Re: “A couple I know caught it last month and she still has bad symptoms. He was fine in just a few days.”
I stand corrected. I was going by my own Omicron experience and published reports saying it was upper respiratory only (not down in the lungs like the original Covid or the Delta variant):
Re the “gene therapy” I agree. It’s no more “gene therapy” than one would get from catching the disease and developing natural immunity. I think it likely it’s the mRNA bit that gets people confused. The vaccines contain part of the virus’s spike protein, yes, the crucial mRNA. But so does the virus bristling with spikes itself. Why do they think one is “gene therapy” but not the other? How do they think viruses hijack our cells to replicate themselves? Why is the bit of spike protein in the vaccine “gene therapy” but not the whole dang virus?
Maybe this will help explain?
https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/why-mrna-vaccines-arent-gene-therapies/
Even better:
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210719/covid-19-vaccines-not-gene-therapy
But people who prefer to believe The Daily Expose, Steve Kirsch, Stew Peters, Facebook and Twitter posts, etc., are going to continue believe the “gene therapy” notion. (And there are grifters making lots of $ off these sites and from selling “detox” concoctions, so they proliferate.) There is simply no reasoning with them.
By the way, guess how people develop natural immunity to malaria? It’s caused by a parasite, not a bacteria or virus, so how? Their immune systems learn to recognize the proteins expressed on the surface of the nasty little protozoa. But they’re tricky little devils and switch up which proteins they express to evade the host’s immune system, so it’s a process, and this “immunity” does not entirely prevent infestation with parasites, but does prevent them from replicating and causing serious illness. It’s a fascinating process.
Surprised there were fewer Covid deaths and serious symptoms in areas where malaria is endemic and natural immunity high (one would expect the opposite), researchers are looking into this.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8853697/
And recruiting for a clinical trial:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05012280
Could be implications for treatment or prevention of Covid — or could just be interesting, at least I think it interesting.
The thing is, what’s so sinister about our immune systems learning to recognize certain proteins expressed by little enemy invaders, whether viruses, bacteria or parasites? Or those contained in a vaccine?
“Surprised there were fewer Covid deaths and serious symptoms in areas where malaria is endemic and natural immunity high (one would expect the opposite), researchers are looking into this.”
Which makes you wonder what the common thread could be.
Shortly after SARS-1 researchers were trying quinine derivative drugs as a means of fighting SARS. Chloroquine was tried in 2005 and found very effective in vitro using green monkey kidney tissue. Chloroquine is a more toxic cousin of HCQ, and SARS-1 of course is the close cousin of Covid-19 aka SARS-2.
I suspect that this 2005 study is probably what prompted Trump’s people to promote HCQ. It held the possibility of working.
But the problem with the 2005 study is that it was done in the lab on monkey tissue in petri dishes. There was no opportunity to try it in people infected with SARS.
That chance finally arrived with Covid 19, and once Chloroquine and HCQ were tried in people they just didn’t work like they had in the lab. Not unusual, just a disappointment. But the conspiracy crowd wouldn’t be deterred by mundane reality and the rest is history.
That doesn’t explain the malaria zone exemption, it just rules out one possibility