#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

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

We sat down with Jair Bolsonaro. Facing prison, he’s pining for Trump.

Jair Bolsonaro was surrounded by his own image. It graced most available surfaces at his party’s headquarters, from the walls to the coffee mugs. There was a large painting of Bolsonaro wearing his presidential sash. Photos of Bolsonaro before thousands of supporters, arm reaching into the sky. A golden bust of Bolsonaro, grim-faced, placed before a painting of an even-grimmer-faced Bolsonaro.

But none of these was the image that Bolsonaro wanted us to see.

Bolsonaro, who was awaiting trial before the Brazilian Supreme Court on accusations he plotted to assassinate his rivals and stay in power after his 2022 election loss, pulled over a thick coffee-table book written and gifted to him by President Donald Trump.

“I didn’t pay anything,” said Bolsonaro, 70, twice. “Look, he even signed it.”

On page 305, beside a letter Bolsonaro had written to Trump — “You’ll always have a friend in Brazil” — he found a large photo of himself alongside Trump, and another on the next page. He lingered to admire the photos, reliving his political apex, his moment of greatest proximity to a figure he had long sought to emulate. Then he closed the book and returned to a present and very different moment:

Out of power. Unable to run for office until 2030. Facing the prospect of four decades in prison. Soon to undergo emergency surgeryand a lengthy recovery. Prohibited from leaving the country.

“I couldn’t go to [Trump’s] inauguration,” he mourned. “My passport had been apprehended.”

I’ve been reporting on Bolsonaro for six years, from his rise to power through the darkest days of Brazil’s devastating coronavirus outbreak, from his electoral loss to the storming of the capital by thousands of supporters in protest of the result. But our interview last month was my first time sitting down with him. Walking into a conference room at the Liberal Party headquarters with Post reporter Marina Dias and photographer Dan Agostini, I expected to find the brash, aggressive Bolsonaro I’d come to know from his public persona.

The Bolsonaro who had mocked the coronavirus. Inflamed calls for a military takeover. Clashed with the Supreme Court. Alleged without evidence that the electoral system was rigged against him. And made a vulgar campaign slogan out of the Portuguese word “imbrochável” — something like “never flaccid” — to tout his supposed virility.

In many respects, we found that Bolsonaro. Six feet tall and broad-shouldered, he was physically imposing, irreverent, charismatic, paranoid. Quick to laugh. Quick to anger. He never broke eye contact. He asserted he was “stronger than ever” politically, claimed the “system” wanted him dead — possibly by sniper attack — and falsely asserted that the coronavirus vaccine, which he said he hadn’t received, “isn’t scientifically proven” to be effective. He said he saw a narrow path back to power: Galvanize mass support for another presidential bid and pressure the electoral authorities into overturning his political disqualification.

“There is a popular appeal behind me,” he said.

But we also saw a man reckoning with his own downfall, scared of prison and death, trying to reconcile how he had quickly gone from perhaps Latin America’s most powerful politician to a criminal defendant facing decades of incarceration. He vacillated between expressing certainty that he’d find a way back to power and moments of doubt.

“I’m not anything,” he said at one point.

Continue reading.

[darkmaga-returns]

By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

The McCullough Foundation study authored by M. Nathaniel Mead, Jessica Rose, William Makis, Kirk Milhoan, Nicolas Hulscher (myself), and Peter A. McCullough, was just published in the International Journal of Cardiovascular Research & Innovation: Myocarditis after SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination: Epidemiology, outcomes, and new perspectives

ABSTRACT Myocarditis, typically manifesting as myopericarditis, is among the serious cardiac consequences observed over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. We performed a comprehensive, evidence-based literature synthesis of findings from clinical trial data reanalyses, post-marketing surveillance, large observational studies, and other diverse research sources that help shed light on the phenomenon of myocarditis post SARS-CoV-2 infection versus COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis. Our conclusions refute several claims previously made by public health agencies and professional associations, namely the following: (1) the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Omicron infections have caused more cases of myocarditis than the COVID-19 mRNA immunizations; (2) mRNA vaccine-induced myocarditis is typically mild, transient, and rare, with no long-term sequelae; and (3) the risk-bene t calculus favors continued use of these products despite evidence of more iatrogenic cases. We address each of these misconceptions by applying a combination of epidemiological, clinical, and immunological perspectives. We urge governments to remove the COVID-19 mRNA products from the market due to the well-documented risk of myocardial damage, a risk that is strongest for younger males (<40 years old).

[covid-safer-hotties]

Reference archived on our website (Over 1,000 scientific sources plus news, politics, opinion, resources, and more! Updates daily!)

Could vax and relax be driving covid's genetic mutations? It's more likely than you'd think.

Abstract Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine breakthrough infections have been important for all circulating severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variant periods, but the contribution of vaccine-specific SARS-CoV-2 viral diversification to vaccine failure remains unclear. This study analyzed 595 SARS-CoV-2 sequences collected from the Military Health System beneficiaries between December 2020 and April 2022 to investigate the impact of vaccination on viral diversity. By comparing sequences based on the vaccination status of the participant, we found limited evidence indicating that vaccination was associated with increased viral diversity in the SARS-CoV-2 spike, and we show little to no evidence of a substantial sieve effect within major variants; rather, we show that rapid variant replacement constrained intragenotype COVID-19 vaccine strain immune escape. These data suggest that, during past and perhaps future periods of rapid SARS-CoV-2 variant replacement, vaccine-mediated effects were subsumed with other drivers of viral diversity due to the massive scale of infections and vaccinations that occurred in a short time frame. However, our results also highlight some limitations of using sieve analysis methods outside of placebo-controlled clinical trials.

[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.

[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

[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.

[ges-who]

HEALTH

Can You Still Get a COVID-19 Vaccine at Any Age?

New FDA plan could curb access to shots for some people under age 65

By Rachel Nania, AARP

6 Comments

Published May 21, 2025

nurse in PPE and latex gloves carrying a syringe with a covid-19 vaccine

Getty Images

Federal health officials outlined plans in The New England Journal of Medicine that indicated a narrower population could have access to updated COVID-19 vaccines this year.

Rather than making the shots available to all individuals 6 months and older, like they are now, officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in the May 20 journal article that the agency plans to limit COVID vaccine eligibility to adults 65 and older and individuals with at least one underlying health condition that increases their risk of severe illness from a coronavirus infection. Such conditions include asthma, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer and physical inactivity, among many others.

The article’s authors, FDA vaccine chief Vinay Prasad, M.D., and FDA commissioner Martin Makary, M.D., note that under this change, 100 million to 200 million Americans would have access to COVID-19 vaccines.

For people between the ages of 6 months and 64 years who don’t have any risk factors for severe COVID, “the FDA anticipates the need for randomized, controlled trial data” to evaluate the benefit of the vaccines before licensing them for younger populations, Prasad and Makary write in the article.

For people ages 50 to 64, the FDA officials are calling for a post-marketing trial to test the vaccines against a saline placebo; for individuals under the age of 50, the officials say, manufacturers can conduct sponsor-driven, randomized, placebo-controlled trials, which experts note can be expensive and time-consuming.

The reason for the change, the article’s authors write, is that “the benefit of repeat dosing — particularly among low-risk persons who may have previously received multiple doses of Covid-19 vaccines, had multiple Covid-19 infections, or both — is uncertain.”

The new COVID-19 vaccine framework was published two days before FDA vaccine advisers are scheduled to meet to discuss which coronavirus strain or strains the shots should contain for the 2025-2026 respiratory virus season, and a month before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) convenes to discuss vaccine recommendations.

Doctors familiar with the framework say it’s unclear how changes in the vaccine policy would affect insurance coverage for individuals under the age of 65 who have no risk factors. Insurers are required to cover certain vaccines recommended by ACIP and adopted by the CDC.

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Changes raise questions for adults under 65

Federal data highlights the heightened risks of the coronavirus for adults 65 and older. Since the start of the pandemic, about 77 percent of COVID-19 deaths have occurred in adults 65 and older, data from the CDC shows, and hospitalization rates for this age group are much higher than those for younger populations.

Still, roughly 17 percent of COVID deaths have occurred in adults ages 50 to 64, and about 5.5 percent in people ages 30 to 49.

Robert H. Hopkins Jr., M.D., medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, says the outlined change could “raise, potentially, additional concerns in the health care professional community about the value of vaccinating people at all who are under 65, if they don't have major health conditions.”

What’s more, Hopkins adds, the framework excludes people who want to get the vaccine to reduce their risk of long COVID, which affects more than 20 million Americans. According to the CDC, research shows that COVID vaccination is the best way to prevent long COVID, including in children.

Find COVID-19 vaccines in your state

AARP's 53 state and territory COVID-19 vaccine guides can help you find vaccines near you and provide the latest answers to common questions about costs, eligibility and availability.

“There’s an implication that [the vaccine] is not effective, and we know it’s effective,” says Rebecca Wurtz, M.D., an infectious disease physician and a professor in health policy and management at the University of Minnesota. According to a CDC study, the vaccines averted approximately 68,000 hospitalizations during the 2023–2024 respiratory virus season.

Wurtz says the shift could also put more responsibility on patients under 65 to familiarize themselves with all the conditions that can increase their risk of severe illness and communicate those conditions to their doctor, especially since it’s unlikely clinical trial data will be available in time for the fall vaccine season.

“The risk factors [outlined by the CDC] are conditions that many people ages 50 to 65 share,” Wurtz says, pointing to obesity as one and trouble hearing another. Federal research shows that 28 percent of adults 50 and older are physically inactive — another key risk factor for severe COVID-19.

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Another concern among some doctors: Restricting the vaccine to older individuals and people with certain health conditions ignores young children, who are not immune to the effects of COVID-19. According to an analysis of data from the American Academy of Pediatrics, about 234,000 children under age 18 were hospitalized with COVID-19 from the fall of 2020 to the spring of 2024. And children ages 0-4 accounted for 58 percent of the confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions from January 2022 to April 2024, the same analysis found.

“We’re not talking about and thinking about that relationship between, you know, teachers and health care providers and grandparents getting COVID and transmitting it to their non-immune grandchildren or patients or students,” Wurtz says. CDC data shows that about 13 percent of U.S. children under the age of 18 got the COVID-19 vaccine in the 2024-2025 respiratory illness season.

Reducing your COVID risk

It’s unclear when the changes could take effect. In the meantime, Wurtz says, adults 65 and older who are concerned about getting sick from the virus this summer can get a spring booster, as recommended by the CDC. Individuals who are moderately or severely immunocompromised are also eligible for a spring shot.

“We know that immunity wanes over the space of four to six months. And we also know that COVID is a year-round condition, not an influenza-patterned condition,” Wurtz says. “[The vaccine] is safe, it’s effective, it’s covered by insurance, and it’s available at drugstores. And I think people [65 and older] should be reminded to get that booster.”

For people under 65 who are not eligible for a spring shot, washing hands often and cleaning frequently touched surfaces can help reduce the risk of getting sick. Opting for outdoor activities over indoor ones and wearing a high-quality mask in public indoor areas can also help.

“We have to recognize that COVID-19 is still here with us,” Hopkins says. “It’s still causing thousands of deaths a year. It’s causing tens of thousands of hospitalizations a year. Those numbers are less each year as we come through the pandemic, but as long as the virus continues to circulate, we’re still going to generate new variants.”

Rachel Nania is an award-winning health editor and writer at AARP.org, who covers a range of topics including diseases and treatments.

[newssphere0]

FDA scrutiny of Novavax COVID-19 vaccine sparks uncertainty about other shots

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s effort to impose new requirements on Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine — the nation’s only traditional protein-based option for the coronavirus — is sowing uncertainty about updates to other vaccines, too. Novavax said Monday that the Food and Drug Administration was asking the company to run a new clinical trial of its vaccine after the agency grants full…

[decentralvaccine]

The Promise Of A Single Vaccine Against Multiple Coronavirus

Wong explains that the goal is to create a single vaccine that protects against multiple coronaviruses, potentially reducing the need for frequent boosters. A Phase I clinical trial, led by Rock Biotherapeutics, has already completed enrollment and dosing. The results of this trial will also be highlighted in Wong’s presentation.

“For a lot of vaccines, like smallpox and tetanus, we only have to be immunized once,” Wong says. “But we have to take a flu shot every year.” He adds that the high rate of mutation seen in the SARS-CoV-2 virus — specifically, the receptor binding domain on the virus’ spike protein — has led to an unprecedented number of COVID-19 vaccine updates.

https://scitechdaily.com/universal-coronavirus-vaccine-breakthrough-a-single-shot-that-could-protect-you-from-covid-mers-and-the-common-cold/

[nursingwriter]

Technology and the Development of Modern Medicine The 20th century saw a seismic change in the perception of the human body, and the relationship of patients to physicians and other aspects of modern medicine. With the recent coronavirus pandemic, of course, the focus upon technology and medical developments has become a matter of global importance. Vaccines and innovative drugs were not solely innovations of the past century, but they extent to which they were proven safe and effective is relatively new. The relationship between providers and patients has likewise changed, as well as expectations about treatment. Vaccination and Immunization Technology Infectious disease was once an accepted part of modern life. However, the first smallpox vaccines were developed as early as the late 18th century. Safety of vaccines could not always be guaranteed, however. Inactivation of bacteria via heat or chemical treatment to confer immunity status was developed by the very end of the 19th century (Plotkin 12284). But in the 20th century, the generation of technology that would allow widespread, safe transmission of the vaccine became popularized, freeing generations from the fear and threat of illness as a childhood rite of passage. Purified protein vaccines were developed as early as the 1920s (Plotkin 122285). “By the 1940s, virologists understood that attenuation could be achieved by passage in abnormal hosts,” and both rabies and oral polio vaccines were developed in chicken embryos and mice (Plotkin 12284). Live annotated vaccines for the oral polio vaccine was developed in 1963, with measles, mumps, and rubella shortly after in the 1960s (Plotkin 12284). The 20th century also saw the development of live, inactivated viral vaccines, such as the influenza vaccine (Plotkin 122284). Most influenza vaccines are grown in embryonic eggs. However, “Influenza HA has been produced in insect ells and induces antibodies without the risk of allergy to egg proteins” through the use of genetic engineering and the development of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine was made “because of the properties of the L1 protein of the virus” and “L1 is produced in yeast or in-sect cells, and the VLPs produced there inform the basis of the current vaccines” (Plotkin 122285). The development of these vaccines has freed modern society, until recently, from the fears of infection in crowded areas. Even as recently as the 1990s, until the development of vaccines, certain illnesses as chickenpox were considered rites of passage. The knowledge that contracting the illness conveyed immunization provided some comfort, although the diseases could cause debilitating effects for the duration of the individual’s lifetime. A good example of this is the polo vaccine, an illness so debilitating and common even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had suffered the condition when a young man, and was partially paralyzed as a result (Palca). In the 1950s, when the first polio vaccines were being developed, confidence in science was at a new high, and in contrast to current anxieties about vaccines, there was a widespread call to fuel money and time into developing a disease that was, by the end of World War II, a rite of passage of closing swimming pools and monitoring children in the summers to contain threats of the disease (Palca). In one scandal during the early development of the vaccine, the Cutter Laboratory’s manufacturing did not fully kill the virus, and children actually contracted polio (Palca). During the early vaccine trials on children, a number of children received a placebo in the control group (Palca). Thus, many of the ethical and scientific practices during the development of the vaccine would not be acceptable today. Fear of polio was so great, however, that when the rollout of the vaccines took place, compliance was widespread. This is in stark contrast to today, where memories of the virulence of infectious diseases is much fainter, and parents often express concerns about impurities or toxins in vaccines, or vaccine side effects, which they fear may be greater than the diseases the vaccines are designed to effect. Whether vaccine resistance and fears in the online age will continue, despite the proven threat of coronavirus in recent months, still remains to be seen as the distribution of the vaccine has only begin. Development of Sulfonamide Drugs and Penicillin Along with infectious diseases such as mumps, rubella, polio, chickenpox, and influenza, bacterial diseases such as syphilis had destroyed many lives (famous and non-famous) and was a continual, inhibiting fear in the eyes of many. The development of antibiotics and sulfonamide drugs were likewise groundbreaking. The drugs turned illnesses which could destroy lives and communities, and also generated considerable anxiety in the case of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) about sexuality in general, into far more benign concerns. “Sulfa antibiotics were first used in the 1930s, and they revolutionized medicine….While antibiotic resistance remains a problem for this class of antibiotics, sulfa drugs are still commonly used to treat a variety of bacterial infections” (Earl). Concerns about antibiotic resistance, however, has led to the need for innovation for treatment of a variety of types of drugs to address these illnesses. Unlike the highly orchestrated drive to develop sulfa drugs, however, the development of penicillin was initially accidental. “Alexander Fleming…noticed a zone around an invading fungus on an agar plate in which the bacteria did not grow” (Gaynes 859). Fleming isolated the mold, identified it as the Penicillium genus, extracted the mold, and thus penicillin was born (Gaynes). Penicillin even became a player in World War II, as various Axis powers attempted to secure penicillin from the Allies (Gaynes). Just as germ warfare was long been a factor, treatments for various illnesses have become an issue in wartime. The creator would receive a Nobel Prize, but as seismic an achievement as penicillin was, the generation of new bacterial agents has remained until this day. The fight for new antibacterial agents to keep ahead of antibacterial resistance has likewise continued apace. There are also concerns about over-sanitization regarding antibacterial drugs and cleansers further contributing to antibacterial resistance. Insulin Development Finally, another disease which has long plagued humankind is diabetes. Just like measles and syphilis could rob people of their lives, or, at minimum, their productivity and lifetime health, diabetes was often a death sentence before the development of insulin. Before the development of insulin, the only way to control blood sugar was extreme fasting, and this was only a way to delay, not completely postpone the risk of coma and premature death. The discovery of insulin in 1922, following a link to understanding the pancreas’ role in metabolic regulation, was critical, although for many years, potency varied considerably (Quianzon and Cheikh). Even today, although refinement of insulin treatment and new understanding of the illness has increased, complications in individuals who live longer and longer with the autoimmune disease Type 1 diabetes has increased, and the incidence of Type 2 diabetes (an illness of different origins, but also treated with insulin quite frequently) has likewise increased, due to lifestyle factors that contribute to the illness. Modern medicine once again has made it far easier for people to have their illnesses treated, but new diseases and lifestyle factors continue to be generated. Works Cited Earl, Leslie. “How Sulfa Drugs Work.” National Institute of Health. March 12, 2012. Gaynes, Robert. “The Discovery of Penicillin—New Insights After More Than 75 Years of Clinical Use.” Emerging Infectious Diseases vol. 23, 5 (2017): 849–853. Web. December 20, 2020. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5403050/ Palca, Joe. “The Race For A Polio Vaccine Differed From The Quest To Prevent Coronavirus.” NPR. May 22, 2020. Web. December 20, 2020. Plotkin, Stanley. “History of vaccination.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 111, 34 (2014): 12283-7. December 20, 2020. Web. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4151719/pdf/pnas.201400472.pdf Quianzon, Celeste C, and Issam Cheikh. “History of Insulin.” Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives, vol. 2, 2 10.3402/jchimp.v2i2.18701. July 16, 2012. Web. December 2020. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3714061/   Read the full article

[darkmaga-returns]

Now that Donald Trump has been reelected as president of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is ready to get to work locking up Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, and every other Big Pharma executive who conspired with the media to censor the ugly truth about Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) "vaccines."

Each of these Big Pharma hacks assumed that Kamala Harris would win and sweep the whole thing under the rug. Now that Trump is about to take office a second time, many of them are running for cover.

Kennedy helped unearth evidence showing that COVID injections are bioweapons rather than honest medicine. Their purpose, among other things, was to sicken the general public while reducing the population and laying the groundwork for global medical fascism.

Gates pumped billions of dollars into the production of the Operation Warp Speed jabs, which Congress and the Trump administration paved the way for with the PREP Act. Since Gates also recently funded $50 million to the Kamala campaign, Kennedy wants him to pay.

"[Bill Gates] has been indicted in the Netherlands for lying to the public about the COVID-19 vaccine," Kennedy said last month. "And he's going to have to go to trial."

"You think that he wants to go to trial here in the United States of America? [Do] you think that's one of the reasons he chose to give $50 million to Kamala Harris?"

[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.

[rockhaven777]

辉瑞标榜的疫苗95%有效性是如何得来的？

Eglise医生讲解辉瑞如何“避重就轻”，玩转“临床试验数据”，迷惑公众。

事实上在临床数据中，无论是否接种疫苗，新冠病毒感染率都低于1%。

How did Pfizer achieve the 95% effectiveness of its vaccine?

Dr. Eglise explains how Pfizer "avoided the main issue" and played with "clinical trial data" to confuse the public.

In fact, according to clinical data, the infection rate of the new coronavirus is less than 1% regardless of whether the vaccine is administered or not. #Pfizer #vaccine #避风港Haven #NewsAnalys