COVID Deception: Sen. Rand Paul's Book charges Fauci and others with funding dangerous research and then covering it up.

Remember when Sen. Rand Paul accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of funding China’s Wuhan virus lab?

The media loved it. Vanity Fair smirked, “Fauci Once Again Forced to Basically Call Rand Paul a Sniveling Moron.”

But now the magazine has changed its tune, admitting, “In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan … Paul might have been onto something.”

Then what about question two: Did COVID-19 occur because of a leak from that lab?

When Paul confronted Fauci, saying, “The evidence is pointing that it came from the lab!” Fauci replied, “I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating.”

Was Paul lying? What’s the truth?

The media told us COVID came from an animal, possibly a bat.

But in my new video, Paul points out there were “reports of 80,000 animals being tested. No animals with it.”

Now he’s released a book, “Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up,” that charges Fauci and others with funding dangerous research and then covering it up.

“Three people in the Wuhan lab got sick with a virus of unknown origin in November of 2019,” says Paul. The Wuhan lab is 1,000 kilometers away from where bats live.

Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Energy and others agree with Rand Paul. They believe COVID most likely came from a lab.

I ask Paul, “COVID came from evil Chinese scientists, in a lab, funded by America?”

“America funded it,” he replies, “maybe not done with evil intentions. It was done with the misguided notion that ‘gain of function’ research was safe.”

Gain of function research includes making viruses stronger.

The purpose is to anticipate what might happen in nature and come up with vaccines in advance. So I push back at Paul, “They’re trying to find ways to stop diseases!”

He replies, “Many scientists have now looked at this and said, ‘We’ve been doing this gain of function research for quite a while.’ The likelihood that you create something that creates a vaccine that’s going to help anybody is pretty slim to none.”

Paul points out that Fauci supported “gain of function” research.

“He said in 2012, even if a pandemic occurs … the knowledge is worth it.” Fauci did write: “The benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”

Paul answers: “Well, that’s a judgment call. There’s probably 16 million families around the world who might disagree with that.”

Fauci and the National Institutes of Health didn’t give money directly to the Chinese lab. They gave it to a nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. The group works to protect people from infectious diseases.

“They were able to accumulate maybe over $100 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars, and a lot of it was funneled to Wuhan,” says Paul.

EcoHealth Alliance is run by zoologist Peter Daszak. Before the pandemic, Daszak bragged about combining coronaviruses in Wuhan.

Once COVID broke out, Daszak became less eager to talk about these experiments. He won’t talk to me.

“Peter Daszak has refused to reveal his communications with the Wuhan lab,” complains Paul. “I do think that ultimately there is a great deal of culpability on his part … They squelched all dissent and said, ‘You’re a conspiracy theorist if you’re saying this (came from a lab),’ but they didn’t reveal that they had a monetary self-incentive to cover this up,” says Paul.

“The media is weirdly un-curious about this,” I say to Paul.

“We have a disease that killed maybe 16 million people,” Paul responds. “And they’re not curious as to how we got it?”

Also, Our NIH still funds gain of function research, Paul says.

“This is a risk to civilization. We could wind up with a virus … that leaks out of a lab and kills half of the planet,” Paul warns.

Paul’s book reveals much more about Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance. I will cover more of that in this column in a few weeks.

Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”

I am talking about HAVING ALREADY BEEN Naturally immune due to inadvertent exposure to the SARS-COV-2 virus.
This is what has happened to tens of millions of people in the USA and around the world who have already been exposed to the SARS-COV-2 virus EVEN BEFORE THE mRNA vaccines went through Operation Warp Speed ( the name of the operation in itself tells you something ).

The first Covid vaccine was issued an emergency use authorization on Dec. 11, 2020. COVID-19 Vaccines. By that time, a total of 69,833,475 people were infected and 1,587,024 had died, giving a death rate of 2.27%. This is worldwide data, no reference because I recorded daily case and death data in a spreadsheet from Mar, 2020 through May, 2023. Now I record weekly data.

So, yes, tens of millions of people did get infected prior to vaccine roll-out and after, because the vaccines had to be rationed at first due to limited supply. But look at that death rate--over twice as high as it is now that vaccines are available.

This does not mean that their disease-induced immunity is better than vaccine-induced immunity. It just means that they had no choice about the method of getting that immunity.

There are several studies that show that vaccine-induced immunity is preferable to disease-induced immunity in terms of its ability to prevent or mitigate Covid infection.

Immune imprinting, breadth of variant recognition, and germinal center response in human SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination.

Reduced Risk of Reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 After COVID-19 Vaccination — Kentucky, May–June 2021.

Effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines on covid-19 related symptoms, hospital admissions, and mortality in older adults in England: test negative case-control study. Note: this is one of those studies that the conspiracy theorists tell us are classified for the next 75 years.

The death rate of Covid along with the increase in excess deaths from other causes in 2020 and 2021 were high enough to actually cause a decrease in life expectancy. COVID-19 exacerbated life expectancy trends in the US.

What this all boils down to is that expecting disease-induced immunity to substitute for vaccine programs comes with a huge cost in terms of lives. Had we not had lockdowns and so forth which helped to reduce the spread of Covid prior to vaccine availability, that 2.27% death rate would have caused over 7 million deaths in the US during the first few months of the pandemic (calculated based on fatality rate, virus reproduction number [R-nought], and US population).

Editorial note: prior to vaccines, humanity's forced reliance on disease-induced immunity resulted in very short life expectancies of 30-40 years. Life expectancies increased throughout history because we found better ways to prevent disease. Vaccines are one of the most important health interventions ever invented.

As for Operation Warp Speed, that was one of President Trump's greatest accomplishments. Maybe you don't remember, but one of his campaign issues was to streamline FDA approval of drugs, which takes at least ten years if everything works out perfectly, but usually takes longer. He was not able to do that in terms of routine FDA operations (getting sufficient safety and efficacy data and convincing the FDA to issue an approval is time-consuming and costly). However, when the pandemic showed up, he was able to hasten the process via the initiative called Operation Warp Speed. I've explained before how the approval process timeline was shortened by a combination of elimination of certain red tape and the ability of pharmaceutical companies to recruit tens of thousands of trial participants in very short time. No corners were cut. The necessary safety and efficacy studies were done, not just with the mRNA vaccines but with all of the prototype vaccines.

In other words, I QUESTION the necessity of having to vaccinate ( Or VACCINATE BY FORCE ) people who already have the Covid antibodies.

It is impossible to determine without titer testing whether someone has antibodies that are reactive against SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. (This is the only antibody species that is relevant in terms of preventing Covid or decreasing severity of infection at time of exposure. Antibodies against non-surface SARS-CoV-2 virus will not prevent infection.)

As I have mentioned numerous times, the immune system is not very good at maintaining immunity against certain viruses over a span of years; coronavirus immunity typically fades after months.

Thus, as a matter of health policy, it is best to set a vaccine schedule and just vaccinated people when they are due. Measuring titers of antibodies that react with SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is possible--but there is a cost involved, as well as the discomfort of the blood draw necessary to get a sample for the titer test. Administration of vaccine according to a schedule is the approach taken to literally every other vaccine. The vaccination schedule is based on a number of factors, including the typical duration of immunity to a specific pathogen.

Also, as the authors of the "Immune imprinting" study linked above found, the immune response of Covid survivors to vaccination is very robust. In addition, the immunization overcomes some of the shortcomings of disease-induced immunity.

You’re trying to compare rabies and Covid, two different diseases.

What I was doing was trying to illustrate that immunity is not an end-point health goal by using an example of a virus that has a 100% fatality rate. (Yes, I am aware of rabies pre-exposure prophylaxis, usually called "rabies vaccine" and post-exposure prophylaxis which consists of administration of anti-rabies anti-serum (a component of blood that contains antibodies) and of rabies vaccine.) Post-exposure prophylaxis is effective, but you have to know you were exposed. People have been known to get bat bites while sleeping and only found out they were bit when they start showing symptoms of rabies. By then, it's too late, because they will die.

Almost everyone who is at risk of rabies selects the pre-exposure vaccination. And no one chooses to become immune by catching rabies.

The end-point health goal is not immunity. It is disease prevention. This is the point professional antivaxxers keep obscuring. Of course they want you to think that immunity is the end-point goal because many of them are in the business of selling you expensive yet useless "immune boosters."

We have not seen any other mRNA vaccines approved before these two that we can be given years to observe.

No, none were approved but several were actually developed prior to the arrival of Covid. The company Moderna (notice the "RNA" at the end of the company name) was working on influenza vaccines for years. Other mRNA vaccine prototypes were against Zika, rabies, and Ebolavirus. Here is a nice overview of mRNA vaccine development: The Long History of mRNA Vaccines.

Evaluation of a New Ebola Vaccine Using a Short-interval Prime-boost Vaccination. This is a description of a phase 1 trial of a two-step mRNA based Ebolavirus vaccine. I link this one because it includes study results. There are currently 484 mRNA vaccine studies registered in the clinicaltrials.gov database: mRNA vaccine search results. mRNA vaccines in these studies target cancers and influenza as well as Covid.

I will admit that I was skeptical early in the pandemic whether the FDA would approve mRNA based vaccines. I was aware of them before the pandemic, since one of my roles before I retired was influenza countermeasures expert. My skepticism was not based on the technology, but on my familiarity with how hesitant the FDA is to grant approval to anything new. Approval of new egg-based influenza vaccines goes quickly because the same technology has been in use since (IIRC) the 1920s. Approval of a new drug to treat Alzheimer's might take a long time because the FDA wants to review a ton of safety and efficacy data before it will grant approval.

I should probably point out that we have had all of human history to observe the effects of introducing foreign mRNA into the body. Not only is it in all of the food we eat, but every time we get a viral infection, our cells are hijacked and forced to make RNA or DNA virus genomes, mRNA, and proteins and then package them into new virus particles. In addition, several times throughout evolution, entire viruses have inserted themselves into the genome and become permanent residents. Around 8 percent of our genome consists of ancient virus remnants, and another 40% is thought to have a viral origin. The non-human living inside of you. So, not only do viruses force your cells to use foreign mRNA, your own genome is a source of foreign mRNA. The use of mRNA in vaccines basically takes advantage of a natural process.

Look, As of Monday, September 11, 2023, the FDA has provided “Emergency Use Authorization” for the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine boosters.

(I'm not reposting your link.)

There is a need to update the vaccines to better match the strains of SARS-CoV-2 currently in circulation. The original strain that first appeared in the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan is gone now, presumably extinct. The early alpha, beta, and delta variants are gone, too. There are now nine variants in circulation, three of which are deemed "variants of interest" and the rest are "variants under monitoring." Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The latest vaccine to receive FDA EUA (which *is* an approval) specifically targets the Omicron variant XBB.1.5. It should provide good protection against all of the XBB variants due to their high level of similarity. Older vaccine formulations are no longer available.

Apparently, one narrative that professional antivaxxers push is that the vaccines are rushed and inadequately tested. In that narrative, clinical trials involving tens of thousands of participants along with post-market observance of billions of vaccinees is inadequate, since there hasn't been twenty years (or whatever) of clinical trial of each specific mRNA vaccine. But if we subjected every single iteration of Covid vaccines (regardless of technology used) to the same lengthy approval process that is the norm for new drugs, it would become impossible to provide updated vaccines to protect against the latest variant. Coronaviruses evolve too rapidly. If the only part of the vaccine that changed is the mRNA molecule component, but the rest of the vaccine is the same, then the FDA already has considerable safety and efficacy data. All the vaccine manufacturer has to do is show that the vaccine is effective against the variant it targets. This is the same philosophy used by the FDA to approve new influenza vaccines every year. Everything about egg-based influenza vaccines remains the same; only the targeted influenza strain changes. Thus, only efficacy data is needed for approval. The company doesn't have to start the approval process from scratch just because it updated the vaccine.

The specific change in the vaccine was to update the mRNA to match the mRNA of the XBB.1.5 spike protein. You'll be exposed to that altered mRNA and the spike protein it encodes at far higher than vaccine doses if you catch that particular strain of Covid--so why not choose the safer method of vaccination to get that mRNA into your body?

Even if you maintained immunity against a specific coronavirus for years, you would still need an updated Covid vaccine because you aren't immune to the new variants. Your antibodies might not recognize the new variants. And catching Covid multiple times is risky, to say the least.

What doctors wish patients knew about COVID-19 reinfection.

“It can be problematic if you are reinfected,” Dr. Rouhbakhsh said. “We know from a pretty elegant study that was recently published in Nature Medicine that each subsequent COVID infection will increase your risk of developing chronic health issues like diabetes, kidney disease, organ failure and even mental health problems.”

Such evidence “dispels the myth that repeated brushes with the virus are mild and you don’t have to worry about it,” he added, noting that “it is akin to playing Russian roulette.”

That is why “you want to try to avoid reinfection if possible. That should not be the mechanism by which you aspire to get immunity from the virus,” Dr. Rouhbakhsh said.

The blog linked just above from the American Medical Association refers to this article published in Nature Medicine: Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection.

What do the current CDC data show in the USA (total deaths)?

271 deaths per week, 38 deaths per day WITH COVID. In contrast, we lose 200 - 300 mostly young people per day to Fentanyl and other opiates. That is 1400 deaths per week from drug overdoses. As if one 737 full of young US citizens crashed and killed all passengers per week. Five times the COVID deaths. If opioid deaths are not a public health emergency, then why is COVID an emergency?

According to my spreadsheet, from 9/25/2023 until today, a total of 5833 people died from Covid. So, in the last 35 days, 167 (rounded up) people have died per day from Covid. This comes out to an annual death rate of just over 60,000 deaths from Covid which is a HUGE improvement over the 244,986 Covid deaths in 2022. In 2022, there were 107,081 drug-related deaths--lower than Covid deaths in 2022 but higher than my calculation of annual Covid deaths for 2023.

Illicitly Manufactured Fentanyl–Involved Overdose Deaths with Detected Xylazine — United States, January 2019–June 2022.

My question to you is, why do you not perceive the drug abuse crisis as a public health emergency? The fact that you are not personally aware of all of the resources the government is putting into fighting drug addiction doesn't mean it's not happening. With the exclusion of deaths of babies by abortion, if something kills people, our government is concerned and throws resources at it (in the forms of research funding, education efforts, and public outreach). Even non-abortion related fetal deaths are considered a topic of concern by the CDC, which tracks them and directs resources towards study and prevention.

You have a couple of links to The Epoch Times. I would read them to find out what the actual science is that they are distorting, but The Epoch Times has decided that I cannot view any more articles without a subscription. Nope, I'm not paying to read that.

As for the Fox News link regarding the surgeon general of Florida, I will say simply that I have looked into his background and the guy is a kook, right up there with Sherry Tenpenny, RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, Jenny McCarthy, Judy Mikovits, and every other kook who's made a name for themself in antivax circles. The fact that DeSantis placed him as surgeon general of Florida is one reason I would never vote for DeSantis...if he were ever a presidential candidate, I don't know if I would vote. At least Gov. Abbott has left competent people in charge of the Texas Department of Health Services, despite some questionable policies he set in the past (such as lifting mask mandates long before scientifically advisable).

Oh, my, this is terribly long. I tried to address everything in your post...

I will only discuss a viral infection, because the mechanisms of infection by other pathogens are different.

The first step is, of course, exposure to an active virus.

The second step is virus attachment through the attachment of a virus surface protein to a cell surface receptor. The cell surface receptor is a protein which is embedded in the cell membrane. The membrane is the outer covering of the cell.

The third step is when the cell initiates a process called “endocytosis.” In this process, the cell pulls a little part of its membrane containing the receptor/virus complex inside to make a little bubble in the cytoplasm. The receptor/virus complex is inside the bubble.

The fourth step is when the virus and components of the cell interact to cause the virus membrane to fuse with the cell membrane. This causes the contents of the virus to spill into the cytoplasm of the cell.

Step five occurs when the virus takes over function of the cell. The virus insides contain proteins and nucleic acids. which force the cell to stop its normal activity and turn all of its energy to making copies of the virus nucleic acid genome (it can be RNA or DNA), making mRNA encoding virus proteins, and using the cell’s ribosomes to make viral proteins. The newly made virus genome, mRNA, and proteins are packaged inside membranes to form new virus particles.

Not all viruses follow the same sequence of events. Some viruses, like DNA viruses or RNA retroviruses literally insert their genome into the host DNA and direct the formation of new virus particles from there. Retroviruses have an enzyme to make a DNA copy of their genome; RNA cannot integrate into DNA. Other viruses, like Coronaviruses which are RNA based, do not integrate their genome into the host genome. They just force the cell to make new virus particles.

Step six is the release of new virus particles to infect other cells. Some viruses can cause the new virus particles to “bud” from the cell membrane, which does not kill the cell and allows the invading virus to keep using it for a prolonged period of time. Other viruses, such as coronaviruses, cause the cell to burst open to release the new virus particles. This kills the cell. Either way, the new virus particles infect nearby cells or enter the blood and travel to other parts of the body to infect distant cells.

Whether you have symptoms during a viral infection and how serious those symptoms are is dependent on a lot of factors. Some viruses, such as cytomegalovirus, rarely cause symptoms. Most people are infected and never know it. Other viruses, such as rabies virus, cause severe and ultimately fatal symptoms. All viruses fall between those extremes.

The symptoms themselves are not strongly related to how contagious the virus is. Since the majority of people catch cytomegalovirus, it seems pretty contagious. Avian influenzas, on the other hand, have severe symptoms and are life-threatening but human to human transmission is rare. Some viruses, like the 200+ different viruses that cause colds, cause symptoms very conducive to spreading (sneezing and coughing) but are not life-threatening.

The symptoms of a virus infection have two sources. One is the immune system which has activated to fight off the virus. Your immune system can make you feel absolutely rotten, causing you to have a headache and fever, releasing poisons into your blood to try to kill the invading pathogens, and so forth. The other symptoms are related to the specific tissues the virus infects. Cold viruses primarily infect the upper respiratory passages and sometimes the upper part of the lungs. So your symptoms are coughing, sneezing, and prolific mucus production. Norovirus infects the gastrointestinal system, causing vomiting, diarrhea, and cramping. Rabies virus infects muscle and nerve cells. In the muscle, it does not cause symptoms, but once it reaches the nerves, it causes tingling, paralysis, and other symptoms of nerve damage. Once it travels through the nerves and reaches the brain, it causes a number of neurological symptoms including anxiety, delirium, and hallucinations, eventually culminating in coma and death. There is an old educational video showing the progress of rabies in an Iranian man who was bitten by a rabid wolf; the progress of his disease is horrific to watch. No, I won’t link it. If you are really interested, you can find it on youtube.

Tl;dr version: an infection occurs when viruses take over cell function in order to reproduce.

Reading your screed, you claim to have a PhD in two years of graduate school, following four years of undergrad: and apparently to have read “thousands of papers” while doing so.

No, I didn't. A two year PhD would be quite remarkable.

What I said was that my education was in the classroom during all four years of undergraduate school and the first two years of graduate school. During the classroom portion of my education, I read a ton of textbooks. (Okay, maybe only a few hundred pounds... either way, those things are heavy.) During the first two years of graduate school, I had to spend my non-classroom time in the lab. Since a PhD is awarded based on the student's understanding and knowledge of the background science, as well as the student's original research adding to the body of knowledge in that specific field, I read thousands of papers as a student. I had to, in order to understand what had already been done in the field and in order to identify where there were gaps in knowledge that I could fill through my research.

A PhD typically takes 5-6 years to complete, but can take 10 years or longer. Bob--remember him?--told me that I would be there for ten years. Thank goodness it didn't take that long.

Most PhD graduates enter a secondary phase of education called a post-doc. This is where they get more research experience, usually in a different lab than where they did their PhD, and usually lasts two years. I did a little post-doc phase in the lab where I got my PhD, but I chose not to do a formal post-doc and went instead directly into the workforce.

By your own earlier confession, the texts were like Greek to you when you first started grad school.

Yes, absolutely. Talking to senior graduate students was like trying to speak in Greek, as well. It was overwhelming. But practice, practice, practice, is key to learning how to read scientific papers. With enough practice, you not only learn to read them, but you can write and think in the same language. It's kind of like being thrown into a foreign country and learning the language by immersion. (I was an exchange student, so I have had this experience.) Overwhelming at first, but eventually you realize that you have become fluent.

Grad school is at least one year of classes; in addition to a Masters’ for most people, and written and oral exams before admission to PhD candidacy. Then the seminars sponsored by the departments, teaching and grading duties, and the thesis work itself in addition to writing and defending the thesis.

The classroom requirement is dependent on the school and the specific graduate program. Someone getting a PhD in, for example, piano studies had a vastly different path to their PhD than I had. (I say that because there was actually someone being awarded a PhD in piano at my graduation ceremony.) People getting PhDs in English at my university had, for reasons I'll never understand, a very long and difficult path to their PhD. They never finished in less than 8 years.

Also, notice that I have never said I have a Master's degree. It is not a prerequisite to get a PhD degree. In order to advance to the status of PhD candidate, I had to write two proposals in the format of grant proposals--no written exam. Then I had to stand in front of a committee of five faculty members and defend both proposals. This is where I had to demonstrate that I had a thorough grasp of all background material. Remember those textbooks I linked earlier? Well, they are considered core knowledge for someone in my field. So anything contained in those books was fair game for my oral exam. I do not remember any of the questions I answered, but I do remember the question I couldn't answer. A professor asked about athymic mice, and the only thing I could blurt out was, "How are they alive?" It was a complete surprise to me that you can remove an organ from a mouse without killing it...

FYI, writing a thesis is the requirement to earn a research-based Master's. PhD students write a dissertation. Yes, I did all of the seminars, teaching assistance, attending scientific meetings, etc., that you mentioned. The one thing I did not do is defend my dissertation, which basically meant giving a one hour seminar on my research and then answering questions. I didn't want to do that and did not say anything to my PI (the person who oversaw my graduate studies), and he did not remember.

A fellow grad student once characterized graduate school as the place where you become the world's foremost expert on a topic that is so obscure no one else has ever heard of it. That's a good description.

RE: There are several studies that show that vaccine-induced immunity is preferable to disease-induced immunity in terms of its ability to prevent or mitigate Covid infection.

These papers on the other hand seem to refute what you said above:

The paper “Durability of Vaccine-Induced and Natural Immunity Against COVID-19: A Narrative Review” can be found at the following link:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36622633/

This paper is a review of the existing literature on the durability of vaccine-induced and natural immunity against COVID-19. The authors conclude that there is no clear consensus on the relative durability of the two types of immunity, and that more research is needed.

“Superiority of natural immunity against SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe disease compared with vaccine-induced immunity in the population”. This article was published in the Journal of Science Translational Medicine on March 16, 2023. The full article is available at this link:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1

The study uses data from over 10 million people in Qatar who were either vaccinated or had a previous COVID-19 infection. The researchers looked at the incidence of reinfection, hospitalization, and severe disease in each group. They found that people who had a previous COVID-19 infection were less likely to be reinfected than people who were vaccinated. They also found that people with a previous infection were less likely to be hospitalized or to develop severe disease if they did become reinfected.

The researchers conclude that natural immunity to COVID-19 is more robust than vaccine-induced immunity. They suggest that people with a previous infection may not need to be vaccinated.

It is important to note that this study was conducted in Qatar, which has a relatively young and healthy population. The results of this study may not be applicable to other populations, such as older adults or people with underlying health conditions.

Here’s my point:

People who have contracted the virus and recovered deserve recognition. The realization that natural immunity – which pertains now to perhaps half of the US population and billions around the world – is effective in providing protection should have a dramatic effect on vaccine mandates.

Individuals whose livelihoods and liberties are being deprecated and deleted need access to the scientific literature as it pertains to this virus. Many Scientists have not been silent; they just haven’t received the public attention they deserve.

These studies demonstrate what was and is already known: natural immunity for a SARS-type virus is robust, long-lasting, and broadly effective even in the case of mutations, generally more so than vaccines. In fact, a major contribution of 20th-century science has been to expand upon and further elucidate this principle that has been known since the ancient world. Every expert presumably knew this long before the current debates.

Here’s another link:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v4

The Abstract tells us that:

“The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant might cause high viral loads, is highly transmissible, and contains mutations that confer partial immune escape. Outbreak investigations suggest that vaccinated persons can spread Delta. We compared RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) data from 699 swab specimens collected in Wisconsin 29 June through 31 July 2021 and tested with a qualitative assay by a single contract laboratory. Specimens came from residents of 36 counties, most in southern and southeastern Wisconsin, and 81% of cases were not associated with an outbreak. During this time, estimated prevalence of Delta variants in Wisconsin increased from 69% to over 95%. Vaccination status was determined via self-reporting and state immunization records.”

And I think you have not commented on this link, so I’ll post it again:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v2

It states: “Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before.”

Then we have this study comparing those who have had the infection before compared to those who have been vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.19.21262111v1.full

TITLE: Large-scale study of antibody titer decay following BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine or SARS-CoV-2 infection,

It concludes thusly:

“This study demonstrates individuals who received the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine have different kinetics of antibody levels compared to patients who had been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with higher initial levels but a much faster exponential decrease in the first group.”

Then we have this:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3838993

TITLE: Discrete Immune Response Signature to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination Versus Infection,

It states:

“While both infection and vaccination induced robust innate and adaptive immune responses, our analysis revealed significant qualitative differences between the two types of immune challenges. In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients.”

This study tells us that Natural Immunity gives quite long lasting antigen-specific BMPCs in humans:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4

TITLE: SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans

It tells us that: “We detected SARS-CoV-2 S-specific BMPCs in bone marrow aspirates from 15 out of 19 convalescent individuals, and in none from the 11 control participants…. Overall, our results are consistent with SARS-CoV-2 infection eliciting a canonical T-cell-dependent B cell response, in which an early transient burst of extrafollicular plasmablasts generates a wave of serum antibodies that decline relatively quickly. This is followed by more stably maintained levels of serum antibodies that are supported by long-lived BMPCs.”

Here’s another:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.19.21255739v1

TITLE: Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells,

The conclusion states that: ““Ending the COVID-19 pandemic will require long-lived immunity to SARS-CoV-2. We evaluated 254 COVID-19 patients longitudinally from early infection and for eight months thereafter and found a predominant broad-based immune memory response. SARS-CoV-2 spike binding and neutralizing antibodies exhibited a bi-phasic decay with an extended half-life of >200 days suggesting the generation of longer-lived plasma cells. In addition, there was a sustained IgG+ memory B cell response, which bodes well for a rapid antibody response upon virus re-exposure.”

Here’s another question: What are the incidences of reinfection rates of those vaccinated compared to those who have been previously infected ?

There’s a study for that entitled:

Incidence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 infection among previously infected or vaccinated employees,

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.03.21259976v2

It concludes thusly:

“Previous SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 were associated with decreased risk for infection or re-infection with SARS-CoV-2 in a routinely screened workforce. The was no difference in the infection incidence between vaccinated individuals and individuals with previous infection. Further research is needed to determine whether our results are consistent with the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.”

If there is not much difference, WHY INSIST ON FORCING THE VAX ON RELUCTANT PEOPLE?

Here’s another study assessing the longevity of immunological memroy after acquiring natural immunity:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7919858/

TITLE: Immunological memory to SARS-CoV-2 assessed for up to 8 months after infection

The WHO did a scientific brief on natural immunity as well. See here:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-2019-nCoV-Sci-Brief-Natural-immunity-2021.1-eng.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

World Health Organization. May 10, 2021. It states:

“Available scientific data suggests that in most people immune responses remain robust and protective against reinfection for at least 6-8 months after infection (the longest follow up with strong scientific evidence is currently approximately 8 months). Some variant SARS-CoV-2 viruses with key changes in the spike protein have a reduced susceptibility to neutralization by antibodies in the blood. While neutralizing antibodies mainly target the spike protein, cellular immunity elicited by natural infection also target other viral proteins, which tend to be more conserved across variants than the spike protein.”

And these studies are not limited to the USA. Here’s a study in Austria:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33583018/

TITLE: SARS-CoV-2 re-infection risk in Austria,

It states: “We recorded 40 tentative re-infections in 14 840 COVID-19 survivors of the first wave (0.27%) and 253 581 infections in 8 885 640 individuals of the remaining general population (2.85%) translating into an odds ratio (95% confidence interval) of 0.09 (0.07 to 0.13). We observed a relatively low re-infection rate of SARS-CoV-2 in Austria. Protection against SARS-CoV-2 after natural infection is comparable with the highest available estimates on vaccine efficacies. Further well-designed research on this issue is urgently needed for improving evidence-based decisions on public health measures and vaccination strategies.”

Here’s one study from England:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00675-9/fulltext

TITLE: SARS-CoV-2 infection rates of antibody-positive compared with antibody-negative health-care workers in England: a large, multicentre, prospective cohort study (SIREN)

It made the following conclusions:

“A previous history of SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with an 84% lower risk of infection, with median protective effect observed 7 months following primary infection. This time period is the minimum probable effect because seroconversions were not included. This study shows that previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces effective immunity to future infections in most individuals.”

And here’s a study made in The Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, located between Norway and Iceland.

https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/8/8/ofab378/6322055

TITLE: SARS-CoV-2 Natural Antibody Response Persists for at Least 12 Months in a Nationwide Study From the Faroe Islands

It states that: ““Although the protective role of antibodies is currently unknown, our results show that SARS-CoV-2 antibodies persisted at least 12 months after symptom onset and maybe even longer, indicating that COVID-19-convalescent individuals may be protected from reinfection. Our results represent SARS-CoV-2 antibody immunity in nationwide cohorts in a setting with few undetected cases, and we believe that our results add to the understanding of natural immunity and the expected durability of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine immune responses.”

There was also a study made of airline passengers arriving in Qatar.

See here:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2781112

TITLE: Associations of Vaccination and of Prior Infection With Positive PCR Test Results for SARS-CoV-2 in Airline Passengers Arriving in Qatar,

What did they find?

“Of 9180 individuals with no record of vaccination but with a record of prior infection at least 90 days before the PCR test (group 3), 7694 could be matched to individuals with no record of vaccination or prior infection (group 2), among whom PCR positivity was 1.01% (95% CI, 0.80%-1.26%) and 3.81% (95% CI, 3.39%-4.26%), respectively. The relative risk for PCR positivity was 0.22 (95% CI, 0.17-0.28) for vaccinated individuals and 0.26 (95% CI, 0.21-0.34) for individuals with prior infection compared with no record of vaccination or prior infection.”

In other words, NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VACCINATED AND UNVACCINATED NATURALLY ACQUIRED IMMUNITY.

Here’s another study conducted by Rockefeller Unviersity:

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210801/Antibody-responses-following-SARS-CoV-2-infection-more-potent-than-vaccine-elicited-ones.aspx

previously contracted COVID-19 show a more potent antibody response than those who were solely vaccinated for the respiratory virus.

Conducted by a research team at Rockefeller University in New York, the analysis found “that between a first (prime) and second (booster) shot of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, the memory B cells of infection-naïve individuals produced antibodies that evolved increased neutralizing activity against SARS-CoV-2,” but also that “no additional increase in the potency or breadth of this activity was observed thereafter.”

Meanwhile, researchers determined that not only do recovered COVID-19 patients possess neutralizing antibodies up to a year after infection, but that such infection simultaneously assists in offering protection against developing variants.

“Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection produces B-cell responses that continue to evolve for at least one year,” the study read. “During that time, memory B cells express increasingly broad and potent antibodies that are resistant to mutations found in variants of concern.”

The analysis later goes on to conclude, “Memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination.”

Moreover, the results suggest that “boosting vaccinated individuals with currently available mRNA vaccines would produce a quantitative increase in plasma neutralizing activity but not the qualitative advantage against variants obtained by vaccinating convalescent individuals.”

The study’s findings add to further mounting evidence detailing the level of protection natural immunity offers previously infected COVID-19 patients.

BTW, if my memory serves me right, Rockefeller is not the only university that made such a conclusion. Emory University published an extensive investigation describing the efficiency of long-term immunity against the respiratory virus. Similar discoveries have also been identified in research released by the Cleveland Clinic and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, respectively.

I could provide more links to show that Naturally Acquired immunity is at least as good or better than Vaccine induced immunity but this post is getting long so I’ll pause for the meantime.

Based on these, our vaccine policies SHOULD HONOR THE CHOICE OF TENS OF MILLIONS ( HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS PERHAPS ) OF THOSE WHO HAVE HAD BEEN INFECTED AND RECOVERED FROM COVID *NOT* TO TAKE THE VACCINE IF THEY DO NOT WISH TO.

I am not sure why you have a problem with non-coercion.

______________________________________

RE: As for Operation Warp Speed, that was one of President Trump’s greatest accomplishments. Maybe you don’t remember, but one of his campaign issues was to streamline FDA approval of drugs, which takes at least ten years if everything works out perfectly, but usually takes longer.

Yes, but it was still WARPED SPEED as compared to the other traditional vaccines that have been approved in the past which took at least 5 years of testng prior to approval without having to be given EUA’s.

Yes, he wanted to streamline FDA approval, but I did not expect it to be this short. And unlike Joe Biden ( whose policies you support and approve of ), Trump does not support FORCED VACCINATION.

BTW, You are still silent on who you intend to vote for in 2024. As I said above, if FORCED VACCINATION FOR ALL is an important issue for you, and a priority issue at that, then you will have to vote for Joe Biden.

Why don’t you tell us?

The “reproducibility problem” has been getting publicity even before COVID.
Most papers are not reproduced, or even attempted to be.

What you need to be aware of is that there are many kinds of studies, and they vary significantly in terms of robustness and repeatability.

For example, a retrospective study, especially one based on surveys, is one of the weakest types of studies there is. No matter how many people answer the surveys, their answers are biased because 1) they are trying (subconsciously) to give the answers they think the surveyors want to see, and 2) memory is faulty. These studies are not very reproducible.

Clinical studies, many of which are observational studies, run the gamut between being very well designed and being garbage. So reproducibility varies. Even a well-designed study might not be reproducible, for reasons that have nothing to do with the design of the study.

Now we get to basic research, the type of research I was trained to do. Basic research is based on physical manipulations of physical objects to learn about their properties. This type of research is the most reproducible type of research there is. If I describe a PCR assay in my paper, anyone should be able to read that paper and repeat my PCR assay with the same result. If I describe how I mapped out the interactions of two proteins, anyone should be able to repeat my protein mapping studies and demonstrate the same interactions that I reported. And so on. It is the reproducible nature of basic science that allows science to progress. I can't conduct the logical follow-on to a previous experiment if I cannot reproduce the previous work.

Judy Mikovits (I'm sure you've heard the name) was outed as a fraud precisely because her work was not reproducible. She published a study claiming that a virus, XMRV, was present in the blood samples of chronic fatigue (CF) patients. Such a find would have been a game-changer in the understanding and treatment of chronic fatigue. This study generated a lot of interest, and other researchers immediately tried to replicate her findings. But no one could. The XMRV virus that Mikovits reported finding was probably a lab contamination. It is possible for a lab to become contaminated with a virus to the point where it is impossible to do any experiment in that lab without finding the virus. (In my experience in one lab, all of my samples seemed to contain a certain virus because virus RNA had contaminated the entire lab.)

Mikovits, instead of acknowledging the evidence that the apparent correlation of XMRV with CF was a result of lab contamination, doubled down on insisting that XMRV causes CF. As a result, she was outed as a fraud and drummed out of the research community.

Fake Science: XMRV, COVID-19, and the Toxic Legacy of Dr. Judy Mikovits.

By the way another example of your double standard: you claim Dr. Malone is unqualified to share opinions on the jabs because he is only a pathologist; but in another post you stated Senator Dr. Rand Paul should know better, because he is an MD and opthalmologist.

No. Bob is a pathologist, meaning that his theoretical understanding of RNA chemistry and function is not as deep as my understanding due to my background as a molecular biologist. But he is a researcher with a solid background in scientific methodology and theory, as well as a publication history within the medical literature. Therefore, when he makes claims about mRNA being a gene therapy or whatever, there is every reason to believe that he is intentionally lying about the subject.

On the other hand, Rand Paul is an MD who never learned scientific methodology. Most MDs are not qualified to do research. However, in order to get the MD degree, he did have to take at least a few classes on scientific subjects such as microbiology and biochemistry. This is why I say he should know better than to promote antivax pseudoscience. He isn't a researcher, but based on the fact that he did have to take some science classes and that MDs have to read medical literature in order to keep up with the continuing education requirement to maintain their license, he should be able to read the relevant Covid-related literature. Therefore, he should know better than to spout nonsense that is not supported by the literature. As a physician, he has an ethical obligation not to promote medical misinformation. His decision to do so is almost certainly based on a political calculus. (He illustrates why I hate politicians so much: they do what they think will give them political advantage without regard as to whether they are acting ethically or morally.)

(e.g the six-foot rule was recently *admitted* to have been made up)

And how do you know that it was allegedly made up? Was that a result of doing extensive review of the medical literature, or did you simply read that on one or more antivax blogs and automatically assumed it was true without any further evidence?

The subject of the fate of droplet nuclei has been an active area of research since at least 1925: The size and the duration of air-carriage of respiratory droplets and droplet-nuclei. This 1946 paper refers to a 1925 paper describing the duration of artificial droplet nuclei in the air. It also refers to a 1934 paper which found that the time it takes for droplets to fall 2 meters (a little larger than six feet) varies based on droplet size and the humidity content of the air. Large droplets fall quickly, small ones fall slowly.

Fast forward to the state of current research, in which droplet survival and physical structure have been studied under a wide range of conditions.

The physical nature and survival of droplets are not the only factors which determine the airborne transmissibility of viruses. Some droplets are so large that you have to be in the face of the person emitting them in order to breathe them yourself. Others are so small that they don't contain virus. Small droplets that are large enough to contain virus evaporate quickly, especially in a dry environment, such that even if they remain airborne for a prolonged period of time (6 seconds for a droplet of 100 micrometers, according to the 1946 paper), any virus within them is rendered inactive by the concentration of salt during the drying process. Etc.

The "six foot rule" was determined experimentally long before Covid ever appeared. It was even mentioned in the 2011 movie Contagion, in which one of the characters described pretty much the same pandemic control measures implemented during the Covid pandemic. The movie was fictional, but its producers took care to consult with real scientists to get those scientific details accurate.

No one has ever shown that the six foot rule is invalid. All of the research to date adds a lot of details but does not change the basic rule. Note: it is the "six foot rule" rather than "two meter rule" because we are Americans who steadfastly refuse to use the metric system. (Well, American scientists use metrics in their work, but outside, they use imperial measurements as much as anyone else does.)

It looks like Dr. Malone helped get jabs for jobs mandates declared unConstitutional in New York State.

I can find no evidence that Covid vaccine mandates were declared unconstitutional in New York. What I found was this article, New York health officials to end COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health workers. The body of the articles says "While the rule will no longer be enforced, individual health care facilities will be able to continue to implement their own internal policies for COVID-19 vaccination, the Department of Health said." The fact that health care facilities and other entities can continue to enforce mandates means that mandates are not, in fact, unconstitutional by NY law.

I did find a law firm blog, Healthcare Law Alert: New York State Supreme Court Judge Invalidates COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate. This blog indicates that the ruling by a single judge on the NY supreme court has been placed on hold pending review by the full court. The decision of the NY health officials to lift the statewide mandate was not because of the single judge's (held) ruling.

There is legal precedent stretching back for decades where the Supreme Court of the US has upheld public health mandates.

That must give you a sads.

No, I'm not sad. What I am is disappointed and frustrated over the widespread use of social media by professional antivaxxers to disseminate a load of sometimes very sophisticated misinformation and to target it specifically at conservatives. The influence of people who believe the misinformation on public health decisions by non-scientist politicians (including elected and appointed judges) is extremely unfortunate for public health efforts.

I don’t think you realize the degree of anger that’s being now that the vast scale of lies about COVID.

Oh, I do not doubt that people who love the conspiracy theories are angry. Provoking anger is the primary purpose of those creating the conspiracies. By equating the mandate of a vaccine to attend school or to work in certain sectors in which there is a lot of contact with the public to efforts to overturn the Constitution, to turn leadership of the US over to the UN, to institute a totalitarian dictatorship in the US, etc., of course people who can't discern the incendiary goal of conspiracy theories are angry.

There is a website, which I will not link, that exists for the sole purpose of mocking (primarily conservative) people who have fallen for antivax propaganda and who went on to die from Covid. This website links to their Facebook pages, which are chock-full of antivax memes and angry declarations about "The Government!!!!! My rights!!!!! Grunt!!!!!" Not all of the antivaxxers featured on the site died; some only came extremely close to death. (I'll point out that someone who has a serious case of Covid requiring prolonged ICU stay with induction of coma and tracheotomy who continues to refuse vaccination has a significant risk of dying during a second bout of Covid.) There was one young man (early 20s) featured on the site who wasn't necessarily a victim of antivax propaganda because he got Covid before vaccines were available, but he remained in the ICU for 9 or 10 months before finally succumbing to Covid. His family's FB page describing the effort to keep him alive is heartbreaking. Early on, they had to accept that the lung and cardiac damage caused by Covid would nip his athletic career in the bud (he had been picked up for college on an athletic scholarship). Later, they had to come to terms with the fact that he almost certainly wouldn't make it. Watching a child die is so hard for a parent, I feel for them.

It seems that that site has not been active since June.

...to Fauci talking about how one of the jab trials had 45 human subjects

That looks like a description of a phase 1 trial. The purpose of phase 1 is to assess whether there are safety issues or side effects associated with the drug that would raise concerns about moving it on to phase 2 and 3 trials. Phase 2 trials enroll from 100-300 participants and are intended to assess drug efficacy. Often, phase 2 trials include a "dose-finding" component which is the process of determining how large a dose must be to be effective without causing toxicity. Phase 3 trials are large scale trials including thousands of participants (typically 1000-3000, but the Covid vaccine phase 3 trials were much larger) in order to develop a safety and efficacy profile in support of eventual FDA approval. Phase 4 trials consist of post-market monitoring of the drug in the general population. Vioxx, as I explained before, was pulled as a result of phase 4 observations.

The fact that Fauci seemed to be discussing one single phase 1 trial does not in any way indicate that no other trials were conducted on Covid vaccines. (I should mention that he may have been describing a small-scale assessment of efficacy of an updated mRNA vaccine for which the large scale safety and efficacy studies of the vaccine technology were already done.) There are currently 1,265 covid vaccine studies in all phases registered on clinicaltrials.gov.

General information about clinical trials: NIH Clinical Research Trials and You - The Basics.

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