Covid

[alec]

New paper here highlighting the significant increased risk of a variety of chronic lung conditions following covid infection - www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537024000798

These are pretty stark, with big increases in things like asthma and COPD. These are the kinds of findings that help explain why health services globally are so stretched. It's also noteworthy that they also pick up a big increase in lung cancer, but this only appears as an elevated risk for the 6 months post infection, which probably means it's an artefact of better rates of diagnosis. The other conditions remain as higher risks, which suggests more of a direct linkage. Critically, the risks are significantly elevated for reinfections.

We have been routinely assured that covid infection will lead to immunity against severe outcomes, but the science continues to stack up against this. More infections lead to more illness.

[alec]

Fascinating paper from Ireland, further blowing apart the myth of 'immunity debt' - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/all.16069

This is a relative small study of Irish babies born during lockdowns, which used the changed circumstance to measure gut microbiomes to explore any differences in results and health outcomes. The hypothesis being tested was that a lack of 'horizontal exposure' to microbes and pathogens (exposure from other sources outside the home and family) due to social restrictions would cause developmental and health problems, but in fact the complete opposite was found, with lockdown babies found to have significantly healthier microbiomes, require far fewer antibiotics, and suffer significantly fewer allergies. The rate of allergic disease was cut by 50% among those in the highest category of social isolation, while the overall rate of antibiotics required in the lockdown cohort was 17%, massively down on the pre-pandemic normal rate of 80%.

This is another nail in the coffin for the daft idea of 'immunity debt', providing hard scientific evidence that exposure to more pathogens harms children, rather than strengthens them. There is some merit in the idea that a period of isolation would lead to a short period of 'catch up' infection when restrictions end, but that is not what many misguided people were claiming when inventing the immunity debt concept; it was usually presented as a fact that children would be harmed if they weren't exposed to infections. This is wrong, completely.

What this study shows is what was already known. Children do need to be exposed to a natural microbiome, as we depend on a huge array of bacteria to function. The 'hygiene hypothesis' - that modern lives were too sterile and this was harming children's health - may have some merit to it, but there is a huge difference between benign bacterial microbiomes - 'comensal infections' - and pathogenic viral infections. Viruses that infect humans are never beneficial to health. As this study found, "spontaneous vaginal birth" and breastfeeding are critical in exposing infants to the microbiome they need ('vertical exposure') but infection with disease is not.

Once again, the science is forging ahead on the impact of covid and the covid response, and it's becoming ever more clear that the myths invented to discredit both the severity of the virus and exaggerate the adverse impacts of the response are fictitious inventions designed for political manipulation.

[leftieliberal]

An extreme example. The man appears to have suffered no ill effects, researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg say.

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

AstraZeneca's COVID prevention drug application gets EU fast-track assessment

AstraZeneca (AZN.L) said on Monday that the European Union drug regulator has accepted a market authorisation application for its investigational COVID-19 prevention drug, sipavibart, for an accelerated assessment.

The submission was based on positive data from a late-stage trial that showed the drug reduced the risk of infection in patients with weaker immunity.

"The EMA's (European Medicines Agency) Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use(CHMP) granted sipavibart accelerated assessment as it was deemed of major interest for public health and therapeutic innovation," the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker said.

An accelerated assessment aims to speed up the EMA's review of a market authorisation application.

AstraZeneca acquired sipavibart from RQ Bio in May 2022.

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Nov 14, 2024 22:41:30 GMT alec said:

I noticed a discussion between c-a-r-f-r-e-w and others regarding mRNA vaccine recently which I think Carfs said had screwed up his gut flora? Not the first time I've come across this, and sadly, we are now starting to see an increasing body of evidence showing elevated risks associated with the covid jabs, alongside more evidence of reducing efficacy. The latest CDC data shows that the efficacy against hospitalisation of the 2023/24 boosters for over 65 yos waned substantially after four months, with very limited additional protection (Although v important to note that this is not the same as saying no protection; the baseline was against those who hadn't had the 23/24 booster, not those who had never been vaccinated, so there will still be protection, it's just that any additional protection afforded by boosters is reducing and becoming shorter lived).

Perhaps more concerning are the slew of papers coming out, mainly from eastern researchers where there doesn't appear to be the same reticence to critique the vaccines, showing risks associated with the vaccines themselves. This one is quite odd - www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02627-0

It's in Nature, so there are no presumed issues with credibility or quality, and it's a large (2m) cohort study from S Korea. They looked at the 3 month period after receiving the vaccines and while they found that schizophrenia and bipolar disorders incidence was significantly reduced compared to having no vaccine, incidence of a range of other depression, anxiety, dissociative, and stress-related episodes was significantly raised. They note that these same conditions are known to be elevated by covid infection also, and postulate that the spike protein is responsible.

As with a range of autoimmune conditions and gastric issues, the covid vaccines are starting to look like the kinds of vaccines which it would be better to have less frequently, as they are relatively high risk in vaccine safety terms, with these risks starting to appear as cumulative (the more shots, the more elevated the risks). It needs to said that all the evidence still suggests that the risks from the vaccines aren't as great as the risks from infection, but if the protection against infection lasts but a matter of weeks, it does start to raise significant questions about the dependence on vaccines alone when it comes to covid.

The JVCI today announced their recommendation that free covid jabs are further restricted to the over 75s, so despite a welter of evidence that covid remains around 3 - 5 times more serious than covid, the UK government is offering flu jabs to the over 60s but covid to the over 75s.

It's a complete mess, and I suspect comes as a result of inertia within public health agencies, none of which wish to start seriously addressing covid transmission, as to rock that boat now would be an effective admission that the adoption of a vaccine only strategy in 2022 was a mistake.

Meanwhile, the Irish Health & Safety Executive have published guidance recently that says recent covid infection is a risk factor for stroke and cardiovascular disease. This has been known about within the scientific literature for several years now, but is rarely acknowledged publicly by government agencies, so it's inclusion in updated guidance from the Irish HSE is noteworthy

Thought I’d post this here for reference