The Coronavirus Thread

[pErvinalia]

I will be getting Pfeifer.

Michelle Pfeifer!

[pErvinalia]

The vaccine roll-out here is pretty slow. Partly it's due to supply issues, given some government incompetency, partly dues to public reluctance due to blood clot fears, and partly because there is no great sense of urgency, given the absence of any community transmission for many weeks now. Our only cases come from Australians returning from overseas, and they are in hotel quarantine. Hopefully it is working effectively now...

What types of vaccine do you get? Using the Astrazeneca would be a bad idea in Australia. It's less effective against the emerging variants that will come up Australia once you open the borders.

Yeah, it's mostly Astrazeneca, which we make under licence in Melbourne.

And the answer is simple. We're never going to open our borders!

You are going to have to eventually. You wouldn't need to be vaccinated otherwise. Is there an ongoing discussion in Australia about the vaccination strategy? Using Astrazeneca in Australia in this situation is a really bad strategy:

* You are not in a hurry
* Astra has more severe side-effects than other available vaccines
* Astra works less efficient against the emerging variants of concern

We threw our lot in with AZ early, so it seems we are probably stuck with it. They will only use it now for over 50's, with us younguns getting the Pfizer.

[Tero]

Oops, I guess it was even triple mutated, in India.

...sort of what was predicted.

The rich countries grabbed all the supplies, and left a huge population to incubate variants.

The vaccines will become less effective, meaning that we won't be over this Covid thing for some time.

Fucking First World Arrogance

This could go on for decades. We must get some african genes and try to delete all the nearnderthal genes we white folks have.

[Tero]

NYT
For weeks, New Yorkers have witnessed the alarming rise of a homegrown variant of the coronavirus that has kept the number of cases in the city stubbornly high. City officials have repeatedly warned that the variant may be more contagious and may dodge the immune response.

On that second point, at least, they can now breathe easier: Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines will effectively prevent serious illness and death from the variant, two independent studies suggest.

Antibodies stimulated by those vaccines are only slightly less potent at controlling the variant than the original form of the virus, both studies found.

“We’re not seeing big differences,” said Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York and a member of the team that published one of the studies on Thursday.

“The take-home message is that the vaccines are going to work against the New York variant and the South African variant and the U.K. variant,” said Nathan Landau, a virologist at N.Y.U.’s Grossman School of Medicine who led the study.

[Brian Peacock]

Yes, a big, beautiful wall... and we can make the Africans and the Indians pay for it!

[pErvinalia]

Mexico can pay for it. They've got some money left over from the last wall they paid for.

[pErvinalia]

Covid deaths are exaggerated. What's the methodology? You can't trust statistics. They count anything as a Covid death.

[Brian Peacock]

Long Covid...

[Tero]

We had a week or two of low cases. Now we have the usual 50-60 cases a day for the county. All the people refusing to get vaccine or wear a mask.

Why bother getting tested? Is it just so you get a few weeks sick leave?

[Cunt]

We had a week or two of low cases. Now we have the usual 50-60 cases a day for the county. All the people refusing to get vaccine or wear a mask.

Why bother getting tested? Is it just so you get a few weeks sick leave?

I got tested because I was asked to by our health overlords (they detected a high signal in our towns effluent).

When I thought carefully about all the possible outcomes of that test, I realized it would not change my plans in the slightest - so I didn't want to know about it.

They still needed to tell me my results though (in case they were positive) so I have to hold still and listen to the results too.

They also follow my 'self isolation' with email forms, and I've been getting a follow up call too. All that attention, and they are giving it a heroic effort, but I doubt they will have much more success than anywhere else.

I remember how much success there was in limiting the spread of other diseases. We humans don't do well with 'compliance', generally.

[Hermit]

I remember how much success there was in limiting the spread of other diseases. We humans don't do well with 'compliance', generally.

Indeed. The lack of success is astounding.

[NineBerry]

Some people in Germany are so desperate for an Australian-like suppression strategy, they made a cringe music video.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Snake oil salesmen push bleach to cure the bug.

'4 Bradenton men indicted on charges of selling "miracle" toxic COVID-19 cure'

A federal grand jury has indicted a Bradenton man and his three adult sons with fraudulently marketing and selling a toxic industrial bleach as a cure for COVID-19, cancer, autism and other serious medical conditions, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.

Mark Grenon, 62, and sons Jonathan Grenon, 34, Jordan Grenon, 26, and Joseph Grenon, 32, also were indicted with defying federal court orders, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Friday.

Prosecutors say the Grenons also allegedly threatened a federal judge that they would “pick up guns” and instigate “a Waco” should the government attempt to enforce court orders that halted their distribution of their product, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release.

The indictment charges each of the Grenons with one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and two counts of criminal contempt, the news release said. If convicted, they face up to life imprisonment.

The four men, all of Bradenton, manufactured, promoted and sold “Miracle Mineral Solution,” which contained sodium chlorite and water, the indictment said, according to the news release. When ingested, the solution became chlorine dioxide, typically used for treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp and paper, the release said.

Despite a lack of Federal Drug Administration approval, the Grenons claimed that ingesting their product could treat, prevent and cure COVID-19, according to the charges.

Former President Donald Trump caused a stir last April, in the final year of his term, when he noted that researchers were looking at the effects of disinfectants on coronavirus and wondered if they could be injected into people. Mark Grenon had taken credit for Trump's idea, according to reports.

Regarding the Grenons’ product, authorities previously said people were buying it, using it and getting sick. And the FDA last year warned consumers about the product and others like it.

The indictment alleges that the Grenons took in more than $1 million from selling tens of thousands of bottles of it, the news release said.

They allegedly sold it under Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, “an entity they are accused of creating to avoid government regulation of MMS and shield themselves from prosecution,” the news release said.

In other COVID shitbird news: The anti-vaccination loons and goons have decided they can appropriate for themselves the yellow star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear.

'ADL criticizes "anti-vaxxers" for adopting Star of David badge

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Monday criticized anti-vaccine activists for adopting the yellow Star of David badge as a symbol of their "persecution."

According to a statement from the ADL, the stars, emblazoned with the stylized words “No Vax,” are showing up on social media, especially on Facebook, and at anti-vaccine events.

The group says that appropriation is "hugely inappropriate" given many European Jews were made to wear the stars during the Holocaust, saying that using the symbol trivializes the "six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust."

“The Holocaust was a unique event in human history. European Jews were forced to wear yellow Stars of David by the Nazis as a kind of scarlet letter, a form of persecution and forced exclusion from society,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.

“It is simply wrong to compare the plight of Jews during the Holocaust to that of anti-vaxxers. Groups advancing a political or social agenda should be able to assert their ideas without trivializing the memory of the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.”

The movement against vaccines, commonly called anti-vax, has been pointed to by a number of public officials for being a major contributor to recent disease breakouts, including a number of ongoing measles outbreaks.

[Brian Peacock]

The world needs a patent waiver on Covid vaccines. Why is the UK blocking it?

Last year the British government made a series of mistakes in its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. As countries from Thailand to the US battle another wave of infections driven by more virulent strains, the UK risks making another historic mistake that could scupper our chance to end this pandemic.

Because coronavirus cases continue to rise worldwide, the risk of vaccine-resistant variants is increasing. Public health voices have already warned that if we don’t rapidly vaccinate the world’s population, our current generation of Covid-19 vaccines could be rendered ineffective within a year. The need for a rapid, global vaccination rollout is clear and urgent.

...

Production is being constrained because pharmaceutical companies have refused to share their vaccine technology, and intellectual property rules prevent countries from creating their own generic versions of the jabs. This means we are restricted to the supply chains of the patent-holder company. Because of this impediment, we are using just a fraction of the world’s potential global vaccine manufacturing capacity...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... k-variants

[L'Emmerdeur]

The anti-mask paper from Medical Hypotheses is being retracted. It's big tech/big med/big government censorship I tells ya.

'Elsevier journal to retract widely debunked masks study whose author claimed a Stanford affiliation'

A study that warned of the perils of using face masks as a precaution against contracting Covid-19 appears slated for retraction, Retraction Watch has learned.

The 2020 paper, “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis,” was written by Baruch Vainshelboim, who listed his affiliation as Stanford University and the VA Palo Alto Health System. But the study gained wide circulation earlier this month, thanks in part to some conservative politicians, and became the subject of fact-checks by the Associated Press and Snopes, which pointed out that

The paper was published by an exercise physiologist with no academic connection to Stanford University or the NIH in a journal that accepts “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas.”