I sometimes edit stuff aimed at MDPI journals, and I always had the slight impression they’re a bit of a predatory publisher - they always seemed to have way too many new titles with minimal peer review. (It appears I’m not the only one to think this.) That article seemed quite well written and plausible though, but I haven’t read the whole thing.
I thought this part was interesting:
In addition to the major COVID-19 outbreaks, hospitalizations, and deaths in humans, there were initial reports of the disease in a number of animal hosts (cats, tigers, dogs, minks, deer, and lions) [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Currently, numerous species have been identified and reported to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, including raccoons, hamsters, ferrets, coatimundi, fishing cats, hippopotamuses, snow leopards, pangolins, gorillas, hyenas, otters, rabbits, puma, armadillo, red fox, coati, cattle, Eurasian beaver, binturong, lynx, leopard, manatee, black-tailed marmoset, giant anteater, squirrel monkey, and mandrill.
I hadn’t realized that COVID had been detected in so many wild animal species actually, though I did write before wondering which animal COVID-24 or COVID-25 would originate from. Let’s wait and see.
AFAIK they discovered the virus “in” other animals in much the same manner you discover bubblegum wrappers in drains - the animals weren’t actually infected.
As for “COVID-25”, there’s this:
According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the H5N1 “bird flu” virus – a lethal pathogen which has killed hundreds of millions of birds around the world – has turned up in mammals, including foxes and otters in Britain.
And … oh, look who it is:
Jeremy Farrar is director of the Wellcome Trust and was recently named as the next chief scientist at the WHO. He feels that the greatest risk of the next pandemic comes from intermediate animal species – creatures that could bridge the gap between birds and humans.
Ahh, the trustworthy, “scientifically-minded” Wellcome Trust:
“It has been reported that the Wellcome Trust has billions of investments on companies which contribute to the problems the philanthropy wants to solve.[35] Also in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been revealed that the trust has investments with pharmaceutical companies, which means it should gain financially from the pandemic.[36]”
Statistical analysis from Nate Silver to crunch numbers in the US. Before vaccines were available for the elderly and other vulnerable peoples in that nation, there was no discernable difference among red and blue states in terms of death rate. Sharp differences started to appear after that point. Takeaway: drinking Republican koolaid on this particular issue may be bad for your health.
“Choices” are based on a variety of factors, including the information ecosystems we inhabit and how such information is presented and decoded and understood.
Tabacco companies presented their products as perfectly OK. With actual truthful data (which they knew about but suppressed), we now know that these products cause harm.
Ditto with the fossil fuel industry, which knew about the impact of the products it was selling and suppressed or recoded that data to sow doubt.
Given what we know statistically about death rates and vaccination, you can draw your own conclusions. One conclusion I draw is utter amazement that a Republican political strategy was to accelerate the deaths of their supporters. At best we could describe this as . . . unusual.
“What we know” is that people who have had several vaxes die at a much, much higher rate than people who have had none. It’s not just a few percent - it’s off the charts. This was shown most recently in a UK ONS release. Now, to be fair, there are probably some large confounders there: people who have had lots of vaxes were most likely unhealthy people in the first place, both in body and mind. They may well have been much older. Conversely, people who weathered the blizzard of lies, coercion and propaganda probably did so because they knew their baseline risk was essentially zero. But “what we know” is that vaccination against COVID isn’t going to affect your all-cause mortality risk by any measurable amount, for the simple reason that the vast majority of people die - if their time is up - of not-COVID.
Somehow, Mr Silver needs to reconcile that fact with his observation about Biden-states and Trump-states, which he claims is a proxy measurement for vaccination rates. The observed difference almost certainly doesn’t have anything to do with vaxes per se, and again the reason is obvious: almost all elderly Americans, regardless of their State of residence, were vaxed. 85%+, IIRC, with little state-to-state variance. Feel free to look it up.
Differences in healthcare provisioning after the vax rollout might be one possible factor. The existence of vaxes sent some people looneytunes - including people in the medical profession - and it may be the case that people who were “known antivaxers” or “Trump supporters” were subtly or unsubtly railroaded across the rainbow bridge. There was a bone-chilling radio advertisement put out in Australia, where the narrator (supposedly a nurse) explained that if you came into her hospital unvaxed, they would simply let you die.
No, I think we’re talking about two different things.
COVID death rate. As usual, you’re making the assumption that all humans are immortal until struck down by viral kryptonite.
The premise of the analysis is reasonable - picking some “before” and “after” conditions and comparing them - and if there’s a difference between R and D COVID deaths, then that merits some explanation; but vaccination rates simply do not offer that explanation, and as I recall I went through the calculations with you some months ago (which you either didn’t understand or just ignored, I forget).
If Mr Silver he’d bothered to do the same exercise with all-cause mortality figures, I doubt he would have seen anything to write home about.
If you can show that that happened, go for it. In any case, hands-in-the-till Biden doesn’t seem to be super popular these days, so even if the Republicans somehow managed to cull their supporters, there are still enough people who are sick of the Biden administration for it to not matter (at least, not in terms of the next election).
However, there were challenges. But by refining the technology, the researchers were able to produce large amounts of the intended protein without causing dangerous levels of inflammation that had been seen in animal experiments.
It’s good that they managed to refine the technology to avoid the dangerous levels of inflammation that had been seen in animal experiments.
I don’t remember reading before of dangerous levels of inflammation being observed in animal experiments, but I assumed it was talking about the lipid nanoparticle formulation. Looks like a mixture of things though, including what you wrote:
Toxicity of Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs)
LNPs are composed of cholesterol, a helper lipid, a polyethylene glycol (PEG) lipid and an ionizable amine-containing lipid [148]. Some cationic/ionizable lipids contained in the LNPs of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines pose toxicity problems [149]. Overall, LNPs exhibit a powerful pro-inflammatory action [150,151]. Small amounts of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) can occasionally be packaged within mRNA vaccines [152]. LNPs evoke a strong pro-inflammatory response by activating the TLR pathways [151,152,153,154,155], and the inflammatory milieu induced by the LNPs could be partially responsible for the reported side effects of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in humans [156]. Furthermore, the Spike protein present on plasma membranes could expose these cells to attack by anti-Spike antibodies, generating an antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) [157].
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to a pair of scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman made the crucial breakthroughs that made mRNA vaccines happen.
The Nobel Prize committee said: “The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”
