Best short video on Covid Pandemic Falsehoods and Truths/ PANDA

I am remiss for not posting on the organization PANDA previously.  They have wonderful, data-driven information to share.  Perhaps best of all is this new 27 minute video, made by PANDA cofounder Nick Hudson.  Please try to make time to watch it.  You won't regret it.  And it will probably disappear soon, since it does not respect the WHO guidance.

NEWS: I have a new website!

The website is merylnassmd.com.  While it will still undergo some tweaks (and your comments will help me improve it) my goal was twofold:

1.  To get out of the clutches of the Goog universe

2.  To make my writing easier for readers to access, by indexing posts, having a Contents bar, and being able to highlight the most important material.

I think it makes sense, at least for now, to keep both the Blogspot site and the new Wordpress site up.  Yesterday's posts are only on the Blogspot, but I hope to have that changed within a week.

Thanks for reading!

Is Emergent BioSolutions authorized? Why have they shipped Covid vaccine for bottling? No one's telling/ Roll Call

The Capitol Hill rag Roll Call is just as flummoxed as I am over the Janssen/ Johnson and Johnson Covid vaccine being produced by Emergent BioSolutions.  The FDA told them to ask J and J about it, but J and J declined to answer.  Below is the first part of a long article that in the end tells you very little.  

However, disgraced Robert Kadlec, former Asst Sec for Preparedness and Emergency Response who gave more contracts to Emergent (his former client) than to any other company, and couldn't afford to procure a machine that made N95 masks nor buy masks or PPE because he was wasting his billions on anthrax and smallpox vaccines from Emergent--well, he is back in business on the Hill.

Kadlec got a job with disgraced Senator Burr, the Pharma industry Senator who was investigated for insider trading last February 2020, after getting secret briefings about the pandemic. Cronies who play together, stay together.

From Roll Call: 

A pharmaceutical contractor under scrutiny for its ties to former government officials could be one of the bottlenecks holding up the production of millions of Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.

Emergent BioSolutions, the U.S. company making “drug substance,” the active ingredient in the vaccines, is still awaiting regulatory approval, according to a person familiar with the process. Emergent-made doses were not included in the paperwork Johnson & Johnson submitted to the Food and Drug Administration.

Johnson & Johnson is due to deliver 20 million doses by the end of March, but just 4.7 million have been delivered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The FDA declined to respond to questions, directing questions to Johnson & Johnson.

“We expect to ship 20 million doses by the end of March,” Johnson & Johnson spokesperson Jake Sargent said in an email, declining to share details on when supply will begin to ramp up and to what degree the delay is related to Emergent....

Understanding the Risks/Dick Atlee

This nice article on Covid vaccination was written by my friend and neighbor Dick Atlee:

There has been much discussion recently about frustration with COVID vaccine delays. The desire to end what we’ve all been going through this past year is understandable. But how — and even whether — the vaccines will accomplish this is open to question. 

Whether someone should take any vaccine should be his/her decision based on uncoerced informed consent and adequate information on risks and benefits. However, the popular discussion so far is failing to adequately provide for this. 

The FDA‘s “Emergency Use Authorization” (EUA) of the vaccines is not an “approval.” As such, their use remains a medical experiment on all vaccine recipients, pending FDA approval and licensure. And that requires completion of the ongoing safety/efficacy trials. That won’t happen until October 2021/January 2023 for Pfizer and October 2022 for Moderna. (Note: until then, employer vaccine mandates are either illegal or subject to lawsuits.) 

An essential requirement of an EUA is that there be “no adequate, approved and available alternatives.” There are, however, alternatives — treatment protocols that are inexpensive and effective, with decades-long safety records. Sadly, their approval and availability has been vigorously opposed by U.S. public health officials. 

These preventative and early-treatment drugs keep people alive and out of the hospital. If they were as readily available and as widely used in the U.S. as they are in other parts of the world (example: population COVID death rates in India are 10 percent of ours; in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1 percent of ours), they would render the vaccines irrelevant. 

Lists of these protocols, and links to the large number of studies evaluating their use, are available at https://c19protocols.com and https://c19study.com. Senate testimony last fall dealt with their successful use in the U.S. Yes, they are indeed available, for those willing to make the effort. 

The issue of whether our situation is an emergency is cloudy. The NYTimes and the World Health Organization have both raised major questions about serious false-positives in test results. The CDC’s unprecedented three changes in death-certificate protocol last spring inflated COVID death figures. Yet despite this, the CDC’s own current estimates of death rates among the infected are very low — age 0-17: 0.002 percent; 18-49: 0.05 percent; 50-64: 0.6 percent; except for 65-plus: 9 percent. 

Regarding the vaccines themselves, what concerns should we take into account? In offering this short list, I‘m relying on mainstream sources: government, science journals, media. Links to all assertions are provided in the online version. 

The vaccine trials weren’t designed to produce evidence that the vaccines prevent either asymptomatic infection by the virus or transmission of the disease. Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization and the heads of Pfizer and Moderna have all acknowledged this. The trials also couldn’t determine reduction of hospitalizations or deaths. Whether the vaccines can or will do any of this is not yet known. 

As such, they potentially create “asymptomatic carriers,” i.e., the very people we have been warned are driving much of the pandemic. So vaccinated people must continue to wear masks (the CDC now says double masks) and do social distancing into an indefinite future. 

Ninety-five percent effective? Maybe not. That number is based on how many trial subjects in the vaccinated and control groups had symptoms and tested PCR positive. However, as noted by British Medical Journal editor Peter Doshi, obscured in Pfizer’s data was the fact that 20 times as many people in each of those groups were classified as “suspected” COVID but weren’t tested. Depending on how many were actual COVID cases, the efficacy may be as low as 20-30 percent. 

If this kind of incomplete immunity is actually the case, herd immunity will never happen. 

RNA viruses are inherently subject to frequent mutation, and new variants of this virus are appearing. So we are told we will need a third “booster,“ or even pharmaceutically-profitable annual shots. All this would be permanently irrelevant if the effective preventatives/treatments were readily available. 

The five-page information sheet required to be given to all vaccine recipients (https://www.fda.gov/media/144638/download) contains a warning for people with a history of allergies, particularly to the lipids used to coat the m-RNA nanoparticles. Many people with a common allergy to one of these — polyethylene glycol — don’t know they have it. 

In Moderna’s earlier research with mice, these lipid nanoparticles ended up in tissues and organs throughout the body. The long-term effects of this inadequately-studied phenomenon — particularly autoimmune issues — won’t be known for an indeterminate time...as with everything else about the vaccines. 

The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System is recording a large number of injuries and deaths associated with the vaccines. The CDC denies a connection, and claims that these percentages are small. That system, however, is characterized by large-scale underreporting, and the separate “BEST” system, intended for accurate monitoring of vaccine injury, isn’t expected to be ready for months. 

Everyone involved in this enterprise —manufacturers, doctors, nurses, program planners, etc. — has been freed from liability for damages under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act. Those who are injured by the vaccines are basically on their own. Their only recourse for damages is the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, which has very tight rules, requires hard-to-get data, has virtually no appeal, and to date has compensated less than 10 percent of applicants. 

Many may choose vaccination for a variety of often coercive reasons. But it is important to do so with a good understanding of the risk/benefit factors involved.