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

[(Anonymous)]

From social media to mainstream media, I see more and more comments about how lots of people are sick right now:

https://www.scotsman.com/health/why-everyone-is-so-sick-right-now-as-covid-19-figures-published-weekly-again-by-scotlands-health-watchdog-4690971
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-06-14/why-is-everyone-getting-sick-behind-the-global-rise-in-rsv-flu-measles
https://nitter.poast.org/_/status/1810074272729330151
https://old.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1durqbc/anyone_else_got_this_flu/

The Bloomberg piece is perhaps most indicative of what's going on:

"...data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline. Whooping cough, or pertussis, cases have climbed by 45 times in China in the first four months compared with last year."

It's not just covid, it's pretty much anything that makes humans sick, and it's not just in the vexxed part of the population, as my own experience shows, as well as others commenting on the X thread. I'm not sure I buy the shedding idea, as I've seen no real research in that direction, so if we make the assumption that shedding isn't the cause, then does anyone have any thoughts as to just what the heck is going on? I could understand if this were a side effect of the gene shots, given everything that's wrong with them, but as the wave of sickness is affecting the unshotted too, it's not that.

I have seen 2 theories; the gene shots have caused the vexxed to respond to covid with the IgG4 antibody response, i.e. their immune systems are tolerating the virus rather than fighting it, and they are thus all spike protein factories, causing many covid infections. Equally this could be true of people that have had covid 3 or more times, that the disease itself is causing this IgG4 response. However, neither of these explanations make sense in light of the fact that it's not just a surge in covid happening right now, it's a surge in disease generally. It appears as if people's immune systems are not working properly, but I'm not aware of research showing that covid is damaging people's immune systems in general. Have I just missed that research? I'm curious to hear what people think is causing this surge in so many different diseases, and how we might respond (protect ourselves) from that.

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

[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

[(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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[(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/

[open_space]

I've suspected that besides the pathogenic shedding JMG describes below, there is also an etheric "shedding" --we take up on the people around us all the time just as we breath each others air. You don't need to be inoculated to pick up the diseases that spread and proliferate in an immunocompromised herd.. I'll put it very crassly, but if people around you are sweaty and haven't taken a shower, the space you share with them will also smell, even if you just took a shower.

Oh, Plague in Colorado! Govt Deliberately Importing New Diseases

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/health-officials-confirm-human-case-plague-colorado

Illegal immigrants flooding the border are NOT required to be, nor become, up to date on vaccines. Presuming you believe in vaccines...I think I do, although much more than I did. It appears our
government doesn't believe in them very much:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/08/17/new-york-asylum-seekers-public-health-crisis/70598475007/

Re: Oh, Plague in Colorado! Govt Deliberately Importing New Diseases

[(Anonymous)]

As noted in the article, an average of 7 people per year get plague in the western US, where it is carried by rodents, including prairie dogs. This is not a new disease.

[athaia]

Hm. Anecdotal evidence only, but my (vexxed) relatives and colleagues have gotten sick with colds about as often as before the whole covid thing, while I (unvexded) have gotten sick *less* often than before. So personally, I don't experience this ever-increasing wave of sickness (and am very glad about that).

[kiwigaz]

this is the same for me and my eight yr old son. When we do have a bug it also seems to be a lot less severe...with minimal symptoms....those around who are jabbed seem to be a lot more regulary getting ill and more severely...

Prior to COVID I would annually get a really ill usually once a yr. Id be out for 2-5 days and that would be it for the rest of the yr...

Now I dont get this annual bug...I just get a mild illness a couple of times a yr I hardly notice....

[(Anonymous)]

What if this is just more fear-mongering?

If the government or media says there are more people getting sick at the moment, how can you be sure they are telling the truth?

I catch public transport on a regular basis (down here in Oz) and since the beginning of the year I have not seen many people with cold or flu symptoms - not even right now when according to the media there is a wave of covid/flu/rsv hitting society. This was not the case in 2023 when I noticed a lot of people on PT with cold and flu symptoms, and sometimes this correlated with the media coverage. I myself haven't caught anything since I had a barely perceptible cold in Feb.

I haven't seen this level of hysteria in the media since early 2023. There is also the fear-mongering over the avian flu going on.

Based on my own observations, I thought things had settled down and were starting to get back to some kind of normal.

[(Anonymous)]

"Based on my own observations, I thought things had settled down and were starting to get back to some kind of normal."

Same here, actually. No noticeable unusual wave of sickness here at work. I'm in southern California.

- Cicada Grove

[(Anonymous)]

Another anecdotal data point...

I had been running somewhat tired from work before, but last week's plane trip really did a number on me. After coming off the plane back east, I was quite muzzy-minded, had difficulty navigating at times while driving, and made several rather stupid mistakes. After the return flight these symptoms were even worse.

About 4 days after my return, I washed my hair with soap and water for the first time in a couple of weeks (I am trying the 'no-shampoo' policy described in a Frugal Friday last fall). As soon as, and I mean within minutes of, getting my hair squeaky clean, my mind cleared up quite noticeably, and I felt almost like myself again. It was as if "something" was stuck in my hair, messing with my mind, until I washed it off.

Other factors: Daily I am taking 800-1000 FU of nattokinase, and half a star of star anise in my coffee (thank you, JMG and commentariat!!).

Cicada Grove

[boccaccio]

I cannot verify this as I'm on the road for a week without my computer, but I think that the virus does attack T-cells. This means that even after an almost non-symptomatic infection someones immune system can be weakened due to having less T cells. This is a temporary condition (if I remember correct the estimate was 3 months), but in the meantime someone is more vulnerable for other infections. This could explain the all-across-the-board higer viral load in our societies.

The phenomenon of young athletes dropping dead is still baffling to me. Most athletes seem fine, but some have many injuries and a few died unexpectedly. I don't see a pattern in who gets hurt and who don't. A few months back I posted about the only case I know of where an autopsy was done. It was the case of a teenage gymnastics athlete who dropped dead late 2023. It turned out she died of a bloodclot. The article didn't state her vax status, but I could deduct that if she was vaxxed, her last vax was at least a year ago.

[boccaccio]

I gave it some more thought. It is highly speculative, but maybe this can explain the SADS phenomenon: I think Stubborn is right that it is very likely a small percentage of the vaxxed turn into long term super-shedders. Spike attacks the endothelial cells and there are indications that this is an important contribution to the white bloodclots. This could explain the clots and heart attacks. It could also explain the liver problems. According to British data (discontinued end of 2023), the excess mortality was in the 2 categories heart problems and liver problems. So this hypothesis could explain this and the continued cases of SADSS (but it is very speculative of course)

[(Anonymous)]

SARS-CoV-2 Actively Infects And Kills Lymphoid Cells

One of the critical symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection is lymphopenia. Lymphopenia is a condition in which patients exhibit reduced levels of white blood cells called lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are the fundamental defense cells of our adaptive immune system. They consist of natural killer cells, T cells, and B cells. When any of these cells are reduced, it can inhibit our body’s ability to protect itself from viruses. Recent reports have shown that marked lymphopenia is observed in 83.2% of SARS-CoV-2 patients, but little is known about how SARS-CoV-2 effectively dismantles one of our primary tools of defense.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/04/14/sars-cov-2-actively-infects-and-kills-lymphoid-cells/

The paper is a couple of years old, but that's a definite "oh dear" moment if there's been no subsequent research to falsify it.

[scotlyn]

Boccaccio, I have no idea what's going on with athletes, either, but anecdotally, I can share that when I first started researching the house of cards which is "vaccine science" it was in relation to the HPV vac which around 15 years ago started being pushed quite heavily among young preteen and early teen girls and women.

The thing that stood out for me at the time (which, as I say is anecdotal, and very much an impression) was the degree to which it seemed that the fittest, most athletic girls were the ones that were completely floored by it, and ended up unable to think properly or move properly, suffering years of disability bringing all class attendance and all athletic activity to an end for them.

It does seem as if the combination of stresses - athletic and pharmaceutical - may just be a combo too far. This jumps out at you as a compelling research topic, and when there is so much money invested in athletic pursuits, you would think someone somewhere would be stumping up for it. And maybe someone is, informing someone like Djokovic.