC’s Dr Jimena Pérez-Vargas and co-authors describe bathing human lung cells in solutions of the test compounds and exposing them to a modified SARS-CoV-2 virus that makes cells it infects glow green. More than 70 substantially reduced the glow seen in untreated cells, and 26 inhibited the virus by 80-100 percent.
Encouraging as this sounds, it is wise to remember Randall Monroe’s observation that the list of things that kill cancer in cells in a petri dish includes handguns. Many more tests are required before we can even contemplate using any of these to treat COVID-19.
However, the first of these tests has already been undertaken, with the team trying much smaller doses of the antiviral compounds. Three passed this more stringent test. “The advantage of these compounds is that they are targeting the cells, rather than the virus, blocking the virus from replicating and helping the cell to recover,” said Pérez-Vargas in a statement.
Acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines increased globally, from 75.2% in 2021 to 79.1% in 2022, according to a survey in 23 countries that represent more than 60% of the world's population. However, vaccine acceptance decreased in eight countries and almost one in eight vaccinated respondents, particularly younger men and women, were hesitant about receiving a booster dose.
Led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) and published in Nature Medicine, the study underlines a wide variability among countries and the need for tailored communication strategies in addressing vaccine hesitancy.
"The pandemic is not over, and authorities must urgently address vaccine hesitancy and resistance as part of their COVID-19 prevention and mitigation strategy," says Jeffrey V Lazarus, Head of the Health Systems Research Group at ISGlobal, an institution supported by "la Caixa" Foundation. To do so effectively, though, policy-makers need solid data on vaccine hesitancy trends (whether it is decreasing or increasing and in which populations) and drivers (factors that influence vaccine acceptance, such as income or education).
To obtain these data, an international collaboration led by Lazarus and Ayman El-Mohandes, Dean of CUNY SPH, performed a series of surveys starting in 2020 across 23 highly populated countries that were hit hard by the pandemic (Brazil, Canada, China, Ecuador, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States).
The data reported here correspond to the third survey conducted between June and July 2022.
Of the 23,000 respondents (1,000 per country surveyed), 79.1% were willing to accept vaccination. This finding represented an increase of 5.2% from June 2021. The willingness of parents to vaccinate their children also rose slightly, from 67.6% in 2021 to 69.5% in 2022. However, eight countries observed increased hesitancy (from 1.0% in the UK to 21.1% in South Africa).