so how bad is the new covid varient?

 we are hearing about a new covid varient that has poppe dup that the previous vaccines won't stop and President Biden announces he will have a new vaccine and you will take it and like it.

Or maybe not. The government here can't give away the previous bivalent vaccine (I have even seen ads on youtube pushing it).

And we are also supposed to get influenza and the new RSV vaccines. 

Well, those illnesses are nasty but those vaccines are unproven: Give monoclonal antibodies to babies, or vaccinate their moms when pregnant? I will have to look into this. RSV in babies is nasty and can kill and some develop repeated chest infections as toddlers and live in your office with repeated infections, but a previous vaccine caused lymphatic hypertrophy in the intestines that caused intrasusseption and killed kids so was taken off the market. So I will have to look into this.

But although lots of hype about the newest covid varient, there isn't much hard data out there about if it is fatal like the original covid or just a bad cold like Omicron.

And yes I know they are saying the percentage more of illness out there, but without numbers and when a lot of folks are no longr testing, you don't know what this means.

August 9 (GMT) Updates 132 new cases and 3 new deaths in the Philippines

so no big surge in deaths.

Dr. C. discusses.

the problem? The observation that vaccine makes you more prone to get another infection. Dr. C also has taught physiology so here he explains why this is happening.

the comments on the video:

BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines. ? stimulation of T suppressor (regulatory) cells ? stimulation of IgG4 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... No evidence BA.2.86 causing more severe illness. Updated vaccines will be available as early as mid-September What can you do to protect yourself and others as we learn more? Get your COVID-19 vaccines, as recommended''CDC Report COVID-19 Vaccines Are Safe, Effective, and Free Everyone 6 months and older should get an updated COVID-19 vaccine. BA.2.86 https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158... Many spike protein changes (explain vaccine immune escape) Could out compete common EG.5 (Latest COVID-19 booster vaccines are based on XBB.1.5) Jesse Bloom, viral evolutionary biologist, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Seattle, Washington “I don’t think anybody needs to be alarmed by this,” “The most likely scenario is that this variant fizzles out, and in a month nobody other than people like me even remember that it existed.” Even if BA.2.86 does becomes widespread, and proves adept at dodging neutralizing antibodies,

 I got the AZ vaccine, which gives blood clots especially in the young, and he notes it doesn't seem to be affecting the immune system this way. So I am safe, sort of.

The Science article discusses the immune part:

In a recent paper published in Science Immunology, Irrgang et al. (1) showed that administering three doses of an mRNA vaccine encoding the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike antigen eventually results in an increased proportion of antigen-specific antibodies of the immunoglobulin G4 (IgG4) subtype, but IgG4 antibodies were not induced after an adenoviral vector vaccine. Similar results were observed in a separate, contemporaneous study (2). These results provoke a reconsideration of some fundamental immune mechanisms unique to the human immune system but also raise issues that may (or may not) have practical relevance in terms of vaccinology and public health.

...We now know that structural differences in a loop in the CH2 (second constant heavy chain) domain of IgG4 (when compared with IgG1) impair its binding to C1q and to most activating Fc receptors. This has led to the view that IgG4 may have evolved to dampen inflammation and functions essentially as an antigen sink.,,,

fab arm exchange is discussed here;

the title of the paper:Is it bad, is it good, or is IgG4 just misunderstood?

I downloaded a bunch of stuff about immunology which wasn't around when I studied in medical school 50 years ago, so watch Dr. C for details

but the important question is not answered in detail: apparently the summary is:

No evidence BA.2.86 causing more severe illness.

since a bad ordinary chest cold could kill me, that could be a problem.

So now answer this question: Will Ivermectin treat or prevent that new varient? Anyone? Anyone?

sickle cell disease

Scitech has an article that notes the actual mortality from sickle cell disease is much higher than reported because it is the underlying problem of the stroke etc.

It is also, by the way, one reason that in the US we see a higher mortality in black patients, especially children.

When other sources of data on prevalence and birth incidence were combined with mortality data in epidemiological modeling, in 2021, the “total mortality burden” of sickle cell disease was 373,000 deaths, compared to 34,600 sickle-cell-only deaths, or “cause-specific deaths.” The increase was especially pronounced in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where the fatality figures were 67 times higher and nine times higher, respectively.

south asia?

maybe they mean all forms of hemoglobinopathies, including sickle trait and thalessemia?

n 2021, half a million babies were born with sickle cell disease, and more than three-quarters of these births were in sub-Saharan Africa. Under the analysis of total mortality burden (including secondary conditions), sickle cell disease was the 12th leading cause of death globally for children under the age of 5 years. However, total sickle cell disease mortality burden was among the top three causes of death in Portugal, Jamaica, Libya, Oman, and San Marino.

original article in Lancet Hemotology. 

and yes it does include varients including Thalessemia.

We see a lot of sickle cell disease in the USA (our next door neighbor's cousing died of it alas at age 32).

But we only had one case when I worked in Zimbabwe, because we didn't have malaria in the high veldt. The case was a child of a miner from Malawi and I had to instruct the lab how to do the test to see the sickle cells under the micrsoscope because doinga  hemoglobin analysis was not available in our rural hospital and too expensive even if it was.

When I worked in Massachusetts we had a lot of Portuguese patients due to the fishing industy and yes when we saw microcytic anemia we checked for this.

trust to mistrust in authority

Covid, Zika and... Dengue?

the scandal: This was stopped by propaganda and actually punishing docs and families who tried to use it, but other expensive and new anti virals that had a similar success rate (i.e. not very good) were used.

yet the side effects of ivermectin are few (unlike HCQ, which can kill you if you overdose, which is why the mortality in Brazil was higher when this was used: They used too high a dose and it affected people with heart disease).

I only used Ivermectin once for a chest cold just in case it was covid. I get these infections once or twice a year normall, and I had three such infections in the lockdown time for Covid ...for the first two I used my regular steroids and antibiotics; the third time we had bought some ivermectin because Duterte refused to ban it, saying you could take it if your doc prescribed it. 

But you know, I was not aware of that it might help Dengue too:  that it has been used experimentally for Dengue, zika and other viruses,.

Nature magazine:journal of antibiotics:June 2020.

Abstract Ivermectin proposes many potentials effects to treat a range of diseases, with its antimicrobial, antiviral, and anti-cancer properties as a wonder drug. It is highly effective against many microorganisms including some viruses. In this comprehensive systematic review, antiviral effects of ivermectin are summarized including in vitro and in vivo studies over the past 50 years. Several studies reported antiviral effects of ivermectin on RNA viruses such as Zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, Hendra, Newcastle, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chikungunya, Semliki Forest, Sindbis, Avian influenza A, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, Human immunodeficiency virus type 1, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Furthermore, there are some studies showing antiviral effects of ivermectin against DNA viruses such as Equine herpes type 1, BK polyomavirus, pseudorabies, porcine circovirus 2, and bovine herpesvirus 1. Ivermectin plays a role in several biological mechanisms, therefore it could serve as a potential candidate in the treatment of a wide range of viruses including COVID-19 as well as other types of positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses. In vivo studies of animal models revealed a broad range of antiviral effects of ivermectin, however, clinical trials are necessary to appraise the potential efficacy of ivermectin in clinical setting.

here is the part about Dengue: 

Dengue virus, yellow fever virus (YFV), and West Nile virus (WNV)... It may be concluded that ivermectin could be effective in the early stages of infection and maybe a recommended drug for the prevention or treatment of early stages of viral infection, rather than advanced forms. Of course, confirmation of this statement requires further human studies and clinical trials

link2: shows one problem with the medicine: poor water solubility means that oral medicine might not give a high enough dosage.

One reason I didn't think I had dengue was lack of headache and muscle pain.

My Dengue was atypical, mainly severe weakness, and fever, no pain no cough so I didn't think I had covid, and of course my covid was negative test but the low wbc and a dropping platelet count suggested dengue, and the igM of Dengue was positive on the third day.'

We have a lot of dengue in the area, and most cases are treated at home, usually with antibiotics, which don't help Dengue of course but hey when your wbc goes down to 2000, it means your body can't fight off bacterial infections. LINK.

The clinical course of a viral infection can be adversely affected by bacterial coinfection.6–8 However, bacterial coinfection can be easily overlooked in dengue-endemic or -epidemic settings. A simple clinical rule for the identification of concurrent bacterial infection in dengue patients would be pivotal for triggering timely antibiotic therapy within the usual context of supportive management.

Of 2,065 patients, 83 (4.0%) patients had 110 instances of bacterial coinfection marked by positive blood culture (25/110; 22.7%), positive urine culture (43/110; 39.1%), or physician-diagnosed bacterial pneumonia (42/110; 38.2%).

so low rate of secondary bacterial infections but if the patient is sick you might want to treat them just in case.

APOLOGISTS FOR DEATH

 Thirty years ago, civil libertarian expert Nat Hentoff called the bioethics community (which had been hijacked by the PC idea that killing was okay) apologists for death.

And he warned that a centralized health care law would lead to doctors and committees of these type of people deciding who should die, and if you should receive treatment at all, or, in the words of one doctor who was filling in at Pine Ridge and was asked to check the feeding tube of a Lakota lady with a stroke: Why don't you just give her morphine, ha ha.

Which is why most of my patients in the IHS system would not sign living wills or DNR orders, even though they sometimes turned down treatment.

So who dares to point the finger saying The Emperor has no clothes? 

Cue Dr. C, who is a PhD doctor but also a nurse with extensive experience in psychiatric nursing and public health teaching:

This is not about compassion you know. It is about money. It's cheaper to kill a disabled person than enabble them to live in dignity, and of course if a mom aborts her kid and then finds it lived, well, she would be upset so let's kill the kids.

John Paul II warned of this thirty years ago in his encyclical the Gospel of Life.

Back in the early 1990s, the NEJM and bioethicists were going full force in pushing killing of the terminally ill, citing the success of this in the Netherlands. I wrote at least half a dozen identical letters to the NEJM pointing out that very good reporting in the press and in a Hasting center article (a bioethics journal) showed that most cases were indirect, hidden, and not reported, and the actual numbers were much higher than the official letters. None of these letters were published, and when I wrote a letter asking why, I received a nice letter back from their editor saying that these articles were opinion pieces and did not have to be scientifically accurate.

Ironically, Pope John Paul II wrote an encyclical about this danger, but of course with Pope Francis, this growing problem has disappeared into a black hole, and the pro life movement in the US is still stuck in abortion in a way that ignores the big picture of the culture of death.`

Sigh.

Since then, the practice has been pushed in movies, TV, novels for young women, etc. as desireable.

sigh.

typhus in LA.

CDC article on typhus in California, the three cases they cite were Hispanic and one was homeless. No social background on the other cases. TWo were elderly and one was middle aged.

The worry is that lice could spread through homeless camps, homeless shelters, or in crowded facilities where recent migrants are housed.

And most Hispanics live in extended families. Were others in the family affected?

I emailed the author to clarify this, but of course maybe I missed something reading the article.

history of typhus:
Lots of the Irish fleeing the potato famine died of typhus.

covid censorship?

 

Dr C again points out the Swiss study showing lots of side effects from the vaccine (over 2 percent with heart damage) and a new Thai study etc.... And he notes that some studies or questions won't be published.

This censorship is a very real problem for science and the medical establishment: because it leads to distrust that will cause a lot of deaths if we get a really really bad epidemic out there.

Sigh.

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And then we see how this morphs into conspiracy theories.

Lifesite news has a report on the whitecoat conference and includes Dr. Malone's talk. wondering if covid and the power grab is part of a larger plan.

 The US document on limiting population is real by the way: The extreme left wing sites have long pointed it out, that the US is wanting fewer brown babies and the plan to stop them.

Hmm.... sounds like when we were in Africa and there were pill ladies in every village paid for by a British NGO but the villagers didn't have wells or simple WHO rehydration fluid etc until the hostpial got grants from Oxfam to fund projects to supply pumps if people dug wells, and pay for village health workers with basic first aid. 

the irony? China was so impressed by the book the Population bomb that they implemented a one child policy, that is one reason that China was able to become affluent instead of mired in poverty, but now is threatening them with depopulation in the long term.