Category: Health & Medicine

New Peer-Reviewed Study Shows Ivermectin ‘Significantly’ Reduces COVID Infections, Hospitalization, and Mortality Rates

A newly released study from Brazil of over 150 thousand subjects found that regular prophylactic use of ivermectin “was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates.”

The largest ivermectin study to date was conducted in Itajaí, Brazil, between July 2020 and December 2020. It recently passed rigorous peer-review and was published this week, Dr. Pierre Kory noted on Twitter.

Background: Ivermectin has demonstrated different mechanisms of action that potentially protect from both coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection and COVID-19-related comorbidities. Based on the studies suggesting efficacy in prophylaxis combined with the known safety profile of ivermectin, a citywide prevention program using ivermectin for COVID-19 was implemented in Itajaí, a southern city in Brazil in the state of Santa Catarina. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of regular ivermectin use on subsequent COVID-19 infection and mortality rates.

Researchers invited the entire population of Itajaí to enroll in the program and compiled baseline, personal, demographic, and medical information on participants.

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WHO: “No Evidence At All” That Healthy Kids Needs ‘Booster’ Jabs

The only thing really surprising is that the demoncraps feel ‘sporty’ enough to let what they’d like happen out in public.

COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated

While many voters have become skeptical toward the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of Democrats embrace restrictive policies, including punitive measures against those who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.

A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of voters favor President Joe Biden’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the employees of large companies and government agencies. That includes 33% who Strongly Favor the mandate. Forty-eight percent (48%) are opposed to Biden’s vaccine mandate, including 40% who Strongly Oppose the mandate. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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I think they’re just shilling for more ‘boosters’.

Pfizer CEO: 2 shots ‘offer very limited protection, if any’
Admits mRNA vaccines don’t have ‘the safety profile that we hoped’ for

So once it became clear that covid was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following:

1. Cloth masks are ineffective against omicron (Leanna Wen, CNN);
2. The vaccinated can spread and get covid;
3. The death rate is comparable to the flu (Chris Hayes);
4. Many people are entering hospitals with covid, not from covid (Fauci);
5. Natural immunity is a reason omicron hasn’t been as virulent (Fauci);
6. We have to take into account societal needs, not just spread prevention (CDC);
7. The asymptomatic should not be tested (NFL);
8. We should focus on hospitalizations and deaths, not case rate (Biden);
9. Children are not at risk and schools should remain open;
10. Covid is predominantly an illness affecting the immunocompromised and elderly and we should not shut down society.

Those of us in reality have been saying all this for months and most of it since May 2020. But your political priors were more important than the data. You had to have your demonization narrative.
So welcome to reality. And f*** all y’all for pretending you didn’t know this so you could have fun crapping on Trump and DeSantis and all your red state relatives.
And btw, AOC and all you Leftist covid fanatics — those whose virtue signaling authoritarian lockdown nonsense that has resulted in millions of lives destroyed — stay in your states and leave mine alone.
We chose data and freedom. You chose alarmism and unearned moral superiority. Stay in NY, NJ, CA, and the rest — and enjoy the actual paranoid nanny state you created among your friends who reward you for telling them they will kill their kids and grandma if they don’t panic.
Oh yes, and Happy New Year to all.

Almost like a naturally occurring vaccine?

Study shows people infected with Omicron may be less susceptible to Delta variant

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in South Africa has found evidence that suggests people who have been infected with the COVID-19 Omicron variant may be less susceptible to infection from the Delta variant. The team has written a paper describing their work.

As the global pandemic has progressed, variants have emerged—some more resilient than others. Thus far, the Delta variant has proven to be the hardiest and because of that has overtaken the original virus as the most widespread of the variants infecting people around the world. More recently, the Omicron variant has emerged, first in South Africa, then all around the world. Initial reports indicate that the new variant is much more easily spread than Delta but is less harmful to those infected—also, there has been some evidence that the booster shots given for the original and Delta variants may last for as little as ten weeks against Omicron. In this new effort, the researchers in South Africa have found some evidence of Omicron infections giving people some degree of immunity from Delta infections.

The work by the  in South Africa involved testing 15 people who had been infected with the Omicron variant—some of whom had been vaccinated and some of whom had not—to see how well their immune systems would respond to a Delta infection. They found they had all developed some degree of enhanced immunity to the Delta variant. The researchers then tested the  from the same 15 people two weeks later to see how well they put up a fight against both Omicron and Delta. In so doing, they saw a 14-fold increase in ability to overcome Omicron and a 4.4-fold increase in an ability to overcome Delta.

The researchers note that 11 of the patients had been vaccinated (and two were excluded) and that there was a good chance that most or all of them had been infected with either the original version of the virus or the Delta variant—thus it is not clear what was behind the increased resistance to Delta. They note that much more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be drawn about the impact of Omicron on resistance to Delta.

Year-End Musings on COVID, Science, and Chainsaws

COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.

The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It’s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.

I’m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.

I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”

Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.

Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.

Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”

The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show their children sufficient love—a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim’s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one’s own peril.

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.

Vax Passports: The Panzer Tank of the COVID-19 Blitzkrieg

The COVID-19 digital vax pass is the Panzer tank of the next wave of the global public health Blitzkrieg.  If a person complies and gets their COVID-19 shots, they get a personal QR code. They can show this code on their smart phone to participate in society.  This plan is being rolled out around the world and has spread from Israel to Europe to Australia, and now has been established in the most strategic U.S. cities including Washington D.C., New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.  Some people with a whole lot of power are now seizing a whole lot more power in the name of public health.

In Israel it has been used the longest.  They call it the Green Pass, also translated as “Green Mark.”  Israel first used it back in the spring and reinstated it in August. Under this program, your smart phone shows your Green Mark QR code to validate that you’re up to date on your Pfizer COVID shots.  With the pass, you’re allowed to be served at a restaurant; you can enter a library or the community pool; you can visit your elderly mom at the nursing home.  Some employers require it. Until recently in Israel, if you got your two Pfizer COVID-19 shots, your QR code would be activated.  But starting Oct. 3, shots received over six months ago, voided the passport. The 3rd shot, the booster, was required. This applies to everyone ages twelve and up.

There is an important guidance for COVID-19 vax passports that the World Health Organization published at the end of August 2021.  The title of this guidance is Technical Specifications and Implementation Guidance on Digital Documentation of Covid-19 Certificates. This “Guidance” provides direction to countries as they issue digital COVID-19 vax passes, so that all these will meet common standards and potentially function together.

Guess who paid for the work?  Under the acknowledgements, it says that the work was funded by Bill Gates’ foundation and four other funders.

Some of the things in the Guidance are pretty hard to believe — you have to read them for yourself.  For starters, everyone in the world with a vaccine passport receives their own ID number.  This is called a “globally unique identifier” on page 18 and includes an alphanumeric number and a machine scannable QR code.

The Guidance requires your COVID-19 vaccination history to be verified by the digital signatures of authorized persons, like DocuSign.  Once you’re up to schedule with your COVID jabs and your papers are in order, you get the PASS, which the Guidance defines as, “A document that gives an individual the authorization to have access to something, such as public spaces, events and modes of transport.”  If your globally unique machine scannable QR code checks out, then as long as it does, you will have permission to participate in society.

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No protection against Omicron?
From what we’ve seen with all these breakthrough infections, almost from the moment that lots of people were ‘fully vaccinated’, it’s not just this latest mutation, but the bug, period.

BLUF:
What this tells us is what the data have been telling us all along:
That the vaccines provide no protection against Omicron, and can even make it more likely for you to be infected with the virus. 
While boosters may reduce that threat, it would only be for 30 days before that boost faded and the probability of being infected would return to that of the unvaccinated, or higher.

New Vaccine Study Suggests mRNA Vaccines Actually Increase Probability of Being Infected With Omicron After 90 Days

With the spread of Omicron for the last couple of months, members of the Branch Covidian Cult have been freebasing their latest fix for panic, fed to them by their dealers and the other members of the fear cartel. As they froth at the mouth, demanding that we partake of their mind-altering drug-of-choice, their monotonal chant drones on, demanding we “follow the science” and “trust the scientists” absent a single study supporting their fear, without identifying a single scientist whom we should trust, and, more importantly, why we should trust them. Fauci has become a meme of himself in recent months (and especially over the last seven days), as the claims he’s made regarding the virus and its origins have proven to be anything from laughably ridiculous to dangerously misleading.

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Hillary Clinton Emails Surface.

Emails have from 2009 have surfaced that reveal Hillary Clinton knew about — and possibly covered up — the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Institute of Virology while she was in office as President Obama’s secretary of state.

In a leaked State Department cable obtained from Wikileaks, Clinton warned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could lead to “biological weapons proliferation concern.”

The email was sent in June of 2009 from the State Department to all embassies in member nations.

It is dated just before the Australia Group plenary session in Paris, which took place from September 21st to September 25th, 2009.

According to Human Events, “The Australia Group is an international export control forum organized to prevent the spread of technologies and research that could be used in chemical and biological weapons.

“All Five Eyes nations are members of the group, including the EU, India, Japan, and South Korea.

“China is not a member of the group.”

Clinton’s cable states: “We believe it is important to focus on emerging chemical and biological technologies, trends in the trade of CBW-related goods and threats.”

In reference to France, Clinton writes: “The U.S. believes participants would benefit from hearing about your experiences assisting China in setting up a Biosafety Level-4 (BSL-4) laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the export control and intangible technology transfer perspectives.

“We are particularly interested to know how China plans to vet incoming foreign researchers from countries of biological weapons proliferation concern.”

Broadly discussing China’s biological weapons program, Clinton’s cable noted:

“The U.S. believes AG members would be interested in any information you can share related to China and North Korea, specifically information related to:

  • China’s Institutes of Biological Products (locations in Beijing and Wuhan), to include overhead imagery analysis, if possible. 
  • Your perceptions of the CBW proliferation activities by Chinese entities. 
  • Your perceptions of Chinese government efforts to enforce its export control rules.” 

Of course, Clinton kept these concerns to herself once the coronavirus pandemic hit, even referring to allegations that it leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the very lab she expressed concerns about — as racist.

She even went so far as to blame the allegations for attacks on Asian-Americans, without any evidence supporting her claim.

Whether it was because she didn’t want to let Trump be correct, or because she wanted to hide the fact that she was concerned — but did nothing — about the lab leak, it is clear Clinton was lying.

The question is, will she ever be held accountable for her actions?

Bill Would Give NY Gov. Authority to ‘Indefinitely’ Detain ‘Cases or Suspected Cases of Contagious Disease’

What could possibly go wrong?

That’s right — what could go possibly wrong with legislation that would, if passed into law, grant the far-left governor of New York — or any government official or entity — the unilateral authority to detain anyone “indefinitely” even suspected of posing “a significant threat to public health”? No way could that be abused.

You can read the bill on the New York State Senate website.

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So, someone who has taken 2 doses and has no symptoms can give the bug to an elderly person who has already taken a 3rd booster dose, and to prevent that everyone must follow the same “safety” protocols that were recommended before the vaccines became available.

The only logical conclusion is that the vaccines are utterly useless

Still No Deaths From Omicron, And Americans Are Getting On With Their Lives.

Americans are returning to normal despite the corporate media’s attempts to drum up alarm over the supposedly “highly transmissible” Omicron variant of COVID-19.

While corporate media outlets panicked and revived permanent pandemic narratives and talk of more lockdowns, a new poll from CBS News and YouGov found that of 1,731 people surveyed, 81 percent said they have not rearranged plans because of the Omicron variant or the hype surrounding it. In fact, a majority said they still plan to keep their normal holiday traditions and routines. Sixty-eight percent still plan to “gather with friends and family,” 64 percent said they will do their Christmas shopping in person, and 52 percent said they will eat in a restaurant.

Only 17 percent of those surveyed said they were “very concerned about Omicron,” while about 42 percent said they were not concerned at all about Omicron despite the initial media and bureaucracy-induced panic about it.

These Americans’ thoughts on Omicron are validated by the data. As it turns out, not one single COVID-19-related death in the U.S. from Dec. 1-8 was found to be caused by the Omicron variant. As of Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that of the 43 people infected with the Omicron strain of COVID, most cases manifested only mild symptoms such as “a cough, fatigue, and congestion or a runny nose.”

The CDC report also found that “one individual, who was vaccinated, required a brief hospital stay” and that a majority of cases, 79 percent, were in fully vaccinated individuals.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s measures of Omicron produced similar results in a report released Sunday.

“There have been no Omicron-related deaths reported thus far,” the European health agency claimed, noting that most cases of Omicron-related COVID presented as “either asymptomatic or mild.”

COVID Sense Breaks Out in Colorado, World Fails to End

Colorado Governor says emergency is over, ‘It’s their own darn fault’ if the unvaccinated get COVID

Colorado is one of several once-sensible states where the sensible people’s political wishes have been crowded out by Entirely Woke and/or Progressive Democrats in one or two big cities.

Boulder and Denver are cordially invited at any time to bite us and have been for years.

That’s why Insanity Wrap is so pleased — although not entirely pleased — with our Big Woke Governor, Jared Polis right now.

“The emergency is over,” Polis said about the COVID pandemic.
“But that’s not something that you require,” he said about masks. “You don’t tell people what to wear. You don’t tell people to wear a jacket when they go out in winter and force them to [wear it]. If they get frostbite, it’s their own darn fault.”

Insanity Wrap’s main beef with Polis is that he just isn’t very bright. He’s one of those people who seems to sincerely believe the most recent thing somebody told him.
That’s probably why Polis partly walked back those fine words just as soon as he got a good talking-to back at the office.

But here in Colorado, yes, the “emergency” is over.Just like it is for most people in most places.

The only ones who are still panicked are the ones who want to be, and the politicians who still think they can get the rest of us to conform.