#coronavirus vaccine trials

[sophsweet]

Quotes from Coronavirus Vaccine Designers and Researchers since SARS-COV1

Coronavirus Vaccine History Back in 2004, SARS vaccine trial spotlights continued peril by Helen Pearson was published in the science press. But public-health experts remain concerned that a second wave of infections could erupt, either from human contact with infected animals or by the virus escaping from laboratory samples.Pearson, Helen SARS vaccine trial spotlights continued peril. Nature…

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"The Food and Drug Administration approved new mRNA coronavirus vaccines Thursday [August 22, 2024], clearing the way for shots manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to start hitting pharmacy shelves and doctor’s offices within a week.

Health officials encourage annual vaccination against the coronavirus, similar to yearly flu shots. Everyone 6 months and older should receive a new vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends.

The FDA has yet to approve an updated vaccine from Novavax, which uses a more conventional vaccine development method but has faced financial challenges.

Our scientific understanding of coronavirus vaccines has evolved since they debuted in late 2020. Here’s what to know about the new vaccines.

Why are there new vaccines?

The coronavirus keeps evolving to overcome our immune defenses, and the shield offered by vaccines weakens over time. That’s why federal health officials want people to get an annual updated coronavirus vaccine designed to target the latest variants. They approve them for release in late summer or early fall to coincide with flu shots that Americans are already used to getting.

The underlying vaccine technology and manufacturing process are the same, but components change to account for how the virus morphs. The new vaccines target the KP.2 variant because most recent covid cases are caused by that strain or closely related ones...

Do the vaccines prevent infection?

You probably know by now that vaccinated people can still get covid. But the shots do offer some protection against infection, just not the kind of protection you get from highly effective vaccines for other diseases such as measles.

The 2023-2024 vaccine provided 54 percent increased protection against symptomatic covid infections, according to a CDC study of people who tested for the coronavirus at pharmacies during the first four months after that year’s shot was released...

A nasal vaccine could be better at stopping infections outright by increasing immunity where they take hold, and one is being studied in a trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

If you really want to dodge covid, don’t rely on the vaccine alone and take other precautions such as masking or avoiding crowds...

Do the vaccines help prevent transmission?

You may remember from early coverage of coronavirus vaccines that it was unclear whether shots would reduce transmission. Now, scientists say the answer is yes — even if you’re actively shedding virus.

That’s because the vaccine creates antibodies that reduce the amount of virus entering your cells, limiting how much the virus can replicate and make you even sicker. When vaccination prevents symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, people expel fewer respiratory droplets carrying the virus. When it reduces the viral load in an infected person, people become less contagious.

That’s why Peter Hotez, a physician and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said he feels more comfortable in a crowded medical conference, where attendees are probably up to date on their vaccines, than in a crowded airport.

“By having so many vaccinated people, it’s decreasing the number of days you are shedding virus if you get a breakthrough infection, and it decreases the amount of virus you are shedding,” Hotez said.

Do vaccines prevent long covid?

While the threat of acute serious respiratory covid disease has faded, developing the lingering symptoms of “long covid” remains a concern for people who have had even mild cases. The CDC says vaccination is the “best available tool” to reduce the risk of long covid in children and adults. The exact mechanism is unclear, but experts theorize that vaccines help by reducing the severity of illness, which is a major risk factor for long covid.

When is the best time to get a new coronavirus vaccine?

It depends on your circumstances, including risk factors for severe disease, when you were last infected or vaccinated, and plans for the months ahead. It’s best to talk these issues through with a doctor.

If you are at high risk and have not recently been vaccinated or infected, you may want to get a shot as soon as possible while cases remain high. The summer wave has shown signs of peaking, but cases can still be elevated and take weeks to return to low levels. It’s hard to predict when a winter wave will begin....

Where do I find vaccines?

CVS said its expects to start administering them within days, and Walgreens said that it would start scheduling appointments to receive shots after Sept. 6 and that customers can walk in before then.

Availability at doctor’s offices might take longer. Finding shots for infants and toddlers could be more difficult because many pharmacies do not administer them and not every pediatrician’s office will stock them given low demand and limited storage space.

This year’s updated coronavirus vaccines are supposed to have a longer shelf life, which eases the financial pressures of stocking them.

The CDC plans to relaunch its vaccine locator when the new vaccines are widely available, and similar services are offered by Moderna and Pfizer."

-via The Washington Post, August 22, 2024

[darkmaga-retard]

A Big Pharma insider has warned that the new batch of COVID-19 vaccines being pushed on the public contain ‘super strength’ sterilization chemicals that are designed to deliberately serialize 70 percent of recipients.

Prof. Sir John Bell, a prominent figure in the development of the University of Oxford‘s coronavirus (COVID-19) jab, let slip recently the fact that the school’s latest COVID jab is capable of sterilizing between 60 and 70 percent of those who take it.

Naturalnews.com reports: In a recent interview about the new shot, Sir John, who teaches medicine at Oxford, seemed to suggest that one of the goals behind these injections is to mass sterilize the planet under the guise of protecting public health against the “COVID virus.”

“These vaccines are unlikely to completely sterilize a population,” Sir John said with seeming disappointment during the interview.

“They’re very likely to have an effect which works in a percentage, say 60 or 70 percent. We’ll have to look quite carefully, and the regulators will have to look quite carefully to make sure that it’s done what we need it to do before it gets approved.”

A clinical trial for the shot is still ongoing and Sir John says there will be a “delay” between when the results are in and when regulators give the shot the green light for public release.

Sir John was barely able to complete his sentence before the interviewer cut him off, apparently to keep him quiet from revealing any further incriminating information about the new Oxford shot.

[mariacallous]

If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel’s more successful prime ministers.

He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its founding in 1948. The country enjoyed relative security, with no major wars or prolonged Intifadas. The period was one of uninterrupted economic growth and prosperity. Thanks to its early adoption of widespread vaccination, Israel was one of the first countries in the world to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. And toward the end of that span came three agreements establishing diplomatic relations with Arab countries; more were likely on the way.

Twelve years of Netanyahu’s leadership had seemingly made Israel more secure and prosperous, with deep trade and defense ties across the world. But this wasn’t enough to win him another term. A majority of Israelis had tired of him, and he had been tainted by charges of bribery and fraud in his dealings with billionaires and press barons. In the space of 24 months, Israel held four elections ending in stalemate, with neither Netanyahu nor his rivals winning a majority. Finally, an unlikely alliance of right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and Islamist parties managed to band together and replace him with his former aide Naftali Bennett in June 2021.

At that point, Netanyahu could have sealed his legacy. A plea bargain on offer from the attorney general would have ended his corruption trial with a conviction on reduced charges and no jail time. He would have had to leave politics, probably for good. Over the course of four decades in public life, including 15 years as prime minister and 22 as the Likud party’s leader, he had already left an indelible mark on Israel, dominating the second half of its history. But he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up power.

Within 18 months, he was back as prime minister for the third time. The unwieldy coalition that replaced him had imploded, and this time around, Netanyahu’s camp of far-right and religious parties ran a disciplined campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of their divided rivals to emerge with a small parliamentary majority, despite still being virtually tied in the vote count.

Nine months later, Netanyahu, the man who promised, above everything else, to deliver security for Israel’s citizens, presided over the darkest day in his country’s existence. A total breakdown of the Israeli military and intelligence structure allowed Hamas to breach Israel’s border and embark on a rampage of murder, kidnapping, and rape, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostage. The calamities of that day, the failures of leadership leading up to it, and the traumas it caused will haunt Israel for generations. Even leaving completely aside the war he has prosecuted since that day and its yet-unknown end, October 7 means that Netanyahu will always be remembered as Israel’s worst-ever leader.

How does one measure a prime minister?

There is no broadly accepted ranking of the 13 men and one woman who have led Israel, but most lists would feature David Ben-Gurion at the top. Not only was he the George Washington of the Jewish state, proclaiming its independence just three years after a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but his administration established many of the institutions and policies that define Israel to this day. Other favorites include Levi Eshkol, for his shrewd and prudent leadership in the tense weeks before the Six Day War, and Menachem Begin, for achieving the country’s first peace agreement with an Arab nation, Egypt.

All three of these men had mixed records and detractors, of course. Ben-Gurion had autocratic tendencies and was consumed by party infighting during his later years in office. After the Six Day War, Eshkol failed to deliver a coherent plan for what Israel should do with the new territories it occupied and the Palestinians who have remained under its rule ever since. In Begin’s second term, Israel entered a disastrous war in Lebanon, and his government nearly tanked the economy. But in most Israelis’ minds, these leaders’ positive legacies outweigh the negatives.

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. Before the war, she rejected Egyptian overtures toward peace (though some Israeli historians have recently argued that these were less than sincere). And when war was clearly imminent, her administration refrained from launching preemptive attacks that could have saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

Other “worst” candidates have included Ehud Olmert, for launching the second Lebanon war and becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to go to prison for corruption; Yitzhak Shamir, for kiboshing an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein that many believe could have been a significant step toward resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and Ehud Barak, for spectacularly failing to fulfill his extravagant promises to bring peace with both the Palestinians and Syria.

But Benjamin Netanyahu now surpasses these contenders by orders of magnitude. He has brought far-right extremists into the mainstream of government and made himself, and the country, beholden to them. His corruption is flamboyant. And he has made terrible security decisions that brought existential danger to the country he pledged to lead and protect. Above all, his selfishness is without parallel: He has put his own interests ahead of Israel’s at every turn.

Netanyahu has the distinction of being the only Israeli prime minister to make a once reviled movement on the right fringe of the country’s politics into a government stakeholder.

Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a Jewish-supremacist group called Kach, won a lone seat in the Knesset in 1984. He openly called for replacing Israeli democracy with a constitution based on the laws of the Torah and for denying Israel’s Arab citizens equal rights. During Kahane’s single legislative term, the entire Israeli political establishment shunned him. When he got up to speak in the Knesset, all of its members would leave the plenum.

In 1985, Likud joined other parties in changing election law so that those who denied Israel’s democratic identity, denied its Jewish identity, or incited racism could be barred from running for office. Under this provision, Kach was never allowed to compete in another election. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. Four years later, a member of his movement killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron, and the Israeli government proscribed Kach as a terror organization and forced it to disband.

But the Kahanists didn’t go away. With each Israeli election, they tried to rename their movement and adjust its platform to conform with electoral law. They remained ostracized. Then, in 2019, Netanyahu saw a roadblock on his path to reelection that they could help him get around.

Several Israeli parties had pledged not to serve in a government led by an indicted prime minister—quite possibly, enough of them to shut Netanyahu out of power. To prevent that from happening, Netanyahu needed to eke out every possible right-wing and religious vote for his potential coalition. The polls were predicting that the latest Kahanist iteration, the Jewish Power party, which is led by the thuggish but media-savvy Itamar Ben-Gvir, would receive only about 10,000 votes, well below the threshold needed to make the party a player on its own; but Netanyahu believed that if he could persuade the Kahanists and other small right-wing parties to merge their candidates’ lists into a joint slate, together they could win a seat or two for his potential coalition—just what he needed for a majority.

Netanyahu began pressuring the leaders of the small right-wing parties to merge their lists. At first the larger of these were outraged. Netanyahu was meddling in their affairs and, worse, trying to coerce them to accept the Kahanist outcasts. Gradually, he wore down their resistance—employing rabbis to persuade politicians, orchestrating media campaigns in the nationalist press, and promising central roles in future administrations. Media figures close to Netanyahu accused Bezalel Smotrich, a fundamentalist settler and the new leader of the religious Zionist party, of “endangering” the nation by making it easier for the hated left to win the election. Soon enough, Smotrich’s old-school national-religious party merged not only with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power but with an even more obscure, proudly homophobic party led by Avi Maoz.

Netanyahu did worry a bit about the optics. Throughout five stalemated election campaigns from 2019 to 2022, Likud coordinated closely with Jewish Power, but Netanyahu refused to be seen in public with Ben-Gvir. During the 2022 campaign, at a religious festival, he even waited backstage for Ben-Gvir to leave the premises before going up to make his speech.

Two weeks later, there was no longer any need to keep up the act. Netanyahu’s strategy succeeded: His coalition, merged into four lists, edged out its squabbling opponents with 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Netanyahu finally had the “right-wing in full” government he had often promised. But before he could return to the prime minister’s office, his allies demanded a division of the spoils. The ministries with the most influence on Israelis’ daily lives—health, housing, social services, and the interior—went to the ultra-Orthodox parties. Smotrich became finance minister; Maoz was appointed deputy minister in charge of a new “Agency for Jewish Identity,” with power to intervene in educational programs. And Ben-Gvir, the subject of numerous police investigations for violence and incitement over a period of three decades, was put in charge of a newly titled “Ministry of National Security,” with authority over Israel’s police and prison services.

As Netanyahu signed away power to the Kahanists, he told the international news media that he wasn’t forming a far-right government. The Kahanists were joining his government. He would be in control. But Netanyahu hadn’t just given Israel’s most extreme racists unprecedented power and legitimacy. He’d also insinuated them into his own formerly mainstream party: By March 2024, Likud’s candidates for local elections in a handful of towns had merged their slates with those of Jewish Power.

Likud long prided itself on combining staunch Jewish nationalism, even militarism, with a commitment to liberal democracy. But a more radical stream within the party eschewed those liberal values and championed chauvinistic and autocratic positions. For much of the past century, the liberal wing was dominant and provided most of the party’s leadership. Netanyahu himself espoused the values of the liberal wing—until he fell out with all the main liberal figures. By 2019, none was left to oppose the alliance with Ben-Gvir’s Kahanists.

Now more than a third of Likud’s representatives were religious, and those who weren’t preferred to call themselves “traditional” rather than secular. They didn’t object to cooperating with the Kahanists; indeed, many had already worked with them in the past. In fact, many Likud Knesset members by that point were indistinguishable from the Jewish Power ones. Israel’s worst prime minister didn’t just form an alliance of convenience with the country’s most irresponsible extremists; he made them integral to his party and the running of the state.

That Netanyahu is personally corrupt is not altogether novel in the history of the Israeli prime ministership. What makes him worse than others is his open contempt for the rule of law.

By 2018, Netanyahu was the subject of four simultaneous corruption investigations that had been in motion for more than a year. In one, known as Case 4000, Netanyahu stood accused of promising regulatory favors to the owner of Israel’s largest telecom corporation in return for favorable coverage on a popular news site. Three of the prime minister’s closest advisers had agreed to testify against him.

Investigations of prime ministers are not rare in Israel. Netanyahu was the subject of one during his first term. The three prime ministers who served in the decade between his first and second terms—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert—had all been investigated as well. Only in Olmert’s case did police deem the evidence sufficient to mount a prosecution. At the time, in 2008, Netanyahu was the leader of the opposition.

“We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations and has no public or moral mandate to make fateful decisions for Israel,” Netanyahu said of Olmert. “There is a concern, I have to say real, not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest of political survival and not on the national interest.”

Ten years later, Netanyahu would be the one snared in multiple investigations. Then he no longer spoke of corruption in high office but of a “witch hunt,” orchestrated by rogue police commanders and left-wing state prosecutors, and egged on by a hostile news media, all with the aim of toppling a right-wing leader.

Netanyahu was determined to politicize the legal procedure and pit his supporters against Israel’s law-enforcement agencies and judiciary. Never mind that the two previous prime ministers who had resigned because of corruption charges were from the center left. Nor did it matter that he had appointed the police commissioner and attorney general himself; both were deeply religious men with impeccable nationalist backgrounds, but he tarred them as perfidious tools of leftist conspiracy.

Rather than contemplate resignation, on May 24, 2020, Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister to go on trial. He has denied all wrongdoing (the trial is still under way). In a courthouse corridor before one session, he gave a 15-minute televised speech accusing the legal establishment of “trying to topple me and the right-wing government. For over a decade, the left wing have failed to do this at the ballot box, and in recent years have come up with a new idea. Elements in the police and prosecutor’s office have joined left-wing journalists to concoct delusional charges.”

The law didn’t require Netanyahu to resign while fighting the charges against him in court. But doing so had seemed logical to his predecessors under similar circumstances—and to Israel’s lawmakers, who had never envisaged that a prime minister would so brazenly challenge the justice system, which he had a duty to uphold. For Netanyahu, however, remaining in power was an end in itself, one more important than preserving Israel’s most crucial institutions, to say nothing of Israelis’ trust in them.

Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power. Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel’s judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel’s worst prime minister.

For 34 of the past 47 years, Israel’s prime ministers have come from the Likud party. And yet many on the right still grumble that “Likud doesn’t know how to rule” and “you vote right and get left.” Likudniks complain about the lingering power of “the elites,” a left-wing minority that loses at the ballot box but still controls the civil service, the upper echelons of the security establishment, the universities, and the media. A growing anti-judicial wing within Likud demands constitutional change and a clamping-down on the supreme court’s “judicial activism.”

Netanyahu had once minimized these complaints, but his stance on the judiciary changed after he was indicted in 2019. Indeed, at the start of his current term, Likud’s partners demanded commitments to constitutional change, which they received. The ultra-Orthodox parties were anxious to pass a law exempting religious seminary students from military service. Such exemptions had already fallen afoul of the supreme court’s equality standards, so the religious parties wanted the law to include a “court bypass.” Netanyahu acceded to this. To pass the legislation in the Knesset, he appointed Simcha Rothman, a staunch critic of the court, as the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee.

He also appointed Yariv Levin, another fierce critic of the court, as justice minister. Just six days after the new government was sworn in, Levin rolled out a “judicial reform” plan, prepared by a conservative think tank, that called for drastically limiting the court’s powers to review legislation and gave politicians control over the appointment of new justices.

Within days, an extremely efficient counter-campaign pointed out the dangers the plan posed, not just to Israel’s fragile and limited democracy, but to its economy and security. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested in the streets. Likud began to drop in the polls, and Netanyahu privately urged the leaders of the coalition parties to delay the vote. They refused to back down, and Levin threatened to resign over any delay.

Netanyahu’s motives, unlike those of his partners, were not ideological. His objective was political survival. He needed to keep his hard-won majority intact and the judges off-balance. But the protests were unrelenting. Netanyahu’s independent-minded defense minister, Yoav Gallant, pointed to the controversy’s dire implications for the Israel Defense Forces as hundreds of volunteer reserve officers threatened to suspend their service rather than “serve a dictatorship.”

Netanyahu wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the judicial coup, but the idea of one of Likud’s senior ministers breaking ranks in public was unthinkable. On March 25 of last year, Gallant made a public statement that the constitutional legislation was a “clear and major threat to the security of Israel” and he would not be voting for it. The next evening, Netanyahu announced that he was firing Gallant.

In Jerusalem, protesters besieged Netanyahu’s home. In Tel Aviv, they blocked main highways. The next morning, the trade unions announced a general strike, and by that evening, Netanyahu backed down, announcing that he was suspending the legislation and would hold talks with the opposition on finding compromises. Gallant kept his post. The talks collapsed, protests started up again, and Netanyahu once again refused to listen to the warnings coming from the security establishment—not only of anger within the IDF, but that Israel’s enemies were planning to take advantage of the country’s disunity to launch an attack.

The debate over judicial reform pitted two visions of Israel against each other. On one side was a liberal and secular Israel that relied on the supreme court to defend its democratic values; on the other, a religious and conservative Israel that feared that unelected judges would impose incompatible ideas on their Jewish values.

Netanyahu’s government made no attempt to reconcile these two visions. The prime minister had spent too many years, and all those toxic electoral campaigns, exploiting and deepening the rift between them. Even when he belatedly and halfheartedly tried to rein in the radical and fundamentalist demons he had ridden back into office, he found that he could no longer control them.

Whether Netanyahu really meant to eviscerate Israel’s supreme court as part of a plot to weaken the judiciary and intimidate the judges in his own case, or whether he had no choice in the matter and was simply a hostage of his own coalition, is immaterial. What matters is that he appointed Levin as justice minister and permitted the crisis to happen. Ultimately, and despite his professed belief in liberal democracy, Netanyahu allowed Levin and his coalition partners to convince him that they were doing the right thing—because whatever kept him in office was right for Israel. Democracy would remain strong because he would remain in charge.

Trying to diminish the powers of the supreme court isn’t what makes Netanyahu Israel’s worst prime minister. The judicial reform failed anyway. Only one of its elements got through the Knesset before the war with Hamas began, and the court struck it down as unconstitutional six months later. The justices’ ruling to preserve their powers, despite the Knesset’s voting to limit them, could have caused a constitutional crisis if it had happened in peacetime. But by then Israel was facing a much bigger crisis.

Given Israel’s history, the ultimate yardstick of its leaders’ success is the security they deliver for their fellow citizens. In 2017, as I was finishing my unauthorized biography of Netanyahu, I commissioned a data analyst to calculate the average annual casualty rate (Israeli civilians and soldiers) of each prime minister since 1948. The results confirmed what I had already assumed. In the 11 years that Netanyahu had by then been prime minister, the average annual number of Israelis killed in war and terror attacks was lower, by a considerable margin, than under any previous prime minister.

My book on Netanyahu was not admiring. But I felt that it was only fair to include that data point in his favor in the epilogue and the very last footnote. Likud went on to use it in its 2019 campaigns without attributing the source.

The numbers were hard to argue with. Netanyahu was a hard-line prime minister who had done everything in his power to derail the Oslo peace process and prevent any move toward compromise with the Palestinians. Throughout much of his career, he encouraged military action by the West, first against Iraq after 9/11, and then against Iran. But in his years as prime minister, he balked at initiating or being dragged into wars of his own. His risk aversion and preference for covert operations or air strikes rather than ground operations had, in his first two stretches in power, from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021, kept Israelis relatively safe.

Netanyahu supporters on the right could also argue, on basis of the numbers, that those who brought bloodshed upon Israel, in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks, were actually Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, with his rash attempts to bring peace; and Ariel Sharon, who withdrew Israeli soldiers and settlers unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, creating the conditions for Hamas’s electoral victory there the following year. That argument no longer holds.

If future biographers of Israeli prime ministers undertake a similar analysis, Netanyahu will no longer be able to claim the lowest casualty rate. His 16th year in office, 2023, was the third-bloodiest in Israel’s history, surpassed only by 1948 and 1973, Israel’s first year of independence and the year of the Yom Kippur War, respectively.

The first nine months of 2023 had already seen a rise in deadly violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as terrorist attacks within Israel’s borders. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7, in which at least 1,145 Israelis were massacred and 253 kidnapped and taken to Gaza. More than 30 hostages are now confirmed dead.

No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu’s term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security.

To understand how Netanyahu so drastically failed Israel’s security requires going back at least to 2015, the year his long-term strategic bungling of the Iranian threat came into view. His mishandling didn’t happen in isolation; it is also related to the deprioritization of other threats, including the catastrophe that materialized on October 7.

Netanyahu flew to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to implore U.S. lawmakers to obstruct President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Many view this gambit as extraordinarily damaging to Israel’s most crucial alliance—the relationship with the United States is the very bulwark of its security. Perhaps so; but the stunt didn’t make subsequent U.S. administrations less supportive of Israel. Even Obama would still go on to sign the largest 10-year package of military aid to Israel the year after Netanyahu’s speech. Rather, the damage Netanyahu caused by presuming too much of the United States wasn’t to the relationship, but to Israel itself.

Netanyahu’s strategy regarding Iran was based on his assumption that America would one day launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. We know this from his 2022 book, Bibi: My Story, in which he admits to arguing repeatedly with Obama “for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Senior Israeli officials have confirmed that he expected Donald Trump to launch such a strike as well. In fact, Netanyahu was so sure that Trump, unlike Obama, would give the order that he had no strategy in place for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program when Trump decided, at Netanyahu’s own urging, to withdraw from the Iran deal in May 2018.

Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs had been far from enamored with the Iran deal, but they’d seized the opportunity it presented to divert some of the intelligence resources that had been focused on Iran’s nuclear program to other threats, particularly Tehran’s network of proxies across the region. They were caught by surprise when the Trump administration ditched the Iran deal (Netanyahu knew it was coming but didn’t inform them). This unilateral withdrawal effectively removed the limitations on Iran’s nuclear development and required an abrupt reversal of Israeli priorities.

Senior Israeli officials I spoke with had to tread a wary path here. Those who were still in active service couldn’t challenge the prime minister’s strategy directly. But in private some were scathing about the lack of a coherent strategy on Iran. “It takes years to build intelligence capabilities. You can’t just change target priorities overnight,” one told me.

The result was a dissipation of Israeli efforts to stop Iran—which is committed to the destruction of Israel. Iran sped further than ever down the path of uranium enrichment, and its proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, grew ever more powerful.

In the months leading up to October 7, Israel’s intelligence community repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Iran and its proxies were plotting a major attack within Israel, though few envisaged something on the scale of October 7. By the fall of 2023, motives were legion: fear that an imminent Israeli diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia could change the geopolitics of the region; threats that Ben-Gvir would allow Jews greater access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners; rumors that the deepening tensions within Israeli society would render any response to an attack slow and disjointed.

Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings. The senior officers and intelligence chiefs who issued them were, to his mind, conspiring with the law-enforcement agencies and legal establishment that had put him on trial and were trying to obstruct his government’s legislation. None of them had his experience and knowledge of the real threats facing Israel. Hadn’t he been right in the past when he’d refused to listen to leftist officials and so-called experts?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was the result of a colossal failure at all levels of Israel’s security and intelligence community. They had all seen the warning signals but continued to believe that the main threat came from Hezbollah, the larger and far better-equipped and trained enemy to the north. Israel’s security establishment believed that Hamas was isolated in Gaza, and that it and the other Palestinian organizations had been effectively deterred from attacking Israel.

Netanyahu was the originator of this assumption, and its biggest proponent. He believed that keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, as it had been for nearly two years when he returned to office in 2009, was in Israel’s interest. Periodic rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south were a price worth paying to keep the Palestinian movement split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank enclaves and Hamas in Gaza. Such division would push the troublesome two-state solution off the global agenda and allow Israel to focus on regional alliances with like-minded Arab autocracies that also feared Iran. The Palestinian issue would sink into irrelevance.

Netanyahu’s disastrous strategy regarding Gaza and Hamas is part of what makes him Israel’s worst prime minister, but it’s not the only factor. Previous Israeli prime ministers, too, blundered into bloody wars on the basis of misguided strategies and faulty advice from their military and intelligence advisers.

Netanyahu stands out from them for his refusal to accept responsibility, and for his political machinations and smear campaigns since October 7. He blames IDF generals and nourishes the conspiracy theory that they, in alliance with the protest movement, somehow allowed October 7 to happen.

Netanyahu believes that he is the ultimate victim of that tragic day. Convinced by his own campaign slogans, he argues that he is the only one who can deliver Israel from this valley of shadows to the sunlit uplands of “total victory.” He refuses to consider any advice about ending the war and continues to prioritize preserving his coalition, because he appears incapable of distinguishing between his own fate, now tainted by tragic failure, and that of Israel.

Many around the world assume that Israel’s war with Hamas has proceeded according to some plan of Netanyahu’s. This is a mistake. Netanyahu has the last word as prime minister and head of the emergency war cabinet, but he has used his power mainly to prevaricate, procrastinate, and obstruct. He delayed the initial ground offensive into Gaza, hesitated for weeks over the first truce and hostage-release agreement in November, and is now doing the same over another such deal with Hamas. For the past six months, he has prevented any meaningful cabinet discussion of Israel’s strategic goals. He has rejected the proposals of his own security establishment and the Biden administration. He presented vague principles for “the day after Hamas” to the cabinet only in late February, and they have yet to be debated.

However one views the war in Gaza—as a justified war of defense in which Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties it has cynically hidden behind, or as an intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, or as anything in between—none of it is Netanyahu’s plan. That’s because Netanyahu has no plan for Gaza, only one for remaining in power. His obstructionism, his showdowns with generals, his confrontations with the Biden administration—all are focused on that end, which means preserving his far-right coalition and playing to his hard-core nationalist base.

Meanwhile, he’s doing what he has always done: wearing down and discrediting his political opponents in the hope of proving to an exhausted and traumatized public that he’s the only alternative. So far, he’s failing. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone. But Netanyahu is fending off calls to hold an early election until he believes he is within striking distance of winning.

Netanyahu’s ambition has consumed both him and Israel. To regain and remain in office, he has sacrificed his own authority and parceled out power to the most extreme politicians. Since his reelection in 2022, Netanyahu is no longer the center of power but a vacuum, a black hole that has engulfed all of Israel’s political energy. His weakness has given the far right and religious fundamentalists extraordinary control over Israel’s affairs, while other segments of the population are left to pursue the never-ending quest to end his reign.

One man’s pursuit of power has diverted Israel from confronting its most urgent priorities: the threat from Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the desire to nurture a Westernized society and economy in the most contested corner of the Middle East, the internal contradictions between democracy and religion, the clash between tribal phobias and high-tech hopes. Netanyahu’s obsession with his own destiny as Israel’s protector has caused his country grievous damage.

Most Israelis already realize that Netanyahu is the worst of the 14 prime ministers their country has had in its 76 years of independence. But in the future, Jews might even remember him as the leader who inflicted the most harm on his people since the squabbling Hasmonean kings brought civil war and Roman occupation to Judea nearly 21 centuries ago. As long as he remains in power, he could yet surpass them.

[covid-safer-hotties]

They develop a mask that lights up when it detects the Coronavirus. It would signify great progress in case detection - Published Aug 5, 2024

Scientists at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to apply the technology that worked to fight other diseases to this pandemic.

This invention could help stop the spread of COVID-19. A team of scientists from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) develop a mask that glows when contaminated by the new coronavirus. It would greatly help in the fight against this global pandemic.

According to Business Insider, in 2014, the MIT bioengineering laboratory began to develop sensors to detect the Ebola virus when it underwent lyophilization (a dehydration process) on a piece of paper. This same technology was adapted to address the Zika virus outbreak.

Again, as part of their work on this subject, they’re conducting research to be able to help in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this case, they hope to create a mask that can produce a fluorescent color to identify the coronavirus. If successful, it would help complement current virus detection methods.

“As we open up our transit system, you could envision it being used in airports as we go through security, as we wait to get on a plane,” said Jim Collins, head of the MIT lab, in conversation with Business Insider.

“You or I could use it on the way to and from work. Hospitals could use it for patients as they come in or wait in the waiting room as a pre-screen of who’s infected” he added.

This could greatly facilitate the work of doctors in the midst of this pandemic. One of the peculiarities of this coronavirus, unlike previous outbreaks, is the lack of symptoms in patients that test positive, making contagion easier for those who think they’re healthy when in reality they’re just asymptomatic. Also, it would make the detection of cases much quicker.

For now, it’s just in the first phase – although expectations are very high. They hope to develop the detector’s design in a way in which the sensors can be embedded into any mask.

They hope to show in the coming weeks that this method works. “Once we’re in that stage, then it would be a matter setting up trials with individuals expected to be infected to see if it would work in a real-world setting,” Collins said.

It would just be a matter of adapting the sensors to this new coronavirus, since in 2018 this technology was able to detect the viruses that cause SARS, measles, influenza, hepatitis C, West Nile, in addition to other diseases.

“We initially did this on paper to create inexpensive paper-based diagnostics,” Collins said. “We’ve shown it can work on plastic, quartz, as well as cloth.”

The COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be part of a long process, which is still far from over. However, this mask could help lower the rate of contagion around the world.

[liesmyteachertoldme]

In an October 2023 lecture, David E. Martin, Ph.D., detailed how we can know that SARS-CoV-2 is a manmade bioweapon that has been in the works for 58 years

The virus called “coronavirus” was first described in 1965. Two years later, the U.S. and U.K. launched an exchange program where healthy British military personnel were infected with coronavirus pathogens from the U.S. as part of the U.S. biological weapons program

In 1992, Ralph Baric at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, took a pathogen that used to infect the gut and lungs and altered it with a chimera to make it infect the heart, causing cardiomyopathy. This research was part of the efforts to produce an HIV vaccine

In November 2000, Pfizer patented its first spike protein vaccine. Between 2000 and 2019, vaccine trials using this technology proved it was lethal, yet in the summer of 2020, the clinical trials for the SARS-CoV-2 shots went straight into human trials

mRNA spike protein was publicly described as a bioweapon 18 years ago. In 2005, at a conference hosted by DARPA and The Mitre Corporation, the mRNA spike protein was hailed as a “biological warfare-enabling technology,” i.e., a biological warfare agent

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The man who allegedly attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband early Friday posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about COVID vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and an acquaintance told CNN that he seemed “out of touch with reality.”

David DePape, 42, was identified by police Friday as the suspect in the assault on Paul Pelosi at the Speaker’s San Francisco home.

Three of DePape’s relatives told CNN that DePape has been estranged from his family for years, and confirmed that the Facebook account – which was taken down by the social media company on Friday – belonged to him.

His stepfather, Gene DePape, said David DePape grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, and left Canada about 20 years ago to pursue a relationship that brought him to California.

“I really don’t know what to think,” the suspect’s uncle, Mark DePape, said of his nephew’s alleged attack on Pelosi. “Hopefully it’s a scam. I don’t want to hear something like that.”

People who knew DePape in California described him as an odd character.

A 2013 article in the San Francisco Chronicle identified him as a “hemp jewelry maker,” and said that he lived with a nudist activist. Other photos published by the Chronicle show DePape – fully clothed – at a nude wedding on the steps of San Francisco City Hall.

Linda Schneider, a California resident, said she told CNN she got to know DePape roughly eight years ago and that he occasionally housesat for her. When they met, she said, DePape was living in a storage unit in the Berkeley area and told her he had been struggling with hard drugs but was “trying to create a new life for himself.”

She said that he was extremely shy. “He said he couldn’t even go and have a bank account because he was terrified of speaking to a teller,” Schneider said.

But Schneider later received “really disturbing” emails from DePape in which he sounded like a “megalomaniac and so out of touch with reality,” she said. She said she stopped communicating with him “because it seemed so dangerous,” adding that she recalled him “using Biblical justification to do harm.”

DePape’s social media presence similarly paints a picture of someone on a worrying trajectory, falling into conspiracy theories in recent years.

Last year, David DePape posted links on his Facebook page to multiple videos produced by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell falsely alleging that the 2020 election was stolen. Other posts included transphobic images and linked to websites claiming COVID vaccines were deadly. “The death rates being promoted are what ever ‘THEY’ want to be promoted as the death rate,” one post read.

DePape also posted links to YouTube videos with titles like “Democrat FARCE Commission to Investigate January 6th Capitol Riot COLLAPSES in Congress!!!” and “Global Elites Plan To Take Control Of YOUR Money! (Revealed)”

Two days after former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of killing George Floyd, DePape wrote that the trial was “a modern lynching,” falsely indicating that Floyd died of a drug overdose.

He also posted content about the “Great Reset”– the sprawling conspiracy theory that global elites are using coronavirus to usher in a new world order in which they gain more power and oppress the masses. And he complained that politicians making promises to try to win votes “are offering you bribes in exchange for your further enslavement.”

BLOGS SHOW IMAGES OF PELOSI, QANON AND ANTISEMITISM

Most of the public posts on DePape’s Facebook page were from 2021. In earlier years, DePape also posted long screeds about religion, including claims that “Jesus is the anti christ.” None of the public posts appeared to mention Pelosi.

More recently, two other blogs written by someone with the username “daviddepape” have posted content similar to that on DePape’s Facebook page.

In a string of posts on a Wordpress.com blog over the course of several days in August 2022, the author complained about big tech censorship and posted statements like “Hitlery did nothing wrong.” The site has since been taken offline.

And another blog, also attributed to “daviddepape,” featured antisemitic screeds and content linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory. One video posted on the site includes a shot of Pelosi swinging a gavel during one of former President Donald Trump’s impeachments, and another video includes an image of Pelosi and other politicians. A third video includes a clip of Pelosi speaking on the House floor.

Other posts from the last few weeks featured videos accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” children, and declared that “any journalist saying” there is no evidence of election fraud “should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.” The most recent post – linking to a YouTube video comparing colleges to cults – went up the day before the Pelosi attack.

CNN was not able to confirm that the two blogs were written by DePape.

Another former acquaintance of DePape’s also told CNN he exhibited concerning behavior over the years.

Laura Hayes, who also lives in California, said she worked with DePape for a few months roughly a decade ago making hemp bracelets when he was living in a storage shed in the Berkeley area. She said DePape sold the bracelets as a business.

“He was very odd. He didn’t make eye contact very well,” Hayes said. She recalled him saying that “he talks to angels and there will be a hard time coming.” But she didn’t remember any seriously threatening comments, and said she didn’t think much of it because “it’s Berkeley,” a place where eccentric characters aren’t uncommon.

Hayes, who was Facebook friends with DePape, called his more recent posts “so phobic in so many ways” and filled with “so much anger.”

[theculturedmarxist]

Abstract

There have been hundreds of millions of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). With the growing population of recovered patients, it is crucial to understand the long-term consequences of the disease and management strategies. Although COVID-19 was initially considered an acute respiratory illness, recent evidence suggests that manifestations including but not limited to those of the cardiovascular, respiratory, neuropsychiatric, gastrointestinal, reproductive, and musculoskeletal systems may persist long after the acute phase. These persistent manifestations, also referred to as long COVID, could impact all patients with COVID-19 across the full spectrum of illness severity. Herein, we comprehensively review the current literature on long COVID, highlighting its epidemiological understanding, the impact of vaccinations, organ-specific sequelae, pathophysiological mechanisms, and multidisciplinary management strategies. In addition, the impact of psychological and psychosomatic factors is also underscored. Despite these crucial findings on long COVID, the current diagnostic and therapeutic strategies based on previous experience and pilot studies remain inadequate, and well-designed clinical trials should be prioritized to validate existing hypotheses. Thus, we propose the primary challenges concerning biological knowledge gaps and efficient remedies as well as discuss the corresponding recommendations.

[rehsgalleries]

At Rehs Contemporary Galleries - Josh Tiessen – Vanitas and Viriditas. On view from April 28th through May 26th

The Ferret Trials

Oil on panel

12 x 12 inches

$4,000.00

https://rehs.com/Josh_Tiessen_The_Ferret_Trials.html

In my painting, a lone ferret lays deceased on a lab table with a syringe––perhaps one of the many experimental injections for risky gain-of-function research. This work is a lament for the atrocities of vivisection (animal testing). The seven rose petals are symbolic of a funeral. It is my way of eulogizing the Black-Footed Ferret, the most commonly used species for coronavirus vaccine experiments, due to its lung structure resembling that of humans. While at first ferrets showed promising signs of antibody response, many died later when exposed to the wild virus [iii]. Today, animals are experimented on in labs all over the world, and, as a result, just like the ferrets, many of them prematurely perish due to compromised immune systems.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Regulators greenlight phase two trials for Brazilian Covid vaccine

Brazilian federal health regulator Anvisa authorized a Covid vaccine developed by research institute Senai Cimatec to advance to phase two trials.

Under the technical name RNA MCTI Cimatec HDT, the vaccine is part of a global plan that includes U.S.-based company HDT Bio Corp and India’s Gennova Biopharmaceuticals. Phase one trials were approved in October of last year and began in January.

The health regulator added that the vaccine is based on self-amplifying RNA replicon (repRNA) technology, capable of encoding the coronavirus spike protein.

“Compared to messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine platforms, the repRNA platform has the potential to generate more robust immune responses, inducing long-term protective immunity at lower dose levels, with potential for single-dose application,” reads a statement. 

Continue reading.

[albonium]

"Long COVID is an often debilitating illness that occurs in at least 10% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections. More than 200 symptoms have been identified with impacts on multiple organ systems. At least 65 million individuals worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, with cases increasing daily.

Biomedical research has made substantial progress in identifying various pathophysiological changes and risk factors and in characterizing the illness; further, similarities with other viral-onset illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome have laid the groundwork for research in the field.

In this review, we explore the current literature and highlight key findings, the overlap with other conditions, the variable onset of symptoms, long COVID in children and the impact of vaccinations. Although these key findings are critical to understanding long COVID, current diagnostic and treatment options are insufficient, and clinical trials must be prioritized that address leading hypotheses.

Additionally, to strengthen long COVID research, future studies must account for biases and SARS-CoV-2 testing issues, build on viral-onset research, be inclusive of marginalized populations and meaningfully engage patients throughout the research process."

[tamanna31]

Clinical Trials 2024 Industry Size, Demands, Growth and Top Key Players Analysis Report

Clinical Trials Industry Overview

The global clinical trials market size was valued at USD 80.7 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.49% from 2024 to 2030. 

The market growth spiked in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. This growth pattern was witnessed by both virtual clinical trials and traditional ones. Several companies invested heavily in novel drug development to minimize COVID-19 patient burden. One such example being, in 2020, Synairgen plc and Parexel collaborated on a Phase III study of Interferon-beta (IFN-beta) treatment for COVID-19. Furthermore, rapid technological evolution, rising prevalence of chronic diseases, globalization of clinical trials, penetration of personalized medicine and a rise in demand for CROs for conducting research activities is expected to positively impact the market growth.

Gather more insights about the market drivers, restrains and growth of theClinical Trials Market

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic led to changing the ways of conducting upcoming or ongoing clinical trials. Regulatory agencies including the U.S. FDA, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and China’s National Medical Products Administration among several others issued various guidelines for conducting trials during the pandemic to support the implementation of decentralized clinical trials and virtual services. The current scenario for research and development activities across the globe and the need for several new treatment options have also led to the adoption of fast-track clinical trials. Thus, aforementioned factors are estimated to offer new avenues to the clinical trials market growth.

Favorable government support and initiatives is another aspect boosting the market growth potential. For instance, the WHO launched Solidarity, an international clinical trial to determine effective treatment against COVID-19. [PS2]  It includes comparing four treatment options against the standard of care to evaluate their effectiveness against the coronavirus. In May 2020, the WHO also announced an international alliance for simultaneously developing multiple candidate vaccines to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease, calling this effort the Solidarity trial for vaccines.

Furthermore, the use of CRO services helps manufacturers/sponsors pay complete attention to the production capacity and enhance their in-house processes. The availability of the vast array of services from drug discovery to post marketing surveillance has further simplified processes for mid-size & small-scale pharmaceutical and biotechnological organizations by providing them the option to outsource research and development activities to reduce infrastructure investment. For instance, in November 2023, Syneos Health signed an agreement with GoBroad Healthcare Group. This collaborative initiative extended the company’s clinical trial capabilities into a more extensive array of therapeutic areas in China.

Browse through Grand View Research's Healthcare IT Industry Research Reports.

The global digital neuro biomarkers market size was estimated at USD 593.1 million in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 25.3% from 2024 to 2030.

The global healthcare digital experience platform market size was valued at USD 1.26 billion in 2023 and is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 12.5% from 2024 to 2030.

Clinical Trials Market Segmentation

Grand View Research has segmented the global clinical trials market based on phase, study design, indication, sponsor, indication by study design, and region:

Clinical Trials Phase Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Phase I

Phase II

Phase III

Phase IV

Clinical Trials Study Design Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Clinical Trials Indication by Study Design Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Autoimmune/Inflammation

Rheumatoid Arthritis

Multiple Sclerosis

Osteoarthritis

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

Others

Pain Management

Chronic Pain

Acute Pain

Oncology

Blood Cancer

Solid Tumors

Other

CNS Condition

Epilepsy

Parkinson's Disease (PD)

Huntington's Disease

Stroke

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

Muscle Regeneration

Others

Diabetes

Obesity

Cardiovascular

Others

Clinical Trials Indication Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Autoimmune/Inflammation

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Pain Management

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Oncology

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

CNS Condition

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Diabetes

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Obesity

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Cardiovascular

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Others

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Clinical Trials Sponsor Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Pharmaceutical & Biopharmaceutical Companies

Medical Device Companies

Others

Clinical Trials Service Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Protocol Designing

Site Identification

Patient Recruitment

Laboratory Services

Bioanalytical Testing Services

Clinical Trial Data Management Services

Others

Clinical Trials Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

North America

US

Canada

Europe

UK

Germany

France

Spain

Italy

Asia Pacific

India

Japan

China

Australia

South Korea

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Argentina

Colombia

Middle East & Africa

South Africa

Saudi Arabia

UAE

Key Companies profiled:

IQVIA

PAREXEL International Corporation

Pharmaceutical Product Development, LLC

Charles River Laboratory

ICON Plc

PRA Health Sciences

Syneos Health

Eli Lilly and Company

Novo Nordisk A/S

Pfizer

Clinipace

Recent Developments

In August 2023, Parexel & Partex entered a strategic partnership aimed at utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven solutions to expedite the process of drug discovery and development for biopharmaceutical clients globally. The collaboration aimed to reduce risks associated with the assets in their respective portfolios.

In August 2023, Novo Nordisk announced to acquire Inversago Pharma. This acquisition was part of Novo Nordisk's strategic efforts to develop new therapies targeting individuals with obesity, diabetes, and other significant metabolic diseases

Order a free sample PDF of the Clinical Trials Market Intelligence Study, published by Grand View Research.

[darkmaga-retard]

Prof. Sir John Bell, a key figure in the development of the University of Oxford's Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) "vaccine," let slip the other day the fact that the school's latest COVID injection is capable of sterilizing between 60 and 70 percent of those who take it.

In a recent interview about the new shot, Sir John, who teaches medicine at Oxford, seemed to suggest that one of the goals behind these injections is to mass sterilize the planet under the guise of protecting public health against the "COVID virus."

"These vaccines are unlikely to completely sterilize a population," Sir John said with seeming disappointment during the interview.

"They're very likely to have an effect which works in a percentage, say 60 or 70 percent. We'll have to look quite carefully, and the regulators will have to look quite carefully to make sure that it's done what we need it to do before it gets approved."

A clinical trial for the shot is still ongoing and Sir John says there will be a "delay" between when the results are in and when regulators give the shot the green light for public release.

Sir John was barely able to complete his sentence before the interviewer cut him off, apparently to keep him quiet from revealing any further incriminating information about the new Oxford shot.

[novumtimes]

Australian long-COVID research gives hope for new vaccines and treatments

Key PointsAustralian-led research on cells fighting long-COVID could aid in developing new coronavirus treatments and vaccines.A Doherty Institute study found that memory T cells can recognise and fight long-COVID for up to two years.Research could guide new vaccines and therapies, especially for long-COVID patients. Special cells with long memories could help produce new coronavirus treatments on the back of breakthrough Australian research. A Doherty Institute study found memory “T cells” that recognise long-COVID can be established and fight subsequent infections for two years. T cells fight viral infections by killing off infected cells and can remember what they have encountered. The study, which targeted the previously under-researched area of long-COVID immunity, found specific T cells within the 31 people examined could maintain their key features over the two-year period. Long-COVID is a chronic condition where people who have caught COVID-19 experience symptoms for an extended period of time. It can affect almost every part of the body through extreme fatigue, muscle pain, reduced appetite, sleep problems and a host of other issues. Doherty Institute senior research fellow Louise Rowntree said the study was good news for long-COVID sufferers, as it showed their T cells were doing what they are meant to. “It’s really positive news for someone with long-COVID … the T cells are establishing and they’re maintaining,” she told the Australian Associated Press. “The establishment and maintenance of these cells for this two-year period really provides that protection against a subsequent infection, and their responses are really good following their first vaccination as well.” The research could help shape future therapies and vaccines for long-COVID patients. “SARS-CoV-2 vaccines stimulate both antibodies and T cell responses, so we followed the T cell responses through, and it’s definitely encouraging that we do need to be looking at therapies and vaccines that are going to trigger both antibodies and T cells,” Dr Rowntree said. “Those T cells can help protect when the virus mutates, so they can offer protection despite the virus changing over time.” In June, the federal government invested $14.5 million into long-COVID research to generate better evidence on effective management of the condition within the community. The money was to be used investigating how people experience long-COVID, impacts on health systems, causes and national trials to try to fast-track therapies. Source link via The Novum Times

[covid-safer-hotties]

COVID-19: examining the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions - Published Aug 2023 (PDF)

© The Royal Society The text of this work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

The license is available at: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Executive summary

Introduction

The purpose of this report from the Royal Society is to assess what has been learnt about the effectiveness of the application of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 – 2023 by assembling and examining evidence from researchers around the world. These NPIs were a set of measures (described in Box 1) aimed at reducing the person-to-person transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that caused the pandemic. Six groups of researchers were commissioned to assemble evidence reviews for this report, examining the effectiveness of a range of NPIs that were applied with the aim of reducing the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Researchers were tasked with documenting what has been learnt, identifying gaps in knowledge and considering how these might be filled in the future. This report summarises these evidence reviews and interprets them alongside national case studies. It pays particular attention to the context and the constraints on the types of research that could be and were performed during the pandemic. The report is non-judgemental on the timing and manner in which NPIs were applied in different regions and countries around the world. It focuses on understanding the impact of NPIs on SARS-CoV-2 transmission and makes no assessment of the economic or other societal impacts of the different NPIs. Assessing these other impacts are important tasks for the many different COVID-19 inquiries that are underway around the world.

From the start of the pandemic, rapidly growing scientific information was deployed continuously to help to control its spread. The genome of the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2, was sequenced from some of the very earliest samples available from infected humans in China. This sequence information enabled the development of precise molecular diagnostic tests that could be used for diagnosis and mass testing of populations, the development of vaccines and continuous monitoring of the evolution of the virus. The development of tests led to the widespread implementation of ‘test, trace and isolate’ interventions early in the pandemic. COVID-19 was the first pandemic in which it was feasible to conduct prophylactic and therapeutic drug trials and to create novel vaccines during the course of the pandemic, saving lives and modifying the outcomes. However, despite extraordinary scientific capabilities, for most of the first year of the pandemic the only measures available to slow the transmission of the novel virus were NPIs. For those that were infected and seriously ill, there were no specific treatments or preventative measures in the form of drugs or vaccines. The supportive measures of modern medicine, such as oxygen supplementation, pulmonary ventilation and other forms of advanced life support, saved many lives, but did nothing to slow transmission.

What are NPIs? The principles behind NPIs are firmly grounded in prior knowledge about the epidemiology and biology of infectious diseases. In essence, the transmission of an infection from one human to another can be prevented if the transmission pathway can be blocked effectively. For an airborne virus such as SARSCoV-2, effective measures reduce exposure to virus that has been exhaled by infected people (by breathing, talking, coughing or sneezing). Measures that can assist, in theory, include the wearing of face masks, enhanced ventilation and social distancing. Where infectious virus survives on surfaces (furniture, clothes or hands), cleaning regimes including enhanced handwashing can help. Personal protection equipment (PPE), common in healthcare environments (including gloves, visors, gowns and masks) potentially offers protection against exposure.

Early clinical studies of COVID-19 strongly suggested that the primary routes for acquiring infection were likely to be by direct inhalation or exposure of the mucosal surfaces of the nose and mouth to virus suspended in airborne droplets or, as was realised some months into the pandemic, in aerosols. Early evidence of fomites (contaminated surfaces), extensively contaminated with SARS-CoV-2 viral nucleic acid shed from infected people, pointed to the possibility that hand-to-face contact might also transmit the infection. This view was informed by prior knowledge of the transmission mechanisms of other respiratory viruses, such as influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and the coronavirus (now named SARS-CoV-1) that caused the SARS outbreak in several countries around the world in 2003.

Use of NPIs for infectious disease control Considering the incomplete knowledge about this new viral infection and prior knowledge, many governments around the world implemented measures similar to those used just over a century earlier during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Some countries in Asia implemented measures based on their more recent experience of outbreaks of SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). NPIs included the wearing of masks and enhanced personal hygiene measures, including enhanced surface cleaning and handwashing. Social distancing was introduced and enforced to variable extents. Social distancing measures included closures of schools and workplaces, as well as entertainment, leisure and sporting venues. These closures were often augmented by stayat-home orders for all but essential workers.

Border controls and closures were put in place in many countries with the aim of reducing the movement of cases across national borders. The precise measures, and the ways they were implemented, varied between countries according to their social and political-economic contexts and prior experiences. In most of the world, NPIs remained the dominant mechanism for control of the pandemic until well into its second year. The UK was the first country to approve the use of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, approving three vaccines during December 2020 and January 2021. By July 2021, approximately half of the UK’s population had received two doses of vaccine. However, it took until January 2022 for half of the global population to have had two doses – and a year later in January 2023 the global figure had risen to approximately 63%.

The challenge for governments around the world facing a pandemic is how to minimise the harms to their populations. The harms of a pandemic are the morbidity and mortality from the viral infection, coupled with the social disruption and harms that follow from the direct and indirect consequences of that morbidity and mortality. The latter can be exceptionally severe if the extent of illness and social response to the illness disrupts the healthcare systems, infrastructure, goods and services on which the health, wellbeing, resilience and security of the population depend.

What are non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)? NPIs include any measure that is implemented during an infectious disease outbreak to attempt to reduce transmission that is not a vaccine or drug. NPIs can be behavioural, social, physical, or regulatory in nature. Their uptake and use can be encouraged through a variety of approaches, escalating from advice and guidance through to regulation. NPIs are therefore the first line of defence in the effort to contain outbreaks and to limit the impacts on affected populations before biological interventions become available. They have also been used alongside vaccines and drugs, especially where these interventions fail to prevent transmission. The precise ways in which NPIs were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic varied between different countries and contexts.

The programme of work described in this report covered six broad categories of NPIs and the evidence available concerning= their effectiveness at reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The six categories are as follows:

Masks and face coverings Masks act as barriers to virus particles in air being inhaled and/or exhaled through the nose or mouth. Virus-carrying droplets (larger, heavier particles) or aerosols (smaller, lighter articles) captured on the inside or outside of the mask can no longer spread via the air. The materials and features of masks affect the size of the particles that are filtered out, and their resulting effectiveness. How well the mask fits the face of the wearer is also key. N95 masks (also known as respirators), when worn correctly, are highly effective barriers.

Social distancing and ‘lockdowns’ Respiratory diseases are transmitted by infectious material carried by exhalations (eg. breathing, talking, coughing or sneezing) from one individual to another. Increasing physical distance between individuals can reduce the amount of infectious material being carried to others in droplets and aerosols, although aerosols typically transmit over longer distances than droplets. A commonly recommended minimum distance of separation between individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic was two metres. Interventions on populations and communities included closures of schools, workplaces, places of worship and entertainment venues, as well as ‘stay-at-home’ orders (‘lockdowns’) that prevented most people from coming into contact with anyone outside their own homes.

Test, trace and isolate SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted when infected individuals are in close proximity to others. A strategy employed to break the chain of transmission is to identify infectious people (‘test’), determine with whom they have come into physical contact (‘trace’) and encourage or enforce both infected individuals and their contacts to stay at home and avoid physical contact with others until the risk of being infectious has subsided (‘isolate’).

Travel restrictions and controls across international borders During a pandemic, where an infectious disease is spreading across international borders, restricting the ability of people to move between countries can be used to try to prevent the global movement of the pathogen. Border controls applied during the pandemic varied in stringency and took the form of complete or partial bans targeted at international travellers from particular regions perceived as being at higher risk. Often border controls were accompanied by requirements for international travellers to test and/or quarantine at the border of departure and/or arrival to enable some travel.

Environmental controls Particles carrying infectious material vary in size from droplets that settle on surfaces close to the point of exhalation through to very fine aerosols which can linger in the air and travel further. Certain elements of building design and management can be implemented with the intention of restricting the spread of respiratory pathogens. These include enhancing ventilation systems to replace air carrying infectious aerosols with outside air, and filtering or treating air inside buildings to reduce infectious virus. Screens made of a variety of materials and reduced occupancy limits for rooms or buildings can also be used. Environmental controls also include cleaning of surfaces to remove droplets carrying infectious material and enhanced handwashing.

Communications Effective communication about any of thephysical, social or behavioural interventions is essential if people are to understand and be convinced of the reason for their use, as well as being willing to adopt and maintain the practices, and to do so correctly, so as to maximise effectiveness.

[liesmyteachertoldme]

Majority of Americans now dying from Covid were Vaccinated and Boosted

A majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine, writes The Washington Post.

The latest data shows that 58% of COVID-19 deaths in August 2022 were from people who were vaccinated or boosted. Based on past figures and the current trends, we can reasonably estimate that the number of vaccinated/boosted COVID-19 deaths will only rise, comments The Reactionary.

Majority now dying from Covid were Vaccinated: In September 2021, the vaccinated accounted for 23% of COVID-19 deaths; in January/February 2022, the vaccinated were 42%.

This is what happens when you rush ineffective and dangerous vaccines.

Majority now dying from Covid were Vaccinated: The FDA’s promises of efficacy – 91% for the Pfizer vaccine and 93% for the Moderna vaccine – were always based on hope, not data. So too were the promises of safety.

At the time of the official approvals, both Pfizer and Moderna hadn’t submitted any type of long-term numbers on effectiveness. Their trials were polluted with the unblinding of participants and their safety studies are “ongoing.”

Now, we’re seeing efficacy numbers plummet within months of vaccination. The pandemic is of the vaccinated. The boosters?