Coronavirus

Yup, this is the first time in medical history that medical "experts" recommended a treatment of doing absolutely NOTHING for an illness. Told "em to isolate themselves until it gets so bad that they're having difficulty breathing. I'm sure there's at least several posters here who could explain how doing nothing is better than doing something. They'll also explain how taking an experimental injection that doesn't work is a sound proactive approach to herd immunity. And they'll be along shortly to explain it all to you, unless they don't like being reminded of the insanity they support; then they'll round up a posse of down-thumbers and make it all go away.

As it turns out, you've pissed them off by reminding them of the insanity they accept, so they did the only thing they could do. Welcome to Thumbville!

You'll also find that when confronted with the insanity of this:

“Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms. The performance of this test has not been established for monitoring treatment of 2019-nCoV infection. This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.” — The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention

. . . they'll still keep testing 'til the cows come home. And the real mystery is that they can all read!!

Yeah and not as bad this time around. Last night I had a fever of 101 and this morning it's normal, now I feel like I'm coming down with a cold, cough is back but nothing like it was in December.

In another sign of the changing state of the pandemic, an invaluable source of information about the virus over the last three years is shutting down, NPR has learned.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center plans to cease operations March 10, officials told NPR.

"It's bittersweet," says Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor who launched the project with one of her students on March 3, 2020. "But it's an appropriate time to move on."

When the pandemic erupted, no one knew much of anything about the virus and how to respond. Was it safe to go grocery shopping? How easily could someone get infected on a bus or train? Could runners get sick just by passing another jogger in the park?

"As everyone can remember, there was very little information, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic," says Beth Blauer, an associate vice provost at Johns Hopkins who has helped run the center.

"And when we started to see the cases move out of China and in through Europe and headed toward our shores, we knew that there were going to be a series of public policy decisions that would have to be made," Blauer says.

Those decisions included where to impose dramatic but crucial public health measures. Should mayors close schools? Should governors mandate masks? Should CEOs shut down factories? Should heads of state seal borders?

But there was no good data available to make those decisions. Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the World Health Organization were providing enough useful numbers in real time. So journalists and academic researchers at places like Johns Hopkins jumped in to fill the void.

"I know CDC has the ability to do this and has done it numerous occasions in the past," says Dr. Ali Khan, a former CDC official who is now dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "So it was unusual that at the beginning of this COVID pandemic that they did not collect this data and put it out in a timely many. Extremely unusual and very surprising." Johns Hopkins "essentially filled the vacuum," Khan says, "That was invaluable to understand what was going on."

After Johns Hopkins launched the project, the website quickly became crucial for deciding everything from where drug companies should test vaccines to where Hollywood should film movies. Even the White House and the British prime minister were relying on Hopkins data.

You need to boost up your immune system! Three times within a relative short time is not good. Are you wearing your mask?

Just before 7 am on March 3, Danny Lemoi posted an update in his hugely popular pro-ivermectin Telegram group, Dirt Road Discussions: “HAPPY FRIDAY ALL YOU POISONOUS HORSE PASTE EATING SURVIVORS !!!”

Hours later, Lemoi was dead.

For the last decade, Lemoi had taken a daily dose of veterinary ivermectin, a dewormer designed to be used on large animals like horses and cows. In 2021, as ivermectin became a popular alternative COVID-19 treatment among anti-vaxxers, he launched what became one of the largest Telegram channels dedicated to promoting the use of it, including instructions on how to administer ivermectin to children.

But despite Lemoi’s death, the administrators of his channel are pushing his misinformation—even as his followers share their own worrying possible side effects from taking ivermectin and some question the safety of the drug.

Lemoi, a heavy equipment operator who lived in Foster, Rhode Island, “passed away unexpectedly” on March 3, according to an online obituary post by his family last week. He was survived by his parents and brother. The obituary gave no details about the cause of his death.

In the Telegram channel, administrators broke the news of his death to his followers. “Though it was obvious that Danny had the biggest heart, it was unbeknownst to him that his heart was quite literally overworking and overgrowing beyond its capacity, nearly doubled in size from what it should have been,” the admins wrote, adding: “We understand that this is going to raise questions for those who were following him.”

The admins added that Lemoi had undergone testing on his heart last year, but the results had shown no cause for concern.

Lemoi began taking the version of ivermectin designed for animals on a daily basis in 2012, after he was diagnosed with Lyme disease, according to a detailed account of his medical history he gave on a podcast last November. He said then that five months after first taking the drug, he quit all other treatments and believed ivermectin had “regenerated” his heart muscle.

During the pandemic, Ivermectin became hugely popular among anti-vaxxers, many of whom were taking and recommending the veterinary formulation of the drug, rather than the one designed for human use. While ivermectin for humans is used to treat serious illnesses like river blindness, it has repeatedly been shown to be an ineffective treatment for COVID-19.

And according to the Missouri Poison Center, ingesting large doses of ivermectin formulated for animals has a long list of side effects, including seizures, coma, lung issues, and heart problems. Veterinary ivermectin is not a cure or effective treatment for COVID, the FDA has repeatedly warned, and is highly concentrated because it is designed for large animals like horses and cows. “Such high doses can be highly toxic in humans,” the FDA cautions.

“Danny was fully convinced that his heart had regenerated after his incident with Lyme disease that almost ended in congestive heart failure,” the admins wrote, before claiming that “a family history of heart disease and chronic stress” were why his heart had ultimately become engorged. “All of his other organs were unremarkable,” the admins wrote. “And this was determined to be a death by unfortunate natural causes.”

The admins of Lemoi’s channel did not respond to VICE News’ questions about where they got their information about his death. Lemoi’s surviving family did not respond to VICE News' request for comment on the cause of his death.

But a review of Lemoi’s Telegram channels shows that many of his followers who are taking his dosage recommendations, or “protocols,” for veterinary ivermectin are experiencing numerous known side effects of taking the drug.

“I’m 4 months now and all hell’s breaking loose, all pain has hit my waist down with sciatic, shin splints, restless leg syndrome, tight sore calves & it feels like some pain in the bones,” a member wrote on Friday.

Many of his followers who are taking his dosage recommendations, or “protocols,” for veterinary ivermectin are experiencing numerous known side effects of taking the drug.

Lemoi explained away the negative side effects of taking veterinary ivermectin by describing them as “herxing,” a real term to describe an adverse response that occurs in people who take antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease.

“My wife has been taking ivermectin for 3 months,” a member wrote Friday. “She is being treated for autoimmune hepatitis, thyroid, and vertebrae issues. She has had some serious HERXING. Today she has a migraine, vomiting and severe stomach pain. Does anyone have any ideas how to help, and are these HERXING symptoms?”

Some members of the group are taking ivermectin not only as a treatment against COVID, but as a cure-all for almost every disease—from cancer and depression, to autism and ovarian cysts—believing that every disease is caused by a parasite that is removed from the body by ivermectin, just as animals are given the drug to treat parasitic worms like tapeworm.

Lemoi also formulated an ivermectin regimen for children, and numerous members of the group reported that they were using it. This week alone one member wrote that she had established another group for “parents of children on the spectrum, cerebral palsy, pans/panda, downs etc.,” who are using the Lemoi’s recommended children’s dosage.

When some members of the group blamed Lemoi’s death on ivermectin, they were criticized in the Telegram channel; their fellow group members claimed they were spreading misinformation.

​​“No one can convince me that he died because of ivermectin,” one member wrote this week. “He ultimately died because of our failed western medicine which only cares about profits and not the cure.”

Despite Lemoi’s death, administrators said this week the Telegram channel would live on, and the group is attracting new members who continue to take ivermectin despite suffering serious side effects.

“I am very new to this... I’ve been on Bimectin paste for 20 days,” one new member wrote on Friday morning, explaining that he too was suffering from Lyme disease. “I have severe chest pain. Costochondritis symptoms. Air hunger, internal tremors, brain fog, headaches on the back of my head, anxiety, depression, doom and gloominess.”

Science does not care what you believe.

The Australian Federal Government officially opened a compensation scheme for those experiencing injuries caused by Covid-19 vaccines on 13th of December, 2022 and the scheme will expire in April 2024.

Long before the first needle pierced the skin to deliver Pfizer/BioNTech’s highly anticipated COVID-19 vaccine, social media was rife with speculation and fearmongering. Alongside pertinent questions about safety, efficacy, and the historic rapidity of the vaccine’s production were conspiracy theories: that the vaccine was unsafe, unhealthy, itself the product of a conspiracy. Some claimed that the vaccine would alter your DNA or give you the disease itself. Others stated that the vaccine contained a microchip, perhaps placed there by Bill Gates, that linked to cell towers via 5G technology to allow for population surveillance. These narratives are persistent and are intruding on the real world: In Wisconsin, a pharmacist purposely sabotaged 57 vials over the holidays because he thought the vaccine would change people’s DNA.

Despite their elaborate nature and novelty, I find these narratives thoroughly familiar.

I’ve spent my career as a folklorist studying disease narratives: the rumors, legends, gossip, and jokes that circulate informally during epidemics and pandemics. These narratives are recycled from one epidemic to the next, and they maintain certain features over time, even as specific details vary to fit a new disease or context, and channel contemporary preoccupations.

As detailed by the folklorist Andrea Kitta, the anti-vaccination movement has century-old concerns about safety, efficacy, and government control, as well as religious and philosophical objections and beliefs that vaccines are “unnatural.” Two common themes are that vaccines actually hurt the recipient—resulting in worse outcomes than letting the disease progress unimpeded—and that the ingredients are somehow suspect. Narratives about vaccines causing autism, for instance, feature MMR shots overwhelming the nervous system, and warnings about toxic thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative. Today’s COVID-19 narratives include parallel worries about damaged or altered DNA, and whisperings about microchips.

The details of the COVID-19 narratives, even as they reach into the past, also reflect larger societal concerns. A public hesitance to purchase genetically modified foods, combined with concerns about the nature of gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR, might have influenced the “altered DNA” narrative, especially given the newness of the vaccine’s mRNA technology. Growing anger over revelations of governments and corporations spying on private citizens—as in the very public outcries following Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing and the Cambridge Analytica scandal—connects with the “microchip” narrative.

Another expected aspect of the COVID-19 theories is how sprawling they are, how many individuals and institutions are suspected of involvement. A recent study of conspiracy-theory narratives, led by the UC Berkeley folklorist Timothy R. Tangherlini, compared a conspiracy theory—2016’s Pizzagate—with an actual conspiracy—2013’s Bridgegate—by plotting out key “nodes” in the narratives to generate the “narrative frameworks” that separate real from fictional conspiracy. The research demonstrated that actual conspiracies are comparatively slow to develop and focus on a single domain (in the case of Bridgegate, that domain being New Jersey politics), while conspiracy theories develop quickly around a widely disparate set of domains (Pizzagate involving, among the more prevalent points, the Clinton, Obama, and Podesta families, as well as WikiLeaks, the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, human trafficking, underground tunnels, pedophilia, and satanism).

As the study concluded, this multi-domain focus may be the primary feature of a conspiracy theory. For although both actual and fictional conspiracies involve the uncovering of “hidden” or “secret” information, the difference lies in how widely the net needs to be cast in order to “prove” the conspiracy. The conspiracy theory frequently makes large leaps to connect previously unlinked domains, while the uncovering of an actual conspiracy involves exposing previously unknown links within a domain.

The multi-domain quality of the conspiracy theory also helps to explain its cyclical and adaptable nature: Once a narrative has established a pattern of creating such large leaps, the creation of further or newer leaps to even more disparate domains is considerably eased.

A deeper question is why these disease narratives circulate at all. One argument, advanced in the book Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories, is that “conspiracy theories are often shared among people who lack—or feel that they lack—social power.” In an age of wealth inequality and partisan politics, the majority of Americans potentially fall into this category.

Another, more general, answer is that the amount of time between the start of an epidemic and the point at which science can provide clear explanations creates an information vacuum for a concerned public that demands immediate response. These vacuums are easily filled both by the individual turning to familiar narratives from previous epidemics, and by anti-vaccination and conspiracy-theory groups actively working to promote their own narratives.

If spreading rumors is easy, combatting them is hard. As folklorists such as Bill Ellis have proposed, “some legends may not die so much as they dive,” remaining latent for long periods of time until a new situation arises that fits the scope and nature of the narrative. It is equally the case, as the sociologist John Gagnon has argued, that the difference between a scientific theory and a conspiracy theory is that a scientific theory has holes in it.

Just as problematic, whether you want to call the current era “postmodern” or “post-truth”: Public trust in both government and fellow citizens is at or near historic lows. In the face of such opposition, public figures may not be capable of turning the tide. A recent Pew Research Center poll of U.S. adults found that 39 percent “definitely or probably would not get a coronavirus vaccine,” and that 21 percent “do not intend to get vaccinated and are ‘pretty certain’ more information will not change their mind.” How many of these respondents were reacting to any given narrative—whether false claim, conspiracy theory, or otherwise—is unclear, but the narratives are certainly massaging these responses.

That doesn’t mean community leaders shouldn’t try to debunk conspiracy theories and chip away at resistance. Pastors, prominent business owners, local sports figures, and so on should work in conjunction with local doctors to provide solid information. Such efforts should be frequent and, for best results, done in person, as when Anthony Fauci personally Zoomed into a Boston-area church to talk directly to parishioners.

Conspiracy theories will always be among us, but the pandemic doesn’t have to be.

We know now from multiple sources of official data from different countries that COVID-19-related deaths aren’t much of an issue at present, such as the lack of virulence of the circulating Omicron strains (something that might change given the selection pressure that is likely to ensue as more people opt for “genetic vaccination” this autumn).

Bear in mind, even these “COVID-19 deaths” (as tracked globally through Our World in Data, see Fig. 1) have often substantially overestimated deaths because COVID-19 was in the majority of occasions not found to be the primary cause of death.

Rather, it was only associated with deaths, having been determined by way of a flawed PCR test within, say, one month of death.

Yes, someone killed in a motorcycle accident who died 27 days after having received a false positive COVID-19 antigen test would be down in the official record as a “COVID-19 death.”

More than this, when you explore the data from this Office for Health Improvement and Disparities source, you find that some of the biggest excesses compared with expected deaths have occurred in the two youngest age groups, ages 0 to 24 years and 25 to 49.

Not only that, there are few differences in death according to the level of deprivation, which might have been caused by inadequate or poor quality diets or lifestyle effects.

Ethnicities also had an influence with white and mixed ethnicities being most impacted, while black and Asian ethnicities, were least affected.

This pattern, whether or not it is coincidental, follows the pattern of COVID-19 “vaccine” uptake — Johnson’s government pushing hard but ineffectually to get black and Asian ethnicities to be less “hesitant.”

An Ivermectin Influencer Died. He died of a common side effect of the medication.