I am not sure, but I believe at this point they think it is environmental as a best guess? Everything else has been looked into if I remember correctly.
We're talking about 886 excess deaths in a province that reported 114 COVID deaths. Are unreported COVID deaths at home really that common and likely to be missed on the death certificate? In my understanding of the lethal progression of the disease, there's usually a telltale pulmonary phase which is very likely to lead the infected person to seek care.
Yup. Or at least there was significant fear about it being a new prion-related neurological disease. Since then, the government has "investigated" and been pretty vocal in denying any environmental causation or even any connection amongst patients whatsoever. In fact, there is apparently no "shared common illness" at all:
> An oversight committee reviewing the case files of all 48 of the potential cases found that the patients didn’t have symptoms in common or have a shared common illness.
> A separate in-depth epidemiological investigation last fall concluded the patients didn’t have any common behaviours, foods or environmental exposures.
> Following these reports, all the patients were excluded from the cluster and the Minister of Health has accepted the conclusion that no such neurological syndrome of unknown cause exists in New Brunswick.
Our government has a long history of arrogance and paternalism (probably nothing too unique there), and incredibly deep ties to the most powerful corporation in NB (again nothing new there), Irving, which has a uhh, let's just say, tenuous relationship with the environment and pollution. So it's hard to say whether or not one should believe the government's conclusion. But there it is.
Let’s be honest… Irving fucking owns the province. It’s enormous control has been held onto since the era of Golden Age wealth in America and they have a hilarious history of not giving a fuck about anything that costs them money they don’t have to spend. Safety, Health, Pollution, you name it Irving has probably cut all legal corners and is lobbying to make new ones they can cut.
The next 5 years could be very interesting and sad if it turns out that COVID has lasting, long term damaging effects on your organs and vascular system, we are just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg.
For example, there is an extremely serious post covid multi-system organ inflammation that occurs in children : https://www.cdc.gov/mis/mis-c.html
Watch, I bet we will even see a huge jump in rare cancers.
Put the fear aside, speculation is important as a tool for looking ahead at what possibilities there could be. It's not like the OP was trying to pass the speculation as fact. Personally, I would rather think about the "ifs" and plan ahead than to find myself in the "now" with consequences I could've possibly avoided.
Dartboard guesses are not useful for anything, and when those guesses all veer toward a certain emotion (fear, etc.), then it's not an attempt at useful predictions.
I’d rather bring under control people who are trying to prevent my children from having normal life. We all had Covid already (likely even twice). We are done with the theater. We don’t want to listen to scaremongering. We want to smile in public. We want to breathe freely. We don’t want or need any more boosters. If you like the restrictions, wear a mask, or just stay home permanently, I don’t care. Just don’t force me and my children into literally faceless, anti-social dystopia.
There is a big policy space between "We are done with the theatre" and "literally faceless, anti-social dystopia".
Unfortunately many of the policies in that space will negatively effect powerful vested interests (see climate change, see health reform, see food standards, see police training, see banking, see...). Such vested interests have expended vast amounts of effort to convince the 'ordinary person' that nothing can be done - or equivalently, that the only things that would work would end our way of life as we know it. I'm sorry you seem to have been caught up in that.
From where I'm sitting, the large vested interests you're pointing to benefitted enormously from the COVID response, especially the lockdowns which destroyed around a third of small businesses and concentrated that market share upward.
What does "under control" even mean? The virus is here to stay no matter what we do. Everyone will be exposed. Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments are fairly effective at preventing deaths. I'm not even slightly afraid.
We do not need to concern ourselves with how people’s access to information should be restricted.
In fact, there have
been published several robust scientific arguments for the possibility that COVID-19 infection can increase the risk of cancer.
Here’s one paper, Cancer as a prospective sequela of long COVID‐19, Geetanjali Saini and Ritu Aneja, both of the Department of Biology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia. Published April 29, 2021 in the journal Bioessays of the Wiley Online Library. – https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fbies.202000331
“Herein, we propose that long COVID‐19 may predispose recovered patients to cancer development and accelerate cancer progression. This hypothesis is based on growing evidence of the ability of SARS‐CoV‐2 to modulate oncogenic pathways, promote chronic low‐grade inflammation, and cause tissue damage.”
And:
”COVID-19 has been associated with T-cell depletion and activation of oncogenic pathways, including JAK-STAT, MAPK, and NF-κB, potentially increasing the risk of cancer development.[20] Hypoxia due to inflammation or virus-induced angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 depletion can induce oxidative stress and malignant transformation.[21-26] Over time, both chronic inflammation and oxidative stress can lead to DNA damage and subsequent carcinogenesis.[27-31] Moreover, COVID-19 is known to cause multiorgan damage,[32] and extensive tissue damage is an oncogenic driver.”
Etc. etc.; I suggest reading the paper, and others like it.
I don't think this is deserving of being grayed out. There certainly do seem to be some lingering systemic effects for some people that have recovered from covid, and for some people those effects are very serious. Cancers, though, seem like a stretch. I don't see any reason to think covid would cause that. It's lingering tiredness that really seems to be common among those who have been infected
Why is cancer a stretch? Other viral infections are well known to increase cancer risk. It seems like basically anything that causes tissue damage increases the risk of cancer, which is basically a result of the breakdown of information.
It seems pretty likely that a vasculatory inflammatory virus that also infects the immune system will have lasting, long-term damaging effects on your organs and cardiovascular system.
> The next 5 years could be very interesting and sad if it turns out that COVID has lasting, long term damaging effects on your organs and vascular system, we are just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg.
The same can be said about the potentially damaging long term effects of the experimental immuntherapies being touted as vaccines. Unfortunately it is taboo in polite society to raise this obvious concern about these risks but, until the passage of time, the long-term effects are just as unknown and just as unknowable as those resulting from COVID. As someone who has received this experimental immunotherapy (as well as having Covid), I am equally concerned with both.
As a counterpoint I got omicron in Jan and it was extremely mild. One day of fever and fatigue and I was back to normal. No lingering effects at all. I honestly think the hysteria over long covid is rather harmful in of itself, because now you have a lot of people with a sort of placebo effect. For instance, feeling tired and ascribing that to a permanent affliction of long covid rather than the 3 hours of sleep you got last night.
Long Covid has a proven association with microclotting and other vascular issues. Covid is essentially a vascular illness and there's some evidence it attacks the entire immune system.
So this is anything but "hysteria." I know a shocking number of previously healthy people who have suddenly had strokes, heart arrhythmias, and - in a few cases - are now dead. Less dramatic symptoms include extreme incapacitating fatigue, persistent brain fog, joint pain, breathlessness, and measurably low blood oxygen.
Your personal experience is exactly that - personal - and not in any way relevant to people who are now living with real, observable clinical abnormalities.
I got the original COVID and it felt very mild.
Except I nearly passed out when I helped another patient in the hospital (the poor guy was obese, was on oxigen and they placed him near a window with no blinds and no AC, I had to improvise a blind from some bed sheets) from very mild excertion.
And about a month afterwards I had a couple of episodes of vertigo.
And then the tinitus started and I still get it two years in.
And then half of my penis and testicle hurt when orgasming (thankfully that resolved).
As a counterpoint, I got Covid Original Flavour(tm) and it gave me a fever of 103 for a little more than 2 weeks and took me way more than a year to fully recover. And, I know several folks who are younger than me that are now dead--and every version of Covid is represented in that cohort (mostly anti-vaxxers after Delta--take that as you will).
I'm glad your round of Russian roulette resulted in a blank.
However, personally, when it comes to Russian roulette, I prefer to not play at all.
And for all these people saying that the mRNA vaccines could be anything to do with it is absolute nonsense. Yes, Pfizer had some questionable data released during their trial, but show me a vaccine that hasn't had side effects?
> Watch, I bet we will even see a huge jump in rare cancers.
Only if those cancers are triggered specifically by Covid.
For most other cancers, we are likely going to see a time-shifted decrease in them.
The Covid lockdowns absolutely wiped out a flu season. Other viruses probably had similar profiles. We know that asthma went down more than expected from environmental triggers during Covid lockdowns. Continuing hygiene is likely to push down some viral transmission--for example, sick service employees who can't take a day off have their transmission significantly curtailed by corporate policies still mandating a mask.
Medicine is about to have a whole lot of information about things that are triggered by pathogens. The end conclusion is likely to be that we are FAR to cavalier about viral diseases.
Well, if we're just trading anecdata: I know exactly zero people who collapsed and died within a few months of receiving a booster or second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Where does that leave us?
I know hundreds of people who have triple doses various combinations of Pfizer/Moderna/AZ vaccines. None of them have collapsed and died. Where does my anecdotal information fit into your theory?
I know a guy who was in his early 30s and died of a heart attack. He was vaccinated, I think boosted, had covid a couple months before his death, occasionally did cocaine, ate a horrible diet, had an extremely stressful home life. I don't think it was the vaccine that did him in.
In my experience, creeping unexplainable crashes are usually caused by recent releases which didn't receive enough testing. Sometimes these bugs go unnoticed by teams without sufficient monitoring.
Have there been any major updates or releases 'across unconnected demographics' in the last year or two? If I was trying to solve this in my production systems, I would focus my investigation there
I like how you phrased this, I feel like this is how people had to talk in times of heavy censorship and the fact we have to pass messages like this in this day and age is terrifying and makes the future seem bleak.
You do realize that socially imposed norms about what topics you talk about, in what context, between whom and how has probably been the norm for longer than written history?
The problem is that usually those norms were dictated by some monarch because he had power and took the responsibility for that power and its consequences.
Now nobody is taking the responsibility, but we still have the norms.
MRNA therapies as vaccines have been used in humans for 2 years. For terminally ill people they were used for purposes other than vaccination for ~5 years. Prior to that they caused a very high occurrence of (often deadly) problems in non-human mammals for their ~30 years of study. This is why they were only used on the terminally ill prior to COVID.
"Vaccines" which have been around for a long time and MRNA therapy for vaccination are two very different things. It's like saying "Fear of Sugar of Lead isn't rational because sugars have been around for all of human history."
Medical drugs have been in use for hundreds of years. Fearing experimental drugs isn't rational.
Or
Doctors have been doing surgery for hundreds of years. Fear of surgery isn't rational.
There are at least three entirely rational reasons to "fear" vaccines:
1. They're a category, not a specific product. Safety of one doesn't automatically imply safety of all. See examples above.
2. The history of vaccines is full of failures which ended up injuring or killing healthy people e.g. polio, in more recent times, Pandemrix.
3. Vaccines appear to trigger deeply problematic psychology in which people point blank refuse to believe in any downsides at all, something you don't see in e.g. chemotherapy, surgery, drug treatments and so on. Probably it's the combination of giving them to healthy people and the collective/coercive policies that often accompany them. If anything goes wrong at all, ever, then you've hurt an innocent person who was previously fine and who trusted you, which would be tough for even the coldest most calculating person to handle. And people in public health appear to be the exact opposite of that.
Therefore the sort of people who believe most strongly on vaccines are often poorly informed about them. You gave us a great example of this problem above when you revealed you thought VAERS had only 28,000 reports in it total. This is basic data and you weren't aware of it, so how rational can you really be on the topic? Certainly, vaccines are surrounded by immense propaganda as a topic.
By the way in case you're wondering, before the COVID mandates I never thought about vaccines, had taken my set of shots and held "anti vaxxers" in contempt like a typical HN user. Not anymore. Watching the process of development, testing, rollout subsequent cover-ups of the real data, and blanket censorship has changed me forever. You can't unsee what happened.
Sure, let's blame vaccines in a funny roundabout way, while conveniently ignoring the more probable cause that is COVID. The article seems to suggest that underreported COVID deaths are a likely explanation.
You might want to consider broadening the scope of your investigation to include probable causes ...
Why is it fair to entertain speculation about underreported deaths and all kinds of long-tail effects of COVID the disease, but not fair to do the same speculation about the vaccines?
I'd put it differently. We know that the vaccine absolutely saved millions of lives. Covid directly killed millions of people plus the millions more who have life-long complications from it.
The vaccine is like any substance that goes into our bodies, it might have complex interactions with the functioning of the body, just as is true for the foods we eat, the things we encounter in our environment, even aspirin was recently reconsidered as a general thing to take daily. The vaccine has been extensively tested and now we have real world testing with billions of doses given that it is extremely safe.
It's hard for people to talk about any potential concerns because of the huge number of people fixated on the fact that it could have other effects (like every single medicine in the world) who constantly make bad faith arguments (you have some sickness and got the vaccine and thus they claim the "obvious" connection). People had difficult to diagnose things like chronic fatigue syndrome before there was ever a covid vaccine and we don't understand those either.
Because we know that Covid kills people (more than a million in the US), and there is very little evidence that Covid vaccines have killed people ( likely fewer than 100 deaths in the US).
>Because we know that Covid kills people (more than a million in the US), and there is very little evidence that Covid vaccines have killed people
The US VAERS vaccine adverse reporting system reports over ten thousand deaths post covid-vaccine, over two orders of magnitude more than reported for previous vaccines (including the flu vaccines which half of Americans take annually). Now, this does not imply causation, only autopsies can determine that, but for some reason in the US autopsies have not been done. In Germany, renowned pathologist Dr. Peter Schirmacher (acting chairman of the German Society of Pathology, director of the Institute of Pathology at Heidelberg University Hospital, and president of the German Association for the Study of the Liver) did conduct such autopsies, and found that 30-40% of the deaths following soon after vaccination were indeed caused by the vaccine.
Not only does it not imply causation it doesn't even imply correlation. If you got the vaccine and were subsequently hit by a truck you could end up in VAERS.
> found that 30-40% of the deaths following soon after vaccination were indeed caused by the vaccine
Sadly there is lots of evidence that vaccines can kill people. Obviously, there's the primary reports from people saying "the vaccine killed someone I know" and the medical experts denying everything, e.g this 29 year old man:
"On 06-Feb-2022, the patient received the 3rd vaccination with this vaccine. Pyrexia of 39 degrees Celsius developed. The patient took loxoprofen sodium hydrate, and the symptoms subsided. On 08-Feb-2022, around 20:00, the patient was confirmed as alive. Myocarditis developed. On 09-Feb-2022, at 07:00, the patient was found dead in the room. On an unknown date, autopsy was performed. No dissection was performed. The outcome of pyrexia was reported as resolved. The outcome of myocarditis was reported as fatal. Follow-up investigation will be made.
Company Comment: The events developed after the administration of ELASOMERAN and there is temporal relationship. Reporter's Comments: Since no electrocardiogram was performed during the medical examination, the condition of the heart is unknown. There is no lesion in the brain such as subarachnoid hemorrhage. As CT scan showed no remarkable findings, the causality between this vaccine and death is considered unknown."
(n.b. Elasomeran is the Moderna vaccine). There are ~28,000 like that in VAERS and more in other countries equivalents. The party line on these reports is they're all written by fools and things like a healthy 29 year old dying of myocarditis just days after taking a vaccine known to cause exactly that problem, is simply "unknown causality" and a coincidence that tells us nothing.
Unfortunately there's also the correlation with excess deaths.
"I note that we managed to get through the Omicron wave in the UK with normal levels of excess deaths in those aged 75-85, but as soon as the booster doses were rolled out we rapidly hit the threshold for a ‘substantial increase’."
People who are trying to convince themselves and others that this is all just mysteriously undetectable COVID need to explain why the correlations are wrong.
All of them are deaths. Total reports in VAERS of all problems including injuries is in the millions (for COVID vaccines). Meanwhile the underreporting rate is enormous, usually estimated at two orders of magnitude based on pre COVID comparison with known incidence rates. If that held now the true number of injuries would be in the hundreds of millions (in the USA).
Who is allowed, in theory anyone but if you browse the database you'll discover most are coming from doctors and pharma firms. The latter are obliged to report events when they become aware of them and awareness of reporting systems outside the medical profession is low. The one I cited was picked semi randomly while writing that post (first report that was of a young person's death with more than a few lines of detail), and it came via pharma.
At any rate, as you just saw, the reports from medical "professionals" are not more professional than ones from average people. They have more detail but are so reluctant to acknowledge the obvious that they'll happily claim deaths that occur days after injection from known vaccine side effects are just coincidences.
I had long covid 14 months and never heard of myocarditis on forums before the shots. I had chest pain for a while but it was not permanent damage. Myocarditis is permanent damage.
My wife had (long) covid induced myocarditis long before we could get our vaccines here I the UK, as did many others on her 'long haulers' slack group. Likely it is more down to the timings of the groups and vaccines, than linked to vaccines
Note that it correlates with the start of the vaccine rollout, not the start of COVID. The idea expressed above that it's all "long COVID" doesn't make much sense given that fact.
At this point it's very hard to see how it can be under-reported COVID deaths because Omicron mutated to become so much milder. The vaccines however generate large quantities of the more potent Wuhan 2019 spike.
Would you mind explaining the biochemistry of the following statement: "The vaccines however generate large quantities of the more potent Wuhan 2019 spike."
Please including at least a few sentences that precisely describe the differences in the structure and chemistry of what you call the "Wuhan 2019 spike" compared to the Omicron spike protein.
It would be great if you could also explain specifically how differences between the structure and chemistry of the "Wuhan 2019 spike" and the Omicron spike protein support the allegations you're making.
Do you think differences in spike protein structure and chemistry have implications for immune system modulation via signaling molecules? If so, which signaling molecules and which cell lines?
"Please including at least a few sentences that precisely describe the differences in the structure and chemistry of what you call the "Wuhan 2019 spike" compared to the Omicron spike protein."
Huh, OK. Odd question though. Isn't this widely covered in the press?
The vaccines code for the spike protein lifted from the original 2019 RNA sequencing reported by China. They were never adapted, all boosters are just more of the original. Omicron is highly mutated compared to both the 2019 strain and Delta. It has something like 40-odd mutations in the spike alone.
Above you claim these are "allegations" but that's really weird. These are well known facts disputed by nobody, as far as I know. It's not some anti-vax talking point. Go read the documents submitted to regulators if you like. The chemistry of the mRNA vaccines is public, there's a good explanation of the microbiology here:
"Do you think differences in spike protein structure and chemistry have implications for immune system modulation via signaling molecules? If so, which signaling molecules and which cell lines?"
Well, this feels like a hostile question but whatever, I'll roll with it. At least you're engaging, which is better than most people with stars in their eyes about these things.
Omicron is materially different in ways that make the vaccines ineffective. This is one of at least three known reasons why case numbers in 2022 are much higher than in 2021/2020 despite everyone having taken a vaccine marketed as 95% effective. The three reasons (that I know of) are:
1. Antibodies to Wuhan spike fail to dock properly to Omicron spike, but the vaccine trains us to produce Wuhan spike.
(this paper also describes the mutations saying there are 37 but the numbers I've seen vary, not sure why)
2. The 95% effectiveness number was most likely never true, as the trials had at least (a) design errors that were guaranteed to create the appearance of effectiveness in literally any substance (even water), and (b) trial fraud which is now only coming to light, in particular for Pfizer at the Argentina site.
3. The vaccines are triggering something called OAS, which is a form of imprinting. Immune systems repeatedly exposed to the vaccine over-train and start producing antibodies to the Wuhan-2019 spike even when challenged with Omicron, delaying the bodies initial response and meaning that people can get repeatedly sick with Omicron, over and over, without building proper immunity. The memory subsystem of the immune system just doesn't seem 100% precise, or maybe it's not meant to be, but whatever the reason it's been proven during the Moderna Omicron vaccine trials that this has happened (previously vaccinated people produced the wrong antibodies when injected with Omicron vaccine, which has delayed approval). This effect has been known about for decades but is poorly understood, and the risk of creating it simply wasn't considered during vaccine design or rollout.
So whilst that's not an explanation at the level of individual signalling molecules, it is an explanation in terms of immune system biology. Hope that satisfies.
In private conversation my PCP will express concerns about the vaccines that she steadfastly refuses to share with most patients for fear of professional repercussions. You are operating from an assumption ("the institutions of authority are healthy and aligned with the imperative of finding and disseminating the truth") which I don't share.
It's more: unsure of cost-benefit for healthy males without comorbidities up to 40 and women up to 30 (especially those who were already recovered from Covid), the insanity of recommending the shots to pregnant women with zero data regarding impact on fetal development, reactivation of latent viruses like herpes simplex which might suggest some level of induced broader immune dysfunction, and the potential for vaccine enhanced disease or OAS (especially given the use of the long defunct Wuhan strain spike protein in ongoing booster campaigns).
Anyway, focusing on the specifics of the concerns is to avoid the more fundamental point, which is that doctors are not some cohort which one can implicitly trust to be guided by pure objective truth and scientific rigor at all times, nor are they a perfectly homogeneous group in lockstep agreement on all scientific questions.
I think the better metaphor might be patching a known day-zero exploit quickly instead of waiting for a full year test cycle (during which the full install-base is vulnerable).
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that it was not a metaphysical impossibility that some unknown issue with the novel technology applied in these vaccines was missed in the severely abbreviated clinical trials. The control groups were all vaccinated the second the EUAs were granted, so we have no controls against which we can check our hypotheses. In the (I know, completely impossible) hypothetical I am putting forth, wouldn't the first hints of the problem be something like unexplained excess deaths coinciding with vaccine rollout?
There is a very strong anti-vax contingent on this website. It’s unfortunate given that you’d think appreciation for science and healthy, well reasoned skepticism would come naturally for technical professionals. Guess not.
>well reasoned skepticism would come naturally for technical professionals.
It's not well-reasoned skepticism to question the safety of a vaccine for which every vaccine adverse event reporting database reports two orders of magnitude more adverse events than previous vaccines? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z would you call Nature an anti-vax journal?
That is one comparison that should be made. The more important one is to compare having covid versus having the vaccine, the outcomes and the outcomes of you get covid while vaccinated.
The "having COVID versus having the vaccine" comparison doesn't make sense because the vaccines do little to prevent infection (and may even be increasing the odds with more recent strains). So the risks are cumulative, not mutually exclusive.
Healthy well reasoned skepticism is exactly what leads to "anti-(COVID)-vax sentiment", because the data is not good.
If you doubt that, just browse this thread with showdead turned on. The people pointing out that the vaccines could be causing this are all being killed. Probably this comment will be gone within minutes. Yet those comments are also providing evidence and citations. Meanwhile, the "pro-vax" comments are all like yours: merely wishing away people who disagree with no arguments or evidence.
So which side is truly the one with the appreciation for science and reason?
You really don't know that at all. Public health makes claims like that, but they distort data and lie with wild abandon, nothing they say can be taken at face value. Even if it were true, exchanging hundreds of thousands of deaths for millions of injuries so severe people can't work anymore is by no means an obvious trade, let alone one that should be forced on people.
I have been dealing with them in person in a clinical setting for a while now and struggle to see a non-negative side to the behaviour directed at myself and colleagues.
Anti-vaxxer here. While their negative behavior directed you/your colleges is reprehensible, I can tell you how I feel towards (most) 'vaxxers'. It's almost exactly the way me, an atheist feel toward religious believers. For course atheists come in all forms...
Anti-vax is a shortening of the term anti-vaccination, and it is not a surprise to find that people who are 'anti-vax' are against vaccinations, and many of them actively try to recruit people to their cause of avoiding vaccines. Anti-vaccination is a highly accurate term.
I and many others who are pro-vax don't think that anti-vax people are against a vast range of science-based medicines. To the contrary, I am amazed at how many anti-vax people will smoke cigarettes (DNA poisons) and drink alcohol (DNA poison) and take antibiotics and blood pressure medicines and see a dentist and see a regular doctor. Not to mention that many who are against a covid vaccine have had many other vaccines. This selective position against vaccines and not other treatments only makes their anti-vax attitude appear even more irrational.
But if you want different word, then vaccine hysteria would be a good choice. Because that's what anti-vax attitudes have caused, and now a few hundred thousand people have died from it. Think of the damage all those avoidable deaths will cause for millions of people.
As I posted a few times here in this area so far, vaccine fear isn't rational. It's also amazing to me that so many people who are against vaccines really think that people who are getting vaccinated have been manipulated to do so, but that their decision to avoid a vaccine is well-reasoned and not the result of manipulation by people with anti-vaccine sentiment who profit from spreading misinformation in society.
Here is a link that I have shared now with many people, including people I know who were against vaccines. It nudged a few people to get a covid vaccine.
129 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] thread> An oversight committee reviewing the case files of all 48 of the potential cases found that the patients didn’t have symptoms in common or have a shared common illness.
> A separate in-depth epidemiological investigation last fall concluded the patients didn’t have any common behaviours, foods or environmental exposures.
> Following these reports, all the patients were excluded from the cluster and the Minister of Health has accepted the conclusion that no such neurological syndrome of unknown cause exists in New Brunswick.
https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/departments/health/neuro-...
Our government has a long history of arrogance and paternalism (probably nothing too unique there), and incredibly deep ties to the most powerful corporation in NB (again nothing new there), Irving, which has a uhh, let's just say, tenuous relationship with the environment and pollution. So it's hard to say whether or not one should believe the government's conclusion. But there it is.
It’s basically Canada’s “friendly” neighbourhood Lawful Evil Corporate Overlord.
For example, there is an extremely serious post covid multi-system organ inflammation that occurs in children : https://www.cdc.gov/mis/mis-c.html
Watch, I bet we will even see a huge jump in rare cancers.
Edit: And in adults, it does weird things to your alcohol tolerance: https://www.kevinmd.com/2021/03/could-a-glass-of-wine-diagno...
I can not drink wine really anymore.
> Watch, I bet we will even see a huge jump in rare cancers.
People are afraid enough we don’t need that.
Unfortunately many of the policies in that space will negatively effect powerful vested interests (see climate change, see health reform, see food standards, see police training, see banking, see...). Such vested interests have expended vast amounts of effort to convince the 'ordinary person' that nothing can be done - or equivalently, that the only things that would work would end our way of life as we know it. I'm sorry you seem to have been caught up in that.
From where I'm sitting, the large vested interests you're pointing to benefitted enormously from the COVID response, especially the lockdowns which destroyed around a third of small businesses and concentrated that market share upward.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
In fact, there have been published several robust scientific arguments for the possibility that COVID-19 infection can increase the risk of cancer.
Here’s one paper, Cancer as a prospective sequela of long COVID‐19, Geetanjali Saini and Ritu Aneja, both of the Department of Biology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia. Published April 29, 2021 in the journal Bioessays of the Wiley Online Library. – https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fbies.202000331
“Herein, we propose that long COVID‐19 may predispose recovered patients to cancer development and accelerate cancer progression. This hypothesis is based on growing evidence of the ability of SARS‐CoV‐2 to modulate oncogenic pathways, promote chronic low‐grade inflammation, and cause tissue damage.”
And:
”COVID-19 has been associated with T-cell depletion and activation of oncogenic pathways, including JAK-STAT, MAPK, and NF-κB, potentially increasing the risk of cancer development.[20] Hypoxia due to inflammation or virus-induced angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 depletion can induce oxidative stress and malignant transformation.[21-26] Over time, both chronic inflammation and oxidative stress can lead to DNA damage and subsequent carcinogenesis.[27-31] Moreover, COVID-19 is known to cause multiorgan damage,[32] and extensive tissue damage is an oncogenic driver.”
Etc. etc.; I suggest reading the paper, and others like it.
Why wouldn't a virus that's 10-100 times more deadly not have serious long term effects?
The same can be said about the potentially damaging long term effects of the experimental immuntherapies being touted as vaccines. Unfortunately it is taboo in polite society to raise this obvious concern about these risks but, until the passage of time, the long-term effects are just as unknown and just as unknowable as those resulting from COVID. As someone who has received this experimental immunotherapy (as well as having Covid), I am equally concerned with both.
So this is anything but "hysteria." I know a shocking number of previously healthy people who have suddenly had strokes, heart arrhythmias, and - in a few cases - are now dead. Less dramatic symptoms include extreme incapacitating fatigue, persistent brain fog, joint pain, breathlessness, and measurably low blood oxygen.
Your personal experience is exactly that - personal - and not in any way relevant to people who are now living with real, observable clinical abnormalities.
Heart disease has been a leading killer since long before COVID.
I'm glad your round of Russian roulette resulted in a blank.
However, personally, when it comes to Russian roulette, I prefer to not play at all.
Only if those cancers are triggered specifically by Covid.
For most other cancers, we are likely going to see a time-shifted decrease in them.
The Covid lockdowns absolutely wiped out a flu season. Other viruses probably had similar profiles. We know that asthma went down more than expected from environmental triggers during Covid lockdowns. Continuing hygiene is likely to push down some viral transmission--for example, sick service employees who can't take a day off have their transmission significantly curtailed by corporate policies still mandating a mask.
Medicine is about to have a whole lot of information about things that are triggered by pathogens. The end conclusion is likely to be that we are FAR to cavalier about viral diseases.
https://www.euroscientist.com/uk-recorded-more-than-10000-ex...
Now we are letting covid run wild, so that stat won’t persist.
Brushed away with the certainty of not fitting into their worldview I am sure.
Have there been any major updates or releases 'across unconnected demographics' in the last year or two? If I was trying to solve this in my production systems, I would focus my investigation there
Now nobody is taking the responsibility, but we still have the norms.
https://historyofvaccines.org/
"Vaccines" which have been around for a long time and MRNA therapy for vaccination are two very different things. It's like saying "Fear of Sugar of Lead isn't rational because sugars have been around for all of human history."
Medical drugs have been in use for hundreds of years. Fearing experimental drugs isn't rational.
Or
Doctors have been doing surgery for hundreds of years. Fear of surgery isn't rational.
There are at least three entirely rational reasons to "fear" vaccines:
1. They're a category, not a specific product. Safety of one doesn't automatically imply safety of all. See examples above.
2. The history of vaccines is full of failures which ended up injuring or killing healthy people e.g. polio, in more recent times, Pandemrix.
3. Vaccines appear to trigger deeply problematic psychology in which people point blank refuse to believe in any downsides at all, something you don't see in e.g. chemotherapy, surgery, drug treatments and so on. Probably it's the combination of giving them to healthy people and the collective/coercive policies that often accompany them. If anything goes wrong at all, ever, then you've hurt an innocent person who was previously fine and who trusted you, which would be tough for even the coldest most calculating person to handle. And people in public health appear to be the exact opposite of that.
Therefore the sort of people who believe most strongly on vaccines are often poorly informed about them. You gave us a great example of this problem above when you revealed you thought VAERS had only 28,000 reports in it total. This is basic data and you weren't aware of it, so how rational can you really be on the topic? Certainly, vaccines are surrounded by immense propaganda as a topic.
By the way in case you're wondering, before the COVID mandates I never thought about vaccines, had taken my set of shots and held "anti vaxxers" in contempt like a typical HN user. Not anymore. Watching the process of development, testing, rollout subsequent cover-ups of the real data, and blanket censorship has changed me forever. You can't unsee what happened.
You might want to consider broadening the scope of your investigation to include probable causes ...
The vaccine is like any substance that goes into our bodies, it might have complex interactions with the functioning of the body, just as is true for the foods we eat, the things we encounter in our environment, even aspirin was recently reconsidered as a general thing to take daily. The vaccine has been extensively tested and now we have real world testing with billions of doses given that it is extremely safe.
It's hard for people to talk about any potential concerns because of the huge number of people fixated on the fact that it could have other effects (like every single medicine in the world) who constantly make bad faith arguments (you have some sickness and got the vaccine and thus they claim the "obvious" connection). People had difficult to diagnose things like chronic fatigue syndrome before there was ever a covid vaccine and we don't understand those either.
The US VAERS vaccine adverse reporting system reports over ten thousand deaths post covid-vaccine, over two orders of magnitude more than reported for previous vaccines (including the flu vaccines which half of Americans take annually). Now, this does not imply causation, only autopsies can determine that, but for some reason in the US autopsies have not been done. In Germany, renowned pathologist Dr. Peter Schirmacher (acting chairman of the German Society of Pathology, director of the Institute of Pathology at Heidelberg University Hospital, and president of the German Association for the Study of the Liver) did conduct such autopsies, and found that 30-40% of the deaths following soon after vaccination were indeed caused by the vaccine.
Not only does it not imply causation it doesn't even imply correlation. If you got the vaccine and were subsequently hit by a truck you could end up in VAERS.
> found that 30-40% of the deaths following soon after vaccination were indeed caused by the vaccine
No, they didn't.
e.g. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/2251260
"On 06-Feb-2022, the patient received the 3rd vaccination with this vaccine. Pyrexia of 39 degrees Celsius developed. The patient took loxoprofen sodium hydrate, and the symptoms subsided. On 08-Feb-2022, around 20:00, the patient was confirmed as alive. Myocarditis developed. On 09-Feb-2022, at 07:00, the patient was found dead in the room. On an unknown date, autopsy was performed. No dissection was performed. The outcome of pyrexia was reported as resolved. The outcome of myocarditis was reported as fatal. Follow-up investigation will be made.
Company Comment: The events developed after the administration of ELASOMERAN and there is temporal relationship. Reporter's Comments: Since no electrocardiogram was performed during the medical examination, the condition of the heart is unknown. There is no lesion in the brain such as subarachnoid hemorrhage. As CT scan showed no remarkable findings, the causality between this vaccine and death is considered unknown."
(n.b. Elasomeran is the Moderna vaccine). There are ~28,000 like that in VAERS and more in other countries equivalents. The party line on these reports is they're all written by fools and things like a healthy 29 year old dying of myocarditis just days after taking a vaccine known to cause exactly that problem, is simply "unknown causality" and a coincidence that tells us nothing.
Unfortunately there's also the correlation with excess deaths.
https://bartram.substack.com/p/increased-deaths-in-england-f...
"I note that we managed to get through the Omicron wave in the UK with normal levels of excess deaths in those aged 75-85, but as soon as the booster doses were rolled out we rapidly hit the threshold for a ‘substantial increase’."
People who are trying to convince themselves and others that this is all just mysteriously undetectable COVID need to explain why the correlations are wrong.
Who is allowed, in theory anyone but if you browse the database you'll discover most are coming from doctors and pharma firms. The latter are obliged to report events when they become aware of them and awareness of reporting systems outside the medical profession is low. The one I cited was picked semi randomly while writing that post (first report that was of a young person's death with more than a few lines of detail), and it came via pharma.
At any rate, as you just saw, the reports from medical "professionals" are not more professional than ones from average people. They have more detail but are so reluctant to acknowledge the obvious that they'll happily claim deaths that occur days after injection from known vaccine side effects are just coincidences.
https://historyofvaccines.org/
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328529
I had long covid 14 months and never heard of myocarditis on forums before the shots. I had chest pain for a while but it was not permanent damage. Myocarditis is permanent damage.
For heart issues in young males at least the more probable cause is actually the vaccine, as per this paper in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
Note that it correlates with the start of the vaccine rollout, not the start of COVID. The idea expressed above that it's all "long COVID" doesn't make much sense given that fact.
At this point it's very hard to see how it can be under-reported COVID deaths because Omicron mutated to become so much milder. The vaccines however generate large quantities of the more potent Wuhan 2019 spike.
Please including at least a few sentences that precisely describe the differences in the structure and chemistry of what you call the "Wuhan 2019 spike" compared to the Omicron spike protein.
It would be great if you could also explain specifically how differences between the structure and chemistry of the "Wuhan 2019 spike" and the Omicron spike protein support the allegations you're making.
Do you think differences in spike protein structure and chemistry have implications for immune system modulation via signaling molecules? If so, which signaling molecules and which cell lines?
Huh, OK. Odd question though. Isn't this widely covered in the press?
The vaccines code for the spike protein lifted from the original 2019 RNA sequencing reported by China. They were never adapted, all boosters are just more of the original. Omicron is highly mutated compared to both the 2019 strain and Delta. It has something like 40-odd mutations in the spike alone.
Above you claim these are "allegations" but that's really weird. These are well known facts disputed by nobody, as far as I know. It's not some anti-vax talking point. Go read the documents submitted to regulators if you like. The chemistry of the mRNA vaccines is public, there's a good explanation of the microbiology here:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
"Do you think differences in spike protein structure and chemistry have implications for immune system modulation via signaling molecules? If so, which signaling molecules and which cell lines?"
Well, this feels like a hostile question but whatever, I'll roll with it. At least you're engaging, which is better than most people with stars in their eyes about these things.
Omicron is materially different in ways that make the vaccines ineffective. This is one of at least three known reasons why case numbers in 2022 are much higher than in 2021/2020 despite everyone having taken a vaccine marketed as 95% effective. The three reasons (that I know of) are:
1. Antibodies to Wuhan spike fail to dock properly to Omicron spike, but the vaccine trains us to produce Wuhan spike.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abn7760
(this paper also describes the mutations saying there are 37 but the numbers I've seen vary, not sure why)
2. The 95% effectiveness number was most likely never true, as the trials had at least (a) design errors that were guaranteed to create the appearance of effectiveness in literally any substance (even water), and (b) trial fraud which is now only coming to light, in particular for Pfizer at the Argentina site.
3. The vaccines are triggering something called OAS, which is a form of imprinting. Immune systems repeatedly exposed to the vaccine over-train and start producing antibodies to the Wuhan-2019 spike even when challenged with Omicron, delaying the bodies initial response and meaning that people can get repeatedly sick with Omicron, over and over, without building proper immunity. The memory subsystem of the immune system just doesn't seem 100% precise, or maybe it's not meant to be, but whatever the reason it's been proven during the Moderna Omicron vaccine trials that this has happened (previously vaccinated people produced the wrong antibodies when injected with Omicron vaccine, which has delayed approval). This effect has been known about for decades but is poorly understood, and the risk of creating it simply wasn't considered during vaccine design or rollout.
So whilst that's not an explanation at the level of individual signalling molecules, it is an explanation in terms of immune system biology. Hope that satisfies.
Anyway, focusing on the specifics of the concerns is to avoid the more fundamental point, which is that doctors are not some cohort which one can implicitly trust to be guided by pure objective truth and scientific rigor at all times, nor are they a perfectly homogeneous group in lockstep agreement on all scientific questions.
It's not well-reasoned skepticism to question the safety of a vaccine for which every vaccine adverse event reporting database reports two orders of magnitude more adverse events than previous vaccines? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z would you call Nature an anti-vax journal?
If you doubt that, just browse this thread with showdead turned on. The people pointing out that the vaccines could be causing this are all being killed. Probably this comment will be gone within minutes. Yet those comments are also providing evidence and citations. Meanwhile, the "pro-vax" comments are all like yours: merely wishing away people who disagree with no arguments or evidence.
So which side is truly the one with the appreciation for science and reason?
I have been dealing with them in person in a clinical setting for a while now and struggle to see a non-negative side to the behaviour directed at myself and colleagues.
Here are facts:
Anti-vax is a shortening of the term anti-vaccination, and it is not a surprise to find that people who are 'anti-vax' are against vaccinations, and many of them actively try to recruit people to their cause of avoiding vaccines. Anti-vaccination is a highly accurate term.
I and many others who are pro-vax don't think that anti-vax people are against a vast range of science-based medicines. To the contrary, I am amazed at how many anti-vax people will smoke cigarettes (DNA poisons) and drink alcohol (DNA poison) and take antibiotics and blood pressure medicines and see a dentist and see a regular doctor. Not to mention that many who are against a covid vaccine have had many other vaccines. This selective position against vaccines and not other treatments only makes their anti-vax attitude appear even more irrational.
But if you want different word, then vaccine hysteria would be a good choice. Because that's what anti-vax attitudes have caused, and now a few hundred thousand people have died from it. Think of the damage all those avoidable deaths will cause for millions of people.
Here is a link that I have shared now with many people, including people I know who were against vaccines. It nudged a few people to get a covid vaccine.
https://historyofvaccines.org/