Keeping You Informed

 

Quote: " Making sense of COVID data and recommendations. Anyone trying to keep up with the current state of medical knowledge and recommendations regarding the COVID pandemic is bound to be confused.  The data are conflicting, garbled, and inconclusive.  The recommendations are constantly changing, haphazard, arbitrary, and inconsistent. Making sense of COVID information requires more than simply studying data or following recommendations.  It is useful to consider what the recommendations say about the data. For example, the recommendation that people who have been vaccinated against COVID should receive booster shots suggests that health officials believe that the protection provided by the vaccines is not long-lasting.  It is not necessary to quote the precise clinical data upon which this recommendation is based; the fact that the recommendation is made at all gives a pretty good idea of what the data show.  Likewise, the recommendation that people who have been vaccinated should wear masks indicates that health officials believe that vaccination does not reliably prevent the spread of disease.  In fact, it suggests that health officials are not confident that either masking or vaccination prevents the spread of the disease. The fact that COVID mitigation recommendations consist largely of various permutations of vaccination, mask-wearing, hand-washing, six-foot distances, and little else suggests that the notion that the pandemic can be "stopped" by policy interventions is likely wishful thinking, and that the medical community does not know nearly as much about the virus as it would like, or perhaps should.  The "experts" may know more than the average person about the virus, but this does not guarantee that anyone knows enough to give definitive recommendations.  There is a lack of information necessary to enlist popular support for COVID health interventions, and this lack of information is not remedied by assurances of public health officials who seem to have a different story every week. [...] The conclusion of all of this is that, fairly or not, public health officials do not have the credibility necessary to convince a sizable portion of the population to go along with vaccination and masking recommendations.  There is lack of a compelling argument that relinquishing liberties to improve compliance with recommendations having marginal or time-limited efficacy will produce significant benefits. The COVID pandemic will recede.  It may disappear completely, decline to a very low level with sporadic flares, or become endemic.  Our society will survive it, although its impacts on individual lives will vary greatly.  When the history of COVID is written, however, "policy" will likely have had a much greater effect on social institutions than on the course of the pandemic."      Making sense of COVID data and recommendations - American Thinker

Quote: ".The FDA has authorized an early COVID treatment protocol. After nearly a year-and-a-half and over 618,000 recorded COVID-related deaths in the U.S. alone, the FDA has finally released an emergency use authorization for REGEN-COV, a new drug that was being tested in 2020 (pre-Biden). Primary care physicians can now use it as an early treatment option. Before now, the only authorized COVID-19 early treatment my family doctor had, per the July 2021 update to NIH guidelines, was to recommend quarantine and then wait until symptoms go away or report to a hospital if they get worse. Of note, these updated guidelines continue to identify hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a prohibited drug – although this should not be a surprise considering the war on HCQ began soon after President Trump dared to recommend it. REGEN-COV, however, is no simple take-home medicine like the familiar Tamiflu frequently prescribed in the past for the seasonal flu. For example, in the “old days” that ended in March 2020, my wife and I both caught the seasonal flu. Our doctor immediately prescribed Tamiflu and azithromycin because he knew that delaying even a few days would make Tamiflu less effective. Like Tamiflu, REGEN-COV is similarly recommended only for early use before severe symptoms can develop. Once the initial surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths started in March-April 2020, the seasonal flu magically vanished along with Tamiflu despite some early indications it works on COVID. Coincidentally with its approving a new drug, the CDC is finally pulling the plug on the PCR test for COVID-19. The PCR test often gave false positives and can misidentify the seasonal flu as COVID-19 (although it will remain in use through the end of 2021). According to the FDA fact sheet on REGEN-COV, the intravenous infusion process it requires appears time-consuming (it can take 20 to 50 minutes or more, with a one-hour monitoring period immediately after). For now, the FDA recommends it for use only on confirmed COVID-19 patients over the age of 12 who are at high risk of developing severe symptoms. However, the fact sheet permits some flexibility in using it as a preventative to especially high-risk patients. It sounds so promising that the FDA was careful to say it is not a substitute for the vaccines. [...] Having spent most of my career as an analyst, I wondered what the outcome would have been if Sweden, the UK, and the US had discovered something like REGEN-COV when the pandemic started or had the courage to permit using India’s inexpensive early outpatient treatment protocols. This question can be simplistically answered by using India’s reported 331 cumulative deaths per million as the best possible expected outcome (assuming the results for REGEN-COV would have been similar) and multiplying that same number of deaths (311/million) by the populations of the three western countries:

The potentially avoidable death counts in the last column (in red) are beyond alarming. The results in the next to last column (in green) resemble the expected deaths in a normal seasonal flu year. Obviously, the skeptics will reject this result by saying that there are many other factors that would have ruled out this overly optimistic result. Examples include questioning the accuracy of India’s data, the difference in average ages of each country’s population (India has far more young people), and the lack of domestic manufacturing and supply chain resources to produce and distribute the needed drugs. Nevertheless, the results do raise questions about the wisdom of the government medical establishment’s decision to delay authorizing any early treatment protocols and, instead, gambling on the vaccines’ timely arrival or the hope that something new (and more profitable), such as REGEN-COV, would magically appear. We cannot change history, but we should have the wisdom to learn from it."      The FDA has authorized an early COVID treatment protocol - American Thinker   

Quote: "Why mRNA Technology Will NEVER Produce Herd Immunity (It Can’t!). Most people know, I think, that in over 70 years of trying, doctors and scientists have utterly failed to come up with a vaccine that protects us from the common cold. Often mis-named the “flu”, which is altogether a different and more severe disease, the common cold (coryza) is caused by a very naughty virus called the corona virus! It keeps changing all the time; morphing into new antigenic forms, which makes it very hard for the immune system to beat it. In effect we start fresh every time the winter season comes along. In fact you can get many colds in one season, this is such a crafty and versatile virus. Not deadly, thank goodness. But a big nuisance. Probably finding a vaccine against it is a hopeless, lost cause. Within weeks it will become  useless; the antigenic make up of the offender has mutated yet again. That’s why there has never been a successful vaccine against the corona virus.Yet, we are told, they have now solved this problem and within a matter of WEEKS come up with a vaccine that works; works every time; and works for everybody. Do you sense that funny smell around here?Well, they call it a vaccine. But it’s not designed to stop you getting the disease. No pharmaceutical company has ever made that claim. So vaccine is probably the wrong word. It’s based on gene-modification technology. Messenger RNA (mRNA) can induce changes in the way your genes manifest; what’s called the “expression” of your genes. It’s quite a story, actually, and knowing more about it will help you understand what the current “vaccines” are supposed to do (and why they don’t). When Professor Richard Jorgensen, a plant scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, tried to make his petunia flowers a deeper shade of purple, he had little idea that he was about to find the key to one of the hidden mysteries of life and one of the most promising weapons in the war against viruses and cancer. Jorgensen decided he would try to make purple petunia flowers even more purple by injecting them with the gene for pigment coloration. To his surprise, the flowers bloomed white. Instead of the two sets of pigment-producing genes complementing each other, they seemed to interact by mutually turning themselves off. It’s important to note that the purple gene did not vanish. It was still there in the DNA. It just stopped having any effect! At the same time as these experiments were taking place, molecular biologists had been working on something called “antisense” technology. This was a way of turning genes off using a close cousin of DNA called RNA (ribonucleic acid).Antisense worked by injecting into a cell a molecule of RNA that was complementary in its genetic sequence to the RNA of the cell involved in giving instructions for the synthesis of proteins. It was hoped that an antisense strand of RNA would block the manufacture of a particular protein, by shutting off the gene. But yet again something happened that was unexpected. Scientists found that the antisense technique worked best when the RNA was injected in the form of a double-stranded molecule, instead of its usual single-stranded form.Trouble was that nobody understood the mechanism, never mind why this is so. Just that you could “turn off” a gene, by using RNA as a catalyst of change."    Why mRNA Technology Will NEVER Produce Herd Immunity (It Can't!) - Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby (alternative-doctor.com)