It’s not a wildfire, it’s a different type of fire that looks like a wildfire!

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The Chinese government announced that they may provide weapons to Russia. The US propaganda machine therefor decided it is once again time to demonize China and the Chinese. The Wall Street Journal reported on February 26, 2023 that the United States Department of Energy (DOE) concluded that the virus likely stemmed from a lab leak in China. From the onset of the pandemic, questions emerged about the virus’ origins with two leading theories typically dominating the scientific community.

Most scientists initially believed the virus was likely transmitted to “patient zero” via a bat in an open-air market in Wuhan. However, a second theory that the virus could have been man-made and leaked from a nearby lab also gained traction, in the United States.

The report did not confirm or show evidence of conspiracy theories that have spread on social media amid the pandemic, including that the virus was made as a biological weapon or that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was involved in the leak.

So far there is no “smoking gun.” Regardless of how the virus started, the wildfire has spread around the world unchecked. Gaslighting from public officials today is aimed at convincing everyone needs to “live with the virus”. That however equated to over 500 people a week dying from the virus. There is no push for masking or air purification in public buildings. Living with the virus equals death and disability.

Fall COVID Colors

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Emerging COVID variants and waning immunity means there will be a wave of COVID infections in the fall and winter of 2022. BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5 are subsiding but other variants are in the wings to take it’s place. The effort to roll out a bi-valiant booster to combat the new variants has been anemic at best. Only 2% of Americans have opted to get the shot. Al the while Omicron is evolving with a new generation of immunity-dodging variants.

United Kingdom and some other European countries, are seeing the swift ascent of BQ.1 ( a descendant of BA5). In India, the BA.2.75 variant is on the rise. BA.2.3.20, is growing quickly in Singapore, and has turned up in Denmark and Australia. BQ.1.1 (a member of the BQ.1 family with one extra spike change) and BA.2.75.2 are the most immune evasive, being able to dodge most neutralizing antibodies elicited by infection with BA.5. That means your past infection will not protect you from being re infected.

BA.4.6, dubbed Aeterna by variant trackers on Twitter, is slowly but steadily climbing toward the top of the mountain of variants in the U.S. In early October 2022 it accounted for 14% of cases in the United States. It’s growth is exponential. Aeterna appears to have a nearly 6% growth advantage over BA.5, according to an Oct. 7 technical brief from the United Kingdom Health Security Agency.

I am sure your head is swimming with all the different variants which are competing to infect us. Those who have gotten vaccinated have some protection from severe disease and death but the anti vaccine folks are shit out of luck.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, predicts a coming wave of infections that will swell in October and peak in late December or early January. So far no single variant has become undeniable the most dominate. I would put my money on BA.4.6 to be knocking on your door this fall season.

Rebound

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, caught COVID-19 and experienced a recurrence of symptoms after taking the Pfizer’s oral antiviral medication Paxlovid as a treatment for COVID-19.

Fauci reported that he had initially experienced only mild symptoms upon becoming infected with COVID-19 in mid-June 2022. “When [the symptoms] increased, given my age, I went on Paxlovid for five days and I felt really quite well, really just a bit of (runny nose) and fatigue,” said Fauci, 81.

After finishing his course of Paxlovid, Fauci claimed he tested negative for COVID-19 on antigen tests for three days in a row. But on the fourth day, he again tested positive. He also began to experience worsening symptoms. “It was sort of what people are referring to as a ‘Paxlovid rebound,’” Fauci said. Fauci is currently on another course of Paxlovid, he confirmed.

The phenomenon, known as COVID-19 rebound, has been acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In May, the CDC issued an advisory on the potential recurrence of symptoms and possibly a “new positive viral test after having tested negative” within two to eight days of finishing a five-day course of Paxlovid.

Rebound

Gridiron Superspreader

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The Gridiron Club is the oldest and among the most prestigious journalistic organizations in Washington, D.C. The annual white-tie-and-gowns dinner attracted about 630 guests this year. Last year’s even was canceled due to COVID, so this year was to be a celebration of a return to normal.

It has been reported that over 70 attendees of the annual Gridiron Dinner have tested positive for COVID-19. The Gridiron Dinner became a super spreader event. Two were two Cabinet members, two members of Congress and a top aide to Vice President Kamala Harris. Oh, in a shocking case of 1+1=2, Kamala Harris is infected.

Also in attendance were Chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walenski. These top medical advisors managed to avoid infection though Walensky had a case of COVID a few short weeks ago. She was offering COVID advice virtually as she self isolated at home. Dr. Fauci said he wore a mask for the reception and only took it off to eat.

The A-list guests were asked to show proof of vaccination but not negative tests, and many mingled freely without masks at the dinner at the downtown Renaissance Washington Hotel. Thus far, none of those infected have reported serious illness. The Washington Post has learned of about a half-dozen journalists tested positive. Their identities are being protected since they did not announce their cases publicly.

After a cocktail reception, guests sat together at long, narrow tables for hours and watched satirical skits and songs performed by members. On stage that evening women in COVID virus costumes bounced around on stage while actors and a song lifted from Hamilton which altered lyrics shouting “I’m not gonna take that Shot!”  At the event’s conclusion, guests joined hands for the traditional singing of “Auld Lang Syne.” The stupidity and irony is profound.

These A-list viral hosts are getting the best possible treatments which most everyday Americans would be hard pressed to find. The Journalists and politicians are regularly testes for COVID-19, but what about the staff at the hotel? Are they getting tested and treated with the same level of care? Do they have a top notch insurance plan? Do they have access to the new Paxlovid COVID pill? The A-list guests have the status and access needed to stay healthy. If you don’t have the same status and access, so be it. Best of luck.

White house messaging now is that the pandemic is a matter of personal choice. You get to choose the level of risk you take every day while airlines and mass transit are dropped all masking requirements. No states have mask mandates in place. Only 30% of Americans have gotten a booster shot of vaccine. The white house is claiming victory over the virus even as cases rise. To mitigate public safety is bad for any re-election bid. Ignore the hundreds of daily deaths from COVID and go about life as normal. Welcome to the new normal of public health apartheid.

Anti-Science Aggression

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There is a horrifying level of anti-science aggression in the United States coming from far right groups including some elected members of the US Congress and conservative news outlets that target scientists fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conservative news outlets repeatedly and purposefully promote disinformation designed to portray key American scientists as enemies. As a consequence, many receive threats via email and on social media, while some are stalked at home, to create an unprecedented culture of antiscience intimidation.

Prior to 2021, there was a concerted program of antiscience disinformation that dismissed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic which was promoted by a White House committed to policies of “America First”. “America First” promotes negativism, anti-immigration, voter suppression, and loyalty tests to the former President that question the veracity of the 2020 Presidential election. These elements converge to form what could become modern day authoritarian regime. Historically, such regimes viewed scientists as enemies of the state.

In June 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced house bill 2316. The “Fire Fauci Act” which called for halting payment of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s salary as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and auditing his digital correspondence and financial transactions. Mud slinging Rand Paul (R-KY)  has been making unsubstantiated claims that Fauci is responsible for 5 million deaths. Public threats against Anthony Fauci have resulted in his having to hire security to keep his family safe.

Scientists who are trying to keep Americans safe are being threatened all across the county. Public-health researcher Tara Kirk Sell experienced online and e-mail attacks after talking about COVID-19 in the media. Infectious-diseases physician Krutika Kuppalli had been in her new job for barely a week in September 2020, when someone phoned her at home and threatened to kill her. Of 321 scientists asked by Nature Magazine, 15% said they had received death threats and 22% had been threatened with physical or sexual violence as a result of talking publicly about the pandemic. Two-thirds said they had had a negative experience after appearing in the media. Scientists disclosed how they had been left distressed and scared and in some cases stopped sharing their views publicly after experiencing harassment and intimidation.

In June 2021, the Republicans organized a House Select Subcommittee on the origins of COVID-19 with the presumption that it was ignited by gain-of-function genetic engineering research from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Despite evidence pointing to spillover from a viral infection in bats to additional mammals and ultimately humans as has happened in previous coronavirus epidemics.

Vaccines and vaccine scientists are also targeted. Alongside the June 2021 Republican COVID-19 origins hearings, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) organized a round table in Milwaukee to highlight the rare adverse side effects from COVID-19 vaccines, as evening Fox News anchors promoted fake claims regarding deaths from COVID-19 vaccination. In July 2021, Rep. Greene declared on Twitter that a COVID-19 vaccine is “a political tool used to control people”, while Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) said that door-to-door COVID-19 vaccinations were just a step away from US Government confiscations of guns and bibles, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) referred to vaccinators as “needle Nazis”. Days later, the medical director for vaccines in the Tennessee Department of Health was abruptly terminated for her efforts to vaccinate minors (14 and up) without parental consent. At the same time states are making efforts to halt vaccine advocacy and outreach to teens and adolescents.

 

Winter Surge

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The Omicron blizzard that continues to sweep across America will find just about everybody this winter.

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”

Those who are not vaccinated are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” Fauci added. Across the United States, at least one in five eligible Americans — roughly 65 million people– are not vaccinated against Covid-19. Only 23% who are fully vaccinated are also boosted, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

US Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on January 18 2022, “I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get Covid… and what we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”

Dr. Fauci pointed out that there are 5 stages of the pandemic and we are still in phase 1. He cautioned against thinking we are further along than we actually are. The first phase of the pandemic—or the “The truly pandemic,” according to Fauci—is “where the whole world is really very negatively impacted as we are right now.”

The following four steps are deceleration, control, elimination, and finally eradication.

Deceleration will be a slowdown in the number of newly confirmed cases.

Control refers to endemicity. That means that COVID-19 would become integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases we commonly experience, like the flu or the common cold.

Elimination comes when the virus still exists in the world but it has been eradicated from certain regions or countries.

Eradication will be nearly impossible to reach.

Omicron Detected in California

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The first United States confirmed case of the Omicron variant has been detected inn California. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the case was in an individual who traveled from South Africa on November 22, 2021 and tested positive for Covid-19 on November 29, 2021.

That individual, Fauci said, is self-quarantining and close contacts have tested negative for the coronavirus so far. The person was fully vaccinated and is experiencing “mild symptoms, which are improving at this point,” Fauci said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom tweeted, “As we continue to learn more about Omicron, there is no reason to panic but we should remain vigilant. We know how to protect ourselves from COVID – get vaccinated, get your booster & wear a mask.”
Scientists are working to determine how transmissible the variant is, how sick it makes people and how well current vaccines work against it. The United States restricted travel from South Africa and seven other countries on November 29, 2021 which is seven days after this first case arrived on a flight from Africa. As always too little too late. The genie is out of the bottle.
Health officials are urging people to get vaccinated against Covid-19, or get a booster if they’re eligible. Other measures such as masks, handwashing, physical distancing and good ventilation will still work against the Omicron variant.

Waning Immunity

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The news every day has stories of breakthrough infections. CNN reported that 2 studies published October 6, 2021 confirm that the immune protection offered by two doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine drops off after two months or so, although protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death remains strong. The studies, from Israel and from Qatar and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, support arguments that even fully vaccinated people need to maintain precautions against infection.

Men’s immunity drop off faster than  women’s immunity. The study also indicated that immunity for people who get vaccinated after natural Covid-19 infection lasts longer. It’s especially strong for people who recovered from infection and then got vaccinated. “Overall, the accumulating evidence from our study and others shows that long-term response and vaccine effectiveness in previously infected persons were superior to that in recipients of two doses of vaccine,” they wrote. That leaves me wondering if being fully vaccinated and then getting infected also creates this sort of super boost to immunity.

Pfizer/BioNTech‘s vaccine protection against infection builds rapidly after the first dose, peaks in the first month after the second dose, and then gradually wanes in subsequent months,” Laith Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and colleagues wrote. “The waning appears to accelerate after the fourth month, to reach a low level of approximately 20% in subsequent months,” they added.

Americans can choose a COVID-19 booster shot that is different from their original inoculation but the recommendation is to stick with the vaccine they got first if it is available, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said on October 22, 2021. 80 Million Americans are still unvaccinated so there is plenty of wood for this fire to continue to burn through.

My Halloween Display Plans

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On a walk with the dogs, Pam asked me what I would like to do for Halloween. The idea popped into my head that it might be fun to create hundreds, or thousands or hundreds of thousands of virus sculptures about the size of pumpkins and lay them out on the lawn, each being lit by those old big bulb Christmas lights. Of course we would have some skeletons, zombies and tombstones.

My first thought was to make paper mache viruses but they might not hold up to the Florida rains. Maybe spike proteins could be poked into tennis balls or pumpkins. The thoughts were flowing. How many should we make?  If we made 700,000 of them then the pile would cover and envelop the entire house and probably the block or several blocks. The logistics might be  bit much.

Her response was a simple, “Um, NO.” Regardless I am left wanting to create the perfect pandemic display in my mind. Maybe she will change her mind when she sees the possibilities.

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN October 10, 2021 that kids can “go out there and enjoy Halloween,” an approach he attributed to the fact that more and more people are now vaccinated against COVID-19 and that most Halloween activities, including trick-or-treating, are held outdoors.

“It’s a good time to reflect on why it’s important to get vaccinated,” he said, urging unvaccinated adults and teens to get shots before Halloween. “But go out there and enjoy Halloween.”

College Football Super Spreaders

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College football stadiums across America have been packed this Labor day weekend. The number in attendance at some of the country’s biggest stadiums was staggering. The University of Michigan hosted Western Michigan with close to 110,000 spectators standing shoulder to shoulder. The University of Texas defeated Louisiana on September 4, 2021, cheered by more than 91,000 screaming and cheering fans. And the list could go on and on as more than 80 games were played during the long weekend.

“I don’t think it’s smart,” said Dr Anthony Fauci of the huge college football crowds, amid a surge of Covid-19 cases in the US.

“Outdoors is always better than indoors, but even when you have such a congregate setting of people close together – first, you should be vaccinated. And when you do have congregate settings, particularly indoors, you should be wearing a mask,” the president’s leading infectious diseases expert told CNN on Tuesday.

Penn State, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Alabama are planning for full-capacity crowds and are not asking for vaccination records. Iowa fan and critical care pharmacist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Alyssa Sykuta, commented on her team’s fans waving to the Children’s Hospital behind the stadium before the game on September4, 2021. “As an Iowa fan this is one of my favorite college football traditions, but in the context of the past 18 months, it is cringe worthy,” she wrote on Twitter. “Maybe a moment of silence to honor kids at @UIchildrens who have been impacted by Covid instead? And for the love of God mask up and get vaxxed.” “ICUs are full, children are being hospitalized as schools reopen. College football stadiums full of mask less fans. I don’t understand,” said a retired hospital employee Rick Green on Twitter.

Experts have pointed out that being outdoors is less likely to spread the virus but if you are sitting shoulder to shoulder with thousands of other shouting fans the doesn’t just disappear. On top of that people gather in the bathrooms and then in bars after the game further heightening the chance of spread.

The 2021 NFL season begins on September 9, 2021 when defending Super Bowl champions Tampa Bay host the Dallas Cowboys with a capacity of more than 65,000 people. Masks are not required but recommend for the game.