February 22, 2021 By Michael D. Shaw @ Health News Digest
It is becoming apparent that a bigger story than the COVID-19 pandemic per se is our collective reaction to it. The first official reaction was for everyone to maintain social distancing, followed quickly by the need to mask up. Social distancing made sense to most people since that is what was always practiced around those with a contagious disease. Masking was a somewhat newer phenomenon, first widely observed during the original SARS crisis of 2003-2004.
If social distancing is normal, and masks are a bit cumbersome, the brand-new practice of lockdowns was, in retrospect, a sketchy idea on its face: “Let’s take two weeks to flatten the curve.” Further details of this “curve” were rarely given. Behold, the curve!
The notion of “flattening the curve” first appeared in 2007, and its primary goal is to diminish the health impact by spreading the burden on hospitals and infrastructure over time, not specifically to prevent infections. An added benefit is that it can buy time until effective therapies are developed, and a vaccine can be created.
While hospital resources were overtaxed in certain cases, applying draconian lockdowns as a first response caused other problems, to put it mildly. At least one commentator blames the lockdown zeal and the forcing of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes on prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation , which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Several state governments, including New York, used the doomsday scenario predicted by IHME to come up with their policies, now universally recognized—at least by those affected—as being horrific.
Cold comfort that Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx were also “informed” in their policies by the same modeling. As Jordan Schachtel puts it: “These models, and the policy decisions that were made by relying on them, set off a chain of events that led to indefinite lockdowns, complete business closures, statewide curfews, and most infamously, the nursing home death warrants.”
Characteristically, Bill Gates has never commented on the epic failure of that modeling. In essence, it was based on drastically overinflated numbers supposedly coming from Wuhan, China. As Schachtel concludes:
“The buck does indeed stop with the elected leaders who made the fateful decisions to send sick COVID patients into nursing homes, lock down their states, and mask up their citizens in perpetuity, but that’s only half of the story. The bad data they used almost exclusively came from the Gates network, which has trafficked in pseudoscience and has demonstrated complete incompetence and reckless forecasting since the beginning of last year.”
As to the COVID-19 vaccines, they all operate by targeting the so-called “spike protein,” that part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that enables its entrance into human cells. The idea is that if our bodies create an antibody to this protein, we will prevent infection. The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines accomplish this by introducing a specific messenger RNA into the cell, which provides the genetic information for our cell to produce this antigen spike protein. At that point, our immune system kicks in and creates the antibody.
The Johnson & Johnson and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines introduce the genetic coding information into the cell via a specially modified adenovirus in which that coding is added. The adenovirus is based on DNA, rather than RNA, and is thus much more stable. Still, the basic mechanism of action is the same. The adenovirus-based vaccines do not require the protective envelope (which can cause allergic reactions) needed for the m-RNA based vaccines.
The appeal of this sort of vaccine, which concentrates on a single protein, is that it can be developed in a laboratory using readily available materials, and can be brought to market much quicker than conventional vaccines.
However, one huge difference between this sort of vaccine and a natural immunity created by the cell’s exposure to the actual pathogen is that unintended consequences can occur if the targeted protein is similar to proteins normally present in the body. Indeed, that point was raised by Dr. Michael Yeadon, formerly a Pfizer VP and chief scientific officer.
To wit: “[S]pike proteins also contain syncytin-homologous proteins, which are essential for the formation of the placenta in mammals such as humans.” And an immune reaction against this must be ruled out before the vaccine. Of course, this notion was condemned with the ridiculous assertion that there is no evidence to back the claim of such an action of the vaccine.
Talk about being blinded by devotion to orthodoxy. Yeadon was suggesting that such an action might occur and must be ruled out with in vitro testing. The only affirmative evidence of this effect would be a Dr. Josef Mengele type experiment on a real pregnant woman. Oh wait. This actually occurred.
Dr. Sara Beltrán Ponce tweeted on January 28 that she was “14 weeks pregnant and fully vaccinated!” (Her Twitter account is now locked) Sadly, less than a week later, she announced that she had suffered a rare second trimester miscarriage.
One wonders if this tragedy will have any effect on the legion of vaccine fanboys. Color me doubtful.
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