Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 153

[ecosophia]

We are now winding up the third year of these open posts. As the phrase "died suddenly" repeats in the mass media like a mantra, statistics for work days lost to illness and all-cause mortality mount up in heavily vaccinated nations, and more and more ugly facts about the official response to Covid spill out into public, we are entering what may well turn out to be the most difficult period of the Covid disaster -- the phase in which denial rises in lockstep with the death rate, and a great many people try not to admit what has been done to them by the people and institutions they trusted. It could get ugly, folks.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before: 

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Comments

Population Immunity

[ecosophia]

I think I can propose a hypothesis that can explain what you're seeing: immune system damage from vaccines causing a broad general decline in population immunity, aka herd immunity. Wikipedia has a decent article on the basic concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

Like most accounts of population immunity, this one focuses on the effect of vaccinations and/or naturally acquired immunity on specific organisms. Think about the implications more generally, though. Under most circumstances, one of the core challenges faced by transmissible pathogens is simply a matter of getting to vulnerable people -- at each step in the chain of transmission, they have to deal with somebody else's immune system, and if most people in society have immune systems in decent condition, that's a difficult wall for them to climb.

Now consider what happens when more than half of the population has taken a pharmaceutical that disables their immune systems. All of a sudden that wall falls flat. When a pathogen leaps to some new person, odds are it's someone whose immune system won't react, so the pathogen has no trouble at all establishing itself in a new host, reproducing freely, and leaping from there. Even if the person's symptoms remain subclinical -- and with their immune system partly disabled, this is likely -- they'll be shedding bouncing baby pathogens wherever they go. So those of us with healthy immune systems have to deal with a drastic increase in pathogen load in our environments, and thus we get sick more often.

Meanwhile those whose immune systems have been damaged are also getting sick -- though they may be much sicker than they appear, since so much of what we consider "illness" is in fact immune response. If there is in fact a general decrease in immune function due to the vaccines, and this is permitting a wide range of opportunistic organisms to flourish to one degree or another in the vaccinated, a great many people could be seriously -- even fatally -- ill without showing symptoms other than tiredness, confusion, and malaise.

All this brings to mind a hideous comparison. One of the things that makes Yersinia pestis, the organism that causes bubonic plague, so deadly is that it can suppress the human inflammation response. Different strains of Y. pestis vary in their ability to do this. I read an article years back -- unfortunately I have been unable to find it again just now -- arguing that the strain that caused the Black Death of 1345-1349 was very, very good at this, so people didn't feel ill until very late in the course of the disease; this permitted them to spread the plague freely and then suddenly drop dead.

It might be worth considering some similar mechanism as a potential cause of the sudden deaths among vaccinated people that are continuing at present, long after the spike proteins should have run their course...

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

Certainly makes sense given what we're seeing, and if both covid and its attendant gene therapy shots damage people's immune systems, it's really rather a terrifying possibility. I haven't seen any research in this direction, that covid damages the immune system in general (rather than that specific IgG4 response to the covid pathogen), which is partly why I posted this. I think your theory does explain what we're actually seeing, but I'd like to see some research around that...

I guess all we can do about such a situation is to do whatever we can to help our own immune systems fight off the ever-increasing waves of pathogens. I have read that a few different mushrooms are good here, probably most researched being turkey tails (trametes versicolor), such that it's even part of some cancer therapies in Asia, intended to support people whose immune systems have been damaged by chemotherapy. Reishi is supposed to be good here, too. claire-58 has some good posts on this topic, too:

https://claire-58.dreamwidth.org/5889.html

May the gods help us if this immune system damage theory is what is really going on. I'd imagine these waves of sickness would look more exponential than linear, and trying to imagine how that future is going to look...

Re: Population Immunity

[ecosophia]

I would also like to see some research on this point! That's why I presented it as a hypothesis only -- it's one potential explanation that needs to be confirmed or contradicted by evidence.

One way or another, my working guess at this point -- and it's one I'm implementing in my own life -- is that the best things any of us can do for ourselves is to boost our own general health and our immune systems specifically, and consider getting a little less exposure to crowds, where the swamp of pathogens is likely to be worst. Claire-58's posts are good solid resources for this.

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

I'm very much doing the same. Complicated by the fact that my son (against my wishes) attends school, and his ma is a teacher at another school...unfortunately I see the results of this exposure to hundreds of other kids in all of our healths. He's been coughing so violently the last 2 nights that he's vomited from it; we've actually taken him to a doctor, very much a last resort for me, to get some antibiotics as he seems to have a bacterial infection. He is, I think, beginning to recover, but it's been a hell of a 2 month period.

Despite my hanging around on obscure blogs such as this, I guess you could call me magic-curious, rather than magic-practicing, but I confess that what's been going on lately has got me thinking that I'll do anything to protect the health of my family, which makes me think of the oft-mentioned here sphere of protection. Would I be right in assuming that such a practice could help protect the health of my family, as well as - I guess, our spiritual wellbeing? With apologies as maybe this belongs on the MM thread.

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

Gee, it sounds like being a, um, hermit, might be a rational survival strategy?

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

A year or two ago, there was a study from Spain that showed good evidence that nursing home patients who took a daily dose of loratadine (AKA as Claritin, the over-the-counter anti-allergy drug) had a 90%+ decrease in rates of covid infection. I remember fuss when it was revealed this info was kept out of the media for a year after it was published.

Anyway, if you can't lessen your exposure to crowds, you can perhaps lower your exposure to covid by taking this drug. IIRC, it's postulated that loratadine makes your nasal/sinus mucosa a little drier, which is sufficient to make your mucosa non-receptive to the virus particles.

Personally, I've been of the mind just to let myself get exposed, as I've already had covid, and just let exposure to all the new variants keep my immune system tuned and updated. Since Jan 2020, I've had only one instance of a cold-like illness, namely covid itself in Nov 2021. In that same time-frame, my un-vexed daughters have had covid once, and a cold once. My vex'ed former wife has had covid several times, and more or less the same rate of colds/flus as before the covid era.

Having said that, I'm going to re-read the discussion above and re-assess whether my strategy is optimal, and whether I should start daily loratadine.

--Lunar Apprentice

Re: Population Immunity

[claire_58]

Thank you both for the plug.
Comments on my post have quadrupled!! ;)

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

Exponential initially looks linear - until it doesn't.

Re: Population Immunity

[claire_58]

That's a great explanation of why those of us who aren't vaccinated are getting sicker more frequently. I've been wondering about that.
Thank you.
The bit about the plague is truly frightening though. Yikes!

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

This may be the explanation for why this pandemic is lasting longer as a noticeable event than Russian Flu, the last introduction of a coronavirus to humans. Still, even people with six or seven jabs are mostly getting infected with covid repeatedly, not getting infected once and continuing to test positive forever, so they are generally able to fight it off when they get it.

And it doesn't explain increased prevalence of a bunch of other bugs. Part of that may be just a statistical artifact of counting the waves (perhaps more than ever before) but not the troughs. (Are any diseases lower in any countries now than in the average of the 2010s? Were there any incidents in 2010 in which any bug in any country had a case count exceeding 10 times the baseline, and how many?) But another part may still be the lingering effects of all that social distancing. Organizations and people didn't go back to normal behavior for two, sometimes three years after lockdowns ended. That's a long time to go without being exposed to a rhinovirus, or an adenovirus, or influenza, or whatever, and the better a job you did, deliberately or by happenstance, of avoiding any viral exposures whatsoever, the more likely it is that you'll be guaranteed an illness when you finally do get exposed. Most of those pathogens were reduced to a very low level by the shutdowns and may have taken a while to build back up so that everyone's seeing them again. I've seen no reason to presume that the jabs should impair response to bugs other than covid.*

*To a greater extent than conventional vaccines do. There is some evidence that getting flu shots slightly increases your risk of getting a non-flu respiratory illness in the following season.

Regarding persistent elevation in sudden deaths, here I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Autoimmune myocarditis is an inflammatory condition, and I don't know of any other condition whereby lack of inflammation would cause sudden death. If sudden death were found to be more common in vaxxed people who haven't been vaxxed recently, a more likely explanation is myocardial scarring, from prior cardiac damage, leading over time to the development of ventricular fibrillation. This isn't a common outcome of such scarring, but then, it isn't EVERYONE dropping dead, either. But, there are still people getting booster number 8 or whatever it is, hard to believe as the better-informed may find that. Enough to account for the remaining elevation in sudden deaths relative to 2019? Dunno.

Re: Population Immunity

[ecosophia]

I think you've misunderstood my hypothesis, because it would account for the increased prevalence of other bugs -- in fact, I addressed that specifically in my comment. You've also missed the point of the issue with sudden death; the point is that there could be a great many undiagnosed infections with pathogens because the people infected are not showing symptoms, due to immune system failure. I grant that the mechanism whereby the vaccines cause general immune system failure, if in fact they do, is not yet clear -- but that doesn't mean it's not happening. It means that there hasn't been adequate research and our understanding of the immune system is still far from perfect.

I'm entirely willing to see this hypothesis disproved, but please do try to address what I'm actually saying!

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

Three potential factors come immediately to mind:

(1) Normally healthy people being around sick people will increase the odds of the healthy catching the illness. I think this is basically John's point. If you've raised children you've likely experienced this, in spades. At least I have. Infants get ill almost continually as their immune systems are undeveloped. Parents are naturally around the infants and the parents tend to catch many more, and more bizarre, illnesses than they would otherwise.

(2) The governments of the world, and the media supposedly charged with sharing quality facts, demonstrated a remarkable inability to collect good data, much less to question and analyze it, throughout the Covid period. Why should we presume they've "magically" regained their ability to collect and analyze data now? Didn't Briben's recent unveil demonstrate fairly convincingly that the medical and journalistic endeavors are still brain dead with regard to these basics?

So, all we can do is try to go forward with personal experience, and stories, and stories of stories, since Covid "mysteriously" affected the ability of "scientists" and "journalists" to think competently.

I'm not saying your personal experience isn't valid, but it doesn't provide enough data -- in particular -- to separate the illness rate of the Vexed from the Unvexed. So, healthy people may, indeed, also be experiencing more illness ... but maybe not at the same rates, nor degree of severity, as the Vexed.

(3) Depression lowers immune response, quite significantly. We live in depressing times. Indeed, factoring in that the inflation rate has unambiguously been way above the supposed "growth of GDP" since, at least 2020, we are actually in a prolonged, and rather bad, economic Recession.

Indeed, I think it would clearly be in what people 100 years ago would clearly recognize and label as an Economic DEPRESSION. How nice that our Government and their apparatchiks have made it impossible to ever again have an Economic Depression, by "disappearing" the definition of the term. Just go ahead and try to find a clear definition and distinction, to see what I mean.

-gnat

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

On (3), in Australia, we weren't to worry about the post-COVID economic slowdown because it was just a 'technical' recession we dipped into for a quarter or two. Now it's become a slightly less friendly 'per capita' recession. They brought in a million migrants over the past couple of years to buff GDP, so the overall numbers look passable, but the numbers for household finances tell a different story, and no substantial positive change on the horizon. Not a depression though, apparently.

Re: Population Immunity

[escorcher]

I'm not expert in this area but Rintrah wrote on this very subject back in February.

'Why people are now constantly sick all the time'

https://www.rintrah.nl/why-people-are-now-constantly-sick-all-the-time/

Certainly worth a read and very much along the lines of 'our of balance' innate/adaptive immune systems after mass foxination. As interestingly Rintrah stresses a finely balanced limited resource situation every'body' should be more aware of.

Re: Population Immunity

[escorcher]

By the way this all links into why we are seeing a rise in infections now
...and why GVB is at least partially correct that we have entered a new phase - one that likely will feed into the wider picture of ongoing multiple crises.

And I somewhat understated how insightful that post of Rintrah's was/is. Credit where credit's due.
(And all this before I've had breakfast :-/)

Re: Population Immunity

[mr_nobody1967]

I can relate to this. After a pretty ordinary cold, which I suppose could have been a Covid-cold, last year, for the first time in my life, I had bronchitis, and it was very severe, very long-lasting bronchitis. A lot of people insisted to me that I had pneumonia, and I think they probably thought that because so many vaccinated people who likely developed the same bronchitis probably had it develop, in turn, into full-on, lung-collapsing pneumonia. As I am unvaccinated, I simply recovered from the bronchitis after four unpleasant months, but it did leave behind a productive cough as a parting gift.

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

A chronic PRODUCTIVE cough? Has a doctor explained why you have that productive cough and cleared you? Otherwise, you have not "recovered" from bronchitis. That's evidence of an ongoing inflammatory or infectious process in your lungs until shown otherwise. I know a lot of people avoid doctors like the plaque (especially since as group they swallowed the covid shot Kool-aid), but you don't want to whistle in the dark on this. Lung function is immediately life-critical after all.

--Lunar Apprentice

Re: Population Immunity

[scotlyn]

"...those whose immune systems have been damaged are also getting sick -- though they may be much sicker than they appear, since so much of what we consider "illness" is in fact immune response... a great many people could be seriously -- even fatally -- ill without showing symptoms other than tiredness, confusion, and malaise."

Just a data point in relation to this specific point - (that what we consider illness is actually our immune responese).

Many years ago when my husband's elderly uncle was living with us, and I myself was about midway through my acupuncture course, I noticed one day that he was not himself - kind of low and miserable - but otherwise had no major "symptoms". Still, I worried enough to get out the thermometer and take his temperature and it was a really LOW 35°C. So, I took him to the doctor and he did have a raging kidney infection for which he was hospitalised for a few days. I was startled, at the time, to get such direct confirmation of what my course was teaching.

Which is that every infection is a two-hand reel. One of the partners is the pathogen (however this is defined), and the other partner is the host. Sometimes the host will be strong and the pathogen relatively weak, and in such a case (often seen in children) there will be a short, robust fever after which recovery promptly follows. When the host is weak, even if the pathogen is also relatively weak, the struggle may be prolonged and have few outward signs, except general weakening of vitality. When the host is weak, and the pathogen is relatively strong, the host will quickly succumb. And when the pathogen is strong, it will also be able to overcome many of the stronger hosts as well as the weaker ones, leading to the kinds of epidemics suffered by, say, the author of the 2nd Century AD Shang Han Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage) who says in the introduction that he lost more than 120 family members to a strong, fast-acting, epidemic pathogen (His motivation for writing this classic, whose principles of treatment for infectious illness are still very much alive and in use).

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

I have a somewhat disturbing data point. I figured I'd look into this: I have access to a university library (Carleton University), and I'm sure it should have sources. My searches are turning up nothing. It looks like the entire field of research, all of it, on how Y. pestis interacts with the immune system, has been memory holed.

More generally, it looks like the entire field of research into how immune systems fail is being memory holed, because there are some pretty significant papers that I know for a fact the library ought to have, because I found and accessed them a few years ago, have been removed. Not just from the physical library, but erased from the search system as well.

The most likely explanation I see is that someone has realized this is a major problem and does not want anyone else to be able to piece it together. If so, we may in for a world class mess...

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

Look and see whether unrelated papers from the same journals are available. University libraries nowadays subscribe to very few journals in actual paper copies ... and many journals, to my outrage, do not publish paper copies at all. They subscribe to electronic journals, which does NOT mean that every year you pay for permanent access to that year's new papers; it means you pay for one year's access to the accumulated papers. If the library's funding is cut and they cut one of their super-expensive journal bundles, or the journal bundle cuts out certain journals that were formerly included, then the library's patrons lose all access to the past years' issues.

Or, if just specific papers are not locatable, you can maybe find out in Retraction Watch if they've been retracted.

I'd suggest going to Google Scholar and looking for the papers; search on the topic and if you don't find the paper you want, you may find another that references it. Some will be available free online, and if not, you can at least get the details and write to the author to ask for a PDF "reprint."

Cessair

Re: Population Immunity

[stubborn_ass]

I could guess at some point something like this would be done. I've tried saving as many relevant articles as I could from the beginning, including useful research I found for therapies etc, but over time, the volume just got a bit overwhelming - one big positive of doing the high-dose piracetam brain stack for almost 2 years nowand being able to consume even more literature.

The crappification of the general internet search engines continue too... I sense it was done deliberately, so I'm having problems trying to pull up articles I read but didn't save, but wanted to refer to them again and darn.. 5 pages of search results and they aren't popping up.

One of the early threads for this week's discussion had someone saying that he doesn't believe in shedding... has seen no proof from scientific studies. While both Dr Kory and Midwestern doc have done extensive pieces detailing various shedding effects, his categorical declaration upset me, like the system doctors gaslighting vex injured folks - I must have been imagining all the issues that my family members have had to deal with... and there's new issues cropping up over time too. FWIW, Pfizer's own clinical trial papers noted shedding effects, but since MSM didn't report it, I guess it's not happening /s. I wanted to pull up a simple example - that vexines have been known to shed .... like the MMR vex. If one goes back 5 years ago, the system was categorically denying that such a thing happened for MMR... but in the past year, you can pull up search results saying that in rare cases, the Rubella portion of the vex can shed. But only that, and it's mild.. no worries for the public etc. Someone did a rather extensive investigation (which I've not been able to find again), where upon a measles outbreak, they actually find that a recently MMR-vexed person was the cause. Oh say what? The measles vex causes other people to get measles? Again and again, each report would declare that it was an isolated and rare instance... and this guy compiled news stories of such over a period of time.

Then now we have the mRNA platform, where it can make some folks into 24/7 spike factories - I think the longest confirmed case has been 2 years past the last jab and the poor guy was still producing the spikes. That's the reality that we have to deal with in highly-vexed and high population density areas... there's going to be folks, maybe 1 in 1000, who's going to be a walking spike factory wherever he goes. The effects are going to be scary crazy - literally so in this case. Last month a friend of mine who lives 700km away had a psychotic break... she had taken the SV shots and nothing else for 3 years, and the system classified it as encephalitis. Exactly 1 year after the same situation happened with my wife.. who insisted on meeting up with former colleagues who were jabbed to the wazoo and she had the same psychotic break. Full battery of tests on her spinal fluid returned no detectable infection - it included a battery of tests only by the Mayo clinic, but the colour alone showed that something was going on. Final medical diagnosis? Encephalitis. Convenient catch-all phrase.

Anyways, I've mentioned that stuff keeps happening to my family.. I notice and I have to figure out solutions or possible mitigations, as it will be hitting everyone else in due time. By the time someone in my circle or the online forums that I frequent ask for help/advice regarding a new issue, I can provide some useful guidelines. If they are open-minded, they gratefully accept the often positive results... but if they want to keep holding to aspects of the medical system, it only slows the deterioration.

I just feel like there's kind of a weird thing going on now.... it's across multiple forums, but just here, this week we have someone declaring that shedding is not happening, despite all the anec-data evidence - he MUST have an official scientific study published before he believes it's for real. Couple weeks ago, the benefits of nicotine was explained and the mechanisms by which it works to protect against the spike - and the poster just went ad hominem. Then a week or two before that, someone declared that VIM must be just as evil coz the alt-scene is 'pushing' it and it's still a big pharma product, so it can't be that good. Oh boy.

Re: Population Immunity

[dendroica]

I have not at all been keeping up on the research for the past couple of years, but the logical mechanism for immune system suppression resulting from genetic vaccination would be "broad tolerance" - and it would seem likely to be triggered to some extent by any genetic vaccination (one that causes host cells to produce a foreign protein and therefore come under attack).

Specific tolerance (the IgG4 business) arises because inert, non-infectious antigens (like, e.g. bee venom) show up on occasion, and the immune system needs to be able to remember these and not launch an attack. When spike protein hangs around repeatedly in a non-infectious context, it can trigger this which has implications for spike-bearing virus tolerance in the future.

Broad tolerance (general immune suppression) can get triggered when the immune system attacks healthy cells, such as occurs in certain autoimmune conditions or when mRNA transfected cells start producing spike protein. The issue here is that, having concluded that the cells under attack are indeed healthy and not infected with something (through various complex signalling cascades), the immune system determines that it has made a dangerous self-attack mistake. And the only way to avoid more of these mistakes is to dial back the sensitivity, which makes it easier for cancer cells and pathogens to escape notice.

Again, I don't know what the current research says, but just as I was not surprised to see the original tolerance hypothesis validated (at least in the specific IgG4 sense) I would expect to see some evidence of induced broad tolerance and immune suppression following genetic vaccination.

In terms of illness, I have to say I'm not seeing obvious patterns. Some people are indeed sick a lot. They tend to be vaccinated, but also to have children. Two elders in my family - one rather vulnerable and uber-boosted and the other who received just the first shots - have yet to contract covid or any other respiratory infection since 2020, despite strong household exposure to the virus. I caught covid in 2022 and a regular cold last year, and my once-vaccinated partner had the same two infections of similar non-severity, so increased illness has not been a feature in our household. Other than keeping my Vitamin D levels consistently high I'm not doing anything special.

Re: Population Immunity

[ecosophia]

That seems reasonable. As for seeing/not seeing the increased sickness, that's interesting, and in the absence of meaningful statistical information, potentially useful. It may be that something relatively local (variations in vaccine batches? Something else?) may be playing a role here.

Re: Population Immunity

[escorcher]

Eh up Mark - nice to hear from you.

I personally agree the sickness thing has been really variable and the reportings of such have been as susceptable to the hyperbolic distortions of (social) media as everything else these days. That said, I do feel there's something beginning to kick off now with the newest antibody evasive iterations of Sars2 that will up medium term autoimmunity issues etc. I have commented this week with Rintrah's explanation (and prediction) on this observation of increased sickness from February and I think he's pretty spot on here. Mass vixenation was so ill advised in this case (sorry, couldn't resist that line to finish).

Re: Population Immunity

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Archidruid:
I wonder if the paper about a delayed response of inmunitary system against Yersinia Pestis wich you are refering can be this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2981309/