Taibbi: Why Has "Ivermectin" Become a Dirty Word?

re: Questioning the Safety of the COVID Vaccines is Now a Thought Crime
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: “62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with Ivermectin”

Mainstream researchers and doctors talking about Ivermectin are either afraid to speak out, aor getting canceled by the Big Tech intellectual thugs at Google/Facebook/Twitter.

Matt Taibbi is one of the few reasonably objective media voices left.

Why Has "Ivermectin" Become a Dirty Word?

by Matt Taibbi, June 18 2021

At the worst moment, Internet censorship has driven scientific debate itself underground.

...

One of the challenges of the pandemic period is the degree to which science has become intertwined with politics. Arguments about the efficacy of mask use or ventilators, or the viability of repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or even the pandemic’s origins, were quashed from the jump in the American commercial press, which committed itself to a regime of simplified insta-takes made opposite to Donald Trump’s comments. With a few exceptions, Internet censors generally tracked with this conventional wisdom, which had the effect of moving conspiracy theories and real scientific debates alike far underground. 

A consequence is that issues like the ivermectin question have ended up in the same public bucket as debates over foreign misinformation, hate speech, and even incitement. The same Republican Senator YouTube suspended for making statements in support of ivermectin, Ron Johnson, has also been denounced in the press for failing to call the January 6th riots an insurrection, resulting in headlines that blend the two putative offenses.

“You have these ideas about the need to censor hate speech, calls for violence, and falsity,” Kory says, “and they’ve put science on the same shelf.”

...

WIND: it’s frightening to watch this play out. And not just because the players involved are de facto killers by suppressing the search for the best possible treatments.

COVID Vaccines for Long Haul COVID?

In general, and stated for the (blessedly infrequent) aholes unable/unwilling to take a balanced view and having no concept of risk assessment: In general I support the COVID vaccine. But individuals are specific situations, which is why doctors bother at all with actually seeing patients for any/all issues! The COVID vaccine has proven risks including deadly ones, and there is NO DATA at the CDC for those with auto-immune issues like myself, pregnant women, and numerous other groups. As well as the question of whether it works at all for those taking immunosuppressive drugs (tens of millions of people). And you will not be compensated if the vaccine causes long-term damage!

Several readers have written to suggest that the COVID vaccine(s) might help for Long Haul COVID. I thank them for wanting to help.

Let’s look at that idea from a rational and scientific perspective, which assumes that assumptions are not science, and that the science is never 'settled' (an absurdity).

Hypothesis: one or more of the COVID vaccines might help Long Haul COVID patients

Such a hypothesis needs at least some credible basis.

• The speculative idea that COVID can somehow linger in the body—3/6/9 months later. There is not even the faintest scientific evidence for this that I am aware of. Also, it would imply an incompetent immune system, unable to rid the body of even trace levels of the virus and/or a virus able to embed itself like Herpes Zoster (chickenpox/shingles) or Epstein Barr virus.
• The immune system is somehow in a state of corruption such that the vaccine would somehow stimulate the immune system to be All Good again.
• The vaccine could somehow undamage any damage that had been done by the virus (the “unicorns and rainbows” theory).
• The vaccine being a major stressor to the immune system could help the body repair itself by putting it under duress. When does ADDING stress to a body already under duress help the body heal anything?

Are any of the above credible? Some other working hypothesis? Maybe there could be a side effect of the vaccine that somehow miraculously reset the body and immune system and magically repairs damage? WOW, that would be quite a major medical breakthrough! Sounds like snake oil in its worst-ever incarnation. Still, I cannot rule it out of the realm of possibility that the vaccine could act in ways not yet understood.

But it all seems like the Unicorns and Rainbows theory.

Things like this move around the world at lightning speed while vaccine-happy medical "experts" are all too glad to speculate to encourage vaccine adoption—with no attention to risk assessment. In other words, insidious propaganda. Sure would like to be wrong on that, but it sure looks that way.

Such speculations are why well designed double-blind randomized controlled trials are needed. But what is much more likely is “get the vaccine and shut the fuck up about the risks”.

And the COVID vaccine risks are real for people with auto-immune issues or immunosuppressive drugs, with the government incompetent to track the risks, let alone objectively assess them in the tidal wave of vaccine profits.

Blindly trusting experts/data/science is for the stupid and ignorant, as 2020 proved. Real science is not a “consensus”; it is evidence based! Yet politics and profits are at the very core of much of today’s “science”. Asking questions is as the core of science, which is what the foregoing is all about.

re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: VAERS Reporting for COVID Vaccine Adverse Events vs COVID Deaths
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”
re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: COVID Prior Infection vs Vaccination

Direct from my doctor: People with Auto-Immune Issues have issues with COVID Vaccines

re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: VAERS Reporting for COVID Vaccine Adverse Events vs COVID Deaths
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”
re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: COVID Prior Infection vs Vaccination

See my previous post, Questioning the Safety of the COVID Vaccines is Now a Thought Crime.

I visisted my personal physician a few days ago because of ongoing fatigue problems from Long Haul COVID.

I asked my doctor (internal medicine) whether he felt I was justified in avoiding the COVID vaccines, given my auto-immune issues*. This doctor is very conventional medicine, very skeptical of anything outside the norm, etc.

Without embellishment of any kind, his response was direct and unequivocal.

Of his patients that took the vaccine, the only ones with issues were those that have auto immune issues. They were hit hard by the vaccines and got WORSE. He said he sent one to the hospital. Some were taking up to a month to slowly recover.

He also said that the vaccine demanded a lot of the immune system, and for those aready having immune issues, it could be a long recovery, even a month or longer.

Does that sound “safe” to you? It’s not like such an 'insult' to the body can be assumed to be free of lingering and perhaps permanent damage.

A friend of mine, healthy and in his 30's, was still suffering badly a week after the Astra Zeneca vaccine. The one that some countries are now banning.

These vaccine reactions are NOT normal. If the truth every comes out, my wager is that the COVID vaccines will be shown to have 100X the risks of all other vaccines combined. Maybe Tucker Carlson was on to something, at least in part.

See also: Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy

The new Brown Shirts

Venal and vicious people out there are condemning those of us reluctant to take an experimental vaccine, because we want real data and real science. These human scum believe only in brute force, and are unable to comprehend that for at least some of us, the risks outweigh any benefit, and there are substantive scientific and medical reasons to avoid it.

That the vaccine is safe and that its benefits outweigh its risk is obviously total bullshit when it comes to the Real World for millions of us.

Yet the feckless propaganda train wreck of government and the medical establishment have shoved medical ethics into the toilet, shit all over it, and flushed it. Scum of the earth running a huge guinea pig experiment. The social coercion and demands for punishment for those who refuse the vaccine are escalating. And that’s on top of shredding the Constitution all this time.

* I did not mention that the feckless CDC has no data on how people with auto-immune issues might respond—a group consisting of millions of Americans.

Questioning the Safety of the COVID Vaccines is Now a Thought Crime

re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: VAERS Reporting for COVID Vaccine Adverse Events vs COVID Deaths
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”
re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: COVID Prior Infection vs Vaccination

Questioning the side effect profile and safety of the COVID vaccines is a critically important thing to do. But it is now a thought crime that gets you banned on social media. Ditto for reporting government statistics.

Meet the Censored: C.J. Hopkins, Critic of the "New Normal"

From a data and science standpoint, the COVID vaccine push is one massive anti-scientific train wreck. There is no serious science at work being done. Rather, it’s a massive propaganda push that ignores individual risk assessment and seeks to ignore or obscure the negatives, starting by willfully not collecting side effect data—which thus insures plausible deniability.

The press is the most active player in the suppression and mischaracterization and outright fabrication of news. For example, the press won’t report what people like Joe Rogan actually said about getting the vaccine, because it’s as reasonable and as responsible risk assessment it gets. No doctor could have done it better or more balanced.

Why aren’t we getting any answers or reporting on questions like this (there are dozens):

• Relative to other vaccines, how many deaths do COVID vaccines cause?
• Relative to other vaccines, how many permanent disabilities do COVID vaccines cause?
• Relative to other vaccines, what about existing or new auto-immune disorders, heart attacks and strokes, neurological and brain damage, particularly in people with compromised health including the blood-brain barrier?
• Why the incompetent tracking of vaccine side effects, and why is there no FDA plan to track vaccine side effects at all?
• How can anyone claim a medicine or vaccine is safe when less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration ?
• Why aren’t excitotoxins and the blood-brain barrier of concern with the COVID vaccine, as well as COVID itself?

Where is the data? Not collected/not known.
Where is the science? What science? The data isn’t there.

“Follow the data, follow the science”. Yeah, right.

Worse, ethical boundaries have now been obliterated by the FDA by approving the vaccine for people at nil risk—children. No risk assessment can justify giving an experimental vaccine to children that are not at risk. It is a grotesque violation of medical ethics, and any doctor or nurse giving the vaccine to children has violated the “first, do no harm” rule.

See also: Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy

Sebastian Rushworth MD: “62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with Ivermectin”

re: Sebastian Rushworth MD

Update on ivermectin for covid-19

Sebastian Rushworth, M.D.,  9 May, 2021

...Let's move on and update our meta-analysis. The reason we need to do a meta-analysis here is that none of the trials of Ivermectin is large enough on its own to provide a definitive answer as to whether it is a useful treatment for covid-19 or not... I've included every double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial I could find of ivermectin as a treatment for covid. Using only double-blind placebo-controlled trials means that only the highest quality studies are included in this meta-analysis, which minimizes the risk of biases messing up the results as far as possible.

What we see is a 62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with ivermectin. That would mean that ivermectin prevents roughly three out of five COVID deaths. The reduction is statistically significant (p-value 0,004). In other words, the weight of evidence supporting ivermectin continues to pile up. It is now far stronger than the evidence that led to widespred use of remdesivir earlier in the pandemic, and the effect is much larger and more important (remdesivir was only ever shown to marginally decrease length of hospital stay, it was never shown to have any effect on risk of dying).

I understand why pharmaceutical companies don't like ivermectin. It's a cheap generic drug. Even Merck, the company that invented ivermectin, is doing it's best to destroy the drug's reputation at the moment. This can only be explained by the fact that Merck is currently developing two expensive new COVID drugs, and doesn't want an off-patent drug, which it can no longer make any profit from, competing with them.

The only reason I can think to understand why the broader medical establishment, however, is still so anti-ivermectin is that these studies have all been done outside the rich west. Apparently doctors and scientists outside North America and Western Europe can't be trusted, unless they're saying things that are in line with our pre-conceived notions.

Researchers at McMaster university are currently organizing a large trial of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. That trial is expected to enroll over 3,000 people, so it should be definitive. It's going to be very interesting to see what it shows when the results finally get published.

WIND: amazing to see a doctor just come out and say it: with Big Pharma and the entire medical establishment, it’s all about the money, not about helping people sruvive. But only very poorly informed persons could think otherwise about virtually everything in health care, which in character finds little to distinguish itself from a criminally negligent enterprise hell bent on maximizing profits.

Excitoxins in Food + COVID Breaking Down the Blood-Brain Barrier — a Vicious Combination with the FDA Asleep at the Wheel?

re: The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when you don’t find what you are not looking for, especially when it is not desirable to find it.

Excitotoxins include monosodium glutamate (MSG), aspartame (diet drinks), L-Cysteine. Think just about ALL processed foods, many “health” and energy bars, restaurant food, diet drinks The grocery store is in effect a neurotoxic waste dump. It is why you should eat only whole foods.

MSG can be legally disguised as “natural flavor”, hydrolyzed protein, various protein isolates, casseinate, yeast extract, beef flavor, chicken flavor, flavoring, spices, malt flavoring, etc. It’s a legal con-game.

Particularly in liquids, excitotoxins rise rapidly in the blood, potentially entering the brain as the neurotransmitters glutamate and aspartate, which the body needs and uses. For a healthy adult (a tiny minority?) with a fully intact blood-brain barrier, the excitotoxins may be largely kept out—for a while. But when blood levels stay high for a long time (always), some gets through. And not all parts of the brain have a blood-brain barrier!

Even in a healthy person some level of these excitotoxins will get through. But millions of people lack a fully functional blood-brain barrier, including in-womb fetuses, infants, children and teens, elderly, mTBI victims, etc.

Once into the brain, the excitotoxins selectively excite neurons that primarily use those neurotransmitters, damaging or killing those neurons by firing continuously.

So why don’t people show problems? Because neurons damaged and killed by excitotoxins are not necessarily ones that cause immediate clinically obvious problems. Instead, we see rising levels of all sorts of neurodegenerative brain diseases that start cropping up by middle age, as small but key parts of the brain are degraded or wiped out until “all of a sudden” some nasty condition pops out when a critical threshold of neurons is lost.

COVID and excitotoxin damage — a new vector for brain damage?

Put these facts together:

• Food manufacturers, restaurants can legally include excitotoxins in food as per the FDA, which long ago accepted studies since proven sadly lacking to outright fraudulent, as proving safety.
• The FDA assumes a fully functional blood-brain barrier. But a very large proportion of the population (in-womb fetuses, infants, children through teens, elderly, mTBI victims, etc) do not have a fully functional brood-brain barrier.
• COVID apparently damages the blood brain barrier.

Hypothesis: the combination of blood-brain barrier damage by COVID together with the modern diet high in excitotoxins could be causing or at least exacerbating brain damage in excitotoxin-sensitive neurons.

I scan all my food labels and strictly avoid processed foods and anything containing excitoxins. But it is very easy to be tricked by misleading labeling, and I only learned about some of those tricks in recent months.

Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain. New clues hint at how

...Those results suggest that clots, inflamed linings and leaks in the barriers that normally keep blood and other harmful substances out of the brain may all contribute to COVID-related brain damage.

...

WIND: it’s a scandal that excitoxins have been perfectly legal in food for decades now. But the FDA’s job has long been to protect industry, not people.

So.... tens of millions of people with not fully functional blood-brain barriers were almost certainly seeing localized brain damage from excitotoxins already: fetuses, infants, children through teens, mTBI victims, elderly, etc.

With a damaged blood-brain barrier in COVID patients, how many more millions will be hurt by excitotoxins in food, with effects to emerge a decade or two from now, over and above the immediate clinical issues?

It’s shocking to me that the researchers are not asking the questions about the implications of a blood-brain barrier that is “down”, since food ingredients like excitotoxins as well as many prescription medications could have major implications for brain damage.

Watching otherwise smart people fail to grasp the implications is depressing.

PS: hospital food almost certainly contains excitotoxins. The inmates are runing the asylum.

Reader Comment: COVID-19 Reinfection

re: The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”

Recovering from Long Haul COVID, I keep getting advice and suggestions (including from at least one physician) that vaccination might do something for LHC.

I have seen no science supporting that idea—it’s purely anecdotal bunk as far as I can tell. And it makes no logical sense—damage done by COVID isn’t going to be repaired by challenging the body to fight off proteins it itself is forced to manufacture (the mRNA vaccine for example). You don’t get stronger by asking the body to fight off a challenge while also repairing damage at the same time! Might that double helping cause further problems?

Peter K writes:

I’ve been catching up on your blog. I haven’t read the Lancet paper you cited, but from my anecdotal poll of friends, re-infection is more common than you may think. I used to live in a small town in Wyoming, and more than a handful of my close friends there have developed COVID-19 at least 2X. For many reasons the town was reluctant to institute mask mandates and physical distancing, and now many are vaccine averse. As you may be aware, a year ago Wyoming as a whole got hit hard, and many believed they would be immune this year. Interestingly, because they believed they were immune, many of them traveled, and got infected while traveling, even by car. My friends there who got vaccinated and then traveled, have been fine.

I hear you about the vaccine and possible clotting. I don’t like that they keep talking about frequency being statistically less than normal everyday occurrence of clotting. I want to hear about how they’re teaching healthcare professionals to recognize and diagnose, then treat this successfully. Figuring out the mechanism of the cause would be ideal, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in the near term.

WIND: blood clots in the brain are basically strokes, causing permanent damage. Some types of strokes do not manifest in any clinical way. So we are dealing with massive risk here, potentially.

I still am having a hard time with the “hit hard” statistics. The CDC reporting guidelines classify anything that even has a whiff of COVID as such. It was and is junk data collection violating decades of protocol—fake science that in effect was and is used generate hysteria. The true data will never be known, which makes rational public policy much harder. Let’s see the two and three year statistics, and just how much damage was done by the policies, vs COVID itself.

As far as Wyoming, it looks pretty typical: the elderly and those with comorbidities die at far higher rates. And as usual, the baseline death rate is not subtracted. Consider that a death merely suspected of COVID is a “COVID death” and a death after the vaccine is frequently ruled out as unrelated. How can the medical profession apply this double standard?

Reinfection with COVID

Reinfection is of course possible, as is infection after vaccination. But the science of such claims rests on dubious data integrity.

• PCR tests had and might still have a high error rate because of an absurdly high cycle threshold value, leading to many false positives never recognized as such.
• Testing for COVID with a baseline rate near the error rate, you get GIGO data. Scientific junk.
• The latest science shows that natural immunity is as good or better than any vaccine.
• Many people are nutritionally deficient and thus at high risk. The reinfection idea presupposes a weak immune system. Fix nutrition as a priority.

Basically I don’t trust a claim of “reinfection” not supported by BOTH (1) clinical manifestation of COVID symptoms and (2) at least two positive COVID tests on different days. Seems like junk science otherwise.

Assuming reinfection, you have to ask what is wrong with someone's immune system to get it twice. Probably severe nutritional problems, stress, etc.

Experimental COVID vaccine safety

Note that some vaccines like the J&J don't work for 1 in 3 people. That’s what efficacy of 67% means. So I would not be going with that option.

I have auto-immune issues—multiple symptoms, but most worrisome is my body attacking my thyroid as per the thyroid peroxidase test. Which started after my initial infection. The CDC says "no data" on what the vaccine might do to people with auto-immune conditions. It is all anti-scientific unethical speculation.

Maybe the vaccine would be trouble-free and beneficial to me, and maybe it would fuck me up by “enhancing” an auto-immune response. No doctor can say ! Where in the news do you read anything about side effects short of death and/or what happens 3/6/9/12 months later? Nowhere, and no one cares and no one is studying it as a priority, if at all.

The latest science says getting the vaccine means stronger reactions to the vaccine for those who have had COVID). That might mean a higher risk of adverse events. And what does it mean if the body has an auto-immune situation?

Willful ignorance by the medical establishment

The medical establishment is not looking for micro clots from the vaccine or any number of potential harms.

Nor is there any plan whatsoever to track side effects months or years from now across diverse groups. It’s a medical ethics clusterfuck.

Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”

You don't find what you don't look for. And they are not looking. We could find a year or two from now that 80 million people were damaged somehow by the vaccine—no science can claim otherwise at present. While that’s unlikely, when no concerted effort is made to gather data rigorously, it cannot be ruled out.

Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain (clots, degraded blood-brain barrier, inflammation)

re: The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection”

Not good news for me and many others recovering from Long Haul COVID.

TIP: COVID infection appears to be able to damage the blood-brain barrier. Don’t damage your brain irreperably— avoid excitotoxins like the poisons they are, since the blood-brain barrier may be partially “down” with COVID and its aftermath. And even when healthy, the blood-brain barrier does NOT totally reject excitotoxins. Make sure that magnesium (brain protective) supplementation is part of your care, ditto for other important nutrients.

Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain. New clues hint at how

27 April 2021, emphasis added

For more than a year now, scientists have been racing to understand how the mysterious new virus that causes COVID-19 damages not only our bodies, but also our brains.

Early in the pandemic, some infected people noticed a curious symptom: the loss of smell. Reports of other brain-related symptoms followed: headaches, confusion, hallucinations and delirium. Some infections were accompanied by depression, anxiety and sleep problems.

Recent studies suggest that leaky blood vessels and inflammation are somehow involved in these symptoms. But many basic questions remain unanswered about the virus...

...

....suggests that the virus is affecting the brain in other ways, possibly involving blood vessels... Damage abounded, the team reported February 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Small clots sat in blood vessels. The walls of some vessels were unusually thick and inflamed. And blood was leaking out of the vessels into the surrounding brain tissue. “You can see all three things happening at the same time,” Nath says.

Those results suggest that clots, inflamed linings and leaks in the barriers that normally keep blood and other harmful substances out of the brain may all contribute to COVID-related brain damage.

...

Inflamed body and brain

Inflammation in the body can cause trouble in the brain,... Inflammatory signals released after injury can change the way the brain makes and uses chemical signaling molecules, called neurotransmitters, that help nerve cells communicate.

...With these findings, it’s not clear that SARS-CoV-2 affects people’s brains differently from other viruses, says Navis. In her post–COVID-19 clinic at Mount Sinai, she sees patients with fatigue, headaches, numbness and dizziness — symptoms that are known to follow other viral infections, too. “I’m hesitant to say this is unique to COVID,” Navis says. “We’re just not used to seeing so many people getting one specific infection, or knowing what the viral infection is.”

...

Lingering questions — what the virus actually does to the brain, who will suffer the most, and for how long — are still unanswered, and probably won’t be for a long time. The varied and damaging effects of lockdowns, the imprecision doctors and patients use for describing symptoms (such as the nonmedical term “brain fog”) and the indirect effects the virus can have on the brain all merge, creating a devilishly complex puzzle.

For now, doctors are busy focusing on ways in which they can help, even amid these mysteries, and designing larger, longer studies to better understand the effects of the virus on the brain.

WIND: good luck getting help from doctors—note the complete absence of even the thought that nutrition might be involved! You are the only person in the world who can heal yourself. It is extremely unlikely that a nutrition-ignorant allopathic medicine doctor will have a clue, let alone be able to help.

These speculations are consonant with all the things I’ve been saying for many months now: the Long Haul COVID issues appear to be (1) neurological, (2) inflammatory, (3) auto-immune (which leads to inflamation).

The referenced “fatigue , headaches” are distinctly “not me” symptoms new to me since infection, ditto for numbness in fingers at night sleeping on my side, and at times (now gone) a feeling like dizziness.

No wonder I’ve needed 12 hours of sleep a day all too frequently for the past year. I feel like such a loser having to go to bed at 8:30 PM and get up at 9-10 AM, so to speak. I’ve had to learn to accept that as a physical necessity for now.

FDA and CDC OK resuming J&J COVID-19 shots paused over rare clot concerns

re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: VAERS Reporting for COVID Vaccine Adverse Events vs COVID Deaths
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”
re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”

To do proper risk assessment, you have to know the risks of these experimental vaccines. Immediate risks, medium-term risks, and long-term risks. Immediate risks are hardly reported at all, and medium/long term risks are not studied at all.

But fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported and less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the FDA.

How can these clowns claim safety in light of such incompetent data collection?

FDA and CDC OK resuming J&J COVID-19 shots paused over rare clot concerns

23 April 2021

Experts debated a warning for women under 50, but decided to reinstate the vaccine without one...After reviewing safety data on rare blood clots linked to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, federal regulators said vaccinations can resume immediately in people 18 and older. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made the ruling April 23 following a meeting of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices about the vaccine, made by Janssen, J&J’s vaccine division. 

“The American public should feel reassured about the safety systems and protocols we have in place around the COVID-19 vaccines,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said during a news briefing April 23. The system to detect safety concerns identified a small number of cases of rare blood clots accompanied by low platelet counts. The pause gave regulators time to spread the word to doctors and the public about the risk, she said.

Some members of the CDC advisory committee said that they were concerned that the decision doesn’t adequately warn women of an increased risk of rare blood clots. J&J and the FDA have added information to fact sheets about the vaccine that warns of the rare side effect and provides treatment recommendations.

Sign up for e-mail updates on the latest coronavirus news and research

Health officials examined data collected in the vaccine safety reporting system known as VAERS, where anyone can report side effects from vaccines. They found 15 cases of blood clots, all in women, among 7.95 million J&J doses administered. Three women died. 

...

WIND: the last time I heard of “rare” complications, I get severe nerve damage from Metronidazole. Rare means incompetent reporting. The medical establishment is intellectually and ethically corrupt in failing to track side effects in so many areas of medicine. But willful ignorance means better safety profiles and high profits.

You do not find what you are not looking for.

Let’s get this quack science from the CDC and FDA straight:

• If there is not a severe life-threatening reaction, it’s A-OK? By what science can we expect that the gamut of risks here is either NONE or MAYBE DIE? Where is the science studying the whole gamut of blood clot issues? Who is to say that tens of thousands or even millions of people are not having undetected micro strokes in the brain or elsewhere?
• Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
• Less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration

The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection” (Long Haul COVID)

Not good news for me and many others, but it explains a lot about the difficulties I’ve been having from Long Haul COVID.

6-month neurological and psychiatric outcomes in 236 379 survivors of COVID-19: a retrospective cohort study using electronic health records

06 April 2021, emphasis added

Neurological and psychiatric sequelae of COVID-19 have been reported, but more data are needed to adequately assess the effects of COVID-19 on brain health. We aimed to provide robust estimates of incidence rates and relative risks of neurological and psychiatric diagnoses in patients in the 6 months following a COVID-19 diagnosis.

...

Interpretation

Our study provides evidence for substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection. Risks were greatest in, but not limited to, patients who had severe COVID-19. This information could help in service planning and identification of research priorities. Complementary study designs, including prospective cohorts, are needed to corroborate and explain these findings.

WIND: that explains a lot—the brain fog, difficulty concentrating, vastly increased sleep needs, etc that I’ve been battling for a year now. Though the cognitive issues seem to finally clearin up.

The symptoms were similar to my concussion but I would rate them substantiall worse than that, with a more challenging recovery that oscillates far more. Luckily I experienced the anxiety stuff for only a few weeks after the infection; for me it has been almost entirely neurological (and not just cognitive).

But lately the cognitive stuff has mostly cleared up and what remains is severely impaired physical stamina that shuts me down and still demands 10-12 hours of sleep a day. That might be an auto-immune disruption triggered by the same infection, but it might be neurological—hard to be sure.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: COVID Prior Infection vs Vaccination

This is the kind of insight that I like to see: balanced viewpoint, and realistic about the limitations of studies. Regardless of the counfounding factors, it’s hard to argue with the massive risk reduction enjoyed by those previously infected by COVID.

COVID: Prior infection vs vaccination

24 April 2021, emphasis added

Antibodies are a “surrogate” marker. We think they might tell us something useful, but we can’t really be sure... we still don’t really know whether antibodies play a meaningful role in fighting covid or not. Correlation isn’t always causation. Antibodies appear to be a good marker for prior infection, but that doesn’t mean that they have a causal role in preventing a re-infection.

So, what we really need is a study that looks at the degree to which people actually get re-infected, not more studies that look at antibodies. Once we have that, we can do a comparison with the results of the vaccine trials, and then we will finally have a reasonably good estimate of whether prior infection or vaccination provides a higher level of immunity, or if they are equivalent. That is now exactly what we have, thanks to a study that was recently published in The Lancet.

So, on the face of it, prior infection is equivalent to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in terms of the level of protection offered, and much better than the Astra-Zeneca vaccine and J&J vaccine. In light of this, it seems completely unnecessary for people who have had COVID to get the vaccine. In fact, if the goal of governments is to get their populations to herd immunity as quickly as possible, it would make more sense to tell people who have had confirmed COVID-19 that they don’t need to get vaccinated. Vaccinating people who have already had COVID-19 means delaying vaccination of people who haven’t had it, which means delaying the onset of herd immunity.

There is one potential problem with taking the 92% number at face value, especially in relation to the results from the vaccine trials, and that is that this is an observational study, not a randomized trial, so there is significant scope for confounding...

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The researchers attempted to correct for confounders to the extent that they were able, and came up with a modified risk reduction of 93%. But correcting for confounding is really a kind of guessing game. It isn’t a very reliable technique. And for all the confounders that are known and that can be corrected for, there are plenty more that aren’t known and can’t be corrected for.

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WIND: one concern: I don’t understand how the false positive PCR test confounder is accounted for. But the results are so compelling that some degree of error is not likely to matter.

BTW, if antibodies are not shown to play a causal role in preventing re-infection, what does that say about vaccines whose efficacy is judged by antibody levels?

Also, it is not an established medical fact that a positive PCR test is actually a COVID infection.

Finally, it seems sketchy at best to assume that a vaccine could deliver the full in-vivo physiological response that an actual infection does. Time (years) will be needed to study that question.

Long Haul COVID: Consider Nutritional Deficiencies such as Thiamine, Vitamin C, Magnesium

I am not a doctor, so consider what follows as layman quackery. Consult your doctor for medical concerns.

A year after a mysterious infection which matched in onset, duration and symptoms, I’m still trying to get back to normal. The weird thing is that I have hardly ever gotten ill for some years now. Only this April 2020 infection was strikingly out of place and unusual.

Video: Long COVID: diagnosis, management, prognosis

This quote caught my eye because it matches my initial symptoms: “if you have shortness of breath √, diarrhea √, headache √, skipped meals during the first week √, 2-3X more likely to develop Long COVID”. Plus the usual fatigue as seen with 98%.

So-called Long Haul COVID ("Long COVID") is a misleading term because it is not a COVID infection. Rather, LHC refers to the myriad damages done to the body by COVID that linger, and that takes a long time to recover from. Hence I prefer the term chronic viral sequelae from COVID. But “Long-Haul COVID” is in widespread use, so I’ll stick to that.

Symptoms of Long-Haul COVID vary, but the key ones I experienced are common:

• Extreme fatigue, lack of energy making even simple tasks difficult. From double centuries to being too tired to walk half a mile on flat ground.
• Gastrointenstinal problems for months.
• Brain fog, difficulty concentrating, motivational problems.
• Mild headaches, something new to me in my life.
• Good days and bad days, but attempts to resume normal exercise can hit hard for a week or longer.
• Inflammation including rheumatic systems, aching in back and joints.
• Easily provoked lung impairment (treatable with quick results using 500mg of magnesium va ReMag). Lung symptoms resolved for me now.

For some people there are additional symptoms including mental health, cardiac problems, etc. Thing is, doctors tend to pigeonhole it into one area, like cardiology. While that’s a very necessary and worthwhile area of study, it is 'dangerous' in that it looks at only one area of damage—if the heart is involved it is likely that other things are too. It is also potentially dangerous in focusing on pharmacological drug interventions rather than nutrition. For example, I consider it medical malpractice to ignore critical nutrition factors like magnesium deficiency which are known to be a global public health crisis. Classic training means blinders on. We need this LHC thing to be worked on by cross-disciplinary teams, not specialists. Because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In medical terms, we have a highly-variable clinical picture. Which means that it’s going to be very difficult for the medical establishment to get a handle on things.

IMO, the damage is primarily auto-immune and neurological, at least for me. I would say that brain/neurological and auto-immune issues are its hallmarks (for me). That does not rule out direct physical damage to the heart and other organs. But I’d bet that if the heart is damaged, other damages have also occurred. And for me, there is zero manifestation of any heart issues—totally normal heart rate throughout and with exercise as well (and I say that based on self recording heart rate during excercise for 20 years!). That does not rule out a heart injury, but if it’s there, it has no manifestations—and I’ve monitored my heart for 20 years.

No doctor and no pill is going to cure Long Haul COVID for you. Only YOU can do that by helping your own body heal itself.

• Eat a nutrient rich diet.
• Eliminate artificial ingredients of any kind, processed foods, sugars, etc.
• Therapeutic use of nutrients like Vitamin C, B vitamins, magnesium, Vitamin K2.
• Sleep, then sleep some more and whenever you feel the need.

Note that RDA figures for nutrients are weak sauce (and poor science), barely sufficient to avoid clinical deficiency symptoms. Real requirements vary by individual and can be vastly higher when the body needs to heal itself. Moreover, nutrient content of foods is likely to be less than claimed, being based on nominal findings from years ago when soils were better. And of course, the body may be unable to absorb many nutrients effectively!

The useless annual physical

I had a physical with a family medicine doctor last month, a relatively young doctor seemingly open minded. To his credit, he listened to all the my detailed issues. Well, he spent most of his time doing data entry and it looked like he was listening. Can you think and listen while doing data entry? I can’t. When we concluded, I asked the doctor directly:

Patient: “do you have any insight into any of these issues I’ve described?”
Doctor: no.

What a waste of my time and money*. Ditto for another internist.

Worse: for the past 35 years of my life, I got the blood work before my annual physical. Now, at least at Sutter Health, you get blood work after the appointment. WTF? Is this a new means to generate more appointments and thus more profit? All it did was waste both our time later via the mail system.

* I feel like I have some obligation to at least try to help doctors broaden their professional horizons. So at least I got this particular doctor to look at Subclinical magnesium deficiency: a principal driver of cardiovascular disease and a public health crisis (the one comment I got was “interesting”, so I don’t know if he really read it).

Possible nutritional treatments for Long Haul COVID

At present, I am trying high-dose Vitamin C (10 grams or more a day) plus B vitamins and magnesium and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I avoid all the bad stuff.

Nutrition is a complex ecosystem in which nutrients are synergistic. My approach now is to attack on all fronts, making sure I have no deficiences. There are signs it is helping me—brain fog has cleared, sleep needs are declining, and energy is increasing. But there are enough confounding factors that I’m not going to assert causality.

Magnesium deficiency

Magnesium deficiency is a global public health crisis. No-one can have full health without it.

Thiamine (Vitamin B1) and other B Vitamins

WHO: Thiamine Deficiency and its prevention and control in major emergencies

What medical doctor (99.9% being grossly ignorant of nutrition) can rule out a hypothesis like nutritional deficiency as a primary factor in COVID-19 and Long Haul COVID? Nutritional solutions are as a matter of practice and regulation de facto outside the scope of doctoring.

Long covid: How to define it and how to manage it

Dear Editor,

28 September 2020 Robert W Olney

The symptoms being reported by COVID long-haulers are the same as the known symptoms of thiamine deficiency disease, otherwise known as beriberi. Fighting the virus necessitates consumption of the body's supply of thiamine. Depending on the initial thiamine status, the outcome could be that the person is asymptomatic if they have a good supply and good nutritional status, or they could be mildly thiamine deficient, which could lead to long-hauler symptoms of beriberi, or, in the case of those particularly vulnerable such as the elderly, they could have a severe deficiency with results such as Wernicke's encephalopathy. 

...From this, I suggest that, rather than being the result of an extraordinarily virulent and pathogenic virus as seems to be widely believed, the pandemic we are witnessing is actually the result of a combination of a somewhat more severe virus than we have hitherto experienced, and a generally poor state of nutrition in the community as a whole.

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High-Dose Vitamin C

Vitamin C is a powerful substance. There is an abundance of medical literature proving that once a threshold is reached, that Vitamin C can solve all sorts of health issues, having robust anti-viral, anti-biotic, anti inflammatory properies, in addition to being crucal for all sorts of physiological processes*. As well as being safe in outrageously high doses, bowel tolerance being the main “risk” if too much is taken all at once.

Medical establishment ignores Vitamin C

What is truly appalling is the total lack of interest in using intravenous Vitamin C (IVAA) for COVID patients, although a few brave doctors have shown it to be highly effective for treatment, this case being no accident. It’s just that the medical establishment has no interest in cheap effective treatments, preferring to label any such usage as quackery while failing to falsify it.

* Please don’t get fooled by “scientific” studies that allege to test Vitamin C by using the wrong dosage with the wrong protocols, thus failing to match any of the protocols for which it is claimed to work, then claiming it doesn’t work—a cesspool of intellectual fraud. The history of medical science is riddled with studies designed to fail, to protect financial interests, and vice versa.

Long Haul COVID: “Nature: High-dimensional characterization of post-acute sequalae of COVID-19”

A year after a mysterious infection which matched in onset, duration and symptoms, I’m still trying to get back to normal.

At present, I am trying high-dose Vitamin C (10 grams or more a day) plus B vitamins and magnesium too. So far after 5 days, I am getting a little better every day in terms of mental clarity and energy. There is an abundance of medical literature proving that once a threshold is reached, that Vitamin C can solve all sorts of health issues, having robust anti-viral, anti-biotic, anti inflammatory properies, in addition to being crucal for all sorts of physiological processes*. As well as being safe in outrageously high doses, bowel tolerance being the main “risk” if too much is taken all at once.

Confounding factors for me include a cracked/infected molar which was remove earlier this week. It has been an issue for 3 months, possibly longer but not to my knowledge. I cannot rule out that recent issues had some contribution from that tooth.

Medical establishment ignores Vitamin C

What is truly appalling is the total lack of interest in using intravenous Vitamin C (IVAA) for COVID patients, although a few brave doctors have shown it to be highly effective for treatment, this case being no accident. It’s just that the medical establishment has no interest in cheap effective treatments, preferring to label any such usage as quackery while failing to falsify it.

* Please don’t get fooled by “scientific” studies that allege to test Vitamin C by using the wrong dosage with the wrong protocols, thus failing to match any of the protocols for which it is claimed to work, then claiming it doesn’t work—a cesspool of intellectual fraud. The history of medical science is riddled with studies designed to fail, to protect financial interests, and vice versa.

Nature: High-dimensional characterization of post-acute sequalae of COVID-19

PDF

[I’ve highlighted all the things that have been a problem for me]

The acute clinical manifestations of COVID-19 are well characterized1,2; however, its post-acute sequalae have not been comprehensively described. Here, we use the national healthcare databases of the US Department of Veterans Affairs to systematically and comprehensively identify 6-month incident sequalae including diagnoses, medication use, and laboratory abnormalities in 30-day survivors of COVID-19.

We show that beyond the first 30 days of illness, people with COVID-19 exhibit higher risk of death and health resource utilization. Our high dimensional approach identifies incident sequalae in the respiratory system and several others including nervous system and neurocognitive disorders, mental health disorders, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, malaise, fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, and anemia.

We show increased incident use of several therapeutics including pain medications (opioids and non-opioids), antidepressants, anxiolytics, antihypertensives, and oral hypoglycemics and evidence of laboratory abnormalities in multiple organ systems. Analysis of an array of pre-specified outcomes reveals a risk gradient that increased across severity of the acute COVID-19 infection (non-hospitalized, hospitalized, admitted to intensive care).

The findings show that beyond the acute illness, substantial burden of health loss — spanning pulmonary and several extrapulmonary organ systems — is experienced by COVID-19 survivors. The results provide a roadmap to inform health system planning and development of multidisciplinary care strategies to reduce chronic health loss among COVID-19 survivors.

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WIND: medical science will be baffled for years to come by such complex issues, which is why it is best to realize right away that doctors are not a solution, but are part of the problem. It’s up to you to heal yourself. I mean emphatically, because medical “science” has long ignored nutrition and what works and is addicted to prescription drugs. That crowd is never going to take off the blinders. There will not be any Long Haul COVID pill.

Heal yourself the only way that can work:

• Eat a nutrient-rich diet.
• Eliminate artificial ingredients of any kind, processed foods, sugars, etc.
• Therapeutic use of nutrients like Vitamin C, B vitamins, magnesium, Vitamin K2.
• Sleep and reducing stress.